Requiem and Poem without a Hero. Anna Akhmatova
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ANNA AKHMATOVA
Requiem and Poem without a Hero
ANNA AKHMATOVA
Requiem and Poem without a Hero
translated by
D. M. THOMAS
SWALLOW PRESS
ATHENS OHIO
Swallow Press
An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
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Swallow Press/Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
Requiem and Poem without a Hero first published in England 1976 by Elek Books Limited, London
Translation copyright © D. M. Thomas, 1976
ISBN 978-0-8040-1195-2 pbk
Library of Congress Catalog Number LC-76-7252
Contents
Poem in a Strange Language by D. M. Thomas
Requiem
Poem without a Hero
Notes
Appendix: Three lyrics from the time of the ‘Petersburg masquerade’
Acknowledgments
All translators of Akhmatova are indebted to G. P. Struve and B. A. Fillipov, editors of the only full and scholarly edition of her works: the two-volume Akhmatova: Sochineniya (Inter-Language Literary Associates, second edition, revised and enlarged, 1967–68). My introduction and notes to Poem without a Hero draw heavily on their scholarship, and also on Max Hayward’s excellent introduction and notes in Poems of Akhmatova, selected and translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward (Collins-Harvill, 1974).
The translation of Requiem was first published in the Guardian (London), 19 April 1965. It has been revised for this book; and the author’s Dedication, omitted from the newspaper publication, is now included.
The translation of Evening first appeared in Ambit magazine, and the two following lyrics in The Meanjin Quarterly (Melbourne). The Russian text of these poems can be found in the Penguin Book of Russian Verse (edited by D. Obolensky).
Finally I wish to thank Michael Glenny, of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham, and Mrs Vera Dixon, for their help and advice in the preparation of Poem without a Hero.
D.M.T.
Poem in a Strange Language
Starlings, the burnable stages of stars,
Fall back to earth, lightly. And stars,
Propulsars of angels, die in a swift burn.
And half the angels have fallen below the horizon.
And, falling like alpha particles,
Re-charge the drowned woman Floating in the bitter lake,
Her hair gold as their blood, her face amazed.
She is Lot’s wife, her naked body
Sustained by the salt she has loosened from,
And as her eyes open, grain
Turns green-golden on the black earth of Sodom.
I enter your poem, Mandelstam, yours, Anna
Akhmatova, as I enter my love—
Without understanding anything
Except its beauty and law.
And the way its cloud of small
Movements lifts lightly the fruit
Of a painful harvest and moves
With singing vowels away from death.
D. M. Thomas
Introduction
I
Akhmatova hated the word poetess. If we call her by that name, it is in no condescending sense but from a conviction shared by many critics and readers that her womanliness is an essential element of her poetic genius, a something added, not taken away. Gilbert Frank has pointed to her unusual blending of classical severity and concreteness with lyrical saturation; Andrei Sinyavsky, to the range of her voice ‘from the barest whisper to fiery eloquence, from downcast eyes to lightning and thunderbolts’. No insult is intended, therefore, in saying that Akhmatova is probably the greatest poetess in the history of Western culture.
She was born in 1889, in Odessa on the Black Sea coast, but her parents soon moved to Petersburg. All her early life was spent at Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial summer residence; her poetry is steeped in its memories, and in Pushkin, who attended school there. In 1910 she married the poet Nikolai Gumilev, and her own first collection, Evening, appeared in 1912. She and her husband became a part of that rich flowering of creative talent—the names Blok, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Mendelstam Prokofiev, Meyerhold merely begin the list—which made it the Silver Age: though it might better be described as the second Golden Age. Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Gumilev became the leaders of ‘Acmeism’, a poetic movement which preferred the virtues of classicism, firmness, structure, to the apocalyptic haze and ideological preoccupations of Blok and the other Symbolists.
Gumilev was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921 as an alleged counter-revolutionary. Despite the fact that Akhmatova and he had been divorced for three years, the taint of having been associated with him never left her. To borrow Pasternak’s metaphor (from Doctor Zhivago), she had reached the corner of Silver Street and Silent Street: practically none of her poetry was published between 1923 and 1940. At the beginning of the Stalinist Terror, her son, Lev Gumilev, was arrested—released—rearrested, and sent to the labour camps. Nikolai Punin, an art critic and historian, with whom she had been living for ten years, was also arrested, though he was released a year or two later: the first lyric of Requiem is said to refer to his arrest. Her son was released early in the war to fight on the front-line; but he was again arrested and transported to Siberia in 1949. He was finally freed only in 1956, after Stalin’s death and partial denunciation.
For Akhmatova herself, life was relatively happier during the war, when the enemy was known and could be fought. Such ‘happiness’, as she said, was a comment on the times! She endured the first terrible months of the Leningrad siege, and was then evacuated, with other artists, to Tashkent. Some of her poems were published, and in 1945 a collected works was said to be forthcoming. It never appeared. In the renewed repression a violent campaign of abuse was directed at her. She was too personal, too mystical. Zhdanov, Stalin’s cultural hack, described her as a nun and a whore. This would appear to be a marvellous mixture of archetypes for a poet, but of course his remarks were neither meant, nor taken, in that way. She was expelled from the Writers’ Union—tantamount to her abolition—and was henceforth followed