Product Description

Anna Akhmatova is not only Russia’s finest woman poet but perhaps the greatest in the history of Western culture. This volume brings together all of D. M. Thomas’s acclaimed translations of Akhmatova’s poems, including "Poem Without a Hero" and "Requiem," her poem of the Stalinist Terror.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #254497 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-25
• Original language: Russian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Review
8 November 1913
Alexander At Thebes
And You, My Friends Whohave Been Called Away
Behind The Lake The Moon's Not Stirred
Bezhetsk
Blows The Swan Wind
Blue Heaven, But The High
Boris Pasternak
By The Seashore
The Churchyard's Auiet On A Sunday
Cleopatra
Could Beatrice Write With Dante's Passion
Courage
The Cuckoo I Asked
Dante
Death Of A Poet
The Death Of Sophocles
Do You Forgive Me These November Days?
Evening Room
Everything Is Looted, Spoiled, Despoiled
The Fifth Act Of The Drama
Flight
For Alexander Blok
For M. Lozinsky
Fragment
Freshness Of Words, Simplicity Of Emotions
The Guest
He Loved Three Things Alone:
How Can You Look At The Neva
I Came Here In Idleness
I Don't Know If You're Alive Or Dead
I Have Come To Take Your Place, Sister
I Have Written Down The Words
I Hear The Oriole's Always Grieving Voice
I Won't Beg For Your Love: It's Laid
I'm Not Of Those Who Left Their Country
If All Who Have Begged Help
Imitation From The Armenian
Imitation Of Annensky
In 1940
In 1940: 2, To The Londoners
In 1940: 3, Shade
In 1940: 4
In 1940: 5
In Black Memory You'll Find, Fumbling
In Dream
In Memory Of V. C. Sreznevskaya
It Is No Wonder That With No Happy Voice
It Is Your Lynx Eyes, Asia
Last Rose
The Last Toast
Legend On An Unfinished Portrait
Loneliness
Lot's Wife
Lying In Me, As Though It Were A White
Memory Of Sun Seeps From The Heart
Muse
Native Soil
Neither By Cart Nor Boat
Nobody Came To Meet Me
Northern Elegies: The Fifth
Northern Elegies: The Sixth
Not The Lyre Of A Lover
Now Farewell, Capital
Now No-one Will Be Listening To Songs
O There Are Words That Should Not Be Repeated
The Pillow Hot
Poem Without A Hero: Dedicatory Poems 1. In Memory Of Vs. K.
Poem Without A Hero: Dedicatory Poems 2. To O.a.g-s.
Poem Without A Hero: Dedicatory Poems 3.
Poem Without A Hero: Part One, 1. Across The Landing
Poem Without A Hero: Part One, 1. The Year Nineteen Thirteen
Poem Without A Hero: Part One, 2.
Poem Without A Hero: Part One, 3.
Poem Without A Hero: Part One, 4.
Poem Without A Hero: Part Three -- Epilogue, To My City
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 1.
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 2.
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 3.
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 4.
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 5.
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 6.
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 7.
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 8.
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 9.
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 10
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 11
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 13
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 14
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 15
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 16
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 17
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 18
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 19
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 20
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 21
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 22
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 23
Poem Without A Hero: Part Two -- Obverse, 24
Rachel
Reading Hamlet
Requiem
Requiem: 1.
Requiem: 10. Crucifixion
Requiem: 2.
Requiem: 3.
Requiem: 4.
Requiem: 5
Requiem: 6
Requiem: 7. The Sentence
Requiem: 8. To Death
Requiem: 9.
Requiem: Dedication
Requiem: Epilogue - I
Requiem: Epilogue - Ii
Requiem: Prologue
A Ride
The Road Is Black By The Beach
Seaside Sonnet
So Many Requests, Always, From A Lover!
Song Of The Last Meeting
The Souls Of Those I Love Are On High Stars
Summer Garden
That's How I Am. I Could Wish For You Someone Other
There Are Four Of Us
Three Autumns
To An Artist
To Earthly Solace, Heart, Be Not A Prey
To Fall Ill As One Should, Deliriously
Under An Empty Dwelling's Frozen Roof
The Voice Of Memory
Voronezh
Way Of All The Earth
We're All Drunkards Here. Harlots.
What's War? What's Plague We Know That They %will Pass
When A Man Dies
White Night
Why Is Our Century Worse Than Any Other?
Willow
You Are With Me Once More, Autumn My Friend!
You Will Hear Thunder And Remember Me
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Language Notes
Text: English, Russian (translation)

