First posted December 04, 2011
Reading Hamlet
To the right, wasteland by the cemetery
beyond it the river’s dull blue.
You said: ‘Go, get thee, to a nunnery
or get a fool to marry you…’
Though that’s always how Princes speak,
still, I’ve remembered the words.
As an ermine mantle let them stream,
behind him, through endless years.
‘Hands clasped under the dark veil.’
Hands clasped, under the dark veil.
‘Today, why are you so pale?’
– Because I’ve made him drink his fill
of sorrow’s bitter tale.
How could I forget? He staggered,
his mouth twisted with pain…
I ran down not touching the rail,
I ran all the way to the gate.
‘I was joking,’ I cried, breathlessly.
‘If you go away, I am dead.’
Smiling strangely, calmly,
‘Don’t stand in the wind,’ he said.
‘There’s a secret border in human closeness’
There’s a secret border in human closeness,
that love’s being, love’s passion, cannot pass –
though lips are sealed together in sacred silence,
though hearts break in two with love’s distress.
And friendship too is powerless, and years
of sublime flame-filled ecstasy
when the soul itself is free, fights clear,
of the slow languor of sensuality.
Those who try to reach that boundary are mad,
and those who have – are filled with anguish.
Now you know, now you understand,
why my heart won’t beat at your caress.
Lot’s Wife
The just man followed God’s messenger,
vast and bright against the black hill,
but care spoke in the woman’s ear:
‘There’s time, you can look back still,
at Sodom’s red towers where
you were born,
the square where you sang, where you’d spin,
the high windows of your dark home,
where your children’s life entered in.
She looked, and was transfixed by pain,
uncertain whether she could still see,
her body had turned to translucent salt,
her quick feet rooted there, like a tree.
A loss, but who still mourns the breath
of one woman, or laments one wife?
Though my heart never can forget,
how, for one look, she gave up her life.
Note: The reference is to Lot’s wife in the Bible, Genesis 19:26
Epilogue (from Requiem 1940-1943)
I learned to know how faces fall apart,
how fear, beneath the eye-lids, seeks,
how strict the cutting blade, the art
that suffering etches in the cheeks.
How the black, the ash-blond hair,
in an instant turned to silver,
learned how submissive lips fared,
learned terror’s dry racking laughter.
Not only for myself I pray,
but for all who stood there, all,
in bitter cold, or burning July day,
beneath that red, blind prison wall.
The poem “Rekviem” (“Requiem”) is Anna Akhmatova’s best known work. It is a composition that is made up of several shorter poems, all reflecting the anguish of the Russian people during the years of persecution under Joseph Stalin. Akhmatova (1889 -1966) was hesitant to trust the poem to paper, so consequently, it was memorized by the poet and a few of her trusted friends. It was published in the 1960s, after Stalin’s death. While the poem refers to Stalin’s oppressive rule, it is important to remember that the poem was also written during a time of war. The other poems in this section were written at the bequest of the Soviet government to admonish the German’s siege of Leningrad and their invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin asked for Akhmatova to write poems about the “Siege” in order for them to be shared with the nation via radio broadcast. Akhmatova was evacuated from the city in 1943, by the Soviet army, for her safety.
Read more: http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Russian/Akhmatova.htm
and about her: http://www.uvm.edu/~sgutman/Akhmatova.htm
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Although the Russian poetAnna Akhmatova (1889–1966) never received the highest literary honour, the Nobel Prize, the veneration she enjoyed during her lifetime as well as her ever increasing posthumous fame have made her one of the luminary figures of modern Europe. Few authors of the past century have been portrayed more often in paintings, sculptures or photographs; few bodies of poetry has been more extensively translated, interpreted, recorded and illustrated; few individuals have featured more in the letters, journals or memoirs of her contemporaries. The extensive biographical chronicles of Lydia Chukovskaya, Emma Gerstein, Mikhail Ardov and other associates have helped create a larger-than-life and almost heroic image of the poet, which has become inseparable from her work.
Anna Akhmatova herself propelled this image to mythical dimensions through the consistent self-stylisation and dramatisation of her own persona. A modern-day Cassandra, she lamented, exhorted, raged. Her view of life was characterised by an omnipresence of violence, betrayal and death. Her first husband was executed as a counterrevolutionary; her son was repeatedly sent to labour camps for political reasons; her second husband was murdered in prison; numerous friends and colleague were victims of the so-called purges.
Meanwhile, she was prohibited from publishing, forced to eke out an existence, mostly living in other people’s apartments, places of asylum, emergency accommodation. The body of work that she was able to garner in the midst of her extreme suffering in life and love is a unique and varyingly orchestrated requiem. The fact that the poet was officially and publicly reviled as “half whore, half nun” in the post-war Stalinist period is certainly due to the aura and exalted image that enveloped her, and which was to be maligned at all costs – because it posed an intolerable provocation to the Soviet literary scene.
Among those who accompanied Anna Akhmatova throughout the “century of the wolves” and enjoyed her steadfast trust was Nadezhda Mandelstam. Ten years her junior, this friend – the wife and biographer of poet Ossip Mandelstam – weathered with Akhmatova the arbitrariness of power, persecution, deprivation, evacuation and also the bickering of the menage a trois. And in the process she learned that in the face of extreme circumstances, only those who refuse to to become slaves of fear are able to survive. Whoever is able to master this fear – for one’s life – will maintain his individual integrity and freedom, will remain victorious, even if falling ultimately victim to oppression…
http://www.signandsight.com/features/2209.html
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‘Only love can save those who are infected with anger.’ Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich
Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Lecture (2015)
Baldev Singh Mann: My darling daughter! (1986)
Seamus Heaney’s Advice to the Young. By Maria Popova
What I have learned (humans aged 6 to 92)
एक अजीब-सी मुश्किल / My Uncanny Paradox
Shabad Shaala in Delhi : An Initiative by the Kabir Project
After the truth-shower 