trans. Donald Mager

Анна Ахматова / Anna Akhmatova

from From a Burnt Notebook (Wild Roses in Bloom)1


And thou art distant in humanity.—Keats2

СОЖЖЕННАЯ ТЕТРАДИ (ШИПОВНИК ЦВЕТЕТ)


And thou art distant in humanity.—Keats

Excerpt from a Dedication


Instead of festive well-wishing
This stiff dry wind offers only
The reek of decomposition,
The savor of smoke and verses
That my hand wrote.

ОТРЫВОК ПОСВЯЩЕНИЯ


Вместо праздничного поздравленья
Этот ветер жесткий и сухой
Принесет вам только запах тленья,
Привкус дыма и стихотворенья,
Что моей написаны рукой...

 

From A Burnt Notebook


Already beautiful on the bookshelf
Your well-situated sister is set,
But over you is debris of starry hoards
And under you are fiery coals.
How you prayed, how you wanted to live,
How you dreaded the scathing fire,
But all at once your body began trembling,
And your voice, flying off, swore at me.
And just like that, the pines began to rustle
Making reflections in the deep moonlit water,
While around the fires of the sacred spring
Already you led the round-dance across the graves.

СОЖЖЕННАЯ ТЕТРАДЬ


Уже красуется на книжной полке
Твоя благополучная сестра,
А над тобою звездных стай осколки
И под тобою угольки костра.
Как ты молила, как ты жить хотела.
Как ты боялась едкого огня,
Ио вдруг твое затрепетало тело,
А голос, улетая, клял меня.
И сразу все зашелестели сосны
И отразились в недрах лунных вод,
А вкруг костра священнейшие весны
Уже вели надгробный хоровод,

 

Actuality


Be done with time, be done with space,
I perceived it all through the white night:
The narcissus in the crystal on your table,
The blue smoke of your cigar,
And that mirror, where, like pure water,
You might now be reflected.
Be done with time, be done with space…
But you no longer can be of help to me.

НАЯВУ


И  время прочь, и пространство прочь,
Я все разглядела сквозь белую ночь:
И нарцисс в хрустале у тебя на столе,
И сигары синий дымок,
И то зеркало, где. Как в чистой воде,
Ты сейчас отразиться мог.
И время прочь, и пространство прочь…
Но и ты мне не можешь помочь.

 

On the road where Donskoi3

Once led his great army,
Where the wind recalls the enemy,
Where the moon is yellow with horns,—
I passed along as if in a deep sea…
Even the fragrance of wild roses
Was metamorphosed into words,
And I was ready to meet
The seventh onslaught of my destiny.

По той дороге, где Донской

Вел рать великую когда-то,
Где ветер помнит супостата,
Где месяц желтый и рогатый,—
Я шла, как в глубине морской…
Шиповник так благоухал,
Что даже превратился в слово,
И встретить я была готова
Моей судьбы девятый вал,

 

You are with me again, my autumn-friend!—In. Annenskii4


Let who chooses, loll in the south
And pamper themselves in paradise gardens.
Here is the real north—and autumn is
The companion I choose this year.

I live, as if in a strange imaginary house,
Where, it may be, I have died.
And it seems, Finnish reflections
Appeared in its blank mirrors.

I walk among black stubby firs,
Where heather resembles the wind.
And the glow of the moon is lusterless silver
Like a Finnish saw-edged knife.

Here I carried the happy memories
Of the last non-meeting with you—
The cold, clean, unquenched flame
Of my triumph over destiny.

1956. Komarovo

Ты опять со мной, подруга осень!—Ин. Анненский


Пусть кто-то еще отдыхает на юге
И нежится в райском саду.
Здесь северно очень—и осень в подруги
Я выбрала в этом году.

Живу, как в чужом, мне приснившемся доме,
Где, может быть, я умерла.
И, кажется, будто глядится Суоми
В пустые свои зеркала.

Иду между чериых призмистых елок,
Там вереск на ветер похож.
И светится месяца тусклый осколок,
Как финский зазубренный нож.

Сюда принесла я блаженную память
Последней невстречи с тобой—
Холодное, чистое, легкое пламя
Побежды моей над судьбой.

