why are angels singing with such fiendish voices

become-a-name:

Have some more Stalinist-era Russian poetry! This translation of Requiem by one of Russia’s most famous poets, Anna Akhmatova, is mostly by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward; sections two through ‘the commander of the blue caps’ in section eigh are translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, because the Google Book I found the poem in cut out the middle section entirely.

Anna Akhmatova was already a famous poet by the time of Stalin’s rise to power; during Stalin’s reign, she was condemned and censored, but refused to emigrate and leave her people behind. Both of her husbands were repeatedly arrested without trial and eventually thrown into the gulag, while her son Lev was also arrested and imprisoned for his parents’ supposed anti-Communist activities. Akhmatova outlived Stalin, and died in St. Petersburg in 1966. Thousands attended her memorial ceremonies, and she remains in Russia a national heroine for refusing to bow to what she “regarded as unworthy of her country and herself.”

REQUIEM 1935-1940

No foreign sky protected me,
no stranger’s wing shielded my face.
I stand as witness to the common lot,
survivor of that time, that place.
                                                 - 1961

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

     In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
     “Can you describe this?”
     And I said: “I can.”
     Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
                                                  - Leningrad, 1 April 1957

DEDICATION

Such grief might make the mountains stoop,
reverse the waters where they flow,
but cannot burst these ponderous bolts
that block us from the prison cells
crowded with mortal woe…
For some the wind can freshly blow,
for some the sunlight fade at ease,
but we, made partners in our dread,
hear but the grating of the keys,
and heavy-booted soldiers’ tread.
As if for early mass, we rose
and each day walked the wilderness,
trudging through silent street and square,
to congregate, less live than dead.
The sun declined, the Neva blurred,
and hope sang always from afar.
Whose sentence is decreed? … That moan,
that sudden spurt of woman’s tears,
shows one distinguished from the rest,
as if they’d knocked her to the ground
and wrenched the heart out of her breast,
then let her go, reeling, alone.
Where are they now, my nameless friends
from those two years I spent in hell?
What specters mock them now, amid
the fury of Siberian snows,
or in the blighted circle of the moon?
To them I cry, Hail and Farewell!
                                                 - March 1940

PROLOGUE

That was a time when only the dead
could smile, delivered from their wars,
and the sign, the soul, of Leningrad
dangled outside its prison-house;
and the regiments of the condemned,
herded in the railroad-yards,
shrank from the engine’s whistle-song
whose burden went, “Away, pariahs!”
The stars of death stood over us.
And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed
under the crunch of bloodstained boots,
under the wheels of Black Marias.

I

At dawn they came and took you away.
You were my dead: I walked behind.
In the dark room children cried,
the holy candle gasped for air.
Your lips were chill from the ikon’s kiss,
sweat bloomed on your brow - those deathly flowers!
Like the wives of Peter’s troopers in Red Square
I’ll stand and howl under the Kremlin towers.
                                                  - 1935

II

Silent flows the river Don
A yellow moon looks quietly on,
Swanking about, with cap askew
It sees through the window a shadow of you
Gravely ill, all alone
The moon sees a woman lying at home
Her son is in jail, her husband is dead
Say a prayer for her instead.

III

It isn’t me. Someone else is suffering. I couldn’t.
Not like this. Everything that has happened,
Cover it with a black cloth,
Then let the torches be removed…
Night.

IV

Giggling, poking fun, everyone’s darling,
the carefree sinner of Tsarskoye Selo
if only you could have foreseen
what life would do with you -
that you would stand, parcel in hand,
beneath the Crosses, three hundredth in line,
burning the new year’s ice
with your hot tears.
Back and forth the prison poplar sways
with not a sound - how many innocent
blameless lives are being taken away…
                                                 - 1938

V

For seventeen months I have been screaming,
calling you home.
I’ve thrown myself at the feet of butchers
for you, my son and my horror.
Everything has become muddled forever -
I can no longer distinguish
who is an animal, who a person, and how long
the wait can be for an execution.
There are now only dusty flowers,
the chinking of the thurible,
tracks from somewhere into nowhere
and, staring me in the face
and threatening me with swift annihilation,
an enormous star.
                                                 - 1939

VI

Weeks fly lightly by. Even so,
I cannot understand what has arisen,
how my son, into your prison
white nights stare so brilliantly.
Now once more they burn,
eyes that focus like a hawk,
and, upon your cross, the talk
is again of death.
                                                 - 1939

VII

THE VERDICT

The word landed with a stony thud
onto my still-beating breast.
Never mind, I was prepared,
I will manage with the rest.

