Singing in Secret
SANDY, STEPHEN
Singing in Secret The Word That Causes Death's Defeat By Anna Akhmatova Translated, with an introductory biography, critical essays and commentary, by Nancy K. Anderson Yale. 326 pp....
...Unfortunately, Anderson's adherence to the original now and then yields somewhat stilted results—through anapestic fervor, or inversion, or the occasional overcrowded line, or ungainly assonance, as in "Don't dictate—I've already sensed/ Upon the roof warm downpour pressed" (from "Poem Without a Hero," for the most part Anderson's most lively translation...
...Private pain is the vehicle by which she addresses her nation and culture...
...While European and American poets might comprehend this vast human disaster intellectually, it was not near to them...
...Their expression of a bonding solidarity with the people does not make them epic...
...There is also the question of length, if not scope...
...Anderson's distinctive accomplishment is not helped by her claim...
...Akhmatova's auditory, erotic image beautifully spells her tangential departure from the poem...
...It's no surprise, I should have known, I'm ready for it, more or less...
...Petersburg and Paris...
...Even her bedroom in Leningrad was bugged...
...30.00...
...She was both a beauty and a bulwark of physical strength who vanquished malnutrition, tuberculosis, typhus, at least three heart attacks, and a thyroid condition...
...Akhmatova's poems are deeply personal...
...How long I've known that this would come, A brilliant day, an empty house...
...Thomas, and Richard McKane, to name a few...
...That has now been remedied by Nancy K. Anderson's The Word That Causes Death's Defeat, which offers handsome, faithful translations of the three works, illuminating commentaries and a critical biography...
...the Great War and the Revolution...
...She was beautiful, sophisticated and acquainted with an international avant garde (Modigliani painted her...
...In Western eyes, Akhmatova became an emblem for our understanding of tortured humanity...
...Her texts provide a means to test the faithfulness of other poets' renderings...
...World War II...
...Thereafter Akhmatova and their son were increasingly persecuted by the Soviet regime, and her poetry was attacked as detrimental to the Revolution...
...She was an icon of strength amid the mass executions of insane purges, a poet silenced, a citizen deprived of every civil right, who with patriotism and indomitable persistence, despite ill health, survived...
...Given the limitations of our perspective, it is curious how insistently she has remained in our view, until we realize that for three generations she has been a counter for suffering womankind, as writer, wife and mother...
...the mass murders of Stalin's Purge...
...Anderson makes claims that give one pause...
...Akhmatova and her work have been one conduit connecting our spirit with the larger emotional destitution and social wreckage of the 20th century's violent revolutions, new ideologies and technological upheavals...
...An example from "Requiem": The word fell, dropping like a stone And striking my still-living breast...
...This period lasted from the publication of her initial poem at age 18, in 1907, through the Russian Revolution, until about 1920...
...Or else...
...During the first she wrote Romantic lyrics, poems exquisite with passion, partaking of a fin-de-siècle, Symbolist and soon Imagist—or Acmeist, as Akhmatova's circle called it—manner...
...We should remember, too, that she lived a long time, and longevity is a friend of fame...
...Must turn my heart to stone all through, And must relearn how one should live...
...Although an important poet for her place and time, she is not a great one...
...Beginning with Akhmatova's first collection, Evening (1912), there is in her work a passionate presence of self and sharpness of metaphor that reverberates beyond the poet's emotional state to a grander, historical horizon...
...As is the case with many poets from distant cultures, our first acquaintance is usually formed with her brief songs...
...Reviewed by Stephen Sandy Author, "Black Box," "Surface Impressions: A Poem" Anna Akhmatova's life and work divide naturally into two periods...
...we may feel, however, that Kenyon's style overtakes Akhmatova and we hear more Jane than Anna...
...Resilient and combative under Soviet oppression, Akhmatova elected to remain in Russia after the Bolshevik takeover...
...the initial permissive optimism of Communist life...
...The suffering and isolation did not end until the post-Stalin Thaw, the last years of her life—she died in 1966...
...Herself persecuted, she was also a witness of persecution—her son and second husband were imprisoned, the first one killed by the state—and a focus of Stalin's paranoia...
...Nevertheless, she cast her lot with her native place, as she knew a poet must...
...and the Thaw...
...this dream, now becoming real: the swaying of branches brushed aside and the faint ringing of your spurs...
...Her life had seven acts: the early bohemian years in St...
...She lived beyond them all...
...Fluent in French from youth, she had honeymooned in Paris, visited Italy and Switzerland, and was a poet of European reputation...
...In the course of those hard years Akhmatova wrote three long poems—or suites of lyrics—that constitute the second period of her work...
...Such disengagement made for some strange outlooks through thepeepholeofherconfinement...
...When Isaiah Berlin found her in 1945, the Purge and World War II over, she told him their meeting (obviously reported to Stalin by his informers) would be the cause of the Cold War—an instance of folie de grandeur illustrative of how out of touch and self-dependent she had become...
...For instance, the close of an eightline poem in Jane Kenyon's translation reads...
...For those of us who are not Russian specialists, The Word That Causes Death's Defeat is an indispensable guide to Akhmatova's central achievement...
...Some poems thus make convincing lyrics in English, and we can trust no liberties have been taken...
...Requiem," "The Way of All the Earth" and "Poem Without a Hero," her crowning achievements, have been translated into English before, but never by a Slavicist...
...None was allowed publication from 1925 to 1940, and then only sparseiy...
...But none except McKane worked without a Russian specialist...
...Her record of her feelings is the central metaphor of her writing: Through her plight she speaks of Russia's plight...
...the "Yezhov era" of NKVD repression...
...This heroic choice cut Akhmatova off from the world of European letters, and though she read, for example, some later T.S.Eliot, her awareness of the European literary scene was severely curtailed in the three decades before 1950...
...awoke from the torpor normal to all of us and breathed a question in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): "'Can you describe this?' "And I said: "'I can.'" What follows depicts no dramatic action, beyond such a chance encounter, that can be called heroic in a traditional epic sense...
...Anderson, by contrast, is a Russian linguist and has followed the text and its form to the small details of style...
...She is surely the most translated Russian poet of the 20th century and thus a major component of our view of Russian literary accomplishment from the pre1914tothepost-Stalinist eras...
...Many poets have translated her: Robert Lowell, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Bly, Kenyon, Judith Hemschemeyer, D.M...
...In a section entitled "Instead of a Foreword" that precedes the body of "Requiem," she joins endless lines outside Crosses prison to give packages to loved ones and perhaps learn news of them: "A woman...
...Now we can decide for ourselves if "Poem Without A Hero' deserves a place beside the other icons of modernist poetry...
...Today there's so much I must do: Must smash my memories to bits...
...a carefree festive hum, Outside hot summer's rustling now...
...We do not call Yeats' "Easter, 1916" or Lowell's "Skunk Hour" epics, though each meditation powerfully finds a nation's or a citizenry's plight in the writer's own profound experience...
...She is a lyrical poet clenched in the vise of a repressive totalitarianism, forced to sing in secret, never trivial, always formally replete, isolated by her urbane, antebellum life and the convulsed disorder of Communism...
...Anderson offers a happy conjunction...
...As A flashpoint for the indignation and compassion the West felt during Soviet tyranny, her work provided coordinates for understanding the suffering of a populace caught in a scheme of madness...
...Requiem," she says, is "a lyric and an epic poem___While the narrator's sufferings are individual, they are anything but unique: As befits an epic poet, she speaks of the experience of a nation...
...Akhmatova's work wants a new category—miniature epic, perhaps...
...It became an Akhmatova-centered world...
...they could not feel it on the pulse...
...Akhmatova's popularity in Anglophone cultures is remarkable...
...By and large we have met Akhmatova through brief poems inflected in the voice of a translator enabled by a Russian scholar sitting at his elbow...
...Yet little of Akhmatova's poetry is familiar to those who are not Russian language specialists, for her highly structured, verbally dense poems, do not—as Joseph Brodsky reminded us—translate easily...
...the divide comes at the execution of her first husband, Nikolai Gumilev, on trumpedup charges in 1921...
Vol. 87 • November 2004 • No. 6
