‘Dense impenetrable, Tatar’ [Excerpt] by Anna Akhmatova

Dense, inpenetrable, Tatar,
drawn from God knows when,
it clings to every disaster,
itself a doom without end.


by Анна Ахматова (Anna Akhmatova) a.k.a.Anna Gorenko
(1960s)
translation by Robert Chandler

Extra information: Akhmatova wrote the above piece about her pen name during her later years. When Anna Andreyevna Gorenko began publishing poetry, in her late teens, her father considered it an unrespectable pursuit and so she adopted her grandmother’s Tatar surname of Akhmatova as a pen name when publishing her works from then on as Anna Akhmatova by which name she is more commonly known. 

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Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

 

by William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)