Anna Akhmatova

To continue on my All-Things-Russian spree... I listen to Garrison Keillor (definitively not Russian) at approximately 6:20AM every morning on WUMB. The station's taste in folk music often leaves me wanting, but it's worth waking to if simply for The Writer's Almanac.

Yesterday, on the summer solstice, Keillor included a segment on Anna Akhmatova, a Russian poet whose popularity in the States has skyrocketed in the past decade or so. Listen here. (You'll also be treated to riffs on midsummer's night and the typewriter. He concludes with a poem by Charles Wright.)

Doesn't Akhmatova have a most fabulous profile? No wonder Modigliani carried on an affair with her.

Her poems are invariably short, easy to access and understand, and almost all deal with loss of some kind. Here she writes of finding solace in a sunbeam.

Sunbeam

I pray to the sunbeam from the window -
It is pale, thin, straight.
Since morning I have been silent,
And my heart is split.
The copper on my washstand
Has turned green,
But the sunbeam plays on it
So charmingly.
How innocent it is, and simple,
In the evening calm,
But to me in this deserted temple
It's like a golden celebration,
And a consolation.

And here is a short excerpt from Akhmatova's "Requiem," her long testament to terrible Bolshevik and then Stalinist times during which her husband was killed and son imprisoned. This translation is by beloved American poet Stanley Kunitz:

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.