"You, Who Was Born..."
1956
You, who was born for poetry's creation,
Do not repeat the sayings of the ancients.
Though, maybe, our Poetry, itself,
Is just a single beautiful citation.
Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, July, 2002
Edited by Tatiana Piotroff, September, 2002
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I took last week off from Akhmatova. I'm reading her and thinking about her, but she's still not really communicating with me. And, yet, Russians adored her. Her latest biography, which I'm longing to read, is called Anna of all the Russias. So I know there must be more there than I'm getting.
A poetess only has one tool -- her language. And Akhmatova's tool was Russian, which I don't speak. But I love the sound of it. You know how some languages just SOUND sexy? For some people, that's French or Italian. For me, it's Russian. I love even the way that the names sound. And, as I've said before, I don't believe Akhmatova translates well.
The translation above is a good example. I can imagine what she was trying to get across, perhaps to a poet with whom she was in love. But it hurts. Why is it "you who was" rather than "you who were"? I'm sure the translator picked the one word over the other for a reason, but it simply sounds so awkward to my ear that I lose the romantic sense of the poem -- a poetess to whom poetry is the highest value, speaking to a lover as one born to create poetry -- due to the dissonance of the words.
I do like "a single beautiful citation." That works and, Bluebooker extraordinaire that I am, I've actually seen and appreciated beautiful citations. It's an art, like poetry. And I can understand why, to one who loves capital-P-Poetry, being a mere citation would seem as if it were, somehow, not enough. Ah, Anna. Am I going to get to appreciate you or will I have to give up, defeated?
A poetess only has her language to wield as a tool. Anna may have wielded Russian so well that only a speaker of Russian can love her the way that I love Mary Oliver, or Dorothy Parker, or Adrienne Rich. We'll see.
1 comment:
Hecate, I tried to find the Russian original of "You, who was born ...," and for the life of me I can't track it down. I even found what seems to purport to be a complete list of her verses (at http://www.akhmatova.org/verses/spisok.htm) but nothing that would seem to match this translation ...
-- Stu
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