Анна Ахматова
(1889-1966)
Молитва
Дай мне горькие годы недуга,
Задыханья, бессонницу, жар,
Отыми и ребёнка, и друга,
И таинственный песенный дар —
Так молюсь за Твоей литургией
После стольких томительных дней,
Чтобы туча над тёмной Россией
Стала облаком в славе лучей.
May, 1915. Day
of the Holy Ghost
St. Petersburg
d
Literal Translation
by Judith Hemschemeyer
Prayer
Give me bitter
years of sickness,
Suffocation,
insomnia, fever,
Take my child
and my lover,
And my
mysterious gift of song—
This I pray at
your liturgy
After so many
tormented days,
So that the
stormcloud over darkened Russia
Might become a
cloud of glorious rays.
d
Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie
A Prayer
Send me bitter
long years of illness on end,
Labored breathing,
insomnia, fever,
Take my one
offspring, take my best friend
And my gift as
a poet, dream-weaver.
So goes my
prayer during liturgy mass,
After
tormenting weeks of travail,
I pray that the
nimbus that looms o’er dark Rus
Turn to clouds
steeped in glory, bright-hale.
d
Translator’s Note
So much for the
efficacy of prayer. The year 1915 was early on in the morass of chaos and grief
that was to plague Holy Rus and its denizens (including Anna Akhmatova) in the
twentieth century. Still to come were the further horrors of the First World War,
two revolutions, a civil war, various famines, then what was billed as the
Glorious Socialist Paradise, the Soviet Union, which included the Leninist
Terror, more famine, another World War, the mass arrests of the Stalinist
Terror, the Gulag Archipelago, etc., etc. With the collapse of the USSR the
nineties promised a new democratic Russia, but that decade came with economic
collapse, followed by the new capitalist oligarchs and their seizure of the
country’s natural wealth. And then came next what was old hat in Russian
history: a new authoritarian leader, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Who decided,
in 2022, that only war with Ukraine could save his country from utter
second-class status as a world power.
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