Vesna > Recent Status Updates

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)

He remembered that his wife had loved some book—oh, years ago now—about a crotchety old woman from Maine, and he had read the book reluctantly only because his wife had liked it. In the book the awful old woman’s father had killed himself when the woman was younger, and now that she was older, the woman thought: People die of loneliness. It happens all the time.
That's Olive Kitteridge!

It is, moreover, to be observed that the regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity. Remarkable things we do as a rule only by fits and starts.

Hi GR friends, I don't think I can post a photo on the general update. Today I passed by Marcel Proust's home where he wrote most of his La Recherche and uploaded a pic to my GR photos in case you want to see it (I'm there too :-)).
https://www.goodreads.com/photo/user/...

Have to abandon this book. While refreshing in thematically (vs. chronologically) organizing the poems, themes are borrowed from another (painstakingly researched!) study not properly credited (a mention in passing would not do it). The translations sometimes drown Cavafy in current colloquialisms and, in some poems, the text is even changed/adjusted to reflect the translator's interpretation, not Cavafy's original.

“He was unable to resist the lure of his new rooms. Whereas the night before he had had to leave Delphine at one in the morning, this time it was Delphine who, at around two, left him to go home.”

Well, well, Monsieur Balzac ... nicely veiled from the censors. :-)

... by a kind of inevitability, the slightest events in his life were conspiring to drive him in a direction, which ... would lead him, as on a battlefield, to kill or be killed, to deceive or be deceived; to leave his heart, his conscience at the gate, to wear a mask, to dupe other men mercilessly, and ... to win his laurels by stealthily seizing his chance.
Eerie echo of what I just watched in The Apprentice film.

"Ourself behind ourself, concealed —
Should startle most —"
(from One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted —)

Way ahead of Freud.

[that] Black Forest philosopher Heidegger has kitschified philosophy... after whom the generations have been chasing, showering him with revolting and stupid doctoral theses even in his lifetime—I always visualize him sitting on his wooden bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife who, with her perverse knitting enthusiasm, ceaselessly knits winter socks for him...

LOL, the one and only Bernhard