In Memory Of M.B.

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.

/For plantsman.

To Death

You will come in any case -- so why not now?
How long I wait and wait. The bad times fall.
I have put out the light and opened the door
for you, because you are simple and magical.
Assume, then, any form that suits your wish,
take aim, and blast at me with poisoned shot,
or strangle me like an efficient mugger,
or else infect me -- typhus be my lot --
or spring out of the fairytale you wrote,
the one we're sick of hearing, day and night,
where the blue hatband marches up the stairs,
led by the janitor, pale with fright.
It's all the same to me. The Yenisei swirls,
the North Star shines, as it will shine forever;
and the blue luster of my loved one's eyes
is clouded over by the final horror.

~The House on the Fontanka
19 August 1939

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

My Way (1940)

One goes in straightforward ways,
One in a circle roams:
One waits for a girl of his long gone days,
Or for returning home.
But I do go -- and woe is there --
By a way nor straight, nor broad,
But into never and nowhere,
Like trains -- off the railroad.

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

This Cruel Age Has Deflected Me

This cruel age has deflected me,
like a river from its course.
Strayed from its familiar shores,
my changeling life has flowed
into a sister channel.
How many spectacles I've missed:
the curtain rising without me,
and falling too. How many friends
I never had the chance to meet.
Here in the only city I can claim,
where I could sleepwalk and not lose my way,
how many foreign skylines I can dream,
not to be witnessed through my tears.
And how many verses I have failed to write!
Their secret chorus stalks me
close behind. One day, perhaps,
they'll strangle me.
I know beginnings, I know endings, too,
and life-in-death, and something else
I'd rather not recall just now.
And a certain woman
has usurped my place
and bears my rightful name,
leaving a nickname for my use,
with which I've done the best I could.
The grave I go to will not be my own.
But if I could step outside myself
and contemplate the person that I am
I should know at last what envy is.

~Leningrad, 1944

*****************

I've had this feeling, haven't you? The feeling that you've failed to do all that you could or should have done and, at the same time, the realization that, if you could look at your life as an objective observer, you'd probably realize that you were doing pretty well. Some of the best advice that I ever got was to, when considering what to do about something in your life that's bothering you, imagine the honest advice that you'd give to a dear, beloved friend in the same situation. Oddly, it's often different from what you'd say to yourself. It at least provides you with two perspectives, instead of just one.

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

I have learned how faces fall to bone,
how under the eyelids terror lurks,
how suffering inscribes on cheeks
the hard lines of its cuneiform texts,
how glossy black or ash-fair locks
turn overnight to tarnished silver,
how smiles fade on submissive lips,
and fear quavers in a dry titter.
And I pray not for myself alone . . .
for all who stood outside the jail,
in bitter cold or summer's blaze,
with me under that blind red wall.

*****

President Bush has declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen whom he alone determines to be a threat to our nation -- without an arrest warrant, without notifying them of what charges have been filed against them, and without even informing their families that they have been imprisoned. The president claims that he can simply snatch an American citizen off the street and keep him or her locked up indefinitely -- even for the rest of his or her life -- and refuse to allow that citizen the right to make a phone call or talk to a lawyer -- even to argue that the president or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person. . . .So a constitutional right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we used to think of in an old-fashioned way as "inalienable" can now be instantly stripped from any American by the president with no meaningful review by any other branch of government.

~Al Gore in The Assault on Reason

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

The Death of Sophocles

That night an eagle swooped down from the skies onto
Sophocles' house.
And the garden suddenly rocked with a cry of cicadas.
Already the genius strode toward his immortality,
skirting the enemy camp at the walls of his native city.
Then it was that the king had a strange dream:
Great Dinoysus ordered him to lift the siege,
so as not to dishonor the service for the dead
and to grant the Athenians the solace of his fame.

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

Some of Akhmatova's best-loved poetry was inspired by her experience of standing in line with other women outside a Soviet prison, waiting to see a loved one -- in Akhmatova's case, her son.

