Poems Read online

  Twenty Poems of Anna Ahkmatova

  (1985)

  Translated from the Russian​

  by

  Jane Kenyon

  with

  Vera Sandomirsky Dunham

  for my mother

  and in memory of my father

  Introduction (1984)

  As we remember Keats for the beauty and intensity of his shorterpoems, especially the odes and sonnets, so we revere Akhmatova for her early lyrics—brief, perfectly made verses of passion and feeling.​

  Images build emotional pressure:

  And sweeter even than the singing of songs​

  is this dream, now becoming real:​

  the swaying of branches brushed aside​

  and the faint ringing of your spurs.

  I love the sudden twists these poems take, often in the last line. In one poem the recollection of a literary party ends with the first frank exchange of glances between lovers. Another poem lists sweet-smelling things—mignonette, violets, apples—and ends, astonishingly, “. . . we have found out forever/that blood smells only of blood.” These poems celebrate the sensual life, and Akhmatova’s devoted attention to de- tails of sense always serves feeling:

  With the hissing of a snake the scythe cuts down​

  the stalks, one pressed hard against another.

  The snake’s hissing is accurate to the sound of scythe mowing, and more than accurate: by using the snake for her auditory image, Akhmatova compares this rural place, where love has gone awry, to the lost Eden.

  Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko near Odessa in 1889. Soon her family moved to Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg, and there she began her education. Studying French, she learned to love Baudelaire and Verlaine. At the age of ten she became seriously ill, with a disease never diagnosed, and went deaf for a brief time. As she recovered she wrote her first poems.

  Money was not abundant in the Gorenko household, nor was tranquility. Akhmatova did not get on with her father, Andrei Gorenko, a naval engineer who lectured at the Naval Academy in St. Petersburg—also a notorious philanderer whose money went to his mistresses. (We know little of Akhmatova’s relationship with her mother.) Akhmatova’s brother Victor recalls an occasion when the young girl asked their father for money for a new coat. When he refused she threw off her clothes and became hysterical. (See Akhmatova: Poems, Correspondence, Reminiscences, Iconography: Ardis.) Andrei Gorenko deserted his family in 1905. A few years later, hearing that his daughter wrote verse, he asked her to choose a pen name. He wished to avoid the ignominy, as he put it, of “a decadent poetess” in the family. She took her Tartar great-grandmother’s name.

  When Akhmatova was still a schoolgirl she met Nikolai Gumilev, a poet and founder of Acmeism who became her mentor and her first husband. Nadezhda Mandelstam has said that Akhmatova rarely spoke of her childhood; she seemed to consider her marriage to Gumilev the beginning of her life. (See Mandelstam’s Hope Abandoned: Atheneum.) She was slow to accept his proposal. He sought her attention by repeated attempts at suicide until she finally married him in 1910. The bride’s family did not attend the ceremony. Having won her at last, Gumilev promptly left to spend six months in Africa. On his return, while still at the train station, he asked her if she had been writing. By reply she handed him the manuscript of Evening, her first book.

  Their son, Lev Gumilev, was born in 1912, the same year Akhmatova published Evening. By 1917, when she was twenty-eight, she had brought out two more books, Rosary and White Flock. Despite the historical tumult of World War I and the Revolution, her poetry quickly became popular. But tumult was private as well as public: by 1918 her marriage had failed; Akhmatova divorced Gumilev and the same autumn married the Assyriologist V. K. Shileiko. This unhappy alliance—Shileiko burned his wife’s poems in the samovar—lasted for six years. (See Amanda Haight’s biography, Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage: Oxford.) Ordinary family life eluded Akhmatova, who went through many love affairs. Before her divorce from Shileiko, she lived in a menage a trois with Nikolai Punin and his wife; Punin later became her third husband. Motherhood was not easy. (“The lot of a mother is a bright torture: I was not worthy of it. . . .”) For the most part, Gumilev’s mother raised her grandson Lev.

  In the years following her early triumphs Akhmatova suffered many torments, as the Soviet regime hardened into tyranny. Gumilev was executed in 1921 for alleged anti-Bolshevik activity. Early in the twenties Soviet critics denounced Akhmatova’s work as anachronistic and useless to the Revolution. The Central Committee of the Communist Party forbade publication of her verse; from 1923 to 1940, none of her poetry appeared in print. The great poems of her maturity, Requiem, and Song Without a Piero, exist in Russia today only by underground publication, or samizdat.

  During the Stalinist terror of the 1930s the poet’s son Lev and her husband Punin were imprisoned. Akhmatova’s fellow Acmeist and close friend Osip Mandelstam died in a prison camp in 1938. (Punin died in another camp fifteen years later.) During the Second World War the Committee of the Communist Party of Leningrad evacuated Akhmatova to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. There she lived in a small, hot room, in ill health, with Osip Mandelstam’s widow Nadezhda.

