051: On Close Reading

Anna Akhmatova, Ilya Kaminsky, translation and poetry, remaking writing + an excerpt from Socially Distanced

I’m going to reference the events in Ukraine with the one thing I can think of that doesn’t feel ridiculously performative, which is to say something about a poem on my way to saying something about writing.

Here is the second stanza of Ukranian-born Anna Akhmatova’s famous poem “Requiem,” written out of her experiences in Stalinist Russia.

During the terrifying years of the Yezhov repressions, I spent seventeen
months in Leningrad prison lines. One time, someone thought they
recognized me. Then a woman standing behind me, who of course had
never heard my name, stirred from her own, though common to all of
us, stupor and asked in my ear (there, all spoke in a whisper):
—Could you describe this?
And I said:
—I can.
Then, something akin to a smile slipped across what once had been
her face.

I love these lines for the power of the execution. She evokes the desperation of the scene in a few sharply chosen phrases: in Leningrad prison lines, (there, all spoke in a whisper), what once had been her fac…