Don Mager | Poem Without A Hero

My translations of Poem Without A Hero (PDF) are presented here in two forms. This posting is updated periodically, most recently December 15, 2007. After working on the multiple versions with cross-references and notes, in 2007 I decided to go back and try to render the poem with more attention to meter and rhyme. Rather than re-edit the earlier version, I offer this new work as a literary version. The literary version is available here for reading.

The manuscript of annotated or variorum of Poem Without a Hero (PDF) is also available for reading. This posting is updated periodically, most recently April 10, 2008. The full title is: 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 (1999-2008). 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.

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 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 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.