Personal themes characterize lyrical beauty of noted work of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, pseudonym of Anna Andreevna Gorenko; the Soviet government banned her books between 1946 and 1958.
People credit this modernist of the most acclaimed writers in the canon.
Her writing ranges from short lyrics to universalized, ingeniously structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935-40), her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her work addresses a variety of themes including time and memory, the fate of creative women, and the difficulties of living and writing in the shadow of Stalinism. She has been widely translated into many languages, and is one of the best-known Russian poets of 20th century.
In 1910, she married the poet, Nikolay Gumilyov, who very soon left her for lion hunting in Africa, the battlefields of World War I, and the society of Parisian grisettes. Her husband did not take her poems seriously, and was shocked when Alexander Blok declared to him that he preferred her poems to his. Their son, Lev, born in 1912, was to become a famous Neo-Eurasianist historian.
Nikolay Gumilyov was executed in 1921 for activities considered anti-Soviet; Akhmatova then married a prominent Assyriologist Vladimir Shilejko, and then an art scholar, Nikolay Punin, who died in the Stalinist Gulag camps. After that, she spurned several proposals from the married poet, Boris Pasternak.
After 1922, Akhmatova was condemned as a bourgeois element, and from 1925 to 1940, her poetry was banned from publication. She earned her living by translating Leopardi and publishing essays, including some brilliant essays on Pushkin, in scholarly periodicals. All of her friends either emigrated or were repressed.
Her son spent his youth in Stalinist gulags, and she even resorted to publishing several poems in praise of Stalin to secure his release. Their relations remained strained, however. Akhmatova died at the age of 76 in St. Peterburg. She was interred at Komarovo Cemetery.
There is a museum devoted to Akhmatova at the apartment where she lived with Nikolai Punin at the garden wing of the Fountain House (more properly known as the Sheremetev Palace) on the Fontanka Embankment, where Akhmatova lived from the mid 1920s until 1952.
La calificación promedio de 4.71 en Goodreads no dice mucho de este libro porque me parece que Anna Ajmátova es una poetisa poco conocida y por ende poco leída. Para mí ha sido una incalculable revelación, la epifanía de la otredad. Este libro me ha abierto un universo hacia la poesía rusa, además de sus poetas. Conocer sus contextos me lleva a pensar que los errores de la historia siempre se repiten, incluso algo peor y triste, quienes lo repiten lo hacen con todo conocimiento movidos bajo una mezquina sed de poder. Este volumen misceláneo reúne, además de los poemas de la Anna, un prólogo y epílogo excelentes, un grupo de textos diferentes en prosa de la autora, material documental y cronología, etc. Leer la poesía siempre es una experiencia personal, dialógica y única entre el autor y el lector. Recomendarlo supone ir más allá de una simple lectura. Significa adentrarse en el imaginario de una mujer inigualable, valiente que supo sortear su destino para no dejarse arrebatar la posibilidad de dejar su huella indeleble.
Réquiem es uno de los mejores poemas jamás escritos, Ajmátova es enorme, pero esta edición en particular es un desastre. Forzar la métrica castellana en una traducción es una empresa ambiciosa, si no es que cuestionable para quien no esté tocado por la gracia. El ruso es un idioma que, naturalmente, omite la cópula (el verbo ser), el español la exige, pero al cuentasílabas que tradujo esto poco le interesa la integridad del poema o lo que este pretende transmitir: es literal cuando no necesita serlo y engorroso cuando se le presenta la oportunidad. Barroquismo vacío. Ajmátova merece algo mejor.
Una pequeña muestra de la poesía de Anna Ajmatova, una muestra que hace apreciar la intensidad de su poesía, sin embargo la traducción en su afán por trasladar la rima del original ruso hace rimas fáciles que, en vez de ayudar a la lectura, la entorpecen.