"Your lynx-eyes Asia,
stare at my discontent,
they bring to light
my buried self,
something formerly unknown,
no more to be endured
than the mid-day sun in Termez.

Pre-memory floods the mind,
like molten lava on the sands,
as if I were drinking my own tears
from a cupped palm of a stranger's hand. ( )

Akhmatova's poetry is wonderful. It is to Kunitz's credit that he provides a bilingual edition of the book.

His translations, however, are not wonderful. If I didn't know Russian, I would flip through this book and be utterly bemused as to why anyone thinks Anna Akhmatova is even a remotely good poet. Of course, she really is one of the greatest poets in the history of Russian literature (and one of my favorites too).

To his credit, Kunitz does acknowledge that translating Akhmatova is a very tough task. Since Akhmatova doesn't really use gimmicks in her poetry, it's really difficult to translate, especially because certain formal elements of her poetry are very hard to mimic in English without completely altering the general sense of the poetry.

But one could go on forever about why translation is hard, and that doesn't really get to the problem here. There are many times when Akhmatova writes a few lines that form a totally clear sentence. Kunitz translates this into contorted English syntax that makes the speaker spend a long time figuring out what he's even trying to say. That's completely, completely antithetical to the spirit of Akhmatova's poetry, which is generally piercing in its clarity. As near as I can tell, the main motivation of this is to preserve the formal structure of the poetry. Any translation that chooses to completely destroy the sense and feeling of a poem in order to vaguely mimic the rhyme scheme is, I think, truly misguided.

Other, better translations of Akhmatova exist (and, I think, are in print). Any interested reader would be well advised to find them.

(A) ( )

Beautiful sharp, sparse poems on life, love, death and exile through 2 wars. ( )