|
A truly amazing and captivating collection of not only all of the Poet's work but also the riveting and heart breaking story of her life and harrowing survival as a writer in Communist Russia.A must read.
AA is a true poetic spirit. Here is a human being who, in my opinion, found her hope in her sadness, which, interestingly, was and became expressive of a whole generation of the Russian people. If you are interested in finding out how true poets get inspired, here is a good example. I would caution readers though, that there is an a sense of pessimism, sadness and a nauseating mood that permeates many of the poems, but there is diversity though. Perhaps this is why she is called a prophet in the sense that she expressed the feelings of the people. This stance is good and many can benefit from it but, what is beyond the relishing in sadness, i would ask.
you have to read it in Russian. I honestly don't know who came up with the concept of translating poetry- to me its barbaric. If you want it bad enough, learn Russian. read it in translation- its like trading feces for gold. There is nothing in the world like it- nothing. That is literally what it sounds like in comparison to the original. You CANNOT CANNOT CANNOT, and i repeat, CANNOT (). A poem is so brief, it is so immediate and so dependent upon every word- no one should ever touch it.
The specificity, brutality, the sumptuous tenderness of the Russian language are all but lost in these translations of one of this century's greatest poets. Although you might enjoy what you are reading, given you do not speak Russian- you honestly cannot even BEGIN to touch the greatness of Akhmatova or any other Russian poet by reading it in translation. And just so you know, reading Russian poetry in its original form is MORE than worth going through the trouble of learning the language. It beats Shakespeare.
I am studying Russian writers of the 1930s particularly those who fled to Paris after the Bolshevik Revoltion of 1917. The photos, the biography and the dating of individual poems aided my work. Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva were part of the pre-Revolution intelligencia and suffered terribly from the Reds suppression of artistic freedom. The Complete Poems of AA was helpful to me in this study. Since I am not skilled in Russian, I cannot comment on the quality of the translation but the very moving English version of AA's expression is what I would hope is even better in her native tongue. There is no doubt that even in translation AA and MT were among the great poets of the 20th Century.William Farragher
This was one of a set of books I gave my daughter so I cannot rate the books so far as contents are concerned. To order it was easy and fast.
|
