Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

In Memory of M. B.
by Anna Akhmatova
Translated by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and stayed with her alone.

Now you're gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.



From Poems of Akhmatova, translated and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward, published by Little, Brown & Co. © 1973 Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward.

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I love the lines: "Alone you let the terrible stranger in, /and stayed with her alone. " They can be read so many different ways.

You alone let the terrible stranger in?

You were alone when you let the terrible stranger in and you alone lived with her?

Even after you let in the terrible stranger and lived with her, you were still alone?

You let the terrible stranger in, but you didn't let in the others who came with her?

Each reading is, in its own way, the "correct" one, I suspect.