Don Mager | Don's Akhmatova Story

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 in 1913 and Act 3 on the writing of Poem Without A Hero during WWII. The events of Act 3 recall and reshape the events of Act 1, just as the poem is a “remembrance” of the poet’s youthful past.

Act 2 focuses on Akhmatova, her son, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam and their terrifying cat-and-mouse games with Stalinist authorities during the latter 1930s as reflected in Akhmatova’s poem Requiem and Nadezhda's Hope Without Hope. Here is the libretto outline. The complete librettor anc be accessed at "Akhmatova" Libretto by Don Mager to opera by Marc Satterwhite].

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 Mandelstams (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 of Akhmatova quoted in the libretto, which led in time 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, in my experience, Poem Without A Hero is far more astonishing, and I believe, far more incomparable.

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 ore less complete versions in English were available in 2001. As I searched for the most authoritative Russian text, I discovered a project in progress 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 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. T. A. Gorkova, unlike all previous editors, prints all four versions. This motivated me to retranslate it not only because of my growing fascination with it, but because I believe there are readers of English who will find the four texts of interest. My full translation and extensive glossing can be read by using the tab near the bottom at the left on the welcome page (Poem Without a Hero).

Furthermore, Akhmatova several times attempted to write a ballet libretto that utilizes the "plot situation" of Poem Without a Hero Part One. T. A. Gorkova 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, 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 little-known Russian poets.

For me, a note to an allussion 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 or that Akhmatova builds into Poem Without a Hero. Quite the contrary, such notes tend to mute or even silence those resonances.

Therefore, I made the outrageous and unprecedented, to my knowledge, choice to translate full poems for every allusion and reference I or other scholars have identified. Except for long poems by Pushkin like Eugene Onigen, I have tracked down and made full translations of almost all relevant poems or passages from long works such as plays and autobiographies.

This project appears in PDF format in this website as Poem Without A Hero By Anna Akhmatova Five Versions with annotations of the Poema, “Prose About the Poema: Pro Domo Mea,” “From the Ballet “The Fortieth Year”” and an anthology of related poems by Akhmatova and others in translations By Donald Mager (1999-2006).

What started as an opera collaboration seven years later led to an intense encounter between a poet-translator and a single poema reaching over 1500 pages.

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 experience the whole of the twentieth century. 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.

My entrenchment in Akhmatova's world 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 which I commence 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. Bring the manuscript to a close does not imply the conversation has ended.

This manuscript of original poems is currently under submission to a publisher; however, a section of this website describes it in more depth.

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.