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translated by Don Mager
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If all in the world who have petitioned me
For spiritual assistance,—
All the holy fools and the mutes,
The cast-off women and the cripples,
All in hard labor and all who kill themselves,—
Were to send a single kopek each,
I would be “wealthier than all of Egypt,”
As the now deceased Kuzmin once said…
But they do not send me kopeks,
Rather they share with me their strength,
So that I am stronger than all in the world,
And, even this, for me, is not heavy.
30 March 1960, Palm Sunday
Leningrad, Red Cavalry Street
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All went away, and none returned,
You alone, true to love’s pledge,
My last, scarcely glancing back
Just caught sight of the whole sky in blood.
Accursed was the house, and vocation
Accursed too, softly a song rang in vain,
Nor was I bold enough to lift my eyes
Before the dreadfulness of fate itself.
They befouled the unsullied word,
They trampled the sacred verb,
So that with the nurses of thirty-seven
I too scoured the bloody floor.
They separated my son entirely,
They tormented friends in prison,
They encircled with an invisible stockade
Of solidly synchronized surveillance.
They awarded me a muteness
That curses the whole accursed world,
They surfeited me on slander,
They spoiled me with poison,
And, driven to the very border,
Somehow just dropped me there.
I’d rather, among the city’s psychotics,
To wander the almost dead squares.
Of the 1930’s, 1960
Untitled*
Dread, fingering stuff in the dark,
Aims the moonbeam at an ax.
An ominous din resounds behind the wall—
What’s there, rat, wraith, or robber?
In the stuffy kitchen, like a metronome
Water splats onto wobbly floorboards,
While a glossy black beard
Dashes past the attic window—
And gets quite still. How cunning and mean he is
Hiding matches and blowing out candles.
I’d prefer a gleaming rifle muzzle
Aimed right at my breast.
Or, in the grass square, I’d prefer
To be laid flat on an unpainted scaffold
And amid cries of joy, and of groans,
Let the red blood gush to its end.
A smooth cross is pinned over my heart:
God, give back peace to my spirit!
Nauseatingly sweet, the reek of rottenness
Rises from the cold sheets.
25 or 27-28 August 1921
Tsarskoe Selo
From the Cycle Tashkent Pages**
We went mad together that night,
For us the sinister hosts shown bright,
The irrigation canals muttered to themselves
And all Asia smelled of carnations.
And we passed through the strange city,
Songs strangely smoky, midnight, sultry,—
Alone beneath the constellation Draco,***
We dared not look eye to eye.
It could have been Istanbul or even Baghdad,
But alas! Not Warsaw, not Leningrad,
As if in air of orphanhood, we
Choked in that poignant discrepancy.
And it seemed: centuries passed on,
And an invisible hand beat a tambourine,
And sounds, like secret signals,
In the darkness, before us, whirled.
I was with you in that mysterious mist
As if through no-man’s-land we paced,
But all at once like a diamond felucca****
The moon sailed above our hello-goodbye.
And if you should ever retrace that night
In the course of your unknown-to-me fate,
Know that someone once had dreamt
About that consecrated moment.
1 December 1959
Leningrad, Red Cavalry Street
Untitled
…I went mad
From a toast around the table
We went mad together that night,
For us the sinister hosts were bright,
The irrigation canals muttered to themselves
And all Asia smelled of carnations.
And we passed through the strange city,
Songs strangely smoky, midnight, sultry,—
Alone beneath the constellation Draco,
We dared not look eye to eye.
It could have been Cairo or even Baghdad,
But alas, not Warsaw, not Leningrad,—
As if in air of orphanhood, we
Choked in that poignant discrepancy.
And it seemed: centuries passed on,
And an invisible hand beat a tambourine,
And sounds, like secret signals,
In the darkness, before us, whirled.
I was with you in that mysterious mist
As if through no-man’s-land we paced,
But all at once like a diamond felucca
The moon sailed above our hello-goodbye.
And if you should ever retrace that night
And she who fled away as if damned,
Know that someone once had dreamt
About that consecrated moment.
1959 Leningrad
From Eastern Notebook
We went mad together that night,
For us the Asiatic hosts were sinister,
The irrigation canals muttered to themselves
And the blackness smelled of carnations.
