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Way of all the Earth
ANNA AKHMATOVA
Way of all the Earth
Translated by
D. M. THOMAS
Ohio University Press
Athens, Ohio
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
Way of all the Earth first published in England 1979 by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited
Translation copyright © D. M. Thomas 1979
ISBN 978-0-8040-1205-8 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-8040-4094-5 (electronic)
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 79-1953
Acknowledgments
The text I have primarily used has been 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.
I wish to thank Jennifer Munro for her patient and expert help, over many months, with aspects of the Russian language that eluded me. Without her, my task would have been incomparably more difficult.
Amanda Haight’s biography of Akhmatova (Akhmatova, A Poetic Pilgrimage, Oxford University Press, 1976) has been invaluable in supplying background information and interpretative comment on the poetry. 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, has struck me as so ‘happy’ that it would have been foolish to try to find a better.
The Translator acknowledges assistance from the Arts Council of Great Britain.
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
‘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 . . .’
‘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
