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Collectable, beautifully presented hardback of Anna Akhmatova's greatest poems. Edited by D. M. Thomas.
His translations of Akhmatova have been described by John Bayley as 'a masterly achievement'. He has translated 19 additional poems especially for this Everyman edition.
From her appearance in a small magazine in 1906 to her death in 1965, Anna Akhmatova was a dominant presence in Russian literary life. But this friend of Pasternak and Mandelstam was a poet in a country where poetry was literally a matter of life and death, as she found when Mandelstam and her own husband, Gumilyev, were executed, and her son imprisoned for many years in the Gulag.
Akhmatova's first collection, Evening, appeared in 1912. Rosary (1914) made her a household name. After the Revolution she went in and out of favour with the authorities, who sometimes allowed her to publish, sometimes banned her work. She is now most celebrated in the West for Poem Without A Hero and Requiem, a sequencemourning the victims of Stalin's Terror which was only published (and then outside Russia) in 1963.
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The selection is fairly representative of Akhmatova's life work, with early poems from 1909, through her affair with the poet Blok in the teens, the Terror and War, to her deathbed in 1961. I particularly enjoyed the translation of the epic "Requiem". Without a doubt, this is the best English version I have ever read. My only complaint is its berevity - at 40 poems, it merely whets the readers appetite for more - a pity, given the outstanding nature of both poet and translator.
For those who are not familiar with Anna Akhmatova, this is a gem. If you have read some of her work, this is a must-have volume. Enjoy!
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