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Acknowledgements

In the spirit of an apprentice painter joining a master’s workshop, I have had three spells of translating Akhmatova: in 1964 (Requiem), 1974 (Poem without a Hero), and 1977 (a selection of mostly shorter poems). The first two works were published together as Requiem & Poem without a Hero (Elek. London, and Ohio U.P., 1976); the third body of translations was published under the title Way of All the Earth (Secker & Warburg Ltd., London, and Ohio U.P., 1979). The first of these volumes has long been out of print in Britain, and I am grateful to my publishers for providing an opportunity, in the present book, of bringing all my translations of Akhmatova together.

Akhmatova once referred to ‘the blessedness of repetition’. At the risk of some clumsiness of repetition (particularly in the Introductions) I have decided to leave the 1976 and 1979 texts essentially as they were.

My primary text was the two-volume Akhmatova: Sochineniya (Inter-Language Literary Associates, second edition, 1967–68), edited by G. P. Struve and B. A. Fillipov. I am grateful also to Professor Struve for helpful advice in correspondence. My introduction and notes to Poem without a Hero draw heavily on their scholarship, and also on the late Max Hayward’s excellent introduction and notes in Poems of Akhmatova, selected and translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward (Collins-Harvill, 1974).

Amanda Haight’s biography (Akhmatova, A Poetic Pilgrimage, Oxford U.P., 1976) was invaluable in supplying background information and interpretative comment. To her own translations and to those of Richard McKane and Stanley Kunitz, I am indebted for the occasions when a phrase or a line, in one or other of them, struck me as so ‘happy’ that it would have been foolish to try to find a better.

I am grateful to Jennifer Munro for her patient help with texts I found difficult to understand. Michael Glenny and Vera Dixon also gave me much-appreciated help.

But the errors, both linguistic and aesthetic, are mine; and the successes—Akhmatova’s.

D.M.T.

1984