Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem

 

 

Requiem
 

 

Not under foreign skies
Nor
under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.
[1961]

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I
spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone 'picked me out'.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in
her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there) - 'Could one ever describe
this?' And I answered - 'I can.' It was then that
something like a smile slid across what had previously
been just a face.
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]

DEDICATION

Mountains fall before this grief,
A mighty river stops its flow,
But prison doors stay firmly bolted
Shutting off the convict burrows
And an anguish close to death.
Fresh winds softly blow for someone,
Gentle sunsets warm them through; we don't know this,
We are everywhere the same, listening
To the scrape and turn of hateful keys
And the heavy tread of marching soldiers.
Waking early, as if for early mass,
Walking through the capital run wild, gone to seed,
We'd meet - the dead, lifeless; the sun,
Lower every day; the Neva, mistier:
But hope still sings forever in the distance.
The verdict. Immediately a flood of tears,
Followed by a total isolation,
As if a beating heart is painfully ripped out, or,
Thumped, she lies there brutally laid out,
But she still manages to walk, hesitantly, alone.
Where are you, my unwilling friends,
Captives of my two satanic years?
What miracle do you see in a Siberian blizzard?
What shimmering mirage around the circle of the moon?
I send each one of you my salutation, and farewell.
[March 1940]

INTRODUCTION
[PRELUDE]

That was when the ones who smiled
Were the dead, glad to be at rest.
And like a useless appendage, Leningrad

Swung from its prisons.
And when, senseless from torment,

Regiments of convicts marched,

And the short songs of farewell

Were sung by locomotive whistles.

The stars of death stood above us

And innocent Russia writhed

Under bloody boots

And under the tires of the Black Marias.

 

(Police cars for conveying those arrested.)

I

You were taken away at dawn. I followed you
As one does when a corpse is being removed.
Children were crying in the darkened house.
A candle flared, illuminating the Mother of God. . .
The cold of an icon was on your lips, a death-cold
sweat
On your brow - I will never forget this; I will gather

To wail with the wives of the murdered streltsy
Inconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers.


1935

Around the year 1550 Ivan the Terrible—elite troops rebelled.


II

Silent flows the river Don
A yellow moon looks quietly on
Swanking about, with cap askew
It sees through the window a shadow of you
Gravely ill, all alone
The moon sees a woman lying at home
Her son is in jail, her husband is dead
Say a prayer for her instead.

III

It isn't me, someone else is suffering. I couldn't.
Not like this. Everything that has happened,
Cover it with a black cloth,
Then let the torches be removed. . .
Night.

IV
(skip)

Giggling, poking fun, everyone's darling,
The carefree sinner of Tsarskoye Selo (2)
If only you could have foreseen
What life would do with you -
That you would stand, parcel in hand,
Beneath the Crosses (3), three hundredth in
line,
Burning the new year's ice
With your hot tears.
Back and forth the prison poplar sways
With not a sound - how many innocent
Blameless lives are being taken away. . .

[1938]

V

For seventeen months I have been screaming,
Calling you home.
I've thrown myself at the feet of butchers
For you, my son and my horror.
Everything has become muddled forever -
I can no longer distinguish
Who is an animal, who a person, and how long
The wait can be for an execution.
There are now only dusty flowers,
The chinking of the censer,
Tracks from somewhere into nowhere
And, staring me in the face
And threatening me with impending death,
Is an enormous star.


[1939]

VI

Weeks fly lightly by. Even so,
I cannot understand what has arisen,
How, my son, into your prison
White nights stare so brilliantly.
Now once more they burn,
Eyes that focus like a hawk,
And, upon your cross, the talk
Is again of death.


[1939. Spring]

VII
THE VERDICT

The word landed with a stony thud
Onto my still-beating breast.
Never mind, I was prepared,
I will manage with the rest.

I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again. . .

But how. The hot summer rustles
Like a carnival outside my window;
I have long had this premonition
Of a bright day and a deserted house.


