Lunch with Jim and Anna Akhmatova

This is what lunch with Jim is like: he asks questions, makes provocative statements that fly out of his mouth and orbit randomlylike so many scintilla around the space that roughly defines where we are talking. Before I can respond to a question or a comment, he has moved on to another topic, equally provocative. By the end of our lunch, my mind is reeling and spinning, and I want to keep talking.

I recently read about the Latin word for raindrop, also used to describe the water that falls from an overflowing gutter. That image of raindrops falling from an overflowing gutter comes close to describing how I feel, Jim, after talking to you. Yes, we captured some of the ideas, we stopped some of the flow long enough to consider, to converse, but so much of what you introduced spilled over the top and was reabsorbed into the ground. Maybe like those ideas that "wake up the writer", but don't wake him up quite enough so that he is sitting at his desk; those ideas just get reabsorbed back into the ether.

Where, he asks (asks Jim), are the female Russian writers? (I can tell, and in fact you tell me, that you have been perusing the suggested reading list for the seminars.) Good question. Where are they? Other than Anna Akhmatova, Jim, and Nina Berberova, I haven't found any. Not that I have been looking in particular for the women, I've just been reading whatever I find, and I have not found many women. Akhmatova survived the Stalin years, in part by memorizing her poetry so that there would be no written record of anything that could be construed as anti-Stalinist. Berberova, also writing during the early 20th century, wrote, among other things, The Ladies of St Petersburg, a book of short stories, available through the VIRL. Akhmatova is a poet, an amazing poet. I'm just now reading slowly through her poetry and biography and have not much to say about it. (As for the Russian women, I've had to learn what I can from Tolstoy's Anna and Kitty, and the women characters in Pasternak and Gogol and Chekhov and Dostoyevski, but I'm sure you'll agree, that's not the same. I mean, after all, Anna dives under the carriage of a train, and Kitty, well, she rusticates herself to the countryside with a pedant)...But now that I'm thinking about Anna Akhmatova, I'm remembering something that I read in the preface to the translation of her poetry by Judith Hemschemeyer.

Here is a quotation from Hemschemeyer's preface: "The act of translating, as anyone who has tried it will attest, entails sacrifices. For the music and the delicious web of connotations of the original one substitutes, if one is lucky and patient, a verbal equivalent that conveys the tone and the meaning and some kind of music of its own. The music of a translation is not the original music, of course." (13)

I like this passage because it reminds me that everything written is a translation that suffers from similar discrepancies between the music as conceived in the mind of the maker, and what is actually written down. All making, including writing, becomes a translation, which is at best a "verbal equivalent" of whatever mood, tone, idea, concept, image, sound, etc, etc, that a maker is attempting to reify in words.

So, is every act of making an act of translation? Hemschemeyer goes on to talk about the differences between English and Russian grammars, and the challenges those differences pose to the translator, and that discussion, too, is fascinating to read. This book, too, is available in the VIRL, and worth getting if only for the preface. Hemschemeyer herself is a bit of a character, apparently, beginning her Preface in the following way:

"In 1973 I read a few of Anna Akhmatova's poems in translation in the American Poetry Review and was so struck by one of them that I decided to learn Russian in order to read them all...three years later, when I could read the Russian..." (1). Three years, Judith? You learned Russian well enough in three years to be able to read poetry?

Well, that's enough for now, but I'll conclude the post with a Works Cited list: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, Edited and Introduced by Roberta Reeder. Zephyr Press, Boston, 2006.

The Ladies from St. Petersburg, Nina Berberova.