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Title: Anna Akhmatova Selected Poems
WonderClub
Item Number: 9780140585582
Number: 1
Product Description: Anna Akhmatova Selected Poems
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9780140585582
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9780140585582
Rating: 5/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/55/82/9780140585582.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Heigh : 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Depth: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9296 total ratings) |
Darrell Windham
reviewed Anna Akhmatova Selected Poems on May 16, 2018'Who can refuse to live his own life?'
Anna Akhmatova once remarked in answer to some expression of sympathy. Her refusal not to live her life made of her one of those few people who have given dignity and meaning to our terrible century, and through whom and for whom it will be remembered. She is regarded as one of the greatest Russian poets. Her incorruptibility as a person is closely linked to her most fundamental characteristic as a poet: fidelity to things as they are, to 'the clear, familiar, material world.'
Her work has such gravity that any attempted encapsulation would fail.At 160 pages, Selected Poems are only a fragment of Akhmatova’s creation. The reality of translation weakens the force of the Russian as it is changed into practicable English. Any English reader of a Russian writer is at a slight disadvantage from the start in this respect, as the two languages are largely incongruous. Knowing this, and appreciating nonetheless the effort of D.M. Thomas’ translation, the reader of Selected Poems may glimpse the essence of Akhmatova’s style. As a woman, in her personal life she suffered because her gifts, her independent poetic sensibility itself, made ordinary family life hugely difficult; others’ attempts to make her give up poetry (and her own attempts as well) made life intolerable. As a poet in the Stalinist state, she suffered simply because she wrote. Poetry had marked her out, and as one of her biographers has written, she seemed “to have been chosen by fate to test all the intuitive and inherited values of her contemporaries.” Among those values was a belief in the power of the true word, which for a lyric poet comes only from a fidelity to a true self, not one mandated by theory or ideology. With the Russian Revolution and the repression, terror, and war that followed after, fate seemed to raise the stakes: Once poetry had been for her a source of both inner pain and inner strength; now, for four decades of her life, it would be the regime’s excuse for harassment and persecution—and her own chief means of spiritual survival. In these poems, Akhmatova addresses many themes, including religion, the desperation and hopelessness of war, censorship and silencing, grief, and whether it is possible to maintain hope in the midst of darkness. "Requiem" is Akhmatova's best known work, considered by many to be her magnum opus, or masterpiece.
Memories and reflections on love, loneliness, and regret are expressed in combination with the use of color and nature in order to expertly convey the moment and circumstance under which each poem is devised. For Akhmatova, scenes in nature, seasons changing, and light versus dark imagery bring to mind her constant thoughts about death, pain, spirituality, and fate. Akhmatova's peculiar gift was to combine two diametrically opposed styles in the same poet: she is at once understated and passionate, classical and romantic, matter-of-fact and radiant. Her verse denotes a radical break with the intellectual, fancy style and the otherworldly portrayal of affection so run of the mill of writers like Alexander Blok and Andrey Bely. Her verses are made out of short pieces of straightforward discourse that don't frame a consistent sound example. Rather, they mirror the way we really think, the connections between the pictures are passionate, and straightforward ordinary articles are accused of mental affiliations.
Akhmatova's poetry could be said as a constant conflict between affection and guilt in not so common form. Some portion of what makes the authors so awesome and their work so convincing to peruse is that while all individuals have recollections and encounters of profound individual esteem and importance, most can't impart them. A writer like Akhmatova recounts her own particular story, as well as those of others too. There are examples while perusing this gathering when a peruser may go over a piece that appears to flawlessly clarify their most personal considerations.
White Flock is one of her early collections, so compactly focused on themes of love and the Muse that at first glance it feels removed from the enormous tragedy of the First World War. There is in certainty a solid seriousness at work here that charges you to find some hidden meaning and discover confirmation of a world turned out badly, while as the gathering advances, references to the war turn out to be more consistent.
from White Flock
Loneliness
So many stones are thrown at me,
They no longer scare.
Fine, now, is the snare,
Among high towers a high tower.
I thank its builders:may
They never need a friend.
Here I can see the sun rise earlier
And see the glory of the day's end.
And often into the window of my room
Fly the winds of a northern sea,
A dove eats wheat from my hands...
Divinely light and calm
Finishes the unfinished page.
Flight
I don't know if you're alive or dead.
Can you on earth be sought,
Or only when the sunsets fade
Be mourned serenely in my thought?
All is for you: the daily prayer,
The sleepless heat at night
And of my verses, the white
Flock, and of my eyes, the blue fire.
In telling us about one woman, standing in the endless queue outside a Leningrad prison, month after month, hoping to hand in a parcel or hear some news of her son, Akhmatova speaks for all Russia. She achieves universality, through an exquisiteness of style that is at the same time anonymous and transparent- the voice of 'the orphans, the widows', in Chukovsky's prophetic phrase of 1921. Requiem honours poetry, as well as the dead.
To death
You will come in any case, so why not now?
Life is very hard: I'm waiting for you.
I have turned off the lights and thrown the door wide open
For you, so simple and so marvellous.
Take on any form you like.
Why not burst in like a poisoned shell,
Or steal in like a bandit with his kunckleduster,
Or like a typhus-germ?
Or like fairy-tale of your own invention-
Stolen from you and loathsomely repeated,
Where I can see, behind you in the doorway,
The police-cap and the white-faced concierge?
I don't care how. The Yenisei is swirling,
The Pole Star glittering. And eyes
I love are closing on the final horror.
On the other hand, Poem without a Hero, in contrast, is sustained, polyphonic, symphonic. It is a fairly long poem; nevertheless Akhmatova's preoccupation with it so many years is astonishing. A poem which describes possession, it possessed her. The poem is complex, but less so; its depths are almost limitless, if one goes on exploring them, yet its surface is clear, real, ordered and beautiful, no more and no less mysterious than the view from your window.
Poem without a Hero
'The hero's on stage!' Ah
Yes, here he comes, displacing
Of holy vengeance he sings.
-But why have you all fled, as
Though to a communal wedding,
Leaving me in the gloom
Face to face with a frame' s blackness
Out of which stares that hour
Which became most bitter drama
Never sufficiently wept.
Akhmatova sees beyond the endless road to lowest paradigms of humanity has to touch during those 'inhumane' times. Those tragic moments of revelation and reality exceeds all that art can do; and through her art she shares it all with us- agony, recognition, catharsis. She presents to the world- a portrait of a woman who, besides her genius, had gifts of life-enriching gaiety and loyalty, and a moral strength which suffering only made stronger.
Excerpts:-
from Evening
Memory of sun seeps from the heart
Grass grows yellower.
Faintly if at all the early snowflakes
Hover, hover.
Water becoming ice is slowing in
The narrow channels.
Nothing at all will happen here again,
Will ever happen.
Against the sky the willow spreads a fan
The silk's torn off.
may be it's better I did not become
Your wife.
Memory of sun seeps from the heart.
What is it? - Dark?
Perhaps! Winter will have occupied us
In the night.
from Rosary
-You've come to put me in the grave.
Where is your shovel and your spade?
You're carrying just a flute.
I'm not going to blame you,
Sadly a long time ago
My voice fell mute.
from Anno Domini
Everything is looted, spoiled, despoiled,
Death flickering his black wing,
Anguish, hunger- then why this
Lightness overlaying everything?
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