1956. Комарово

 

I see, my swan amuses herself!—Pushkin


In vain you cast at my feet
Greatness and fame and power.
You know yourself that it will not heal
Poetry’s luminous obsessions.

Will it cancel out slanders?
Will gold heal tedium?
It may be that I’ll give up in pretense,
But I’ll aim no muzzle at my brow.

Regardless, death stands at the door,
Whether you drive it off or invite it.
Behind it the road grows dark,
Along which I crawled in blood.

And behind that decades
Of tedium and terror and the void
Of which I’d go hoarse singing,
But fear, would avenge you with tears.

Goodbye for now.  I do not live in a desert,
I have with me the constancy of night
And Russia, save me from boasting,
And what’s left I’ll handle myself. 

Вижу я, лебядь тешится моя!—Пушкин


Ты напрасно мне под ноги мечешь
И величье, и славу, и власть,
Знаешь сам, что не этим излечишь
Песнопения светлую страсть.

Разве этим развеешь обиду?
Или золотом лечат тоску?
Может быть, я и сдамся для виду,
Не притронусь я дулом к виску.

Смерть стоит все равно у порога,
Ты гони ее или зови.
А за нею темнеет дорога,
По которой ползла я в крови,

А за нею десятилетья
Скуки, страха и той пустоты,
О которой могла бы пропеть я,
Да боюсь, что расплачешься ты.

Что ж, прощай.  Я живу не в пустыне,
Ночь со мной и всегдашняя Русь.
Так спаси же меня от гордыни,
В остальном я сама разберусь.

1 “Wild Roses in Bloom,” the cycle of poems written over many years that celebrates Isaiah Berlin’s visit to Akhmatova at the end of the War, is presented by the Ellis Lak variorum in two complete versions, both as part of the projected volume ВЕГ ВРЕМЕНИ The Flight of Time, a 1962 and a 1963 arrangement. This is the 1962 version. ↩

2 In English in the original. Epigraph is from John Keats’s “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.” ↩

3 In 1380, Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoi led his army out of Moscow on the Kolomenskaya Road where they met the Tatars in battle and achieved a decisive Russian victory. ↩

4 Innokentii Annenskii (1855–1909) was an educator, poet, and translator of Greek tragedies. His sole collection, The Cypress Chest, was admired as a model of clarity by Akhmatova and her friends. ↩

The Ellis–Lak edition’s 1962 version from БЕГ ВРЕМЕНИ (The Flight of Time):  Ахматова, Анна Андреевна. Сование Сочнеий В Шести Томах. [Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna.  Complete Works in Six Volumes. Ed. T. A. Gorkova. Moscow: Ellis–Lak [Эллис Лак], 1998–2005: 4, 370–380.

 

Anna Akhmatova’s early Acmeist poems were sensationally popular during the teens and 20s of the twentieth century. After the Bolshevik Revolution, her personal life and public career went from crisis to crisis. She was effectively barred from publishing. She continued to write “for the bottom of her chest” as she said. Her third husband and adult son were imprisoned and sent to Siberia during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Her great poem “Requiem” reflects this experience. It circulated among friends and later in samizdat, but was not published in the Soviet Union until the “thaw” in the 1950s. This was followed by a second long political poem, “The Way of All the World.” In 1942, she began her long masterpiece “Poem Without a Hero,” which occupied her for much of the rest of her life. After Stalin’s death, she was gradually rehabilitated, and her work was again widely published in the Soviet Union. In 1998, Ellis Lak Publishers began a comprehensive collected edition of her works, including, drafts, sketches, and variations. The eighth and final volume came out in 2005. It supersedes all previous editions both in the West and in Russia.

Don Mager’s chapbooks and volumes of poetry are: To Track the Wounded One, Glosses, That Which is Owed to Death, Borderings, Good Turns and The Elegance of the Ungraspable, Birth Daybook Drive Time, and Russian Riffs. He was the Mott University Professor of English at Johnson C. Smith University from 1998–2004 where he served as Dean of the College of Arts and Letters (2005–2011). As well as a number of scholarly articles, he has published poems and translations from German, Czech and Russian into English. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

 
 

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