[22 June 1939. Summer]

VIII
TO DEATH

You will come anyway - so why not now?
I wait for you; things have become too hard.
I have turned out the lights and opened the door
For you, so simple and so wonderful.
Assume whatever shape you wish. Burst in
Like a shell of noxious gas. Creep up on me
Like a practised bandit with a heavy weapon.
Poison me, if you want, with a typhoid exhalation,
Or, with a simple tale prepared by you
(And known by all to the point of nausea), take me
Before the commander of the blue caps and let me
glimpse
The house administrator's terrified white face.
I don't care anymore. The river Yenisey
Swirls on. The Pole star blazes.
The blue sparks of those much-loved eyes
Close over and cover the final horror.
[19 August 1939. Fontannyi Dom]

IX

Madness with its wings
Has covered half my soul
It feeds me fiery wine
And lures me into the abyss.

That's when I understood
While listening to my alien delirium
That I must hand the victory
To it.

However much I nag
However much I beg
It will not let me take
One single thing away:

Not my son's frightening eyes -
A suffering set in stone,
Or prison visiting hours
Or days that end in storms

Nor the sweet coolness of a hand
The anxious shade of lime trees
Nor the light distant sound
Of final comforting words.
[14 May 1940. Fontannyi Dom]

X
CRUCIFIXION

Weep not for me, mother.
I am alive in my grave.

1.
A choir of angels glorified the greatest hour,
The heavens melted into flames.
To his father he said, 'Why hast thou forsaken me!'
But to his mother, 'Weep not for me. . .'
[1940. Fontannyi Dom]

2.
Magdalena smote herself and wept,
The favourite disciple turned to stone,
But there, where the mother stood silent,
Not one person dared to look.
[1943. Tashkent]

EPILOGUE

1.
I have learned how faces fall,
How terror can escape from lowered eyes,
How suffering can etch cruel pages
Of cuneiform-like marks upon the cheeks.
I know how dark or ash-blond strands of hair
Can suddenly turn white. I've learned to recognise
The fading smiles upon submissive lips,
The trembling fear inside a hollow laugh.
That's why I pray not for myself
But all of you who stood there with me
Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
Under a towering, completely blind red wall.

2.
The hour has come to remember the dead.
I see you, I hear you, I feel you:
The one who resisted the long drag to the open window;
The one who could no longer feel the kick of familiar
soil beneath her feet;
The one who, with a sudden flick of her head, replied,

'I arrive here as if I've come home!'
I'd like to name you all by name, but the list
Has been removed and there is nowhere else to look.
So,
I have woven you this wide shroud out of the humble
words
I overheard you use. Everywhere, forever and always,
I will never forget one single thing. Even in new
grief.
Even if they clamp shut my tormented mouth
Through which one hundred million people scream;
That's how I wish them to remember me when I am dead
On the eve of my remembrance day.
If someone someday in this country
Decides to raise a memorial to me,
I give my consent to this festivity
But only on this condition - do not build it
By the sea where I was born,
I have severed my last ties with the sea;
Nor in the Tsar's Park by the hallowed stump
Where an inconsolable shadow looks for me;
Build it here where I stood for three hundred hours
And no-one slid open the bolt.
Listen, even in blissful death I fear
That I will forget the Black Marias,
Forget how hatefully the door slammed and an old woman
Howled like a wounded beast.
Let the thawing ice flow like tears
From my immovable bronze eyelids
And let the prison dove coo in the distance
While ships sail quietly along the river.
[March 1940. Fontannyi Dom]

 

1935-1940

Another translation of Akhmatova’s Requiem   

 

Not under foreign skies protection

Or saving wings of alien birth –

I was then there – with whole my nation –

There, where my nation, alas! was.

 

1961 

 

 

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

 

In the awful days of the Yezhovschina I passed seventeen months in the outer waiting line of the prison visitors in Leningrad. Once, somebody ‘identified’ me there. Then a woman, standing behind me in the line, which, of course, never heard my name, waked up from the torpor, typical for us all there, and asked me, whispering into my ear (all spoke only in a whisper there):

“And can you describe this?”

