Akhmatova Remembering
Bài Intro cho tập thơ - của D.M. Thomas - cho tập thơ Akhmatova do chính ông dịch, đọc, tới lắm. Sẽ post trên tinvan.limo. Tuy nhiên Judith, người bỏ ra 10 năm học tiếng Nga, để dịch thơ Akh tin rằng, phải là 1 nữ dịch giả, và là... tui!
Robert Pinsky, dịch Akh, thú nhận, ảnh hưởng - mang nợ - Judith
AKHMATOVA'S
"SUMMER GARDEN"
Where the statues remember me young and I remember
Them the year they were underwater
And in fragrant silence
Under a royal colonnade of lindens
I imagine the creaking of ships' masts and the swan
Floats over the centuries admiring its flawless twin.
Asleep there like the dead are hundreds of thousands
Of footfalls of friends and enemies, enemies and friends
The procession of those shades is endless
From the granite urn to the doorway of the palace
Where my white nights of those years whisper
About some love grand and mysterious
And everything glows like mother-of-pearl and jasper
Though the source of that light also is mysterious.
Introduction
Akhmatova hated the word poetess. If we call her by that name, it is in no condescending sense but from a conviction shared by many critics and readers that her womanliness is an essential element of her poetic genius, a something added, not taken away. Gilbert Frank has pointed to her unusual blending of classical severity and concreteness with lyrical saturation; Andrei Sinyaysky, to the range of her voice 'from the barest whisper to fiery eloquence, from downcast eyes to lightning and thunderbolts'. No insult is intended, therefore, in saying that Akhmatova is probably the greatest poetess in the history of Western culture.
She was born in 1889, in Odessa on the Black Sea coast, but her parents soon moved to Petersburg. All her early life was spent at Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial summer residence; her poetry is steeped in its memories, and in Pushkin, who attended school there. In 1910 she married the poet Nikolai Gumilev, and her own first collection, Evening, appeared in 1912. She and her husband became a part of that rich flowering of creative talent—the names Blok, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Mendelstam Prokofiev, Meyerhold merely, begin the list—which made it the Silver Age: though it might better be described as the second Golden Age. Akhmatova, Mandelsta.m and Gumilev became the leaders of `Acmeism',
a poetic movement which preferred the virtues of classicism, firmness, structure, to the apocalyptic haze and ideological preoccupations of Blok and the other Symbolists.
Gumilev was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921 as an alleged counter-revolutionary. Despite the fact that Akhmatova and he had been divorced for three years, the taint of having been associated with him never left her. To borrow Pasternak's metaphor (from “Doctor Zhivago”), she had reached the corner of Silver Street and Silent Street: practically none of her poetry was published between 1923 and 1940. At the beginning of the Stalinist Terror, her son, Lev Gumilev, was arrested—released—rearrested, and sent to the labour camps. Nikolai Punin, an art critic and historian, with whom she had been living for ten years, was also arrested, though he was released a year or two later: the first lyric of “Requiem” is said to refer to his arrest. Her son was released early in the war to fight on the front-line; but he was again arrested and transported to Siberia in z99. He was finally freed only in 1956 after Stalin's death and partial denunciation.
For Akhmatova herself, life was relatively happier during the war, when the enemy was known and could be fought. Such 'happiness', as she said, was a comment on the times! She endured the first terrible months of the Leningrad siege, and was then evacuated, with other artists, to Tashkent. Some of her poems were published, and in 1945 a collected works was said to be forthcoming. It never appeared. In the renewed repression a violent campaign of abuse was directed at her. She was too personal, too mystical. Zhdanov, Stalin's cultural hack, described her as a nun and a whore. This would appear to be a marvellous mixture of archetypes for a poet, but of course his remarks were neither meant, nor taken, in that way. She was expelled from the Writers' Union—tantamount to her abolition—and was henceforth followed everywhere by two secret police agents.
còn tiếp
Comments
Post a Comment