Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

In every revolution, the main issue is power.

V. I. Lenin

"Poetry is power," Osip Mandelstam once said to Akhmatova in Voronezh, and she bowed her head on its slender neck. Banished, sick, penniless and hounded, they still would not give up their power.

Nadezhda Mandelstam

Akhmatova continue to evade me. I think now I've been misguided in insisting upon reading her poetry before her biography. I'll need to read about her life if I ever hope to read her poetry even semi-competently. But how can I give up on a woman who agreed so eloquently that poetry is about power and about revolution.

At any rate, I like the feminist feel of this poem:

Lot's Wife
by Anna Akhmatova
Translated by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,

over a black mountain, in his giant track,

while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:

"It's not too late, you can still look back



at the red towers of your native Sodom,

the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,

at the empty windows set in the tall house

where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."



A single glance: a sudden dart of pain

stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .

Her body flaked into transparent salt,

and her swift legs rooted to the ground.



Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem

too insignificant for our concern?

Yet in my heart I never will deny her,

who suffered death because she chose to turn.

What's Anna saying? That it's ok to want to look back? That it's ok to love the comforts and memory of home? That men and their patriarchial god too often trail off into the desert ignoring the things important to women? Or was this a huge comment upon the Soviets that I fail to grasp because I know so little of her life? Well, Anna, I wish I could invite you over to sit in my yard and have tea and tell me, while we enjoy the herb-scented breezes, what you were writing about. I'd offer you cheese, fruit, bread -- the things that were in such short supply while you were writing. We could talk about women turned into "transparent salt," which sounds to me like as good a description as any I'm likely to read of tears.