Five Poems
AKHMATOVA’S poetry has always entranced me. Mostly for its
sonorous, lyrical qualities. When I was a student, I learnt some of Requiem and the shorter lyrics off by heart and I used to recite them to myself. Many of my Russian women friends admit to having been Akhmatova groupies in their teens and I notice rather cynically now that she fills the Plath-gap in Russia. I learnt her words unquestioningly and chanted them, so when I went back to translate them it rather confounded me to discover that I didn’t like her very much. I didn’t like her emotional dependency, her masochism, the rather hysterical voice of her love poems. However I did like the sound of them and the shape of them, and that is just what I felt would be lost in translation. I was anxious that her love songs in my translations would become unleavened free verse, or, worse still, strained rhyme, and that the emotional load would seem ridiculous and old-fashioned without the formal control of the original.
In the process of translating I discovered that the sentiments weren’t as alien to me as I had thought. Really, all Akhmatova did was extract every last drop of narrative from the situations she found herself in or could imagine herself in. It is heady stuff, when distilled, but my mistake was to imagine on some level that she lived like that or that the reader should live like that. The worst mistake a reader can make. The narratives of Akhmatova’s poetry are as artificial and contrived as the forms, and that at least becomes clear in translation. But she sets an example in living life in such a hungry way and harvesting so much from it.
I resolved to make my translations as worked-over as the originals and to try to give some sense of the desperate hunger for life and experience which I found in them. I followed most of the formal structures, not all, and translated rather than adapted - except in the poem ‘The purple marks he left…’ In this poem the lyrical voice describes the detail of the landscape, ‘the real world’, because she wants it all back after her blinding love affair. I felt the essence of the poem would not be altered if this detail was different, and so I located the poem in the vivid coastal landscape of the Shetlands where I was staying when I was working on it.
sonorous, lyrical qualities. When I was a student, I learnt some of Requiem and the shorter lyrics off by heart and I used to recite them to myself. Many of my Russian women friends admit to having been Akhmatova groupies in their teens and I notice rather cynically now that she fills the Plath-gap in Russia. I learnt her words unquestioningly and chanted them, so when I went back to translate them it rather confounded me to discover that I didn’t like her very much. I didn’t like her emotional dependency, her masochism, the rather hysterical voice of her love poems. However I did like the sound of them and the shape of them, and that is just what I felt would be lost in translation. I was anxious that her love songs in my translations would become unleavened free verse, or, worse still, strained rhyme, and that the emotional load would seem ridiculous and old-fashioned without the formal control of the original.
In the process of translating I discovered that the sentiments weren’t as alien to me as I had thought. Really, all Akhmatova did was extract every last drop of narrative from the situations she found herself in or could imagine herself in. It is heady stuff, when distilled, but my mistake was to imagine on some level that she lived like that or that the reader should live like that. The worst mistake a reader can make. The narratives of Akhmatova’s poetry are as artificial and contrived as the forms, and that at least becomes clear in translation. But she sets an example in living life in such a hungry way and harvesting so much from it.
I resolved to make my translations as worked-over as the originals and to try to give some sense of the desperate hunger for life and experience which I found in them. I followed most of the formal structures, not all, and translated rather than adapted - except in the poem ‘The purple marks he left…’ In this poem the lyrical voice describes the detail of the landscape, ‘the real world’, because she wants it all back after her blinding love affair. I felt the essence of the poem would not be altered if this detail was different, and so I located the poem in the vivid coastal landscape of the Shetlands where I was staying when I was working on it.
poetrymagazines notes: Anna Akhmatova's Russian texts copyright © 2005 by Margarita Novgorodova. The rights are granted by FTM Agency, Ltd., Russia
Page(s) 19
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