Way of All the Earth

By Anna Akhmatova and D. M. Thomas

Anna Akhmatova is considered one of Russia’s greatest poets. Her life encompassed the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and the paranoia and persecution of the Stalinist era: her works embody the complexities of the age. At the same time, she was able to merge these complexities into a single, poetic voice to speak to the Russian people with whom she so closely and proudly identified.

Way of All the Earth contains short poems written between 1909 and 1964, selected from Evening, Rosary, White Flock, Plantain, Anno Domini, Reed, and The Seventh Book. Intricately observed and unwavering in their emotional immediacy, these strikingly modern poems represent one of the twentieth century’s most powerful voices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Release date: Sep 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9780804040945

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) is an iconic figure of twentieth-century Russian literature and one of her era’s great poets. Her work has been translated into many languages.

Book preview

Way of all the Earth

ANNA AKHMATOVA

Way of all the Earth

Translated by

D. M. THOMAS

Ohio University Press

Athens, Ohio

Swallow Press

An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

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Printed in the United States of America

Swallow Press/Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ™

Way of all the Earth first published in England 1979 by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited

Translation copyright © D. M. Thomas 1979

ISBN 978-0-8040-1205-8 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-8040-4094-5 (electronic)

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 79-1953

Acknowledgments

The text I have primarily used has been the two-volume Akhmatova: Sochineniya (Inter-Language Literary Associates, second edition, 1967-68), edited by G. P. Struve and B. A. Fillipov. I am grateful also to Professor Struve for helpful advice in correspondence.

I wish to thank Jennifer Munro for her patient and expert help, over many months, with aspects of the Russian language that eluded me. Without her, my task would have been incomparably more difficult.

Amanda Haight’s biography of Akhmatova (Akhmatova, A Poetic Pilgrimage, Oxford University Press, 1976) has been invaluable in supplying background information and interpretative comment on the poetry. To her own translations, and to those of Richard McKane and Stanley Kunitz, I am indebted for the occasions when a phrase or a line, in one or other of them, has struck me as so ‘happy’ that it would have been foolish to try to find a better.

The Translator acknowledges assistance from the Arts Council of Great Britain.

Contents

Introduction

from Evening

‘The pillow hot . . .’

Reading Hamlet

Evening Room

‘I have written down the words . . .’

‘Memory of sun seeps from the heart . . .’

Song of the Last Meeting

‘He loved three things alone . . .’

Imitation of Annensky

‘I came here in idleness . . .’

White Night

Legend on an Unfinished Portrait

from Rosary

‘I have come to take your place, sister . . .’

‘It goes on without end . . .’

‘We’re all drunkards here . . .’

A Ride

‘Nobody came to meet me . . .’

‘So many requests . . .’

The Voice of Memory

8 November 1913

‘Blue heaven, but the high . . .’

‘Do you forgive me . . .’

The Guest

‘I won’t beg for your love . . .’

‘I came to him as a guest . . .’

By the Seashore

from White Flock

Loneliness

‘How can you look at the Neva . . .’

‘The road is black . . .’

Flight

‘I don’t know if you’re alive or dead . . .’

‘There is a frontier-line . . .’

‘Freshness of words . . .’

‘Under an empty dwelling’s frozen roof . . .’

‘The churchyard’s quiet . . .’

‘Neither by cart nor boat . . .’

‘Lying in me . . .’

‘O there are words . . .’

from Plantain

‘Now farewell, capital . . .’

‘I hear the oriole’s always grieving voice . . .’

‘Now no-one will be listening to songs . . .’

‘The cuckoo I asked . . .’

‘Why is our century worse than any other? . . .’

from Anno Domini

‘Everything is looted . . .’

‘They wiped your slate . . .’

Bezhetsk

‘To earthly solace . . .’

‘I’m not of those who left . . .’

‘Blows the swan wind . . .’

‘To fall ill as one should . . .’

‘Behind the lake . . .’

Rachel

Lot’s Wife

from Reed

Muse

To an Artist

The Last Toast

* ‘Dust smells of a sun-ray . . .’

‘Some gaze into tender faces . . .’

Boris Pasternak

Voronezh

* Imitation from the Armenian

Dante

Cleopatra

Willow

* In Memory of Mikhail Bulgakov

‘When a man dies . . .’

* ‘Not the lyre of a lover . . .’

Way of all the Earth

from The Seventh Book

In 1940

Courage

‘And you, my friends . . .’

* ‘That’s how I am . . .’

Three Autumns

‘The souls of those I love . . .’

‘The fifth act of the drama . . .’

‘It is your lynx eyes, Asia . . .’

In Dream

‘So again we triumph! . . .’

‘Let any, who will, still bask in the south . . .’

from Northern Elegies: The Fifth

The Sixth

Seaside Sonnet

Fragment

Summer Garden

‘In black memory . . .’

‘Could Beatrice write . . .’

Death of a Poet

The Death of Sophocles

Alexander at Thebes

Native Soil

There are Four of Us

* ‘If all who have begged help . . .’

Last Rose

* ‘It is no wonder . . .’

‘What’s war? What’s plague? . . .’

In Memory of V. C. Sreznevskaya

‘You will hear thunder and remember me . . .’

Notes to the Poems

* Poems not published in the collection but written in the same epoch.

Introduction

‘Who can refuse to live his own life?’ Akhmatova once remarked in answer to some expression of sympathy. Her