Yehudith Dashevsky
on translating Anna Akhmatova
Akhmatova’s Requiem is a cycle of poems about the years of terror in Russia (1935–1938) known as the Great Purge. Although written during and soon after the events it describes, the cycle remained unpublished in Russia until 1987, thirty-five years after Stalin’s death. The two poems above capture the two main subjects of the cycle: Akhmatova’s individual suffering and the suffering of the many in Russia. In “To Death,” Akhmatova alludes either to her son Lev being taken to a labor camp in Siberia or to her former husband, Nikolai Gumilev, being shot. In “Epilogue I,” Akhmatova mentions all those who waited on the prison lines to visit friends and family members, often to no avail. The shift from the individual to the collective is distinct here in that Akhmatova’s voice remains heard; the pronoun “I” is still used.
I chose not to carry over the formal structure of the poems, which includes rhyme and a distinct Russian cadence, as it is heavily reliant on the Russian language’s easily-formed end-rhymes and fluid word order. However, some echo of form may be felt in the use of iambic tetrameter of “Epilogue I.” Although the emotional register of the poems is expressed in the original through the rhyme and rhythm, giving the content its expressive power, I tried to stay as close as possible to the images in the poem, which communicate by being direct and precise, and letting the sound follow.
about the author
Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) was an acclaimed Russian poet of the “Silver Age” of Russian poetry, the first half of the twentieth century. After moving to St. Petersburg, Akhmatova became a part of the Acmeists, a literary group of six people who attempted to write poetry in traditional form that focused on the objects and incidents of everyday life, in contrast with the highly experimental poetry in fashion at the time. During the war years, Akhmatova’s former husband Nikolai Gumilev was shot, her son Lev was imprisoned and exiled to Siberia, and her close friend Osip Mandelstam was arrested, exiled, and shot. Requiem, along with many other poems, was a response to those times. Beginning in 1925, Akhmatova’s poetry was banned by the Soviet government; even when the official ban was lifted, the implicit ban remained. Still, her poetry circulated orally and on scraps of paper that were burned upon being read. Akhmatova is known as the mother of the modern female Russian voice, freeing it to speak about complex topics including and other than love. She is also known as one of the only well-known poets to outlive the Stalinist era, stay in Russia, and chronicle those times.
about the translator
Yehudith Dashevsky is a junior studying English, Russian, and Hebrew literature. She has also dabbled in Arabic and Old English. Her fascination with translation stems from her mental blocks in the world of words, and she is repeatedly amazed at how the space in the imagination before language is bridged when the right words (for a given time and place) are found. One word she recently encountered and was surprised exists is “idiolect,” which according to Wikipedia is “an individual’s distinctive and unique use of language.”
photo by Daila Wolfson
