a translation, and some thoughts

So first off I thought I would start with a translation... I was flipping mindlessly through the Internet, and because I had a sad mood of love on I decided to google Anna Akhmatova (also to shake myself out of my Tetris fixation, another of the great Russian inventions). I also remembered, lovingly, how the Russians of my acquaintance pronounced her name: not 'Anna Akhmatova,' but "AnnachMAtova," eliding the last A in the first name, the 'Ma' sliding out eagerly... anyhow, I came across this poem-- it's hard to use any adjectives for her poetry besides 'lovely' or 'haunting', so in the interests of not disgusting my readership I will refrain from any adjective at all. But I did a translation, anyhow, because the only translation I could find online (a good one, by Jane Kenyon) only encompassed the first stanza.

Akhmatova's picture was busy staring me down from all the poetry sites, with her razor-sharp unparted bangs, a bent nose like a boxer, hooded eyes... not a beautiful woman. Also, impossible to look away from. And born in Odessa--which anyone who knows me knows is my dream city, the one I will finally get to this summer. I will probably get my just desserts and be disappointed. But right now I am happily dreaming, in Cambridge, of an Odessan exile from earth.

But I digress: back to the poem. This was a hard poem to render into English, because a language with cases like Russian can express things a lot more economically. As you might imagine, a language with no need for clunky prepositions and articles has the upper hand in terms of meter and rhyme. Like most Russian poems, the language this untitled poem uses is sparse, and rigidly metered. I tried to reproduce that effect in addition to following the rhyme scheme in this translation. Translating poems is like walking blindfolded over a tightrope with a small child balanced on your nose--it takes an impossible amount of attention sometimes. (And sometimes you produce metaphors like that in attempting to describe it.)

Akhmatova wrote the poem in 1934, in Leningrad... students of Russian literature and history (the two are more intertwined in that particular nation than any other I can think of except Israel--but more on that later) might quail at the date, knowing that it was deep in the heart of the Stalinist Terror. Akhmatova's ex-husband, father of her child, had been executed by the Soviets; her poetry was subject to an unofficial ban that made it impossible for her to publish original work; this poem was written a year after her rumored lover, Osip Mandelstam, had written the poem that would later prove to be his death sentence (the "Stalin Epigram," nearly always introduced as "the infamous Stalin Epigram," a work with more balls than anyone thought could ever be crammed into fourteen lines). As in most of her work, she's part dour mater dolorosa, part viciously literate, all far-seeing and shrewd. Rumors flew about Akhmatova, and in particular surrounded her relations with both Pasternak and Mandelstam. Part of the rationale of Soviet authorities in censoring her work seems to have been her rumored sexual promiscuity, so it's good to know that love was just as much among her habits as grieving. And yet... It's possible that my love of twentieth-century Russian and Jewish literatures have a common factor--tragedy is their natural idiom. But I digress again. The poem is shorter than its introduction, but aren't they always?



Привольем пахнет дикий мед,
Пыль - солнечным лучом,
Фиалкою - девичий рот,
А золото - ничем.
Водою пахнет резеда,
И яблоком - любовь.
Но мы узнали навсегда,
Что кровью пахнет только кровь...

И напрасно наместник Рима
Мыл руки пред всем народом,
Под зловещие крики черни;
И шотландская королева
Напрасно с узких ладоней
Стирала красные брызги
В душном мраке царского дома...

--


Wild honey smells of freedom,
The dust--—a ray of sun,
A girl’s mouth has violet’s perfume,
and gold has none.

The mignonette smells of clearest water,
And love of apple-wood.
But we’ve found out forever after
that blood smells only of blood.

In vain the alderman of Rome
washed his hands before his men,
under their black and wrathful cries;
And in vain the Scottish queen
scours her palms of scarlet drops
in the choked gloom of the kingly home...


1934
Leningrad





Next time, I promise, it will be Nabokov.
Maybe even later tonight.