From the Inside Flap
This volume presents the largest selection of Anna Akhmatova's poetry yet available in English. It includes many poems translated for the first time, and it covers the whole of her career, from the love lyrics and songs which made her famous in the teens of the twentieth century to the long poems which many critics regard as her most lasting achievements.

Akhmatova, along with her contemporaries Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva formed a "poetic quartet" which many Russian readers think of as the finest representatives of poetry for the last 100 years. They began their careers almost simultaneously, just before World War I. Tsvetaeva would hang herself in 1941, Mandelstam die in terrible Kolyma in 1938. Akhmatova and Pasternak lived out their lives, though not without serious problems from officialdom--Pasternak being railroaded out of the Union of Soviet Writers for winning the Nobel Prize, Akhmatova almost never being published and often being attacked as an "inner emigre," a "bourgeois" a "slut," and so on. Her long poem Requiem, given here in Robin Kemball's translation, was an expression of the vast grief felt by all those Russian women whose loved ones were ground up by GULAG, including Akhmatova's son Lev (her son by Nikolai Gumilev, the Acmeist poet shot to death by the Cheka in 1921).

The other long poem presented here, A Poem without a Hero, is a profound historical and literary meditation on the passing of the whole Silver Age of Russian culture. This poem is highly allusive, so the detailed commentaries provided by Carl R. Proffer are not just useful, but necessary.

But it is Akhmatova's early poems which have had the widest and most loving audience. As Walter Arndt writes in his Introduction: "Among the remaining witnesses of the 20th century's 'remarkable decade' in Russian poetry, 1912-1922, many still speak with animation and awe of the change of air in poetry which was heralded by Evening, Akhmatova's first volume of verse. It was placed beyond doubt two years later by her second, Rosary: a delicate but decisive discharge of lyric directness, authenticity of feeling, palpability of image and phrase." This new collection represents the early period richly.

In addition to the editor's introduction "The Akhmatova Phenomenon," there is a Chronology of the poet's fife. For students who may want to compare the translations to the originals, the Table of Contents provides a key of titles and first fines to the most easily available Russian edition.

Walter Arndt is Professor of Russian Literature at Dartmouth. His translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin won the Bollingen Prize. He is also translator of Pushkin Threefold and Pushkin's Ruslan and Liudmila.

Customer Reviews

A wonderful book of lyric poetry
Anna Akhmatova was one of the century's greatest lyric poets. D. M. Thomas has selected a fine overview of her poetic accomplishment, and translated the poems stunningly: both lyric cadences and the quality of spoken speech come through in his refashioning of the poems into English. (The Hayward/Kunitz tranlations are also fine, but for a brief introduction this is a wonderful book.)

The volume contains her "Requieum," a ten pagel lyric sequence which is my choice for the greatest poem of the twentieth century, as it combines personal lyricism, social witness, historical density, a primal narrative moment -- in poems which are stunning, one after another.

Perhaps only Yeats has rivalled Akhmatova's exploration of love in modern times, and there are many moments when her symbolism, her brevity, her song-like qualities are reminiscent of the best of Yeats.

This is a wonderful book, a fine introduction to a great, powerful, haunting poet.

