'So Dark a Night Will Never See the Day'

“A poem is about many things and the literal sense is only one of them. The rhetorical and musical features of poetry are as intrinsic to a formal poem as its ostensible meaning, which may be little more than a coat hanger; the dazzling gown draped on that hanger may be made of quite other elements.”

Stephen Edgar could have modified “poem” with good or interesting. We’ve all read too many poems that amount to even less than what appears on the page. They are merely literal, like entries in a foreign-language phrase book. In fact, Edgar, an Australian poet, is introducing his translation from the Russian of a poem by Anna Akhmatova, “In Memoriam, July 19, 1914.” I have no Russian.  have read Akhmatova in various translations since the nineteen-seventies and feel as though her work still eludes me. As Edgar writes:

“Some poets have been served well by translation—Seferis and Holub come to mind—but others seem to lose a lot of their magic in the process, Akhmatova among them.”

Reading poetry in translation from a language one doesn’t know is an unavoidable act of faith – and doubt. Edgar’s right: I sense that I have an approximate understanding of Cavafy, Zbigniew Herbert, even some of Montale. In prose, the same is true of Tolstoy and Cervantes. But Pushkin, I suspect, will remain forever an exotic mystery. The case for Osip Mandelstam, in verse and prose, is stronger because I’ve been reading him and his wife for almost half a century, in many translations. Perhaps I’m mistaking hubris for understanding but the poems no longer feel utterly opaque. As an experiment, here is Peter Oram’s translation of Akhmatova’s “Voronezh,” dedicated to Mandelstam:

“All the town’s gripped in an icy fist.

Trees and walls and snow are set in glass.

I pick my timid way across the crystal.

Unsteadily the painted sledges pass.

Flocks of crows above St Peter’s, wheeling.

The dome amongst the poplars, green and pale in

subdued and dusty winter sunlight, and

echoes of ancient battles that come stealing

out across the proud, victorious land.

All of a sudden, overhead, the poplars

rattle, like glasses ringing in a toast,

as if a thousand guests were raising tumblers

to celebrate the marriage of their host.

“But in the exiled poet’s hideaway

the muse and terror fight their endless fight

throughout the night.

So dark a night will never see the day.”

I confess the poem seems flat and predictable to this reader. Perhaps this is because of what Edgar says about the “literal sense” of formal poems in translation. Voronezh is almost three hundred miles southeast of Moscow. The poem is dated 1936. From 1935 to 1937, Mandelstam was living in Voronezh with Nadezhda in internal exile. There he wrote the three Voronezh Notebooks. After returning to Moscow, Mandelstam was arrested a second time in May 1938 and sentenced to five years in the Gulag. He died in a Siberian transit camp in December 1938. A monument to him stands in Voronezh.

[Eight translations of Akhmatova's poems, including Oram’s, are collected in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (eds. Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, Penguin, 2015).]