VORONEZH, a poem
Akhmatova, Anna
—1936 And the town stands locked in ice: a paperweight of trees, walls, snow. Gingerly I tread on glass; the painted sleighs skid in their tracks. Peter's statue in the square points to crows...
...Peter's statue in the square points to crows and poplars, and a verdigris dome washed clean, in a cloud of sun-motes...
...Osip Mandelstam (the "0...
...Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, in association with the Atlantic Monthly Press...
...M." of the dedication) lived there in exile from 1934 to 1937...
...But in the room of the banished poet Fear and the Muse stand watch by turn, and the night is coming on, which has no hope of dawn...
...The site of the battle of Kulikovo (1380), at which Dmitri Donskoi beat the Tatars, is not far away...
...Let the poplars raise their chalices for a sky-shattering toast, like thousands of wedding guests drinking in jubilation at a feast...
...Akhmatova's visit to him in 1936, after which she wrote this poem, is described in Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope...
...Peter the Great built a flotilla there for his conquest of Azov, near the mouth of the Don...
...The poem was originally published in 1940 without the last four lines, and was printed in full in the Soviet Union only in The Flight of Time (1965...
...From Poems of Akhmatova...
...Here the earth still shakes from the old battle where the Tatars were beaten to their knees...
...Selected, translated, and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward...
...Translated by STANLEY KUNIT2 Voronezh is a historical city situated on a tributary of the Don about three hundred miles to the south of Moscow...
...Copyright © 1972 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward...
Vol. 21 • January 1974 • No. 1
