a land not mine, still by Anna Ahkmatova
A land not mine, still
by Anna Ahkmatova
English version by Jane Kenyon
A land not mine, still
forever memorable,
the waters of its ocean
chill and fresh.
Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine,
late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.
Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.
This poem speaks of life, and when you understand a bit of the poet’s history, life against the backdrop of death, and to be with the not knowing while letting all the beauty of of the world so fully in — that to me is what this poem is about. This one came to me through David, for whom I am always grateful that so much wonderful poetry was brought into my life.
Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) is one of the towering Russian poets of the twentieth century, whose life was shaped by Soviet persecution: her first husband was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921, her son was imprisoned in the Gulag for years, her work was banned for long stretches, and she lived under continuous surveillance. Requiem — her sequence about the Stalinist terror, written secretly between 1935 and 1961 because writing it down would have been a death sentence — is one of the great poems of political witness in any language. She memorized it. Friends memorized it. It survived in memory before paper.
This particular poem is not one of her terror poems — it is one of her quiet poems, where the politics is in the air rather than the foreground. The translation by Jane Kenyon is so readable and faithful, Jane herself a major American poet in her own right (she would die of leukemia at forty-seven, in 1995, just ten years after this translation).
