Yehudith Dashevsky
on translating Anna Akhmatova
One distinct feature of Akhmatova’s poetry is that it is precise. Akhmatova reads as if there can be no other word or sound or even syllable stress for each image and no other image for each meaning. Although I chose to focus on staying as true to her images as possible, there were several places where I chose to stray from the images. One such place is in the fourth couplet, “and the list was torn up.” The Russian language makes use of embedded pronouns, so the original reads “and (they) took away the list,” with an implicit plural actor. However, I thought that using another “they” may create pronoun confusion in the translation. It would not be clear when the “they” refers to the regime and when to its victims. I therefore chose the passive. Another such place is in the seventh couplet, where the original reads “and if (they) clamp shut.” There, I chose to include an actor, although “time” is not true to the image or meaning in its full sense. It is not to time, ie. old age, that Akhmatova is referring, but to Stalin and his men. However, because the original only had an implicit “they,” I chose to avoid explicitly naming of Stalin in the translation. Another significant change I made is in the last line. The Neva, a river in Russia, has a riverbank, not a bay. However, I thought that the perfect rhyme in the end couplet was more important for the tone of the poem at its close than preserving a well-known geographic fact. I admit, however, that this may be a contentious point, and native Russian speakers have all the right and reason to disapprove of this choice. A fourth change is adding specificity to the images in the third-to-last couplet, where I thought that only those who had undergone those times would understand what kind of door was banging and who was wailing. As a final point, I wish to clarify that “Black Marias” are the police cars that would come to round up citizens, often at random, to bring them to jail, or worse. A fear of those black cars was ingrained in the generation of that time.
about the author
Anna Akhmatova (Анна Ахматова, 1899–1966) is one of the canonical poets of Russian literature. She grew up near the Black Sea port of Odessa. After studying literature in St. Petersburg, she, along with poets Osip Mandelstam and Sergey Gorodetsky, founded the Acmeism school of poetry, which valued the craft of poetry above its mysterious or symbolic qualities. Akhmatova was known for her rather terse, concise mode of expression, which soon became the model of a new form of expression for Russian women. Some of Akhmatova’s poems were, at a certain point, banned by Stalin, and still others remained unpublished, because they contained explicit anti-regime references. Despite that, her poetry continued to circulate throughout Russia. When her son was sentenced to ten years in a prison camp in Siberia, she attempted to have him released in various ways, including writing propaganda poetry for Stalin. During World War II, Akhmatova would read her poetry to soldiers in military hospitals, as well as write poems that reflected the voices of the people who were victims of Stalin’s regime. She became known as the poet of the Russian people.
about the translator
Yehudith Dashevsky is a sophomore studying English literature with a concentration in poetry. She is a native Russian speaker, fluent in Hebrew, and is learning Arabic. She thinks that translation is at the core of what humans do every day in their lives — constantly translating from one register of language to another, but also from thoughts and ideals to reality and back again. Yehudith was first introduced to the methods of translating poetry in Professor Silverman’s Translation of Poetry class last spring.
