Anna Akhmatova in Translation
Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems. Expanded Edition. Translated by Judith Hemschemeyer. Edited & Introduced by Roberta Reeder. Boston: Zephyr Press and Edinburgh: Canongate Books. 1997. 947pp. $29. Paper.
“In 1973,” Judith Hemschemeyer explains in her Preface, “I read a few of Anna Akhmatova’s poems in translation in the American Poetry Review and was so struck by one of them that I decided to learn Russian in order to read them all.” The poem in question was the 1912 eight-line lyric Potusknel na nebe siniu lak (“The sky’s dark blue lacquer has dimmed”). [...]
