Way of All the Earth. Anna Akhmatova

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      Way of all the Earth

      ANNA AKHMATOVA

      Way of all the Earth

      Translated by

      D. M. THOMAS

      Ohio University Press

      Athens, Ohio

      Swallow Press

      An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

       www.ohioswallow.com

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      Printed in the United States of America

      Swallow Press/Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ™

      Way of all the Earth first published in England 1979 by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited

      Translation copyright © D. M. Thomas 1979

      ISBN 978-0-8040-1205-8 (paper)

      ISBN 978-0-8040-4094-5 (electronic)

      Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 79-1953

       Acknowledgments

      The text I have primarily used has been 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.

      I wish to thank Jennifer Munro for her patient and expert help, over many months, with aspects of the Russian language that eluded me. Without her, my task would have been incomparably more difficult.

      Amanda Haight’s biography of Akhmatova (Akhmatova, A Poetic Pilgrimage, Oxford University Press, 1976) has been invaluable in supplying background information and interpretative comment on the poetry. 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, has struck me as so ‘happy’ that it would have been foolish to try to find a better.

      The Translator acknowledges assistance from the Arts Council of Great Britain.

      Contents

       Introduction

       from Evening

       ‘The pillow hot . . .’

       Reading Hamlet

       Evening Room

       ‘I have written down the words . . .’

       ‘Memory of sun seeps from the heart . . .’

       Song of the Last Meeting

       ‘He loved three things alone . . .’

       Imitation of Annensky

       ‘I came here in idleness . . .’

       White Night

       Legend on an Unfinished Portrait

       from Rosary

       ‘I have come to take your place, sister . . .’

       ‘It goes on without end . . .’

       ‘We’re all drunkards here . . .’

       A Ride

       ‘Nobody came to meet me . . .’

       ‘So many requests . . .’

       The Voice of Memory

       8 November 1913

       ‘Blue heaven, but the high . . .’

       ‘Do you forgive me . . .’

       The Guest

       ‘I won’t beg for your love . . .’

       ‘I came to him as a guest . . .’

       By the Seashore

       from White Flock

       Loneliness

       ‘How can you look at the Neva . . .’

       ‘The road is black . . .’

       Flight

       ‘I don’t know if you’re alive or dead . . .’

       ‘There is a frontier-line . . .’

       ‘Freshness of words . . .’

       ‘Under an empty dwelling’s frozen roof . . .’

       ‘The churchyard’s quiet . . .’

       ‘Neither by cart nor boat . . .’

       ‘Lying in me . . .’

       ‘O there are words . . .’

       from Plantain

       ‘Now farewell, capital . . .’

       ‘I hear the oriole’s always grieving voice . . .’

       ‘Now no-one will be listening to songs . . .’

       ‘The cuckoo I asked . . .’

       ‘Why is our century worse than any other? . . .’

       from Anno Domini

       ‘Everything is looted . . .’

       ‘They wiped your slate . . .’

       Bezhetsk

       ‘To earthly solace . . .’