You Will Hear Thunder. Anna Akhmatova

Dante

       Cleopatra

       Willow

      * In Memory of Mikhail Bulgakov

       ‘When a man dies . . .’

      * ‘Not the lyre of a lover . . .’

       Way of all the Earth

       from The Seventh Book

       In 1940

       Courage

       ‘And you, my friends . . .’

      * ‘That’s how I am . . .’

       Three Autumns

       ‘The souls of those I love . . .’

       ‘The fifth act of the drama . . .’

       ‘It is your lynx eyes, Asia . . .’

       In Dream

       ‘So again we triumph! . . .’

       ‘Let any, who will, still bask in the south . . .’

       from Northern Elegies: The Fifth

       The Sixth

       Seaside Sonnet

       Fragment

       Summer Garden

       ‘In black memory . . .’

       ‘Could Beatrice write . . .’

       Death of a Poet

       The Death of Sophocles

       Alexander at Thebes

       Native Soil

       There are Four of Us

      * ‘If all who have begged help . . .’

       Last Rose

      * ‘It is no wonder . . .’

       ‘What’s war? What’s plague? . . .’

       In Memory of V. C. Sreznevskaya

       ‘You will hear thunder and remember me . . .’

       Requiem

       Poem without a Hero

       Notes

* Poems not published in the collection but written in the same epoch.

Acknowledgements

      In the spirit of an apprentice painter joining a master’s workshop, I have had three spells of translating Akhmatova: in 1964 (Requiem), 1974 (Poem without a Hero), and 1977 (a selection of mostly shorter poems). The first two works were published together as Requiem & Poem without a Hero (Elek. London, and Ohio U.P., 1976); the third body of translations was published under the title Way of All the Earth (Secker & Warburg Ltd., London, and Ohio U.P., 1979). The first of these volumes has long been out of print in Britain, and I am grateful to my publishers for providing an opportunity, in the present book, of bringing all my translations of Akhmatova together.

      Akhmatova once referred to ‘the blessedness of repetition’. At the risk of some clumsiness of repetition (particularly in the Introductions) I have decided to leave the 1976 and 1979 texts essentially as they were.

      My primary text was the two-volume Akhmatova: Sochineniya (Inter-Language Literary Associates, second edition, 1967–68), edited by G. P. Struve and B. A. Fillipov. I am grateful also to Professor Struve for helpful advice in correspondence. My introduction and notes to Poem without a Hero draw heavily on their scholarship, and also on the late Max Hayward’s excellent introduction and notes in Poems of Akhmatova, selected and translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward (Collins-Harvill, 1974).

      Amanda Haight’s biography (Akhmatova, A Poetic Pilgrimage, Oxford U.P., 1976) was invaluable in supplying background information and interpretative comment. To her own translations and to those of Richard McKane and Stanley Kunitz, I am indebted for the occasions when a phrase or a line, in one or other of them, struck me as so ‘happy’ that it would have been foolish to try to find a better.

      I am grateful to Jennifer Munro for her patient help with texts I found difficult to understand. Michael Glenny and Vera Dixon also gave me much-appreciated help.

      But the errors, both linguistic and aesthetic, are mine; and the successes—Akhmatova’s.

      D.M.T.

      1984

Introduction

      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), 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