Epilogue

II

Remembrance hour returns with the turning year.
I see, I hear, I touch you drawing near:

the one we tried to help to the sentry's booth,
and who no longer walks this precious earth,

and that one who would toss her pretty main
and say, "It's just like coming home again."

I want to name the names of all that host,
but they snatched up the list, and now it's lost.

I've woven them a garment that's prepared
out of poor words, those that I overhead,

and will hold fast to every word and glance
all of my days, even in new mischance,

and if a gag should bind my tortured mouth,
through which a hundred million people shout,

then let them pray for me, as I do pray
for them, this eve of my remembrance day.

And if my country ever should assent
to casting in my name a monument,

I should be proud to have my memory graced,
but only if the monument be placed

not near the sea on which my eyes first opened --
my last link with the sea has long been broken --

nor in the Tsar's garden near the sacred stump,
where a grieved shadow hunts my body's warmth,

But here, where I endured three hundred hours
in line before the implacable iron bars.

Because even in blissful death I fear
to lose the clangor of the Black Marias,

to lose the banging of that odious gate
and the old crone howling like a wounded beast.

And from my motionless bronze-lidded sockets
may the melting snow, like teardrops, slowly trickle,

and a prison dove coo somewhere, over and over,
as the ships sail softly down the flowing Neva.

~March 1940

The photo above shows relative lined up outside abu Ghraib. One wonders how many women stand in line outside prisons in Iraq and one wonders how many would stand outside Guantanamo, were it not impossible to do so. Akhmatova speak as eloquently for them as she did for the Black Marias and the howling old crone. Send Amnesty International a few dollars in her memory. Say a prayer for political prisoners everywhere.

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

In honor of the end of the Sopranos, which, whatever else you say about it, was actually that elusive thing -- good tv -- here's some tres depressing Akhmatova.

All Has Been Taken Away . . .

All has been taken away: strength and love.
My body, cast into an unloved city,
is not glad of the sun. I feel [that] my blood
has gone quite cold in me.

I'm baffled by the Muse's state of mind:
she looks at me and doesn't say a word,
and lays her head, in its dark wreath,
exhausted, on my breast.

And only conscience, more terribly each day
rages, demanding vast tribute.
For answer I hide my face in my hands . . .
but I have run out of tears and excuses.

~Sevastopol, 24 October 1916

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

"You, Who Were Born..."
1956

You, who were 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
Edited by Hecate, 2007

I love Akhmatova's exortation to write original poetry, rather than to continue to recycle the themes and techinques already created.

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

To the Many
I -- am your voice, the warmth of your breath,
I -- am the reflection of your face,
The futile trembling of futile wings,
I am with you to the end, in any case.

That's why you so fervently love
Me in my weakness and in my sin;
That's why you impulsively gave
Me the best of your sons;
That's why you never even asked
Me for any word of him
And blackened my forever-deserted home
With fumes of praise.
And they say -- it's impossible to fuse more closely,
Impossible to love more abandonedly. . .

As the shadow from the body wants to part,
As the flesh from the soul wants to separate,
So I want now -- to be forgotten...

September 1922
-- translated by Judith Hemschemeyer

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

And, As It's Going...
1907

And, as it's going, often at love's breaking,
The ghost of first days came again to us,
The willow through the window stretched in,
The silver beauty of her gentle branches.
The bird began to sing the song of light and pleasure
To us, who fear to lift our eyes up from the earth,
We who are so lofty, bitter, and intense,
About the days when we were saved together.


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, Desember, 2000
Edited by Dmitry Karshtedt, February, 2001
Edited by Hecate, May 2007

Picture found here.

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

To the Londoners

Time is now writing with her impressive hand
Shakespeare's black play, his twenty-fourth.
What can we do, who know the bitter taste,
but here, by this leaden river, re-enact
those tragic lines of Halmet, Casear, Lear? --
or maybe guide, as an escort, to her tomb,
child Juliet, poor dove, guide her with songs and torches;
or play the Peeping Tom in Macbeth's windows,
trembling no less than the hired murderer,
Only not this one, not this one, not this one --
this one we do not have the strength to read.


