You, who loved me with the deceptions Of truth – and the truth of lies, You, who loved me – beyond all distance! – Beyond boundaries!
You, who loved me longer Than time – your right hand soars! – You don’t love me any more: That’s the truth in six words.
by Марина Ивановна Цветаева (Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva) (12 December 1923) from Uncollected Poems translated by David McDuff
Ты, меня любивший фальшью…
Ты, меня любивший фальшью Истины – и правдой лжи, Ты, меня любивший – дальше Некуда! – За рубежи!
Ты, меня любивший дольше Времени. – Десницы взмах! Ты меня не любишь больше: Истина в пяти словах.
The poem recited by the Russian actress Alla Demidova
Additional information: The final line translates more accurately as ‘(the) truth in five words’. ‘You, who loved me – don’t’ is as close as I can, clumsily, get to five words (although you could use ‘anymore’ instead of ‘any more’ too) for the penultimate line while maintaining the structural consistency of the translator’s preceding lines. Then again it’s easy to be a critic. This is David McDuff‘s professional translation so ignore my amateur criticisms – I just found some of the translation choices he made unusual.
Winter, to me your gestures are cold and careful: yes, in winter there is something gentle as medicine,
or why else would sickness put out trusting hands into that season, from its own torture and darkness?
Weave your magic then my love, let the kiss of one curl of ice brush over my forehead.
Soon I shall trust any deception, and look without fear into the eyes of dogs, as I press close to the trees:
And forgive, playfully, with a run, turn and jump; and after a bout of forgiveness forgive again,
become like a winter’s day: empty and oval, though in comparison to such presence, always small.
I shall turn to nothing, and so call over the wall, not some shadow of myself, but light I shall not block at all.
by Бе́лла (Изабе́лла) Аха́товна Ахмаду́лина Белла Әхәт кызы Әхмәдуллина Bella Akhatovna Akhmadulina (1950) translated by Elaine Feinstein
Зима
О жест зимы ко мне, холодный и прилежный. Да, что-то есть в зиме от медицины нежной.
Иначе как же вдруг из темноты и муки доверчивый недуг к ней обращает руки?
О милая, колдуй, заденет лоб мой снова целебный поцелуй колечка ледяного.
И все сильней соблазн встречать обман доверьем, смотреть в глаза собак и приникать, к деревьям.
Прощать, как бы играть, с разбега, с поворота, и, завершив прощать, простить еще кого-то.
Сравняться с зимним днем, с его пустым овалом, и быть всегда при нем его оттенком, малым.
Свести себя на нет, чтоб вызвать за стеною не тень мою, а свет, не заслоненный мною.
A recital of the poem in Russian by Maria Selivanova.
Additional information: Bella (Izabella) Akhatovna Akhmadulina (10 April 1937 – 29 November 2010) was a Soviet and Russian poet, short story writer, and translator, known for her apolitical writing stance. She was part of the Russian New Wave literary movement. She was cited by Joseph Brodsky as the best living poet in the Russian language. She is known in Russia as “the voice of the epoch“. Despite the aforementioned apolitical stance of her writing, Akhmadulina was often critical of authorities in the Soviet Union, and spoke out in favour of others, including Nobel laureates Boris Pasternak, Andrei Sakharov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. She was known to international audiences via her travels abroad during the Khrushchev Thaw, during which she made appearances in sold-out stadiums. Upon her death in 2010 at the age of 73, President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev hailed her poetry as a “classic of Russian literature.”
The main themes of Akhmadulina‘s works are friendship, love, and relations between people. She wrote numerous essays about Russian poets and translators, some devoted to her close friend, Bulat Okudzhava. Akhmadulina avoided writing overtly political poems, but took part in political events in her youth, supporting the so-called dissident movement.
Akhmadulina wrote in an apolitical style making use of imagery and humour in her work. She used rhymed quatrains in her early works, which discussed ordinary, yet imaginative occurrences from daily life in language that was full of both archaisms and neologisms. Religion and philosophy became her themes as she aged and she wrote in longer forms.
Of mixed Tartar and Italian descent, Bella Akhmadulina was born in Moscow into a middle-class family. At the age of eighteen she married Yevtushenko, a fellow student at the Gorky Institute of Literature, from which she was expelled. Her second husband was the well-known short-story writer Yuri Nagibin, with whom she collaborated on a film scenario. Her third marriage weas to the playwright and children’s writer Gennadi Mamlin.
Akhmadulina’s first collection, String, was published in 1962 and criticized by the Party as ‘superfluous’, too intimate, etc. It was composed mainly of short lyrics, witty, whimsical, well-turned – strongly influenced by Ahmatova in their sobriety of form and preoccupation with individual emotions. Though Akhmadulina’s work appeared thereafter in magazines and almanacs from time to time, it was not until 1969 that her second collection, Music Lessons, was published. In 1963 a fragment of her long poem ‘A Fairy Tale about the Rain’ was published in Literary Georgia. ‘Rain’ marked a high point and and is still her most ambitious work to date. Since then she appears to have done more translating, especially from Georgian, than original writing, though the indications are that she has again entered a more creative period. Akhmadulina has perhaps major potentialities (Yevtushenko regards her as the foremost woman poet in Russian since the death of Akhmatova). Her work became rapidly more complex after the early short lyrics, and in ‘Rain’ it gained a weight of symbolic meaning that indicates considerable poetic endurance and power. Her subject in this poem, and in many others leading up to it, is nothing less than her relationship to her own poetic inspiration, symbolized by the Rain.
