Poetry in a time of social distance: Anna Akhmatova

After writing mostly historical fiction for the past fifteen years, I returned to writing poetry six months ago. Now as an unprecedented crisis grips the entire world, it seems - to me, at least - that only poetry offers an accessible pathway forward. My last serious burst of poetry - in response to another but entirely personal crisis -  was around twenty-five years ago and I published a number of those poems in small literary magazines. The poetry collected in Equivocations & Mistranslations is from those years and earlier, all of it before 2007.

Writing poetry  is impossible without knowing and loving the poetry that came before us and is contemporary with us. Writing poetry, I would even say, is primarily a response, however indirect, to poetry that we encounter. Poets of the past are our companions in the project.

For me the most important such companion in recent days of officially mandated isolation has been Anna Akhmatova. For those who don’t know her, Anna Akhmatova (accent on second syllable) is one of the most beloved Russian poets of the  Soviet era. Unlike her fellow poets who died in the gulag like Osip Mandelstam or took their own lives like Vladimir Mayakovsky and Marina Tsvetaeva, she endured decades of personal pain and official disgrace to survive under Stalin. She never gave up writing even when she had to burn many works to keep them from being found by the secret police.

Akhmatova grew up in privilege, raised at Tsarskoye Selo, the tsar’s summer village outside of Saint Petersburg,  and was first recognized as a poet in the intellectual circles of the pre-war capital. Her earliest published poetry was inspired by her difficult marriage to the poet Lev Gumilev who did everything to discourage her from writing.  Here’s a poem from that period in her life:

“Heart’s Memory of Sun...”

Heart’s memory of sun grows fainter,
sallow is the grass;
a few flakes toss in the wind
scarcely, scarcely.

The narrow canals no longer flow,
they are frozen over.
Nothing will ever happen here,
oh never!

In the bleak sky the willow spreads
its bare-boned fan.
Maybe I am better off as I am,
not as your wife.

Heart’s memory of sun  grows fainter.
What now? Darkness?
From this very night
winter unfolds.

-Kiev, 1911

This translation is by Max Hayward and the wonderful Stanley Kunitz. My Russian is terrible but I always read her in dual language versions to get some sense of the original sound. Here is my translation of another of her early poems which appeared in the Prentice-Hall Anthology of Women's Literature in 2000:

Red Winged Birds

   After Akhmatova

I hear always the sad voices

of summer

passing like red winged birds

over the high grass

where peasants gather

skirts lifted, blouses open.

If only the old voices would linger

in the evening air!

I cannot recall your loving words

or hurried kiss

as night comes down

in the place where we once lived

innocent as children,

and happier.

Gumilev went off to war and was executed in 1921 for plotting against the new Bolshevik regime. In the relatively mild dictatorship of the early 1920s, Akhmatova continued to be published but this openness was gone with Stalin’s consolidation of power in the mid 1920s.

Akhmatova made the decision to stay in Russia when so many fled to western Europe in those years. I particularly like her poem of 1924 about this decision, in which she likens herself to Lot’s wife who was warned not to look backward lest she be turned to a pillar of salt!

“Lot’s Wife”

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

(also from the Kunitz/Hayward translations)

As Soviet Russia fell deeper into the nightmare world created by Josef Stalin, the dictator found a perfect way to control the beloved poet. He had her son by Gumilev repeatedly arrested and released based on how docile she became. Under this pressure, she did write some doggerel praising the dictator in the sickening fashion that he loved.

“Requiem,” one of her most moving poems, was secretly begun in the 1930s and continued over three decades. Parts were published during the period of relative liberalization under Khrushchev but  it did not appear in its entirety in Russia until the Gorbachev era. It is without doubt the greatest poetic response to the  “Great Terror” imposed by Stalin.

The poem begins as she is standing in long lines outside the NKVD prison, hoping to communicate or send a parcel of food to her son whose only crime was that he provided the ideal hostage for Stalin to keep his mother obedient to his wishes.

This is the beginning of the poem, as translated by Judith Hemschemeyer:

“REQUIEM”
No, not under the vault of alien skies,
And not under the shelter of alien wings —
I was with my people then,
There , where my people unfortunately were.
1961

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror , I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone recognized me . Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear:
“Can you describe this?”
And I answered, “Yes, I can.”
Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.”
-1957

A very good reading of an English translation of the entire Requiem can be found on YouTube.

Near the end of her life, Akhmatova was permitted to travel to Britain and Italy, revisiting scenes of her early life when she was able to meet poets and artists, notably Modigliani, before returning to Russia just before war and tyranny descended for long,bleak decades. The following is my own very free translation of one the poems she wrote in response to this last trip to western Europe:

Departures

    After Akhmatova

Although this land is not my own,

I will remember its inland sea

and the waters that are so cold,

the sand as white

as old bones, the pine trees

strangely red where the sun comes down.

I cannot say if it is our love,

or the day, that is ending.

Anna Akhmatova chose to be a witness to the immense suffering of her people, and maybe that's why I find her reassuring to read now. Sometimes, all that we can do is to witness and to remember.