Free Evening: Poetry of Anna Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova

 
    Evening
    Poetry of Anna Akhmatova
     
     
    Translated by Andrey Kneller

     
     
     
     
     
    Copyrigh t Kneller, Boston, 2013
    All rights reserved
     

 
 
 
For Len a and Sasha
     
     
    Table of Contents
     
    Preface to the collection “Evening” by M. Kuzmin
     
    I
     
    Love
    In Tsa rskoe Selo
    I – “Down the alley the horses are led …”
    II – “…And there, my double made of marble …”
    III – “A swarthy youth once wandered here …”
    “The boy there, on the bagpipes playing …”
    “ Love conquers, deceitful and slow …”
    “ Hands wrought under the dark veil …”
    “In the heart, the memory of the sun fades …”
    “ High in the sky, the cloud grew grayer …”
    “ The door ajar …”
    “ …You want to know how this came to be? …”
    Song of the final meeting
    “ As with a straw, you drink my soul from me …”
    “ Strange boy, I’ve gone mad at last …”
    “ My legs are useless at the present …”
    II
     
     
    Deception
    I - “ This morning’s drunk with sunny weather …”
    II - “ The wind is stifling and parching …”
    III - “ Dark blue evening. Winds abate ….”
    IV - “I wrote the words that lately …”
    “ When you’re drunk, you’re so much fun …”
    “ My husband beat me with the plating …”
    “ Nothing chains a heart to heart …”
    “ By the early sunrise seized …”
    “A loafer, wandering around …”
    “I didn’t lock the door …”
    “ The threshing barn is stifling and hot …”
    “ Bury me, bury me, wind! …”
    “ Not the snake fangs, but the stinging …”
     
    III
     
     
    To the muse
    Alisa
    I - “ She longs for the forgotten moment …”
    II - “ It’s late! I’m tired, I’m yawning …”
    Masquerade in the park
    Evening room
    Grey-eyed king
    The fisherman
    He loved…
    “No letter came for me today …”
    Inscription on an unfinished portrait
    “The smell of dark blue grapes is sweet …”
    Imitation of I. F. Annensky
    “The park was filled with a light haze …”
    “ I live, like a cuckoo in a clock  …”
    Funeral
    Garden
    Over the water
    “ Three times she tortured me like this …”
     
    Added to later editions
     
     
    “ To the beam of light I pray…”
    Two poems
    Reading Hamlet
    “A nd cursing each other with brute…”
    First return
    “ I cried and I even repented…”
    “At the new moon…”
    “There’s an owl sewn…”
     

    Preface to the collection “Evening”
                  In Alexandria, there existed a society whose members, for a more acute and intensive enjoyment of life, considered themselves doomed to death. Their every day, every hour was premortem. Although this premortem pastime in the given society boiled down to continuous orgies, it seems to us that the very thought of premortem sharpening of perception and sensitivity of the epidermis and feeling was more than justified. After all, poets especially have to possess a sharp memory of love and wide opened eyes to the whole dear, joyous and sorrowful world, to see their full share of it and drink its every minute for the final time. You yourself know that in the minutes of extreme dangers, when death is near, in one such second we remember so much more than can present itself even in the span of a long hour, when we are in the ordinary state of mind.  
    And these recollections come neither successive nor integral, but run against one another with a sharp and burning wave.  From this wave, now glimmer the long forgotten eyes, now a cloud in the spring sky, now someone’s blue dress, now a voice of a stranger passerby. These trivialities, these specific fragments of our life torment and worry us to a greater extent that we would expect, and, as if unrelated to the matter at hand, lead us accurately and correctly to those minutes, to those places, where we loved, cried, laughed and grieved – where we lived.
    It is possible to love things, like collectors love them, or like those people