And we passed through the strange city,
Songs strangely wild, midnight, sultry,—
Alone beneath the constellation Draco,
We dared not look eye to eye.
It could have been Istanbul or even Baghdad,
But alas! Not Warsaw, not Leningrad,
As if in air of orphanhood, we
Choked in that poignant discrepancy.
And it seemed: centuries passed on,
And an invisible hand beat a tambourine,
And sounds, like secret signals,
In the darkness, before us, whirled.
In that once-only time, with you I went
As if a tale ran through no-man’s-land,
And all at once like a diamond felucca
The moon sailed above our hello-goodbye.
And if you should ever retrace that night
Be kind, as belatedly I entreat,
You to send, whether real or in sleep,
Me the voice of the Asian reed-pipe.
From Eastern Notebook
We went mad together that night,
For us the sinister hosts shown bright,
The irrigation canals muttered to themselves
And all Asia smelled of carnations.
And we passed through the strange city,
Songs strangely smoky, midnight, sultry,—
Alone beneath the constellation Draco,
We dared not look eye to eye.
It could have been Cairo or even Baghdad,
But clearly not my ghostly Leningrad,
As if in air of orphanhood, we
Choked in that poignant discrepancy.
And it seemed: centuries passed on,
And an invisible hand beat a tambourine,
And sounds, like secret signals,
In the darkness, before us, whirled.
I was with you in that mysterious mist
As if through no-man’s-land we paced,
But all at once like a diamond felucca
The moon sailed above our hello-goodbye.
And if you should ever retrace that night
And she who fled away as if damned,
Know that someone once had dreamt
About that consecrated moment.
From the Cycle Tashkent Pages
We went mad together that night,
For us the sinister hosts shown bright,
The irrigation canals muttered to themselves
And all Asia smelled of carnations.
And we passed through the strange city,
Songs strangely smoky, midnight, sultry,—
Alone beneath the constellation Draco,
We dared not look eye to eye.
It could have been Istanbul or even Baghdad,
But alas! not Warsaw, not Leningrad,
As if in air of orphanhood, we
Choked in that poignant discrepancy.
And it seemed: centuries passed on,
And an invisible hand beat a tambourine,
And sounds, like secret signals,
In the darkness, before us, whirled.
I was with you in that mysterious mist
As if through no-man’s-land we paced,
But all at once like a diamond felucca
The moon sailed above our hello-goodbye.
And if you should ever retrace that night
In the course of your unknown-to-me fate,
Know that someone once had dreamt
About that consecrated moment.
***
* This poem was written shortly after Akhmatova learned of the execution of her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, by the Bolsheviks. They were divorced but shared responsibilities for raising their young son.
** During the Siege of Leningrad, many writers were flown to Tashkent for safety during the war. This is the only poem that survives from a proposed cycle, and it exists in five versions. The Elis-Lak editors print all five, and since it was not published during the poet’s lifetime, they do not give primacy to any one of them. The variants are interesting.
*** Draco the dragon (or serpent) is a constellation in the northern sky, visible at various times of the year from most of the northern hemisphere.
**** A felucca is small narrow ship, possibly of Arab origin, propelled by a combination of oars and lateen (triangular) sails.
About Anna Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova’s early Acmeist poems were sensationally popular during the teens and ’20’s of the twentieth century. After the Bolshevik Revolution, her personal life and public career went from crisis to crisis. She was effectively barred from publishing. Her third husband and adult son were imprisoned and sent to Siberia during the Stalinist purges. Her great poem “Requiem” reflects this experience. In 1942, she began her long masterpiece Poem Without a Hero, which occupied her for much of the rest of her life. After Stalin’s death, she was gradually rehabilitated and her work was again widely published in the Soviet Union.
Don Mager’s most recent book of poems, The Present Tense, was published in August 2018. He has nine earlier books and chapbooks. Us Four Plus Four is an anthology of translations from eight major Soviet-era Russian poets. It is unique because it tracks almost a half-century of their careers by simply placing the poems each wrote to the others in chronological order. The 85 poems represent one of the most fascinating conversations in poems produced by any group of poets in any language or time period. Poets include Akhmatova, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and Mandelstam. At 76, Don is retired.