Status Updates From The Complete Poems of Anna ...

Oh, just finished her monumental REQUIEM, both personal and universal lament for the victims of oppression, those with uncertain fate inside the walls and the women like herself waiting outside the prison gates… shattered me into pieces. Hemschemeyer is fine for fidelity, but do seek out Anderson's version, best of the several I've read.

Reading in parallel with a few collections of her selected poems by other translators (D.M. Thomas, Kunitz & Hayward, Lyn Coffin, Andrew Kneller) and find it interesting that a few of her poems that strongly spoke to me so far were rendered poorly by all. Had to insert Russian text into Google translate to get a better sense of the actual meaning and then listen to the music of her rhyme and rhythm in audio version.

Delighted to see that Prokofiev set to music one of my favorite poems from Akhmatova's early period when she wrote mostly short love lyrical poetry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A8xk...


Modigliani's sketch of Akhmatova from the same year when she wrote this poem (1911)