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4 comments

Comment from: Bryan [Visitor]
Oh man, Don, this was an amazing post. I have nothing to offer, though. I gotta say, I never say that; lonely = l-one-ly.
12/14/09 @ 12:21
Comment from: Edgar [Visitor]
Excellent translation, Don. To work at that level requires mastery of both languages, in both meaning and feeling.
12/14/09 @ 19:34
Comment from: Kyle [Visitor]
Hi, Dr. Livingston. Below is my translation. I substituted the numerical juxtaposition in line 3 for an antonymous one and though I am also not an Akhmatova scholar, this is how I think The Last Toast might look in English if she were a morally relativistic, atheistic Slavophile. Dr. Croft would appreciate that I kept the 8-6-8-6 meter as well as the rhyme scheme. The Doors' "People are strange" was an integral part of the methodology.
I also enjoyed this post and still read your blog daily. Dobrii den.


I drink to a dismantled roof,
and to my ruinous view,
to friendship which makes me aloof,
and I must drink to you,

to my lying lips and false word,
and icy, lifeless stare,
to the rough and cruel in the world,
and God, who was not there.

Don responds: Kyle, I like it. Your version takes the lips as being Akhmatova's own, which is an interpretation that had not crossed my mind, but there is no grammatical reason that precludes it. (I just came across a web page that made me think she might have had in mind the lips of her son Лев Николаевич Гумилёв, who was forced to denounce her while under interrogation in May of 1934.)

I like the phrase “ruinous view.” It first brought to my mind a view of ancient ruins, then a view from a building whose roof had been torn off during war time, and then a reinterpretation of ruinous in the sense of "foreboding disaster."
12/15/09 @ 18:25
Comment from: Degas [Visitor]
Очень хорошие стихи!!! Ахматова великая поэтесса!!!
12/29/09 @ 04:39

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