As Christine Rydel says in her illuminating analysis of Akhmadulina’s symbolic system, ‘The Metapoetical World of Bella Akhmadulina’ (Russian Literature Triquarterly, No.1): ‘Where most poets look to love for inspiration, Akhmudalina looks to inspiration for love.’ Like Tsvetayeva, with whom, as in ‘Music Lessons’ and ‘I Swear’, she identifies explicitly, Akhmadulina is uncomfortable, uneasy in the world. There is a plaintive, complaining tone to all this that can be irritating, but her verbal power, her technical accomplishment, allied to her capacity, by remote control as it were, to enter into and share in the destiny of her distinguished women predecessors, accurately and agonizingly conveys the struggle of creativity in an alienating environment.
Biographical information about Akhmadulina, p.227- 228, Post-War Russian Poetry (1974), ed. Daniel Weissbort , published by Penguin Books Ltd.
‘Bella Akhmadulina: Meeting in the Ostankino Concert Studio’ (1976). It’s about an hour and a half long featuring her doing recitals of her poetry and talking about various subjects. If you have time it’s worth watching (It’s in Russian obviously but the auto-translated subtitles will let you get the gist of many parts).
Among Akhmadulina’s ancestors on her mother’s side were Italians who settled in Russia, including the professional revolutionary Aleksandr Stopani, after whom a street in Moscow was named. On her father’s side were Tatars. In 1955, when her first verses were published in the journal Oktiabr’, it was immediately obvious that a real poet had come on the scene. She entered the Gorky Literary Institute the same year and became its queen. All of the young poets there were in love with her, including the compiler of this anthology who became her first husband. Her talent was also admired by poets of the older generation – Pavel Antokolsky, Mikhail Svetlov and Vladimir Lugovskoi. She encountered Boris Pasternak once while walking down a country path; he recognized her and invited her to visit him the next day when guests were coming, but she was too shy and respectful to come.
After mastering the assonant “Yevtushenko” rhyme, she took a sharp turn in the opposite direction, into whispers, rustling indeterminacy, and, at times, such intimacy as to be incomprehensible. Many of her major poems establish links to the memory on the great Russian poets on the past, especially Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam and Aleksandr Pushkin.
With Anna Akhmatova’s death, Akhmadulina became known as the most brilliant woman poet writing in Russian. She is an absolute sorceress with poetic form, though she has a tendency to spin intricate verbal webs. Probably no one in Russian poetry at the present has such an innate feeling for words. Akhmadulina’s poetry is somewhat private and she has a reputation of being apolitical, as assessment that misses the point. One can discern in such poems as “I Swear”, “St. Bartholomew’s Night,” and “A Fairy Tale About Rain” a social conscience permeated with a hatred for the vile politics that degrades people. Her fragile, gentle hand has signed any and all letters in defense of dissidents or anyone in trouble in the Soviet system. She was unafraid to cross police lines to visit Sakharov while he was in exile.
Akhmadulina writes elegant prose, placing refinement of language above all else, as she does with her poetry. She was awarded the State Prize for literature in 1989 and was the first of her generation to be elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Biographical information about Akhmadulina, p.873 – 874, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc.
I bless the daily labour of my hands, I bless the sleep that nightly is my own. The mercy of the Lord, the Lord’s commands, The law of blessings and the law of stone.
My dusty purple, with its ragged seams… My dusty staff, where all light’s rays are shed. And also, Lord, I bless the peace In others’ houses – others’ ovens’ bread.
by Марина Ивановна Цветаева (Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva) (21 May 1918) from Bon-Voyages (1921-22) translated by David McDuff
The poem recited in Russian by Anna Smirnova
Благословляю ежедневный труд
Благословляю ежедневный труд, Благословляю еженощный сон. Господню милость и Господень суд, Благой закон – и каменный закон.
И пыльный пурпур свой, где столько дыр, И пыльный посох свой, где все лучи… – Ещё, Господь, благословляю мир В чужом дому – и хлеб в чужой печи.
by Владимир Владимирович Маяковский Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1913) translation by Maria Enzensberger
Mayakovsky’s poem recited by Veniamin Borisovich Smekhov
Beneath is the original Russian version of the poem in Cyrillic.
А вы могли бы?
Я сразу смазал карту будня, плеснувши краску из стакана; я показал на блюде студня косые скулы океана. На чешуе жестяной рыбы прочел я зовы новых губ. А вы ноктюрн сыграть могли бы на флейте водосточных труб?
Rambling At The Bridge Head 
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