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Intimations: Selected Poetry by Anna Akhmatova
Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for
- GenresPoetryRussian Literature
176 pages, Paperback
Published June 1, 2010
2 people are currently reading
71 people want to read
About the author
Anna Akhmatova
429 books963 followersalso known as: Анна Ахматова
Personal themes characterize lyrical beauty of noted work of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, pseudonym of Anna Andreevna Gorenko; the Soviet government banned her books between 1946 and 1958.
People credit this modernist of the most acclaimed writers in the canon.
Her writing ranges from short lyrics to universalized, ingeniously structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935-40), her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her work addresses a variety of themes including time and memory, the fate of creative women, and the difficulties of living and writing in the shadow of Stalinism. She has been widely translated into many languages, and is one of the best-known Russian poets of 20th century.
In 1910, she married the poet, Nikolay Gumilyov, who very soon left her for lion hunting in Africa, the battlefields of World War I, and the society of Parisian grisettes. Her husband did not take her poems seriously, and was shocked when Alexander Blok declared to him that he preferred her poems to his. Their son, Lev, born in 1912, was to become a famous Neo-Eurasianist historian.
Nikolay Gumilyov was executed in 1921 for activities considered anti-Soviet; Akhmatova then married a prominent Assyriologist Vladimir Shilejko, and then an art scholar, Nikolay Punin, who died in the Stalinist Gulag camps. After that, she spurned several proposals from the married poet, Boris Pasternak.
After 1922, Akhmatova was condemned as a bourgeois element, and from 1925 to 1940, her poetry was banned from publication. She earned her living by translating Leopardi and publishing essays, including some brilliant essays on Pushkin, in scholarly periodicals. All of her friends either emigrated or were repressed.
Her son spent his youth in Stalinist gulags, and she even resorted to publishing several poems in praise of Stalin to secure his release. Their relations remained strained, however. Akhmatova died at the age of 76 in St. Peterburg. She was interred at Komarovo Cemetery.
There is a museum devoted to Akhmatova at the apartment where she lived with Nikolai Punin at the garden wing of the Fountain House (more properly known as the Sheremetev Palace) on the Fontanka Embankment, where Akhmatova lived from the mid 1920s until 1952.
Personal themes characterize lyrical beauty of noted work of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, pseudonym of Anna Andreevna Gorenko; the Soviet government banned her books between 1946 and 1958.
People credit this modernist of the most acclaimed writers in the canon.
Her writing ranges from short lyrics to universalized, ingeniously structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935-40), her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her work addresses a variety of themes including time and memory, the fate of creative women, and the difficulties of living and writing in the shadow of Stalinism. She has been widely translated into many languages, and is one of the best-known Russian poets of 20th century.
In 1910, she married the poet, Nikolay Gumilyov, who very soon left her for lion hunting in Africa, the battlefields of World War I, and the society of Parisian grisettes. Her husband did not take her poems seriously, and was shocked when Alexander Blok declared to him that he preferred her poems to his. Their son, Lev, born in 1912, was to become a famous Neo-Eurasianist historian.
Nikolay Gumilyov was executed in 1921 for activities considered anti-Soviet; Akhmatova then married a prominent Assyriologist Vladimir Shilejko, and then an art scholar, Nikolay Punin, who died in the Stalinist Gulag camps. After that, she spurned several proposals from the married poet, Boris Pasternak.
After 1922, Akhmatova was condemned as a bourgeois element, and from 1925 to 1940, her poetry was banned from publication. She earned her living by translating Leopardi and publishing essays, including some brilliant essays on Pushkin, in scholarly periodicals. All of her friends either emigrated or were repressed.
Her son spent his youth in Stalinist gulags, and she even resorted to publishing several poems in praise of Stalin to secure his release. Their relations remained strained, however. Akhmatova died at the age of 76 in St. Peterburg. She was interred at Komarovo Cemetery.
There is a museum devoted to Akhmatova at the apartment where she lived with Nikolai Punin at the garden wing of the Fountain House (more properly known as the Sheremetev Palace) on the Fontanka Embankment, where Akhmatova lived from the mid 1920s until 1952.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 1, 2012
In which a saccharine, hapless translator (James E. Falen) constructs a groovy aviary, using some poems by the Acmeist of everyone's (esp. Modigliani's) dreams. On first reading, these bizarre English-language versions led to several bouts of heckling and eye-rolling as I encountered cooling breezes caressing burning brows, pink cockatoos, bronze laughter, silver lamentations... it was all too much.
