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”). [...]