ABSTRACT
A nna Andreevna Akhmatova (born Anna An-dreevna Gorenko) was one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Her legacy consists primarily of seven collections of poetry, and also some memoirs, literary criticism, and several collections of poetic translations. Thoroughly familiar with world literature, she considered her poetry to be a continuous dialogue with her great predecessors, such as Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Byron and Pushkin. For ideological reasons, her highly intellectual poetry was considered incompatible with the Soviet regime, and she was labelled as ‘an internal émigrée’ by official Marxist critics. In periods when she could not publish her own works, she supplemented her earnings as a translator of poetry. In this capacity, she often relied on interlinear translations, a wide-spread practice in the Soviet period, as in her Korean Classical Poetry [Koreiskaia klassicheskaia poeziia, 1956, 1958], or in Ancient Egyptian Lyrics [Lirika drevnego Egipta, 1965]. Several collections of her poetic translations were published posthumously: Giacomo Leopardi. Lyrical Poetry [Leopardi, Dzhakomo. Lirika], with Anatolii Naiman (1967), Classical Poetry of the East [Klassicheskaia poeziia vostoka, 1969], and From Armenian Poetry [Iz armianskoi poezii, 1976]. As in her original work, poetic clarity, precise detail, compressed style and a classical conservative approach to metre and rhyming are distinctive elements of her style in poetic translations. Akhmatova’s poetry has been extensively translated into many languages, and she is one of the few Russian poets whose complete works have been translated into English. Her international recognition was reaffirmed by the Taormina Prize for Poetry in Italy (1964). She became the first Russian writer to be awarded the Honorary Doctor of Letters by Oxford University (1965).