And I answered:

“Yes, I can.”

Then the weak similarity of a smile glided over that, what had once been her face.

 

April 1, 1957; Leningrad 

 

 

DEDICATION

 

The high crags decline before this woe,

The great river does not flow ahead,

But they’re strong – the locks of a jail, stone,

And behind them – the cells, dark and low,

And the deadly pine is spread.

For some one, somewhere, a fresh wind blows,

For some one, somewhere, wakes up a dawn –

We don’t know, we’re the same here always,

We just hear the key’s squalls, morose,

And the sentry’s heavy step alone;

Got up early, as for Mass by Easter,

Walked the empty capital along

To create the half-dead peoples’ throng.

The sun downed, the Neva got mister,

But our hope sang afar its song.

There’s a sentence… In a trice tears flow…

Now separated, cut from us,

As if they’d pulled out her heart and thrown

Or pushed down her on a street stone –

But she goes… Reels…  Alone at once.

Where are now friends unwilling those,

Those friends of my two years, brute?

What they see in the Siberian snows,

In a circle of the moon, exposed?

To them I send my farewell salute.

 

 

PROLOGUE

 

In this time, just a dead could half-manage

A weak smile – with the peaceful state glad.

And, like some heavy, needless appendage,

Mid its prisons swung gray Leningrad.

And, when mad from the tortures’ succession,

Marched the army of those, who’d been doomed,

Sang the engines the last separation

With their whistles through smoking gloom,

And the deathly stars hanged our heads over

And our Russia writhed under the boots –

With the blood of the guiltless full-covered –

And the wheels on Black Maries’ black routes.

 

1

 

You were taken away at dawn’s mildness.

I convoyed you, as my dead-born child,

Children cried in the room’s half-grey darkness,

And the lamp by the icon lost light. 

On your lips dwells the icon kiss’s cold

On your brow – the cold sweet … Don’t forget!

Like a wife of the rebel of old

On the Red Square, I’ll wail without end.

 

2

 

The quiet Don bears quiet flood,

The crescent enters in a hut.

 

He enters with a cap on head,

He sees a woman like a shade.

 

This woman’s absolutely ill,

This woman’s absolutely single.

 

Her man is dead, son – in a jail,

Oh, pray for me – a poor female!    

 

3

 

No, ‘tis not I, ‘tis someone’s in a suffer –

I was ne’er able to endure such pain.

Let all, that was, be with a black cloth muffled,

And let the lanterns be got out ... and reign

                                            just Night.

 

4

 

You should have seen, girl with some mocking manner,

Of all your friends the most beloved pet,

The whole Tsar Village’s a sinner, gayest ever –

What should be later to your years sent.

How, with a parcel, by The Crosses, here,

You stand in line with the ‘Three Hundredth’ brand

And, with your hot from bitterness a tear,

Burn through the ice of the New Year, dread.

The prison’s poplar’s bowing with its brow,

No sound’s heard – But how many, there,

The guiltless ones are loosing their lives now…      

  

5

 

I’ve cried for seventeen long months,

I’ve called you for your home,

I fell at hangmen’ feet – not once,

My womb and hell you’re from.

All has been mixed up for all times,

And now I can’t define

Who is a beast or man, at last,

And when they’ll kill my son.

There’re left just flowers under dust,

The censer’s squall, the traces, cast

Into the empty mar…

And looks strait into my red eyes

And threads with death, that’s coming fast,

The immense blazing star.  

 

6

 

The light weeks fly faster here,

What has happened I don’t know,

How, into your prison, stone,

Did white nights look, my son, dear?

How do they stare at you, else,

With their hot eye of a falcon,

Speak of the high cross, you hang on,

Of the slow coming death?

 

7

 

THE SENTENCE

 

The word, like a heavy stone,

Fell on my still living breast.

I was ready. I didn’t moan.

I will try to do my best.

 

I have much to do my own:

To forget this endless pain,

Force this soul to be stone,

Force this flesh to live again.  

