In the first blog in this series, I
talked about the early French translations of anthologies that introduced
Western fans of literature to Chinese and Japanese poetry, including Le Livre de jade [The Book of Jade], and
the craze for all East Asian art in the West in the late nineteenth century,
called Le Japonisme.
Russian poets were well aware of these
trends in Parisian culture, and Anna Akhmatova, who lived from 1889 to 1966,
was no exception.
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| Anna Akhmatova, Russian poet, 1889–1966 |
Anna Akhmatova and her first husband, Nikolai Gumilev, visited Paris on their honeymoon in 1910, and returned to that city the following year.
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| Nikolai Gumilev, Russian poet, 1886–1921 |
Clearly
they collected all of the available anthologies of East Asian poetry in French,
since Gumilev produced a compilation of these anthologies that he translated
into Russian. Gumilev called this chapbook of poems Farforovyi Pavilion: Kitaiskie Stikhi [The Porcelain Pavilion: Chinese
Poems], which he published in 1918.
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| The Porcelain Pavilion: Gumilev's anthology of East Asian poetry, 1918 |
He
based the book on four different French anthologies of Chinese classical
poetry, including Gautier’s and Saint-Denys’.
At the same time that Akhmatova and
Gumilev were visiting Paris and collecting these volumes of translations,
Akhmatova was working on the book that would turn Russian poetry upside down, the
book that launched modernist poetry in the Russian language. This was her first
collection, Vecher [Evening],
published in 1912.
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| Frontispiece of Akhmatova's collection Evening, published 1912 |
Before Akhmatova’s volume, Russian
poetry was dominated by the symbolist movement. Symbolism was a school of
poetry that often strove to create crystalline word structures that described
an otherworldly reality, often an otherworldly love. One of the most famous symbolist
poems is Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” Poe
was a symbolist avant la lettre,
before the term “symbolism” even existed:
It was many and many a year
ago,
In a kingdom by
the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you
may know
By the name of
Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no
other thought
Than to love and
be loved by me.
Where is this kingdom? What sort of
relationship is this where lovers think only of one another? What kind of
language is this that marches along with a rhythm unlike the phrases that people
usually speak? This was not a world or a style that was useful to Anna Akhmatova
as a poet.
Instead, Akhmatova tried to find a
different model for poetry, one that dealt with real people living in real
places who had real experiences and emotions, spoken in a voice not that
distant from daily speech. Akhmatova found that model in East Asian poetry.
She was particularly influenced by
the traditional topic in East Asian poetry of the woman who waits all night in
vain for her lover to arrive. Akhmatova may well have known a poem by the
mother of the Commander Michitsuna.
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| Mother of the Commander Michitsuna, Japanese poet |
This Japanese poet wrote in the
tenth century C.E. and was married to the Regent Kaneie. The poem appeared in
French translation in de Rosny’s 1871 anthology of Japanese verse. Here is the
U.S. poet Kenneth Rexroth’s English version:
Have you any idea
How long a night can last, spent
Lying alone and sobbing?
This traditional tanka is a
powerful and concise statement of an emotion. It sums up a relationship in just
a few lines. The poet emphasizes the length of the night spent waiting for the
lover. The speaker of this Japanese tanka never mentions her lover explicitly,
but she does address him with a question.
In her poem “White Night” from her
first collection, Evening, Akhmatova
revived the traditional East Asian theme of the lover who waits in vain all
night for her beloved, but she transported it to a modern, Russian setting. The
title refers to the long days of the Nordic summer, when the sun barely sets:
White
Night
I haven’t locked the door,
Nor lit the candles,
You don’t know, don’t care,
That tired I haven’t the strength
To decide to go to bed.
Seeing the fields fade in
The sunset murk of pine-needles,
And to know all is lost,
That life is a cursed hell:
I’ve got drunk
On your voice in the doorway.
I was sure you’d come back.
1911,
Tsarskoye Selo
(translation copyright © by D.M.