I blame Falen for much of the comic effect -- if anapests functioned as meter of romance and angst in Russian, they certainly remain hilarious and redolent of Dr. Seuss in English. "These poems are from another time and place, and Falen offers us a rare opportunity to tune into its distant music" blares the foreword, but I disagree. Fidelity to meter and rhyme seems to have cheapened the music, mowed over their sense, and caused us to titter when we should be rending our garments in sympathy:
And there the glinting raindrops clean
The crusted edges of his wound
But wait, my cold and white-washed dream,
I too shall turn to marble soon.
Rhymes like that -- and they are plentiful here -- are a ska cover of a Patsy Cline ballad, pasties on Akhmatova's Modigliani-tits, a blimp crashing into a herd of swans.
Yet there's something in these poems that I know all too well, a vacillating emotional state, catalyzed by lust and kicked into confusion by dreams of blind hate, social bonding, a shared future. This is where I groove on Akhmatova's works, even beyond this translation's musical fog. For example:
In each full day resides
A dark and anxious hour.
Not opening my eyes,
I talk to grief aloud;
It only beats, like blood,
Or like the breath of heat,
Like happy, sated love,
Malicious in its greed.
Again I suspect this was much more sublime in the original Russian, but look, I fucking dig it. Intimations is an unitentionally campy translation of some Very Serious poems, and I suspect your response will depend entirely on the size of your heart.
I blame Falen for much of the comic effect -- if anapests functioned as meter of romance and angst in Russian, they certainly remain hilarious and redolent of Dr. Seuss in English. "These poems are from another time and place, and Falen offers us a rare opportunity to tune into its distant music" blares the foreword, but I disagree. Fidelity to meter and rhyme seems to have cheapened the music, mowed over their sense, and caused us to titter when we should be rending our garments in sympathy:
And there the glinting raindrops clean
The crusted edges of his wound
But wait, my cold and white-washed dream,
I too shall turn to marble soon.
Rhymes like that -- and they are plentiful here -- are a ska cover of a Patsy Cline ballad, pasties on Akhmatova's Modigliani-tits, a blimp crashing into a herd of swans.
Yet there's something in these poems that I know all too well, a vacillating emotional state, catalyzed by lust and kicked into confusion by dreams of blind hate, social bonding, a shared future. This is where I groove on Akhmatova's works, even beyond this translation's musical fog. For example:
In each full day resides
A dark and anxious hour.
Not opening my eyes,
I talk to grief aloud;
It only beats, like blood,
Or like the breath of heat,
Like happy, sated love,
Malicious in its greed.
Again I suspect this was much more sublime in the original Russian, but look, I fucking dig it. Intimations is an unitentionally campy translation of some Very Serious poems, and I suspect your response will depend entirely on the size of your heart.
June 18, 2017
This girl is classy. Russian poetess around the First World War time in Russian when things were kicking off there big time. She was able to articulate beautiful things in beautifully simple words almost effortlessly and to be able to do that at such a tender young age was really really impressive. She had lots of her close family members imprisoned and was herself ostracised going from highs to lows back to highs again. Talented lady. Here are my favourite bits:
------------------
Love
It may curl like a snake in a ball
Bewitching your heart in the still
Or for days a time it may call
Like a dove on a white windowsill
It flashes in dazzles of frost
And drowses in willowy trees
But leads without fail to the loss
Of happiness freedom and peace
It elicits a sobbing so sweet
Like the prayer of a sorrowful viol, and how dreadful it is when its seen
In a still unfamiliar smile.
-----------------
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone "recognized" me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I answered: "Yes, I can."
Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.
------------------
The ice in my breast was unthawing
But my step as before remained light.
On my left hand I found myself drawing
The glove that was meant for my right.
It appeared that the stairs were unending
Though I knew there were only three.
In the maples a whisper of autumn
Made a plea: come perish with me.
I’m deceived by a fate so malicious
So inconstant it films me with rue
And I answered: my precious, my precious
So am I – and I’ll die with you…
Here’s a song of the final meeting
As I looked at the house in the night
In the bedroom the candles were gleaming
A yellow dispassionate light.
------------------------------------
My sister the muse took a glance at my face
A glance that was crystal and bright
And took from my finger the tiny gold band
My first vernal git and delight
Oh muse you can see how happy they are
The widows the wives and the maids ..
