‘Everything is looted . . .’
‘They wiped your slate . . .’
Bezhetsk
‘To earthly solace . . .’
‘I’m not of those who left . . .’
‘Blows the swan wind . . .’
‘To fall ill as one should . . .’
‘Behind the lake . . .’
Rachel
Lot’s Wife
from Reed
Muse
To an Artist
The Last Toast
* ‘Dust smells of a sun-ray . . .’
‘Some gaze into tender faces . . .’
Boris Pasternak
Voronezh
* Imitation from the Armenian
Dante
Cleopatra
Willow
* In Memory of Mikhail Bulgakov
‘When a man dies . . .’
* ‘Not the lyre of a lover . . .’
Way of all the Earth
from The Seventh Book
In 1940
Courage
‘And you, my friends . . .’
* ‘That’s how I am . . .’
Three Autumns
‘The souls of those I love . . .’
‘The fifth act of the drama . . .’
‘It is your lynx eyes, Asia . . .’
In Dream
‘So again we triumph! . . .’
‘Let any, who will, still bask in the south . . .’
from Northern Elegies: The Fifth
The Sixth
Seaside Sonnet
Fragment
Summer Garden
‘In black memory . . .’
‘Could Beatrice write . . .’
Death of a Poet
The Death of Sophocles
Alexander at Thebes
Native Soil
There are Four of Us
* ‘If all who have begged help . . .’
Last Rose
* ‘It is no wonder . . .’
‘What’s war? What’s plague? . . .’
In Memory of V. C. Sreznevskaya
‘You will hear thunder and remember me . . .’
Requiem
Poem without a Hero
Notes
* Poems not published in the collection but written in the same epoch.
Acknowledgements
In the spirit of an apprentice painter joining a master’s workshop, I have had three spells of translating Akhmatova: in 1964 (Requiem), 1974 (Poem without a Hero), and 1977 (a selection of mostly shorter poems). The first two works were published together as Requiem & Poem without a Hero (Elek. London, and Ohio U.P., 1976); the third body of translations was published under the title Way of All the Earth (Secker & Warburg Ltd., London, and Ohio U.P., 1979). The first of these volumes has long been out of print in Britain, and I am grateful to my publishers for providing an opportunity, in the present book, of bringing all my translations of Akhmatova together.
Akhmatova once referred to ‘the blessedness of repetition’. At the risk of some clumsiness of repetition (particularly in the Introductions) I have decided to leave the 1976 and 1979 texts essentially as they were.
My primary text was 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. My introduction and notes to Poem without a Hero draw heavily on their scholarship, and also on the late Max Hayward’s excellent introduction and notes in Poems of Akhmatova, selected and translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward (Collins-Harvill, 1974).
Amanda Haight’s biography (Akhmatova, A Poetic Pilgrimage, Oxford U.P., 1976) was invaluable in supplying background information and interpretative comment. 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, struck me as so ‘happy’ that it would have been foolish to try to find a better.
I am grateful to Jennifer Munro for her patient help with texts I found difficult to understand. Michael Glenny and Vera Dixon also gave me much-appreciated help.
But the errors, both linguistic and aesthetic, are mine; and the successes—Akhmatova’s.
D.M.T.
1984
