Russian Silver Age poetry translation series (occasional) – 40/?

Deciding to re-awaken this dormant series last night, with a short poem from Anna Akhmatova’s 1914 collection “The Rosary.” It took me some time to “wake up” the translation skills (which to me feel like a combination of writing poetry and solving sudoku or crosswords). I am still not quite happy with a few of the word choices I made while trying to keep the rhythm (and compromised the rhythm slightly — the middle lines of the first verse should have feminine rhymes). But Akhmatova’s poem captures a sentiment I’ve felt myself: “At last, for the first time, you are alone with the person you love” — and he turns out to be, well, not seeing you that way.

Russian Silver Age poetry translations, 25/?

Continuing the theme of love poems (with a twist): This poem by Anna Akhmatova, from her collection White Flock, was dedicated in manuscript to B. V. Anrep, which dedication was subsequently crossed out.

Boris Vasilievich von Anrep (1883-1969) was a poet and artist, who had quit law school to study art (specifically, mosaics) in France and England. By the beginning of the 1920s, he was getting multiple contracts for mosaics in British stately homes, and in 1923, he created the mosaic floor in the Blake Room of the Tate Gallery.

But he spent World War I in Russia, as a reserve officer, and there he met Akhmatova in 1915 in Tsarskoye Selo. She immediately began dedicating poems to him, and seventeen of the poems in White Flock are marked with his name. They would meet whenever he would return from active duty. However, he apparently only saw their relationship as a warm friendship. He had married Yunia Khitrovo, an aristocrat, in 1908, at the insistence of their families as she had been “compromised” by him. Akhmatova met her in 1916 and dedicated another poem to her. By 1911, he had started a relationship with the singer Helen Maitland, and lived with both Helen and Yunia in Paris, while also pursuing other relationships on the side.

He never returned to Russia after 1917, but in 1952, he was commissioned to create four large mosaics for the British National Gallery, and portrayed Akhmatova as Compassion in one of them. They met for the last time in 1965, shortly before Akhmatova’s death.

***

All promised him to me, it seemed:
The sky’s edge with its dull gold glister,
On Christmas Eve the sweetest dream,
The many-chiming wind at Easter,

The ivy’s curving scarlet vines,
Park waterfalls white-churning down,
The two great perching dragonflies
On the wrought-iron fence rust brown.

I couldn’t not believe, not hope,
That soon in friendship we’d be meeting
When I would walk on mountain slopes
Along a path of rocks sun-heated.

Anna Akhmatova, 1916; translation by Tamara Vardomskaya, July 2016.

Russian Silver Age poetry translations, 14/?

When Anna Akhmatova was asked which of her poems were addressed to Nikolai Gumilev, she named six. This is one of the six, and I’ve been pondering every word of it as to what a complicated relationship these two poets had even then.

The year 1913, when this poem was written, Gumilev himself spent many months in Abyssinia, leaving behind Akhmatova and their one-year-old son Lev. Earlier, he had had a brief affair with Olga Vysotskaya which resulted that October in the birth of a son, Orest, whom Gumilev may or may not have known about during his lifetime.

(In the original, the first line is “white home/house and quiet garden,” and I’ve wrestled for a long time with how to fit “white” into the verse without messing up the rhythm, and finally decided to cut it. Again, compromises.)

Russian Silver Age poetry translations, 9/?

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966; born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko) may be the modern Russian poet most acclaimed in the West. This is at least partly because of her longtime struggle against the Stalinist terror that killed her ex-husband Nikolai Gumilev and her common-law husband Nikolai Punin and for many years imprisoned her son Lev Gumilev. Her powerful poetry chronicling and bearing witness to the horrors she saw, most famously the “Requiem,” is popular in the West because it is great, yes, but it also serves the anti-Stalinist and anti-Soviet narrative in a way that, say, Khlebnikov does not. The choice of what gets translated and what gets promoted is often political.