Why is this age worse than other ages? - Anna Akhmatova, narrative poet

Poems of Akhmatova, translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward, is the book I read.  How many translations of Anna Akhmatova are there now?  She seems eminently translatable, with poems that would be interesting even if not poetic in plain prose.  Her life is interesting, her subject matter is interesting.

The Kunitz translation has all of sixty pages of English poetry.  The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, a 1990 translation, has seven hundred pages, just of the poems, not the apparatus.  So what do I know.

Why is this age worse than earlier ages?
In a stupor of grief and dread
have we not fingered the foulest wounds
and left them unhealed by our hands?
In the west the falling light still glows,
and the clustered housetops glitter in the sun,
but here Death is already chalking the doors with crosses,
and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in.

Are they ever.  This poem is only from 1919.  The next forty years gave her many opportunities to update this poem.  The narrative push of this collection is irresistible – this must be true of any chronological collection – as I move, with dread, to the next age, always worse than the previous, until Akhmatova finally outlasts everyone.

I have enough treasures from the past
to last me longer than I need, or want.
You know as well as I… malevolent memory
won’t let go of half of them:
a modest church, with its gold cupola
slightly askew; a harsh chorus
of crows; the whistle of a train;
a birch tree haggard in a field
as if it had just been sprung from jail…  (from “March Elegy,” 1960, first ellipses in original)

Not that Akhmatova’s pre-war poetry is so cheery, but it shares the sense of freedom and possibility with her amazing cohort of peers:

We’re all drunkards here, and harlots:
how wretched we are together.  (1913)

But it is a meaningful Bohemian wretchedness, full of emotion and art:

His eyes are so serene
one could be lost in them forever.
I know I must take care
not to return his look.

But the talk is what I remember
from that smoky Sunday noon,
in the poet’s high gray house
by the sea-gates of the Neva.  (from “To Alexander Blok”)

A number of the poems give a sense of eavesdropping on the talk of the poets, maybe a little too intimately, as in the many poems about Akhmatova’s husband, Nikolai Gumilev:

Three things enchanted him:
white peacocks, evensong,
and faded maps of America.
He couldn’t stand bawling brats,
or raspberry jam with his tea,
or womanish hysteria.
…  And he was tied to me.  (1911, ellipses in original)

If only this had been the tumultuous life of Akhmatova.  No vigils in front of prisons, or sieges of her city.

Put it all to the torch!  And the king named one by one
the towers, the gates, the temples – this marvel of the world;
then brightened, as the thought leaped into words:
“Only be sure the Poet’s House is spared.”  (from “Alexander in Thebes,” 1961)

Please recommend favorite translations of Anna Akhmatova.

The Stray Dog Cabaret - When fearful friends abandoned me music stayed

The Stray Dog Cabaret (2007) masquerades as an anthology of Silver Age Russian poets – Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, and six others, all of whom knew each other and were patrons to a greater or lesser extent of the bar in the book’s title.  It was a scene, as we might say now.

Paul Schmidt, the translator and anthologist, organizes the book so that the poets and poems comment on, respond to, and even directly address each other.  History progresses – the war, the revolution, the terror.  A series of biographical notes, presumably written by Catherine Ciepiela, with Honor Moore the book’s editor, are almost too depressing to read.  The headers are by themselves too depressing:  Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922), Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941).  Let’s move back to 1913:

The Stray Dog Cabaret

All of us here are hookers and hustlers
We drink too much, and don’t care.
The walls are covered with birds and flowers
that have never seen sunshine or air.

You smoke too much.  There’s always a cloud
of nicotine over your head.
Do you like this skirt?  I wore it on purpose.
I wanted to show lots of leg.  (Anna Akhmatova)

Osip Mandelstam is not so sure:

This life of constant thrills will drive us crazy:
wine in the morning, hangover every night.
How can we get away from this sick excitement,
the awful flush of feverish delight?

But Blok sends her a drink:

I sent you a rose in a glass of champagne
while the gypsies played as the gypsies do.
Then you turned to the man you were with and said:
“You see his eyes? He’s in love with me too.”

Akhmatova rejects the offer – “You’re a very bad boy.”  And you’re crazy.”

Translation purists, a sad lot, will be horrified when they turn to the notes and discover that with the Blok poem the translator “has created a new poem from three stanzas of ‘In the Restaurant’” and that “[t]he poem actually was dedicated to Maria Nelidova.  “The original poem has no title.”  “The phrase ‘And it makes me cry’ does not appear in the original poem.”

As fine a translator as Schmidt was (his Rimbaud is sure good), to the bone he was a man of the theater.  The Stray Dog Cabaret is a theater piece in disguise.  The actors playing the poets step forward and read their poems to each other before returning to their drinks and dancing.  Before slipping off of the stage, one by one, until only Akhmatova is left, now old, the survivor:

Music
(for Dmitri Shostakovich)

Something miraculous burns in music;
as you watch, its edges crystallize.
Only music speaks to me
when others turn away their eyes.

When fearful friends abandoned me
music stayed, even at my grave,
and sang like earth’s first shower of rain
or flowers suddenly everywhere alive.

A burst of Silver Age Russian reading would be enormous fun, I am now convinced of that.  Chekhov’s plays, Bely, Babel, and all of these amazingly alive doomed musical poets.

The Blue Lantern has improved The Stray Dog Cabaret by introducing two painters to the show.