With Akhmatova at the Black Gates
About the Book
There are few precedents for what Stephen Berg has attempted and accomplished in these poems. Not really translations, nor even versions or imitations, Berg's poems are meditations on and through the person and poetry of Anna Akhmatova (1899–1966), one of Russia's greatest poets. Akhmatova, whose life began in the Victorian twilight and spanned the days of Revolution and the era of Stalinist persecution, interwove pagan fervor with Christian austerity in poems of passionate longing for the past and lost love. Irresistibly drawn into Akhmatova's orbit, Berg "believed that I was being released from myself by writing these poems when, in fact, I was merely discovering, hearing from a part of myself I did not remember, or know."About the Author
Stephen Berg was a professor at the University of the Arts and a founder of The American Poetry Review. His previous books of poetry include Here, The Daughters, Nothing in the Word, and Grief: Poems and Versions of Poems. He died in 2014.Also by this author
Reviews
Blurbs
"The only word for the Akhmatova poems is amazing. Berg has done a magnificent job of ‘method'--completely projecting himself into the other person. It is hard to believe his versions were done by a man."--Kenneth Rexroth
"I find some of these poems, though ultimately consoling, more than momentarily shattering in their power of human feeling and insight."--Hayden Carruth
"Let me say that I regard Berg as one of the really fine poets around these days, among the very best of a gifted generation. The Akhmatova poems are in a class by themselves. I'd guess these poems, just because of their freedom from translationese, because they are stunning poems in their own right, will have an impact, leave a considerable impression that few books of translated poetry could. They are such a unique combination, such an indwelling--or intercourse--of two spirits, two persons, two poets, that the resulting poems become a testament, an amazing new poetry born of the union! This is work of the kind that makes me shudder, that, as Yeats would say, makes one's hair stand on end at the transformations and re-creations it accomplishes."--Ralph Mills
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