Anna Akhmatova citations

Page 2

“Call me a sinner,
Mock me maliciously:
I was your insomnia,
I was your grief.”

“Your voice is wild and simple.
You are untranslatable
Into any one tongue.”

“As the future ripens in the past,
so the past rots in the future --
a terrible festival of dead leaves.”

“You do not know just what you've been forgiven.”

“Rising from the past, my shadow
Is running in silence to meet me.”

“Forgive me, that I manage badly,
Manage badly but live gloriously,
That I leave traces of myself in my songs,
That I appeared to you in waking dreams.”

“I know beginnings, I know endings too,
and life-in-death, and something else
I'd rather not recall just now.”

“And you know, I agree to everything:
I will condemn, I will forget, I will give comfort to the enemy,
Darkness will be light and sin lovely.”

“Wild honey smells of freedom
The dust - of sunlight
The mouth of a young girl, like a violet
But gold - smells of nothing.”

“That was when the ones who smiled
Were the dead, glad to be at rest.”

“And it seemed to me that there were fires
Flying till dawn without number
And I never found out things-those
Strange eyes of his-what colour?

Everything trembling and singing and
Were you my enemy or my friend,
Winter was it or summer?”

“I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love”

“It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.”

“You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: "she wanted storms.”

“Today I have so much to do:
I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn my soul to stone,
I must learn to live again—
Unless …”

“Regarding myself as a mere echo,
Cave-like, unintelligible and nocturnal…”

“I go forth to seek —
To seek and claim the lovely magic garden
Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.”

“All has been looted, betrayed, sold;
black death's wing flashed ahead.”

“The stars of death stood over us.
And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed
under the crunch of bloodstained boots,
under the wheels of Black Marias.”

“A multi-colored crowd streaked about,
and suddenly all was totally changed.
It wasn't the usual city racket.
It came from a strange land.”

“Already madness lifts its wing
to cover half my soul.”

“Besides
what have poets, in any case, to do with sin?
They must dance before the Ark of the Covenant
or die! But what am I trying to say?”

“No-one was more cherished, no-one tortured
Me more, not
Even the one who betrayed me to torture,
Not even the one who caressed me and forgot.”

“Prince Charming, prince of the mockers —
compared with him the foulest of sinners
is grace incarnate…”

“You will come in any case — so why not now?
How long I wait and wait. The bad times fall.
I have put out the light and opened the door
for you, because you are simple and magical.
Assume, then, any form that suits your wish,
take aim, and blast at me with poisoned shot,
or strangle me like an efficient mugger,
or else infect me — typhus be my lot”

“The sand as white
as old bones, the pine trees
strangely red where the sun comes down.
I cannot say if it is our love,
or the day, that is ending.”

“I am not one of those who left the land
to the mercy of its enemies.
Their flattery leaves me cold,
my songs are not for them to praise.”

“Thinking of the sun makes
my heart beat faster — too fast!
What darkness!
From this night winter begins.”

“Such grief might make the mountain stoop,
reverse the waters where they flow,
but cannot burst these ponderous bolts
that block us from the prison cells
crowded with mortal woe…”