TO THE MUSE 

My Muse-sister kept on looking
At me: her gaze was clear and shining.
She took away my golden ring,
The gift that had signaled the start of spring.

Muse! See how happy they feel-
Girls and women, and widows-See?
I'd rather die on the torturer's wheel
Than endure these fetters made for me.

I know: I too will have to turn
To telling my fortune by tearing apart
A daisy. Everyone must learn
To endure love's torture in his heart.

I burn a candle in the window
Till dawn. There's no one at all I miss.
But I don't, don't, don't want to know.
Who's enjoying whose kiss. 

Tomorrow, mirrors will sneer: "We're not fond
Of your gaze-It's not clear or shining," they'll say.
To which I'll quietly respond:
"She took God's gift away."

1912

 
I learned a simple and wise existence,
I learned to look at the sky and pray,
And in the evening to walk a good distance,
Walking unneeded worries away.

When ravines rustle and burdock roams
And yellow-berried rowans are in their glory,
I put together light-hearted poems
About life, ephemeral, transitory.

I return. The fluffy cat doesn't glower:
He licks my palm and purrs long and hard,
And a light comes on in the little tower
Of a nearby lakeside lumberyard. 

Sometimes there's sound for a moment or more -
The cry of a stork on the house or near it.
-And if you should happen to knock on my door,
I very much doubt if I would hear it. 

1912 

As I die, I long for immortality.
The cloud of dust is low in which ...
Naked red devils let it be,
Even a caldron of foul-smelling pitch. 

Tell lies while crawling, thick and fast
You forking threats from books gone hoary.
Only let my memory last,
Only don't take away my memory.

If in the journey to that stronghold,
His face only will not seem strange,
I'm ready to pay a hundredfold
For the smiles and dreams we used to exchange.

The deadly hour will offer me
Poison to drink-I won't have a choice.
People will come, and help to bury
Both my body and my voice.

1912

 

….

As a theme, death is a good litmus test for a poet's ethics. The "in memoriam" genre is frequently used to exercise self-pity or for metaphysical trips that denote the subconscious superiority of survivor over victim, of majority (of the alive) over minority (of the dead). Akhmatova would have none of that. She particularizes her fallen instead of generalizing about them since she writes for a minority with which it's easier for her to identify in any case. She simply continues to treat them as individuals whom she knew and who she senses wouldn't like to be used as the point of departure for no matter how spectacular a destination.

 

Naturally enough, poems of this sort couldn't be published, nor could they even be written down or retyped. They could only be memorized by the author and by some seven other people since she didn't trust her own memory. From time to time, she'd meet a person privately and would ask him or her to recite quietly this or that selection as a means of inventory. This precaution was far from being excessive: people would disappear forever for smaller things than a piece of paper with a few lines on it. Besides, she feared not so much for her own life as for her son's who was in a camp and whose release she desperately tried to obtain for eighteen years. A little piece of paper with a few lines on it could cost a lot, and more to him than to her who could lose only hope and, perhaps, mind.

The days of both, however, would have been numbered had the authorities found her "Requiem," a cycle of poems describing an ordeal of a woman whose son is arrested and who waits under prison walls with a parcel for him and scurries about the thresholds of state's offices to find out about his fate. Now, this time around she was autobiographical indeed, yet the power of "Requiem" lies in the fact that Akhmatova's biography was too common. This Requiem mourns the mourners: mothers losing sons, wives turning widows, sometimes both as was the author's case. This is a tragedy where the choir perishes before the hero.

The degree of compassion with which the various voices of this "Requiem" are rendered can be explained only by the author's Orthodox faith; the degree of understanding and forgiveness which accounts for this work's piercing, almost unbearable lyricism, only by the uniqueness of her heart, her self and this self's sense of Time. No creed would help to understand, much less forgive, let 'alone survive this double widowhood at the hands of the regime, this fate of her son, these forty years of being silenced and ostracized. No Anna Gorenko would be able to take it. Anna Akhmatova did, and it's as though she knew what there was in store when she took this pen name.

At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise couldn't be retained by the mind. In that sense, the whole nation took up the pen name of Akhmatova-which explains her popularity and which, more importantly enabled her to speak for the nation as well as to tell it something it didn't know. She was, essentially, a poet of human ties: cherished, strained, severed. She showed these evolutions first through the prism of the individual heart, then through the prism of history, such as it was. This is about as much as one gets in the way of optics anyway.

 

These two perspectives were brought into sharp focus through prosody which is simply a repository of Time within language. Hence, by the way, her ability to forgive-because forgiveness is not a virtue postulated by creed but a property of time in both its mundane and metaphysical senses. This is also why her verses are to survive whether published or not: because of the prosody, because they are charged with time in both said senses. They will survive because language is older than state and because prosody always survives history. In fact, it hardly needs history; all it needs is a poet, and Akhmatova was just that.

-JOSEPH BRODSKY: The Keening Muse

Bài này, được dùng là Tựa cho tập thơ của Anna Akhmatova, khi được in trong Less than One, có tên như trên