A click of window glass had roused me
Out of my sleep at early dawn.
Beneath me Venice swam in water,
A sodden pretzel made of stone.
It was all quiet now; however,
While still asleep, I heard a cry--
And, like a sign that had been silence,
It still disturbed the morning sky.
It hung--a trident of the Scorpion--
Above the sleeping mandolins
And had been uttered by an angry,
Insulted woman's voice, maybe.
Now it was silent. To the handle
Its fork was stuck in morning haze.
The Grand Canal, obliquely grinning,
Kept looking back--a runaway.
Reality was born of dream-shreds
Far-off, among the hired boats.
Like a Venetian woman, Venice
Dived from the bank to glide afloat.
Boris Pasternak--Venice, 1913 (revised 1928)
Translated by Lydia Pasternak Slater
"My concern has always been for meaning, and my dream that every poem should have content in itself--a new thought or a new image. And that the whole of it with all its individual character should be engraved so deeply into the book that it should speak from it with all the silence and with all the colors of its colorless black print.
"Thus I wrote a poem called 'Venice', and another called 'The Railway Station'. What I saw before me as I was writing was the town standing on the water, the figures-of-eight and circles of its reflections drifting, multiplying, swelling like a biscuit soaked in tea. Or the distance of the railway station, where the tracks and platforms end in clouds and smoke and the trains vanish, and the skyline of departure ends the history of situations--meetings and farewells and events before and after them.
"I was concerned neither with myself nor with my readers nor with the theory of art. All I cared about was that one poems should contain the town of Venice, and the other the Brest (now called the Byelorussian-Baltic) railway station."
---from Pasternak's An Essay in Autobiography
This was intended to serve as the introduction for a 1954 collection of Pasternak's poems; the collection never appeared, but the introduction was translated by Manya Harari and published in London in 1959.
The watercolor is "Venetian Passageway" by John Singer Sargent, c. 1905, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum.
And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back
at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed.
A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.
Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I will never deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.
Anna Akhmatova, 1922-24
Translated by Stanley Kunitz, with Max Hayward
One of my favorite Russian poets, translated by one of my favorite North American ones. Born in Odessa in 1899, Anna Akhmatova spent most of her life in St. Petersburg, but died in a sanatarium in the Moscow suburbs in 1966.
Akhmatova was part of the generation that included Boris Pasternak, Mariana Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin. The distinctive lyrical tradition she belonged to, which traces its roots back to Pushkin--another St. Petersburg poet--was carried into the late 20th century by her protege, Joseph Brodsky.
This poem comes a collection that was originally published by Little, Brown in 1973 and is now available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The 1914 portrait of Akhmatova by Nathan Altman (1889-1970) is in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg; the photo of Akhmatova is undated but appears to be from about 1910.
Homesickness! Long ago revealed
as fraudulent delusion.
I don't care where
I am alone. It doesn't matter
across what streets, into what house
I drag myself, and my shopping basket--
a house that doesn't know I'm there,
like a hospital or barracks.
I don't care who sees me lie
like a caged lion, snarling slowly,
nor from what society they
thrust me, force me out into
my own internal solitude,
a polar bear in tropic water.
I don't care where I am hurt,
nor where I am insulted.
I do not love my native tongue,
its weak, breast-fed attraction.
I am indifferent to the words
in which someone misunderstands me
(someone who reads magazines
and thrives on gossip columns).
He is Twentieth-Century Man--
my own age was never numbered.
Struck dumb, a rotting log
that marked a path now forgotten.
And I don't care. All things are strange.
All facts. And perhaps what once
was closest is strangest of all.
All signs upon me, all traces
and dates seem wiped away.
A soul. Born. Somewhere. Or other.
My homeland cared so little for me
any clever sleuth
may search my soul--
he will find no birthmark.
Each house is strange, each altar bare.
And I don't care. It doesn't matter.
But if, beside the autumn road, I see
a rowan-tree . . .
"тоска по родине!"
Marina Tsvetaeva (May 3, 1934)
Translation by Paul Schmidt
Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) is one of the poets who made me want to study Russian. This is one of her best known poems, and Paul Schmidt's English version reproduces both Tsvetaeva's depth of feeling and the disarming freedom of her associative leaps.
