National Poetry Day

About an hour ago I overheard a conversation in the Members' Room of London Library between two people one or both of whom might have been a poet and a broadcaster though, sadly, I did not recognize either. The male member of the duo was holding forth about the sheer silliness of National Poetry Day, with which I mostly agree. It's like National Breast Cancer Day, he spluttered. We shall have young people with yellow buckets collecting money for National Poetry Day soon. I hid behind a book so he should not see me smiling and become even more self-satisfied. (Mind you, I am not sure what the point of a National Breast Or Any Other Cancer might be, either. Are there really people around who are not aware of those diseases?)

Still, it is good to have a few portraits of poets around and, to start with, here is one I am particularly fond of as it unites the greatest English language poet of the twentieth century with its greatest portraitist.

And that's enough National Poetry Day. Let us go on to World Poetry Day. Here is an unusual portrait of the great Anna Akhmatova (mentioned by me here, here, here and here). It is part of the mosaics created for the National Gallery by the Russian artist who lived in France but worked for and in England, Boris Anrep. Akhmatova represents Compassion. Let me note, in parenthesis, that it is very annoying to see people walk across those wonderful mosaics without giving them a glance. Not in the guide books, I suppose.

The last of the Akhmatova links in the paragraph above takes us to my translation of the introductory lines to her wonderful cycle about the Great Terror, Requiem, which I still have not translated in full. But on this day I shall re-post those introductory lines:

No, I did not live under an alien sky And was not protected by alien wings - I was then among my own people, Where my unhappy people were.


INSTEAD OF AN INTRODUCTION


In the terrible years of yezhovschina I spent seventeen months in Leningrad’s prison queues. One day somebody recognized me. The woman immediately behind me, whose lips were blue with cold, and who, presumably, had never heard of me, seemed to shake off the numbness that had overtaken us all. Leaning close to my ear she whispered (we all spoke in whispers):


- And this. Can you write about this?


I said:


- Yes I can.


Then something resembling a smile glided across what had once been her face.

Kipling said it in Danegeld

IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
 To call upon a neighbour and to say:
 "We invaded you last night - we are quite prepared to fight,
 Unless you pay us cash to go away."

 And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
 And the people who ask it explain
 That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
 And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
 To puff and look important and to say:
 "Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
 We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
 But we’ve proved it again and again, T
hat if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
 You never get rid of the Dane.

 It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
 For fear they should succumb and go astray,
 So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
 You will find it better policy to say:

 "We never pay any one Dane-geld,
 No matter how trifling the cost,
 For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
 And the nation that plays it is lost!"

A requiem for the victims

May Day is an odd sort of holiday (where it is treated as such). The day after Walpurgis Night, when the witches fly in many countries, it had many pagan connotations and continued to be a feast in Christian Europe well into the sixteenth and seventeenth century, later in some places.

More recently, however, it had been taken over by the rather notional international workers' movement. Actually, rather a lot of events seems to have taken place on this day including the birth of the great Duke of Wellington in 1769 and the issuance of the first penny black stamp in 1840. Nevertheless, since the 1890s the association between May Day and the international workers' movement has become ever firmer, especially promoted in the various Communist countries and by trade unions in the non-Communist ones.

It seems to me that this is a goo day to recall the many victims of Communism and to remind people of what that international workers' movement really led to.

So, I have been re-reading Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, the great sequence of poems about the years of Yezhovschina, that is the Great Terror, dedicated to its many victims. It seems to me that it is a long time since I translated any Russian poetry and the time has come for a return to that occupation. What better way to start than Akhmatova's wonderful cycle. Completed sections will be posted on the blog but in the meantime, here is the easy bit, the quatrain and the prose introduction, both of which I have posted before in a long blog on EUReferendum2 on the subject of an exhibition of art from Russia in the Royal Academy and the disgracefully mealy-mouthed curating.

No, I did not live under an alien sky 
And was not protected by alien wings - 
I was then among my own people, 
Where my unhappy people were. 


INSTEAD OF AN INTRODUCTION 


In the terrible years of yezhovschina I spent seventeen months in Leningrad’s prison queues. One day somebody recognized me. The woman immediately behind me, whose lips were blue with cold, and who, presumably, had never heard of me, seemed to shake off the numbness that had overtaken us all. Leaning close to my ear she whispered (we all spoke in whispers): 


- And this. Can you write about this? 


 I said: 


- Yes I can. 


Then something resembling a smile glided across what had once been her face.

We take a break

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.