The poet as witness and hero
The incredible courage of Anna Akhmatova in being true to her art and her homeland through the kinds of sufferings people in the West have known little of the like of is evident in these poems. The desolation and distance of seperation from loved ones is another subject written powerfully about here. I do not know Russian and cannot speak for the quality of translation. But Kunitz's renderings sound like true poetry. In the introduction Max Hayward tells in brief the story of her incredible isolation in life and dedication to her poetry. Her loyalty to her friends in dark times, and to the other three of the ' four of Russian poetry in this century' (Pasternak Mandelstam Tsetayava ) is also poignantly described. As is the role she had for the silent masses as one of those poetic voices who spoke for the suffering of all the Russians both in the wars and through the time of the Stalinist nightmare.

Here are two of the poems that especially moved me.

"The Last Toast"

I drink to our ruined house,
to the dolor of my life,
to our loneliness together:
and to you I raise my glass,
to lying lips that have betrayed us,
to dead- cold, pitiless eyes,
and to the hard realities:
that the world is brutal and coarse,
that God in fact has not saved us.

I AM NOT ONE OF THOSE WHO LEFT THE LAND

I am not one of those who left the land
to the mercy of its enemies
Their flattery leaves me cold,
my songs are not for them to praise.

But I pity the exile's lot,
Like a felon, like a man half- dead,
dark is your path, wanderer;
wormwood infects your foreign bread.

ut here , in the murk of conflagration,
where scarcely a friend is left to know,
we, the survivors, do not flinch
from anything, not from a single blow.

Surely the reckoning will be made
after the passing of this cloud.
We are the people without tears,
straighter than you.. more proud..

Lost in the translation?
One often wonders, when one hears everyone and their brothers spouting superlatives about a poet from a historically repressive country, whether the superlatives are based on the poet's actual work, or whether they're in some way based on the poet's admirable-- but irrelevant-- ability to perform within a culture that is repressive to the poet's art. In some cases, the superlatives are justified, for example Vladimir Holan's stunning book-length poem _A Night with Hamlet_, written while Holan was officially a non-person in Hungary in the sixties.

Akhmatova has been called "the greatest Russian woman poet ever, and perhaps the greatest woman poet ever." I can't help but think those lauding on these kinds of laurels are looking more at her life than her work. There are certainly flashes of great brilliance here, but to put Akhmativa's work up against that of, say, Elizabeth Bishop, Deborah Allbery, or even the underrated Dorianne Laux would quickly reveal many of its flaws.

This is not to say that Akhmatova's poetry is completely without merit, and one must be forced to consider the viability of the work of any translator who would consider "He, was it, through the packed hall/Sent you (or was it a dream?)" to be the best way to translate anything, much less poetry. And thus, perhaps, the original is far more eloquent than what we receive here. That taken into account, there is still the problem to contend with that much of Akhmatova's work is, for obvious reasons, overtly political, and makes no attempt to convey its message artistically; worse yet, a good deal of that work is imagist, impressionist. The end result is something that's thick, sludgy, and impossible to read.

However, every once in a while a good line will shine through, and occasionally we find ourselves staring at a poem that seems to exist well outside the boundaries of this particular collection:

* * *

Voronezh

And the town is frozen solid, leaded with ice.

Trees, walls, snow, seem to be under glass. Cautiously I tread on crystals. The painted sleighs can't seem to get a grip. And over the statue of Peter-in-Voronezh Are crows, and poplars, and a pale-green dome Washed-out and muddy in the sun-motes. The mighty slopes of the field of Kulikovo Tremble still with the slaughter of barbarians. And all at once the poplars, like lifted chalices, Enmesh more boisterously overhead Like thousands of wedding-guests feasting And drinking toasts to our happiness. And in the room of the banished poet Fear and the Muse take turns at the watch, And the night comes When there will be no sunrise.

* * *

Unfortunately, there's too little of this and too much of the rest. Giving the benefit of the doubt where the translation is concerned, I can still only manage ** 1/2.