 

Just if not … The rustle of summer

Feasts behind my window sell.

Long before I’ve seen in slumber

This clear day and empty cell.

 

8

 

TO DEATH

 

You’ll come in any case – why not right now, therefore?

I wait for you – my strain is highest.

I have doused the light and left opened the door

For you, so simple and so wondrous.

Please, just take any sight, which you prefer to have:

Thrust in – in the gun shells’ disguises,

Or crawl in with a knife, as an experienced knave,

Or poison me with smoking typhus,

Or quote the fairy tale, grown in the mind of yours

And known to each man to sickness,

In which I’d see, at last, the blue of the hats’ tops,

And the house-manager, ‘still fearless’.

It’s all the same to me. The cold Yenisei lies

In the dense mist, the Northern Star – in brightness,

And a blue shine of the beloved eyes

Is covered by the last fear-darkness.

 

9

 

Already madness, with its wing,

Covers a half of my heart, restless,

Gives me the flaming wine to drink

And draws into the vale of blackness.

 

I understand that just to it

My victory has to be given,

Hearing the ravings of my fit,

Now fitting to the stranger’s living.

 

And nothing of my own past

It’ll let me take with self from here

(No matter in what pleas I thrust

Or how often they appear):

 

Not awful eyes of my dear son –

The endless suffering and patience –

Not that black day when thunder gunned,

Not that jail’s hour of visitation,

 

Not that sweet coolness of his hands,

Not that lime’s shade in agitation,         

Not that light sound from distant lands –

Words of the final consolations.

 

10

 

CRUCIFIXION

                              Don’t weep for me, Mother,

                              seeing me in a grave.

 

I

 

The angels’ choir sang fame for the great hour,

And skies were melted in the fire’s rave.

He said to God, “Why did you left me, Father?”

And to his Mother, “Don’t weep o’er my grave…”

 

II

 

Magdalena writhed and sobbed in torments,

The best pupil turned into a stone,

But none dared – even for a moment –

To sight Mother, silent and alone.

 

 

EPILOGUE

 

I

 

I’ve known how, at once, shrink back the faces,

How fear peeps up from under the eyelids,

How suffering creates the scriptural pages 

On the pale cheeks its cruel reigning midst,

How the shining raven or fair ringlet

At once is covered by the silver dust,

And a smile slackens on the lips, obedient,

And deathly fear in the dry snicker rustles.

And not just for myself I pray to Lord,

But for them all, who stood in that line, hardest,

In a summer heat and in a winter cold,

Under the wall, so red and so sightless.

 

II

 

Again a memorial hour is near,

I can now see you and feel you and hear:

 

And her, who’d been led to the air in a fit,

And her – who no more touches earth with her feet.

 

And her – having tossed with her beautiful head –

She says, “I come here as to my homestead.”

 

I wish all of them with their names to be called;

But how can I do that? I have not the roll.

 

The wide common cover I’ve wov’n for their lot –

>From many a word, that from them I have caught.

 

Those words I’ll remember as long as I live,

I’d not forget them in a new awe or grief.

 

And if will be stopped my long-suffering mouth –

Through which always shout our people’s a mass –

 

Let them pray for me, like for them I had prayed,

Before my remembrance day, quiet and sad.

 

And if once, whenever in my native land,

They’d think of the raising up my monument,

 

I give my permission for such good a feast,

But with one condition – they have to place it

 

Not near the sea, where I once have been born –

All my warm connections with it had been torn,

 

Not in the tsar’s garden near that tree-stump, blessed,

Where I am looked for by the doleful shade,  

 

But here, where three hundred long hours I stood for

And where was not opened for me the hard door.

 

Since e’en in the blessed death, I shouldn’t forget 

The deafening roar of Black Maries’ black band,

 

I shouldn’t forget how flapped that hateful door,

And wailed the old woman, like beast, it before. 

 

And let from the bronze and unmoving eyelids,

Like some melting snow flow down the tears,

 

And let a jail dove coo in somewhat afar

And let the mute ships sail along the Neva.