Thomas)
The lover in this poem is so
distraught that she doesn’t even bother to light the candles once it finally
gets dark, or to drag herself to bed when she realizes the man she’s waiting up
for is not coming home. She can’t help keeping the door unlocked in the hope
that he will still arrive. The daylight that goes on and on mirrors the
insomnia and unstoppered pain of the speaker who waits up.
Akhmatova heightens the emotion
implied in poems such as the tanka just discussed. She adapts the
traditional theme of the jilted lover to her own purposes. As in the 10th
century tanka, the speaker addresses her lover directly, but in “White Night” the
speaker throws her accusation of callousness right in her lover’s face: “You
don’t know, don’t care,/ That tired I haven’t the strength/To decide to go to
bed.” Akhmatova made use of the East Asian classical tradition of the lover
waiting all night in vain, but she interpreted the tradition in her own empowering
way.
This forcefulness in Akhmatova’s
work caught the ear of North American women writers when they were looking for
their own poetic models during the feminist revival that began in the second
half of the twentieth century.
In “White Night” Akhmatova employs
another device common in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean verse—she choreographs
imagery to embody emotion—the sunset and the fading pine needles represent her
waning hope. We have the sense that this is not the first time she’s been
disappointed by this man, though the last time is getting close.
Interestingly, Akhmatova ends her
poem with the date and place of its composition: “1911, Tsarskoye Selo.”
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| Tsarskoye Selo |
Her use of a time and location represents a significant extension of the East Asian tradition. Every one of Akhmatova’s poems ends with the date below the last line of the poem, a stamp of authenticity indicating that these experiences were not simply invented. Many classical Chinese and Japanese poems feel autobiographical, and Akhmatova again expands on this tradition. Akhmatova uses the date at the end of her poem to indicate that she is bearing witness to the events of her heart, just as she witnessed the horrors of Stalin’s dictatorship later in her life. By making the date the conclusion of all her poems, Akhmatova was turning her verse into an ongoing diary of her personal experience, a stance that became the foundation of much of the poetry written by North American women in the 1970s and 80s.
The addition of the name of the
town Tsarskoye Selo gives “White Night” an even more personal identification.
Tsarskoye Selo was the Versailles of Russia, the site of the tsar’s summer
palace. Significantly, it’s also the town where Akhmatova grew up and where she
lived with Gumilev, tying the poem more closely to her first marriage.
In a passage from her memoirs, My Half Century, Akhmatova discusses the
importance for her of writing out of her own experience. She contrasts her approach with that
of the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning: “I’m somewhat anti-Browning, He
always spoke in another character, for another character. I do not let anybody
else speak a word (in my poetry, it goes without saying). I speak myself and
for myself….” This passage reads like a manifesto for the North American poetry
of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, when writers such as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath,
Margaret Atwood, Ntozake Shange, Sharon Olds, Linda McCarriston, and many
others used autobiographical material as the source of their poetic inspiration
and politics.
This outspokenly autobiographical
stance of the Acmeist poets was expressed even more explicitly by Nadezhda
Mandelstam. Nadezhda
was the the wife of Akhmatova’s friend and closest literary ally, the poet Osip
Mandelstam: “In poetry, every word is a confession, every finished work is a
part of the poet’s autobiography….” (quoted in Justin Doherty, The Acmeist Movement in Russian Poetry:
Culture and the Word).
In short, what Akhmatova found in
the East Asian tradition was a poetry of personal narrative. This personal
narrative was sorely missing in the European and American poetry of the late
nineteenth century, dominated by otherworldly visions of the symbolists, the
medieval revivals of the pre-Raphaelites, and the displaced emotions of Robert
Browning’s dramatic monologues. Why the personal narrative of the East Asian
tradition? Personal narrative is a sort of bearing witness, and where there are
witnesses, there can be judgments, there can be remedy.
The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry, Part 1, Introduction
The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry, Part 3: Less Is More and the Poetry of Jean Follain
The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry: Part 4—Jack Kerouac’s Haiku; and Conclusion
The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry, Part 3: Less Is More and the Poetry of Jean Follain
The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry: Part 4—Jack Kerouac’s Haiku; and Conclusion
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe
Other recent posts on writing topics:
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry?
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry
