donmager.org
Words Are What We Live
Welcome Don's Story Akhmatova Odes Don's web links
 
Welcome
Don's Story
Akhmatova Odes
Don's web links
PWH Four Texts
Rilke
Voice Clips
Mandel'shtam
Pasternak
Tsvetaeva
Mikhail Kuzmin
Lermontov
Afanasy Fet
Nikolai Klyuev
Sergei Esenin
  

 


Don' Story

DON'S AKHMATOVA STORY
 

chemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> 

In 1999 I began research for an opera on the life of Anna Akhmatova in collaboration with Marc Satterwhite.   As the outline developed, Act 1 came to focus on The Stray Dog caberet in St. Petersburg in 1913 and Act 3 on the writing of Poem Without A Hero during WWII and the Nazi bombing of Leningrad.  The events of Act 3 recall and reshape the events of Act 1, as Poem Without a Hero (PWH) is in part a phantasmigorical remembrance of the poet’s youthful past.  
 
Act 2 focuses on Akhmatova, her son, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam and their terrifying cat-and-mouse games with Stalinist authorities during the latter 1930s as reflected in Akhmatova’s poem Requiem and Nadezhda's memoir Hope Without Hope. Here is the libretto outline.  The complete libretto can be accessed at  Akhmatova libretto  by Don Mager to opera by Marc Saterwhite.

 

 
AKHMATOVA

Music by Marc Satterwhite, Ph.D., University of Louisville
Libretto by Donald Mager, Ph.D. Johnson C. Smith Univ.

Opera in Three Acts and an Epilogue

Act 1: The Stray Dog
The Stray Dog Cabaret, Petersburg, 1913

Act 2: Requiem (1923-1941)
Akhmatova’s apartment, Leningrad
Various residences of the Mandel'shtams (Moscow, Voronezh)
Stalin’s office in the Kremlin
The Kresty Prison, Leningrad

Act 3: Poem Without A Hero (1941 and 1946)
Akhmatova’s apartment, Leningrad
Meeting of the Leningrad Branch of The Union of Soviet Writers, 4 September 1946
Stalin’s office in the Kremlin

Epilogue: March 5, 1953
Akhmatova’s apartment, Leningrad

 

Satterwhite finished the full score in 2005 and the work awaits its first performance.  As I wrote, I challenged myself to translate afresh any lines by Akhmatova used in the libretto.  In time this led to this complete translation of first Requiem and eventually Poem Without A Hero.  Although, with its relentless force of voice and images, its conciseness and angularity, Requiem is a stunning poem and by any scale that I can imagine, one of the great poems of witness of the 20th century; however,  in my experience, Poem Without A Hero (PWH) is far more astonishing, and I believe, far more incomparable.  My translation can be accessed at  Requiem 1935-1940.

Because parts of Requiem are quoted in Act II, I translated the entire poema.  After completing the libretto, I decided to translate Poem Without a Hero, even though three or four more or less complete versions in English were available in 2001.  As I searched for the most authoritative Russian text, I discovered a project in progress in Petersburg by Ellis Lak publishers to publish Akhmatova's works in variorum format, edited by T. A. Gorkova.  Begun in 1991, the seven volume set was not completed until 2005.

Akhmatova worked on Poem Without a Hero (PWH) from its inception in 1941 until the year of her death in 1966, partly because she was prohibited from publishing during most of that period.

At least four times, however, during that period, she prepared a manuscript for publication with some hope that it might be accepted, in 1941, 1946, 1956 and 1965.  Ellis Lak, unlike all previous editions, prints all four versions with extensive notes and varients.  This motivated me to retranslate the poema.  Two formats are available at this site.  One format translates the four Ellis Lak texts with notes.     I've been urged on by my fascination with the poema, and because I believe there are readers of English who will find the four texts of interest becasue all currently avaialbe translations in English are redactions using sections and lines from the four verions Akhamtova had authorized for uplication. My translation of the four versions is available at  Poem Without a Hero: Four Versions (1940-1962) with Prose About the Poema: Pro Domo Mea and From the Ballet "The Forieth Year."  Also click on tab to the left "PWH Four Texts"


Furthermore, Akhmatova several times attempted to write a ballet libretto that utilizes the "plot situation" of Poem Without a Hero Part One.  Ellis Lak collects these in a section called From the Ballet “The Fortieth Year.”  Akhmatova also wrote various short prose "notes" or "commentaries" about Poem Without a Hero (PWH), that she called Prose about the Poema: Pro Domo Mea.  Because these materials to my knowledge have never been translated in English in their entirety, I set out to translate them as well.

My entrenchment in Akhmatova's world of words became deeper.

Translations in English by others offer explanatory notes, some brief, some more exhaustive. As I moved forward, I realized that Akhmatova's intertextuality shapes readers' responses such that they depend not only knowing about the sources of allusions or references but knowing them.  This puts non-Russian readers at considerable disadvantage, because so many of them are to poems by Russian poets not widely known in the West.

For me, a note to an allusion that simply identifies a poet, his or her dates and the name of a poem does not do much to provide a reader the allusive resonance that Akhmatova builds into Poem Without a Hero.  Quite the contrary, such notes tend to mute or even silence those resonances.
 
What started as an opera collaboration eight years later led to an intense encounter between a poet-translator and various projects related the Poem Without A Hero (PWH).

But this is not yet the end of Don Mager's story with Akhmatova. My attraction to her and this particular poema undoubtedly has been triggered and nurtured by identity themes of my own perhaps more probing and complex than even I fully understand. My life in the existential and political world of the twentieth century overlaps hers by twenty-five years.

Thus, even though her career began in a time, the 1910s, that seems remote to us now, her great poema speaks to and of the world in which I was born and in which I came to adult consciousness.  Because Poem Without a Hero tells of a night in 1941 that recalls a night in 1913, through it, and the range of references and intertexts it carries with it, as I read and work on Akhmatova's great poema, I have a sense of holding in my imagination the whole of the twentieth century--her half and my half..  As she stood "atop" the fortieth year (1940) to look back on what she called "the real twentieth century," through her poema I have the sensation that I stand "atop" the beginning of the twenty-first century and view the quickly receding century of my birth.

Because "words are what we live," my entrenchment in Akhmatova's worlds of words turned out to take another unforeseen turn. 

In July 2002 I began to explore some of the sensations and ideas described in the previous paragraph in the form of odes in what eventuated as a three-year long conversation with Akhmatova.  This project was completed in September 2005 as  Akhmatova Odes: 150 Sprung Sonnets and 50 Haiku Strings for Four Voices  by Don Mager.  I view this book as my most important acheivement as a poet, but despair that it will ever find a publisher.   Bringing the manuscript to a close does not imply the conversation has ended.

This manuscript of the book has not found a publisher; however, a section of this website describes it in more depth.  The entire book can be accessed at as Akhmatova Odes: 150 Sprung Sonnets and 50 Haiku Strings for Four Voices by Don Mager.

The decision to create, publish and maintain this website is another chapter, but probably not the final one, in my story with Akhmatova.

I also have in progress several scholarly essays on aspects of my work on Poem Without a Hero. 
 
 

        Copyright © 2005 web hosting services by 2mHost.com Last modification: 02/21/12 06:40:00