I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
turn my living soul to stone
then teach myself to live again…

But how. The hot summer rustles
Like a carnival outside my window;
I have long had this premonition
of a bright day and a deserted house.
                                                 - 1939, Fontannyi Dom

VIII

TO DEATH

You will come anyway - so why not now?
I wait for you; things have become too hard.
I have turned out the lights and opened the door
for you, so simple and so wonderful.
Assume whatever shape you wish. Burst in
like a shell of noxious gas. Creep up on me
like a practiced bandit with a heavy weapon.
Poison me, if you want, with a typhoid exhalation,
Or with a simple tale prepared by you
(and known by all to the point of nausea) take me
before the commander of the blue caps,
led by the janitor, pale with fright.
It’s all the same to me. The Yenisei swirls,
the North Star shines, as it will shine forever;
and the blue lustre of my loved one’s eyes
is clouded over by the final horror.
                                                 - 19 August 1939

IX

Already madness lifts its wing
to cover half my soul.
That taste of opiate wine!
Lure of the dark valley!

Now everything is clear.
I admit my defeat. The tongue
of my ravings in my ear
is the tongue of a stranger.

No use to fall down on my knees
and beg for mercy’s sake.
Nothing I counted mine, out of my life,
is mine to take:

not my son’s terrible eyes,
not the elaborate stone flower
of grief, not the day of the storm,
not the trial of the visiting hour,

not the dear coolness of his hands,
not the lime tree’s agitated shade,
not the thin cricket-sound
of consolation’s parting word.
                                                 - 4 May 1940

X

CRUCIFIXION

“Do not weep for me, Mother,
when I am in my grave.”

I

A choir of angels glorified the hour,
the vault of heaven was dissolved in fire.
“Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?
Mother, I beg you, do not weep for me…”

II

Mary Magdalene beat her breasts and sobbed.
His dear disciple, stone-faced, stared.
His mother stood apart. No other looked
into her secret eyes. Nobody dared.
                                                 - 1940 - 1943

EPILOGUE

I

I have learned how faces fall to bone,
how under the eyelids terror lurks,
how suffering inscribes on cheeks
the hard lines of its cuneiform texts,
how glossy black or ash-fair locks
turn overnight to tarnished silver,
how smiles fade on submissive lips,
and fear quavers in a dry titter.
And I pray not for myself alone…
for all who stood outside the jail,
in bitter cold or summer’s blaze,
with me under that blind red wall.

II

Remembrance hour returns with the turning year.
I see, I hear, I touch you drawing near:

the one we tried to help to the sentry’s booth,
and who no longer walks this precious earth,

and that one who would toss her pretty mane
and say, “It’s just like coming home again.”

I want to name the names of all that host,
but they snatched up the list, and now it’s lost.

I’ve woven them a garment that’s prepared
out of poor words, those that I overheard,

and will hold fast to every word and glance
all of my days, even in new mischance,

and if a gag should blind my tortured mouth,
through which a hundred million people shout,

then let them pray for me, as I do pray
for them, this eve of my remembrance day.

And if my country ever should assent
to casting in my name a monument,

I should be proud to have my memory graced,
but only if the monument be placed

not near the sea on which my eyes first opened-
my last link with the sea has long been broken-

nor in the Tsar’s garden near the sacred stump,
where a grieved shadow hunts my body’s warmth,

but here, where I endured three hundred hours
in line before the implacable iron bars.

Because even in blissful death I fear
to lose the clangor of the Black Marias,

to lose the banging of that odious gate
and the old crone howling like a wounded beast.

And from my motionless bronze-lidded sockets
may the melting snow, like teardrops, slowly trickle,

and a prison dove coo somewhere, over and over,
as the ships sail softly down the flowing Neva.
                                                  - March 1940

(via wendyloulou)