  In 1944 Akhmatova returned to Leningrad, to a still-higher wave of official antagonism. In a prominent literary magazine, Andrei Zhdanov denounced her as “.. . a frantic little fine lady flitting between the boudoir and the chapel ... half-nun, half-harlot.” The Union of Soviet Writers expelled her. A new book of poems, already in print, was seized and destroyed. For many years she supported herself only by working as a translator from Asiatic languages and from French, an activity she compared to “eating one’s own brain” (Haight). The final decade of her life was relatively tranquil. During the thaw that followed Stalin’s death, the government released Lev Gumilev from labor camp and reinstated Akhmatova in the Writer’s Union. She was permitted to publish and to travel. In Italy and England she received honors and saw old friends. She died in March 1966, and was buried at Komarovo, near Leningrad.

  Akhmatova’s work ranges from the highly personal early lyrics through the longer, more public and political Requiem, on to the allusive and cryptic Poem Without a Hero. The early poems embody Acmeist principles. Acmeism grew out of the Poet’s Guild, which Nikolai Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky founded in 1912 - fifteen poets who met regularly to read poems and argue aesthetic theory. At one meeting, Gumilev proposed an attack on Symbolism with its “obligatory mysticism.” He proposed Acmeism as an alternative; Acmeism held that a rose is beautiful in itself, not because it stands for something. These poets announced that they were craftsmen not priests, and dedicated themselves to clarity, concision, and perfection of form. They summed up their goals in two words: “beautiful clarity.” Gumilev himself, Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam were the leading Acmeists, and the movement thrived for a decade.

  Written so many years later, Requiem and Poem Without a Hero naturally moved past Akhmatova’s early poems in intention and in scope. They are manifestly political and historical. Requiem records the terror of the purges in the 1930s, commemorating the women who stood waiting outside prison gates with parcels for husbands, sons, and brothers; Akhmatova compares the suffering of these women to Mary’s at the Crucifixion. In the prefatory note to Poem Without a Hero Akhmatova says: “I dedicate this poem to its first listeners—my friends and countrymen who perished in Leningrad during the siege.”

  These translations are free-verse versions of rhymed and metered poems. Losing the formal perfection of the Russian verses—much of the “beautiful clarity”—has been a constant source of frustration and sadness to me and to my co-worker, Vera Sandomirsky Dunham. But something, I think, crosses the barrier between our languages. Because it is
impossible to translate with fidelity to form and to image, I have sacrificed form for image. Image embodies feeling, and this embodiment is perhaps the greatest treasure of lyric poetry. In translating, I mean to place the integrity of the image over all other considerations.

  Translation provides many frustrations. It seems impossible to translate a single Russian syllable that means “What did he have to do that for?” Trying to translate lines about a native place—so important to Akhmatova, who firmly refused expatriation—how does one render rodnoi, which means “all that is dear to me, familiar, my own . . . I remember Vera clapping her hands to her head and moaning, “This will sink us. .. .”

  There are times when—in the interest of cadence, tone, or clarity I have altered punctuation or moved something from one line to another. Often I needed to shift the verb from the end to the beginning of the sentence. Sometimes a word, translated from Russian as the dictionary would have it, made impossible English. I list significant variations from the original in notes at the back of this book. We have translated from the two volume Works, edited by G. P. Struve and B. A. Filippov, published by Interlanguage Literary Associates in 1965.

  I want to thank Robert Bly, who first encouraged me to read Akhmatova, and later to translate these poems. I also thank Lou Teel, who, as a student of Russian at Dartmouth, helped me begin the work. I owe special thanks to Vera Sandomirsky Dunham, a busy scholar, teacher, and lifelong lover of these poems. Her fear that a free-verse translation of Akhmatova is fundamentally misconceived​

  has not prevented her from offering her time, her erudition, and her hospitality.

  J.K.

  Poems from

  Evening (1912)

  Rosary (1914)

  White Flock (1917)

  1

  The memory of sun weakens in my heart,​

  grass turns yellow,​

  wind blows the early flakes of snow​

  lightly, lightly.

  Already the narrow canals have stopped flowing;​

  water freezes.

  Nothing will ever happen here—​

  not ever!

  Against the empty sky the willow opens​

  a transparent fan.

  Maybe it’s a good thing I’m not​

  your wife.

  The memory of sun weakens in my heart.

  What’s this? Darkness?

  It’s possible. And this may be the first night​

  of winter.

  1911

  2

  Evening hours at the desk.

  And a page irreparably white.

