Anna Akhmatova, "In Memory of M. B."

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소파에 쌓여 있는 책들 증 오늘은 "Poems of Akhmatova"(Stanley Kunitz, Max Hayward 공역)에서 시 몇 편을 읽어본다. 대개가 전에 읽은 시들이다. 안나 아흐마토바의 시는, 마침 커피 테이블에 놓여 있는, Edward Hirsch의 (시 감상/해설서) "100 Poems To Break Your Heart"에도 실렸을 것 같아 찾아보니 "In Memory of M. B." 한 편이 들어 있다.

 

 

         In Memory of M. B.

 

                                  Anna Akhmatova

 

 

    Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,

    not sticks of burning incense.

    You lived aloof, maintaining to the end

    your magnificent disdain.

    You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,

    and suffocated inside stifling walls.

    Alone you let the terrible stranger in,

    and stayed with her alone.

    Now you're gone, and nobody says a word

    about your troubled and exalted life.

    Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn

    at your dumb funeral feast.

    Oh, who would have believed that half-crazed I,

    I, sick with grief for the buried past,

    I, smoldering on a slow fire,

    having lost everything and forgotten all,

    would be fated to commemorate a man

    so full of strength and will and bright inventions,

    who only yesterday, it seems, chatted with me,

    hiding the tremor of his moral pain.

 

    (Translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward)

 

 

Notes on the Poems, "Poems of Akhmatova"에서 :

 

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), to whose memory the poem is addressed, was an outstanding novelist, satirist, and a playwright, most of whose work was banned in the last years of his life, and after his death well into the post-Stalin era.. A physician by training, he knew in advance that he was about to die -- i.e., he had "let the terrible stranger in."

 

Edward Hersch는, 그의 책에서, 이 시에 대해:

 

   Akhmatova also effectively characterizes the isolation Bulgakov must have felt for much of his life, given both his blacklisting by Stalin and his ongoing poor health.... Emphasizing his dignity, his aloofness, and his private, solitary suffering, the speaker ends the stana with the end of Bulgakov's life: "Alone you let the terrible stranger in, / and stayed with her alone."

 

   The speaker's sorrow expands from mourning the friend she has lost to mourning the life she has lost.... Like Bulgakov, Akhmatova suffered from a ban on her work. Her ex-husband was prosecuted and shot; her son was arrested and imprisoned; many of her friends were killed. including Mandelstam, her greatest ally. who had been deported and died in a Siberian labor camp. She lived in poverty, trying to get her son released.

 

   [A]lthough Akhmatova penned her elegy in 1940 from her house in Leningrad, it wasn't published until 1966.

 

 

 

"Poems of Akhmatova" (1973)

 

 

 

Zinaida Serebriakova,  Portrait of Anna Akhtova

 

 

 

Olga Kardovskaya, Portrait of Anna Akhtova

 

 

 

 

Statue of Anna Akhmatova on the bank of the Neva River in Saint Petersburg, facing towards the former Kresty Prison where her son was imprisoned.

 

 

"I should be proud to have my memory graced,

but only if the monument be placed

 

not near the sea on which my eyes first opened ---

my last link with the sea has long been broken ---

 

nor in the Tsar's garden near the sacred stump,

where a grieved shadow hunts my body's warmth,

 

but here, where I endured three hundred hours

in line before the implacable iron bars."

 

  --- Anna Akhmatova, "Epilogue, Requiem"에서

 

 

 

Anna Akhmatova 번역 "한국 고전 시"

 

 

 

이 책에 대한 언급을 "Poems of Akhmatova"에 실린 시 "Heart's Memory of Sun ..."에 대한 Notes에서 읽었다:

"In 1956 she published a volume of translations of Korean classical poetry, to which she felt drawn because, as she said, 'it is close to painting.'"