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March 20, 2006

THOUGHTS ON AKHMATOVA

The new biography of Anna Akhmatova is getting all sorts of attention, including this review by WaPo's Michael Dirda. 

Alexander Blok (1880-1921), the leading poet of the previous generation, said of this early poetry that Akhmatova "writes verse as if she is standing in front of a man." And not, it would seem, just standing. Sometimes her poems hint at a taste for masochism. Certainly, the artistic crowd at the legendary St. Petersburg cabaret The Stray Dog could rival even contemporary Bloomsbury in its sexual freedoms.

"We're all drunkards, here, and harlots," Akhmatova once proclaimed, just as she later announced that "the institution of divorce was the best thing mankind ever invented." Open marriages, gay couples, bisexuals, strings of lovers, menages á trois -- Akhmatova and her friends tried them all. "Forgive me" she coolly wrote to one lover, "for so often mistaking/other people for you." In Evening (1912), Rosary (1914), and White Flock (1917), the poet transmuted both her serious affairs and passing fancies into lyrics of permanent beauty.

We are wholeheartedly for anything that might bring Akhmatova (one of our favorite poets) to a wider American audience.  If you want to know more, you can look up some of her poems here ... find a brief biography here ... visit her Academy of American Poets here (yes, that sounds as odd to us as it does to you) ... and visit some Akhmatova "places" in St. Petersburg here.

Finally, here's our favorite translation of the poem (translated by Lyn Coffin) Dirda references above:

Broad and yellow is the evening light,
The coolness of April is dear.
You, of course, are several years late,
Even so, I'm happy you're here.

Sit close at hand and look at me,
With those eyes, so cheerful and mild:
This blue notebook is full, you see,
Full of poems I wrote as a child.

Forgive me, forgive me for having grieved
For ignoring the sunlight, too.
And especially for having believed
That so many others were you.

(1919)

We think that last couplet is considerably gentler and more moving than "for so often mistaking/other people for you."

Posted at 12:07 AM in Litlinks |

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  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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