  The mimosa calls up the heat of Nice,​

  a large bird flies in a beam of moonlight.

  And having braided my hair carefully for the night​

  as if tomorrow braids will be necessary,

  I look out the window, no longer sad,—​

  at the sea, the sandy slopes.

  What power a man has​

  who doesn’t ask for tenderness!

  I cannot lift my tired eyes​

  when he speaks my name.

  1913

  3

  I know, I know the skis

  will begin again their dry creaking.

  In the dark blue sky the moon is red,​

  and the meadow slopes so sweetly.

  The windows of the palace burn​

  remote and still.

  No path, no lane,​

  only the iceholes are dark.

  Willow, tree of nymphs,​

  don’t get in my way.

  Shelter the black grackles, black​

  grackles among your snowy branches.

  1913

  4

  The Guest

  Everything’s just as it was: fine hard snow​

  beats against the dining room windows,​

  and I myself have not changed:​

  even so, a man came to call.

  I asked him: “What do you want?”

  He said, “To be with you in hell.”

  I laughed: “It seems you see​

  plenty of trouble ahead for us both.”

  But lifting his dry hand​

  he lightly touched the flowers.

  “Tell me how they kiss you,​

  tell me how you kiss.”

  And his half-closed eyes​

  remained on my ring.

  Not even the smallest muscle moved​

  in his serenely angry face.

  Oh, I know it fills him with joy—​

  this hard and passionate certainty​

  that there is nothing he needs,​

  and nothing I can keep from him.

  1 January 1914

  5

  N.V.N.

  There is a sacred, secret line in loving​

  which attraction and even passion cannot cross,—​

  even if lips draw near in awful silence​

  and love tears at the heart.

  Friendship is weak and useless here,​

  and years of happiness, exalted and full of fire,​

  because the soul is free and does not know​

  the slow luxuries of sensual life.

  Those who try to come near it are insane​

  and those who reach it are shaken by grief.

  So now you know exactly why

  my heart beats no faster under your hand.

  1915

  6

  Like a white stone in a deep well​

  one memory lies inside me.

  I cannot and will not fight against it:​

  it is joy and it is pain.

  It seems to me that anyone who looks​

  into my eyes will notice it immediately,​

  becoming sadder and more pensive​

  than someone listening to a melancholy tale.

  I remember how the gods turned people​

  into things, not killing their consciousness.​

  And now, to keep these glorious sorrows alive,​

  you have turned into my memory of you.

  1916

  Slepnevo

  7

  Everything promised him to me:​

  the fading amber edge of the sky,​

  and the sweet dreams of Christmas,​

  and the wind at Easter, loud with bells,

  and the red shoots of the grapevine,​

  and waterfalls in the park,​

  and two large dragonflies​

  on the rusty iron fencepost.

  And I could only believe​

  that he would be mine​

  as I walked along the high slopes,​

  the path of burning stones.

  1916

  Poems from

  Plaintain (1921)

  8

  Yes I loved them, those gatherings late at night,—

  the small table, glasses with frosted sides,

  fragrant vapor rising from black coffee,

  the fireplace, red with powerful winter heat,

  the biting gaiety of a literary joke,

  and the first helpless and frightening glance of my love.

  1917

  9

  Twenty-first. Night. Monday.

  Silhouette of the capitol in darkness.

  Some good-for-nothing—who knows why—​

  made up the tale that love exists on earth.

  People believe it, maybe from laziness​

  or boredom, and live accordingly:​

  they wait eagerly for meetings, fear parting,​

  and when they sing, they sing about love.

  But the secret reveals itself to some,​

  and on them silence settles down. . . .

  I found this out by accident

  and now it seems I’m sick all the time.

  1917

  10

  There is a certain hour every day​

  so troubled and heavy . . .

  I speak to melancholy in a loud voice​

  not b
othering to open my sleepy eyes.​

  And it pulses like blood,​

  is warm like a sigh,​

  like happy love​

  is smart and nasty.

  1917

  11

  We walk along the hard crest of the snowdrift

  toward my white, mysterious house,

  both of us so quiet,

  keeping the silence as we go along.

  And sweeter even than the singing of songs​

  is this dream, now becoming real:​

  the swaying of branches brushed aside​

  and the faint ringing of your spurs.

  January 1917

  12

  All day the crowd rushes one way, then another;​

  its own gasping frightens it still more,​

  and laughing skulls fly on funereal banners,​

  prophesying from the river’s far side.

  For this I sang and dreamed!

  They have torn my heart in two.

  How quiet it is after the volley!

  Death sends patrols into every courtyard.

  1917

  13

  The river flows without hurry through the valley,​

  a house with many windows rises on the hill—​