Way of All the Earth. Anna Akhmatova

zakuski, she could be so funny that everybody fell off their chairs from laughter.’ Her incomparable gift for friendship, and her difficulties in coping with love, are wryly suggested in the lines ‘other women’s/Husbands’ sincerest/Friend, disconsolate/Widow of many . . .’ (That’s how I am . . .) Her love for her son is made abundantly clear in the anguish of Requiem, her great sequence written during his imprisonment in the late 30s; yet she found the practicalities of motherhood beyond her.

In Akhmatova all the contraries fuse, in the same wonderful way that her genetic proneness to T.B. was controlled, she said, by the fact that she also suffered from Graves’ disease, which holds T.B. in check. The contraries have no effect on her wholeness, but they give it a rich mysterious fluid life, resembling one of her favourite images, the willow. They help to give to her poetry a quality that John Bayley has noted, an ‘unconsciousness’, elegance and sophistication joined with ‘elemental force, utterance haunted and Delphic . . . and a cunning which is chétif, or, as the Russians say, zloi.’*¹

      Through her complex unity she was able to speak, not to a small élite, but to the Russian people with whom she so closely and proudly identified. Without condescension, with only a subtle change of style within the frontiers of what is Akhmatova, she was able to inspire them with such patriotic war-time poems as Courage. It is as though Eliot, in this country, suddenly found the voice of Kipling or Betjeman. The encompassing of the serious and the popular within one voice has become impossible in Western culture. Akhmatova was helped by the remarkable way in which twentieth-century Russian poetry has preserved its formal link with the poetry of the past. It has become modern without needing a revolution, and has kept its innocence. In Russian poetry one can still, so to speak, rhyme ‘love’ with ‘dove’.

      Akhmatova herself, with her great compeers, Mandelstam, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva, must be accounted largely responsible for the continuity of Russian poetic tradition. Together, they made it possible for the people to continue to draw strength from them. The crowds who swarmed to Akhmatova’s funeral, in Leningrad, filling the church and overflowing into the streets, were expressing her country’s gratitude. She had kept the ‘great Russian word’, and the Word, alive for them. She had outlasted her accusers: had so exasperated them that, as she put it, they had all died before her of heart-attacks. Mandelstam had perished in an Eastern camp; Tsvetaeva had been tormented into suicide; Pasternak had died in obloquy; Akhmatova had lived long enough to receive the openly-expressed love of her countrymen and to find joy in the knowledge of poetry’s endurance. All four had overcome. The officials of Stalin’s monolith were retiring ‘to rest in card indexes’ in studies of their work. It is a momentous thought. Can it be by chance that the worst of times found the best of poets to wage the war for eternal truth and human dignity?

      In this selection of Akhmatova’s poetry I have tried to keep as closely to her sense as is compatible with making a poem in English; and the directness of her art encourages this approach. The geniuses of the Russian language and the English language often walk together, like the two ‘friendly voices’ Akhmatova overhears in There are Four of Us; but they also sometimes clash, and there are times when it is a deeper betrayal of the original poem to keep close to the literal sense than it would be to seek an English equivalent—one that preserves, maybe, more of her music, her ‘blessedness of repetition’. Striving to be true to Akhmatova implies, with equal passion, striving to be true to poetry. When I have found it necessary to depart from a close translation, I have sought never to betray the tone and spirit of her poem, but to imagine how she might have solved a particular problem had she been writing in English.

Together with my previous volume, versions of Requiem and Poem without a Hero,*² the present selection is intended to be sufficiently large and representative to give English-speaking readers a clearer, fuller impression of her work than has previously been available. Whether or not I have been successful in this, I know that my own gain, from studying her poetry so intimately, has been immense, and beyond thanks, but I thank her.

      D.M.T.

      Notes

*¹ TLS, 16 April 1976.

*² Paul Elek Ltd (London) and Ohio U.P., 1976.

      from Evening

      The pillow hot

      On both sides,

      The second candle

      Dying, the ravens

      Crying. Haven’t

      Slept all night, too late

      To dream of sleep . . .

      How unbearably white

      The blind on the white window.

      Good morning, morning!

      1909

Reading Hamlet

      A dusty waste-plot by the cemetery,

      Behind it, a river flashing blue.

      You said to me: ‘Go get thee to a nunnery,

      Or get a fool to marry you . . .’

      Well, princes are good at such speeches,

      As a girl is quick to tears,—

      But may those words stream like an ermine mantle

      Behind him for ten thousand years.

      1909, Kiev

Evening Room

      I speak in those words suddenly

      That rise once in the soul. So sharply comes

      The musty odour of an old sachet,

      A bee hums on a white chrysanthemum.

      And the room, where the light strikes through slits,

      Cherishes love, for here it is still new.

      A bed, with a French inscription over it,

      Reading: ‘Seigneur, ayez pitié de nous.’

      Of such a lived-through legend the sad strokes

      You must not touch, my soul, nor seek to do . . .

      Of Sèvres statuettes the brilliant cloaks

      I see are darkening and wearing through.

      Yellow and heavy, one last ray has poured

      Into a fresh bouquet of dahlias

      And hardened there. And I hear viols play

      And of a clavecin the rare accord.

I have written down the words

      I have long not dared to speak.

      Dully the head beats,

      This body is not my own.

      The call of the horn has died.

      The heart has the same puzzles.

      Snowflakes,—light—autumnal,

      Lie on the croquet lawn.

      Let the last leaves rustle!

      Let the last thoughts languish!

      I don’t want to trouble

      People used to being happy.

      Because your lips are yours

      I forgive their cruel joke . . .

      O, tomorrow you will come

      On the first sledge-ride of