You Will Hear Thunder
Anna Akhmatova
Also translated by D.M. Thomas
Alexander Pushkin: The Bronze Horseman (Selected Poems)
You Will Hear Thunder
Akhmatova : Poems
Translated by D.M. Thomas
Ohio University Press
Athens
Swallow Press
An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
All rights reserved
To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax).
Printed in the United States of America
Swallow Press/Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
Requiem and Poem without a Hero first published in England 1976 by Elek Books Limited, London
Way of all the Earth first published in England 1979 by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited
This edition first published in England 1985 by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited
Published in the United States of America 1985 by Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio
Translation copyright © D. M. Thomas, 1976, 1979, 1985
ISBN 978-0-8040-1191-4 pbk
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 84-062245
Contents
‘I have written down the words . . .’
‘Memory of sun seeps from the heart . . .’
‘He loved three things alone . . .’
‘I came here in idleness . . .’
Legend on an Unfinished Portrait
from Rosary
‘I have come to take your place, sister . . .’
‘It goes on without end . . .’
‘We’re all drunkards here . . .’
A Ride
‘Nobody came to meet me . . .’
‘So many requests . . .’
The Voice of Memory
8 November 1913
‘Blue heaven, but the high . . .’
‘Do you forgive me . . .’
The Guest
‘I won’t beg for your love . . .’
‘I came to him as a guest . . .’
By the Seashore
from White Flock
Loneliness
‘How can you look at the Neva . . .’
‘The road is black . . .’
Flight
‘I don’t know if you’re alive or dead . . .’
‘There is a frontier-line . . .’
‘Freshness of words . . .’
‘Under an empty dwelling’s frozen roof . . .’
‘The churchyard’s quiet . . .’
‘Neither by cart nor boat . . .’
‘Lying in me . . .’
‘O there are words . . .’
from Plantain
‘Now farewell, capital . . .’
‘I hear the oriole’s always grieving voice . . .’
‘Now no-one will be listening to songs . . .’
‘The cuckoo I asked . . .’
‘Why is our century worse than any other? . . .’
from Anno Domini
‘Everything is looted . . .’
‘They wiped your slate . . .’
Bezhetsk
‘To earthly solace . . .’
‘I’m not of those who left . . .’
‘Blows the swan wind . . .’
‘To fall ill as one should . . .’
‘Behind the lake . . .’
Rachel
Lot’s Wife
from Reed
Muse
To an Artist
The Last Toast
* ‘Dust smells of a sun-ray . . .’
‘Some gaze into tender faces . . .’
Boris Pasternak
Voronezh