Oh better to die on the scaffold by far
Than ever to suffer these chains
I know as I chant, that I’m fated to tear
The delicate daisy to shreds
For here on this earth every soul has to bear
The torment of love and the dread
A candle I burn till the dawn and the dew
And no one at all do I miss
But no I refuse, I refuse, I refuse
To know how another is kissed
Tomorrow my mirror with laughter will say:
Your gaze isn’t crystal or bright
And softly ill answer the muse took away
God’s gift in the night.
---------------------------------
He never mocked, did not extol
As have my friends and foes,
He only left his mortal soul
And told me: guard it close.
And now one worry haunts my mind
If he should die today,
God’s angel then will come to find
And take his soul away.
How then can I conceal it, thought?
How keep from God my prize?
This soul that sobs and warbles so
Should be in paradise.
---------------------------------
Do not torment your heart with earth’s delights
Do not become attached to home or wife,
Deprive your tender infant of his bread
To give it to a strangers use instead.
And be the humblest servant of another,
Of him who was your most relentless foe,
And call the forest beast your only bother,
And never ask the Lord to ease your woe.
-------------------------
------------------
Love
It may curl like a snake in a ball
Bewitching your heart in the still
Or for days a time it may call
Like a dove on a white windowsill
It flashes in dazzles of frost
And drowses in willowy trees
But leads without fail to the loss
Of happiness freedom and peace
It elicits a sobbing so sweet
Like the prayer of a sorrowful viol, and how dreadful it is when its seen
In a still unfamiliar smile.
-----------------
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone "recognized" me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I answered: "Yes, I can."
Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.
------------------
The ice in my breast was unthawing
But my step as before remained light.
On my left hand I found myself drawing
The glove that was meant for my right.
It appeared that the stairs were unending
Though I knew there were only three.
In the maples a whisper of autumn
Made a plea: come perish with me.
I’m deceived by a fate so malicious
So inconstant it films me with rue
And I answered: my precious, my precious
So am I – and I’ll die with you…
Here’s a song of the final meeting
As I looked at the house in the night
In the bedroom the candles were gleaming
A yellow dispassionate light.
------------------------------------
My sister the muse took a glance at my face
A glance that was crystal and bright
And took from my finger the tiny gold band
My first vernal git and delight
Oh muse you can see how happy they are
The widows the wives and the maids ..
Oh better to die on the scaffold by far
Than ever to suffer these chains
I know as I chant, that I’m fated to tear
The delicate daisy to shreds
For here on this earth every soul has to bear
The torment of love and the dread
A candle I burn till the dawn and the dew
And no one at all do I miss
But no I refuse, I refuse, I refuse
To know how another is kissed
Tomorrow my mirror with laughter will say:
Your gaze isn’t crystal or bright
And softly ill answer the muse took away
God’s gift in the night.
---------------------------------
He never mocked, did not extol
As have my friends and foes,
He only left his mortal soul
And told me: guard it close.
And now one worry haunts my mind
If he should die today,
God’s angel then will come to find
And take his soul away.
How then can I conceal it, thought?
How keep from God my prize?
This soul that sobs and warbles so
Should be in paradise.
---------------------------------
Do not torment your heart with earth’s delights
Do not become attached to home or wife,
Deprive your tender infant of his bread
To give it to a strangers use instead.
And be the humblest servant of another,
Of him who was your most relentless foe,
And call the forest beast your only bother,
And never ask the Lord to ease your woe.
-------------------------
April 26, 2024
Such a beautiful collection.
I have so much to do today: / I need to stifle memory’s ken / I need my soul to burn away / I need to learn to live again
Favourites (among many):
- “Yes, he was jealous”
- “Such days as these occur before the spring”
- “All gold and wide is evening’s glow”
- “There is in human closeness a divide”
- “We can’t seem to say goodbye”
- “The Muse”
- “Sentence”
- “From An Airplane”
I have so much to do today: / I need to stifle memory’s ken / I need my soul to burn away / I need to learn to live again
Favourites (among many):
- “Yes, he was jealous”
- “Such days as these occur before the spring”
- “All gold and wide is evening’s glow”
- “There is in human closeness a divide”
- “We can’t seem to say goodbye”
- “The Muse”
- “Sentence”
- “From An Airplane”
November 22, 2010
This is....almost unbelievable.
That to see in some of these selections something that stuns one a hundred times more strongly then when one first felt her heart in your chest.
That to see in some of these selections something that stuns one a hundred times more strongly then when one first felt her heart in your chest.
November 17, 2019
I haven’t read Akhmatova in years... missed her.
October 29, 2023
keywords: ice, frost, flames, rosary, night, dreaming of you
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews