Osip Mandel’shtam famously observed that Anna Akhmatova ‘brought to the Russian lyric the wealth of the nineteenth-century Russian novel’. These two late, seminal sequences – haunted by Akhmatova’s inspirational meeting with her ‘guest from the future’, Isaiah Berlin – amply bear out that assertion, epitomising in deeply personal terms the tragedy that had befallen Russia. In a brilliant and scrupulous translation, innovatory poet and critic Tom Jones allows Akhmatova’s characteristic combination of searching irony and cosmic aspiration to be heard again in all its defiant poignancy.
8
You invented me. There is nothing like it,
there could not be anything like it.
Neither doctor cures, nor does the poet
satisfy – a spectre haunts you day and night.
We met in a year of uncertainty,
when the earth’s strength was already depraved,
all was in mourning, all fell through adversity,
and the only fresh growth was graves.
The lampless Neva’s bank was pitched in blackness,
the deaf night stood about the wall ...
and then the summons of my voice!
What I did – I fail to understand at all.
You came to me as if led by a star
pacing through the autumnal tragedy,
into that home devastated forever
from which a flock of burnt verses winged away.
18 August 1956
Starki