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You Will Hear Thunder
Anna Akhmatova
Also translated by D.M. Thomas
Alexander Pushkin: The Bronze Horseman (Selected Poems)
You Will Hear Thunder
Akhmatova : Poems
Translated by D.M. Thomas
Ohio University Press
Athens
Swallow Press
An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
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Printed in the United States of America
Swallow Press/Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
Requiem and Poem without a Hero first published in England 1976 by Elek Books Limited, London
Way of all the Earth first published in England 1979 by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited
This edition first published in England 1985 by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited
Published in the United States of America 1985 by Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio
Translation copyright © D. M. Thomas, 1976, 1979, 1985
ISBN 978-0-8040-1191-4 pbk
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 84-062245
Contents
‘I have written down the words . . .’
‘Memory of sun seeps from the heart . . .’
‘He loved three things alone . . .’
‘I came here in idleness . . .’
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? . . .’