~1940

~Photo found here.

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

My Way

Some go in straightforward ways,
Some in a circle roam:
One waits for a girl of his earlier days,
Or waits for returning home.

But I do go -- and woe is there --
By a way not straight, nor broad,
But into never and nowhere,
Like trains -- off the railroad.


~1940


Art found here.

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

March Elegy

I have enough treasures from the past
to last me longer than I need or want.
you know as welI as I . . . malevolent memory
won't let go of half of them:
a modest church, with its gold cupola
slightly askew; a harsh chorus
of crows; the whistle of a train;
a birch tree haggard in a field
as if it had just been sprung from jail;
a secret midnight conclave
of monumental Bible-oaks;
and a tiny rowboat that comes drifting out
of somebody's dreams, slowly foundering.
Winter has already loitered here,
lightly powdering these fileds,
casting an impenetrable haze
that fills the world as far as the horizon.
i used to think that after we are gone
there's nothing, simply nothing at all.
Then who's that wandering by the porch
again and calling us by name?
Whose face is pressed against the frosted pane?
What hand out there is waving like a branch?
By way of reply, in that cobwebbed corner
a sunstruck tatter dances in the mirror.

~Leningrad,1960



Art found here

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

I have no use for odic legions,
Or for the charm of elegiac play.
For me, all verse should be off kilter
Not the usual way.

If only you knew what trash gives rise
To verse, without a tinge of shame,
Like bright dandelions by a fence,
Like burdock and like cocklebur.

An angry shout, the bracing smell of tar,
Mysterious mildew on the wall...
And out comes a poem, light-hearted, tender,
To your delight and mine.

21 January 1940

Listen to the poem in Russian here.

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

There Are Four of Us

Herewith I solemnly renounce my hoard
of earthly goods, whatever counts as chattel.
The genius and guardian angel of this place
has changed to an old tree-stump in the water.

Earth takes us in awhile as transient guests;
we live by habit, which we must unlearn.
On paths of air I seem to overhear
two friends, two voices, talking in their turn.

Did I say two? . . . There by the eastern wall,
where criss-cross shoots of brambles trail,
-- Oh look! -- that fresh dark elderberry branch
is like a letter from Marina in the mail.

~November 1961

I think of all the Akhmatova poems that I've blogged, this may be my favorite, so far. Four of them: Anna, the voices of her two old friends, and the elderberry branch.

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

Heart's Memory of Sun

Heart's memory of sun grows fainter,
sallow is the grass;
a few flakes toss in the wind
scarcely, scarcely.

The narrow canals no longer flow,
they are frozen over.
Nothing will ever happen here,
oh, never!

In the bleak sky the willow spreads
its bare-boned fan.
Maybe I'm better off as I am,
not as your wife.

Heart's memory of sun grows fainter.
What now? Darkness?
Perhaps? This very night unfolds
the winter.

~Kiev, 1911

Art found here.

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

To the Muse

The Muse my sister looked in my face,
her gaze was bright and clear,
and she took away my golden ring,
the gift of the virginal year.

Muse! everyone else is happy --
girls, wives, widows -- all round!
I swear I'd rather die on the rack
than live fettered and bound.

In time I'll join the guessing game,
pluck petals from the daisy's wheel.
Each creature on this earth I know,
must suffer love's ordeal.

Tonight I pine for no one,
alone in my candlelit room;
But I don't-don't-don't want to know
who's kissing whom.

At dawn, the mirrors, mocking, will say:
"Your gaze is not bright or clear."
I'll sigh: "The Muse my sister came
and took the gift of gifts away."

~Tsarskoye Selo 1911

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

But listen, I am warning you
I'm living for the very last time.
Not as a swallow, nor a maple,
Not as a reed, nor as a star,
Not as spring water,
Nor as the toll of bells...
Will I return to trouble men
Nor will I vex their dreams again
With my insatiable moans.

1940

You can hear the poem read in Russian here. I don't speak a word of Russian, but I've always loved the way that it sounds.