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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.
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. AA is a true poetic spirit. This stance is good and many can benefit from it but, what is beyond the relishing in sadness, i would ask. Perhaps this is why she is called a prophet in the sense that she expressed the feelings of the 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.
And just so you know, reading Russian poetry in its original form is MORE than worth going through the trouble of learning the language. That is literally what it sounds like in comparison to the original. A poem is so brief, it is so immediate and so dependent upon every word- no one should ever touch it. 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.
you have to read it in Russian. There is nothing in the world like it- nothing. If you want it bad enough, learn Russian. You CANNOT CANNOT CANNOT, and i repeat, CANNOT ().
I honestly don't know who came up with the concept of translating poetry- to me its barbaric. It beats Shakespeare. read it in translation- its like trading feces for gold. 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.
The photos, the biography and the dating of individual poems aided my work. I am studying Russian writers of the 1930s particularly those who fled to Paris after the Bolshevik Revoltion of 1917. There is no doubt that even in translation AA and MT were among the great poets of the 20th Century.William Farragher 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. 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.
To order it was easy and fast. This was one of a set of books I gave my daughter so I cannot rate the books so far as contents are concerned.
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