Translations of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva | Paul Schmidt

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Why is this age worse than all the others? Perhaps
in this: it has touched the point of putrefaction,
Touched it in a rush of pain and sorrow,
But cannot make it whole.

In the west the familiar light still shines
And the spires of cities glow in the sun.
But here a dark figure is marking the houses
and calling the ravens, and the ravens come.

—Anna Akhmatova, 1919

Every poem is a love-child,
A penniless first-born
Bastard, set by the roadside
To beg from the winds.

Heart’s poison, heart’s adoration,
Heart’s paradise, heart’s grief.
His father may have been an emperor—
May have been a thief.

—Marina Tsvetaeva, August 14, 1918

I’d like to live with you
in some small town,
in never-ending twilight
and the endless sound of bells.

And in the little town’s hotel
the thin chime of an antique clock,
like little drops of time.
And sometimes, evenings, from some attic room,
a flute,
a flute player by a window.
And huge tulips at the windows.
And if you didn’t love me, I wouldn’t even mind…

In the middle of a room, a great tile stove,
and a picture on every tile:
a heart, a sailboat, a rose.
And out beyond our only window
snow, snow, snow.

You’d lie around the way I like you: lazy,
indifferent, unconcerned.
Once or twice the harsh crack
of a match.
Your cigarette flares and then burns down,
and trembling, trembling at its tip
a short gray stump—the ash
you’re too lazy to shake away—
and the cigarette flies into the fire.

—Marina Tsvetaeva, December 10, 1916

Paul Schmidt

Paul Schmidt (1934-1999), translator, poet, actor, librettist, playwright, and essayist, was born in Brooklyn, the oldest of seven children. He received a degree from Colgate University in Russian studies in 1955 and, after a year of graduate work at Harvard, he moved to Paris, where he studied mime with Marcel Marceau and acting with Jacques Charon of the Comédie Française. Drafted in 1958, he served in the US Army Intelligence and on his release resumed his Russian studies; his doctoral thesis on "the stylized theater of V.E. Mejerxol'd" was published as Meyerhold at Work. For eleven years, Schmidt was a professor of Slavic languages at the University of Texas at Austin, where he won the Bromberg Award for Teaching Excellence. His Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works was published in 1975, and translations of Russian poets, notably Marina Tsvetaeva, followed. A commission from the Dia Foundation supported his translations of Velimir Khlebnikov (four volumes published between 1985 and 1997), allowing him to leave academia and move to New York City. Working with the Yale Repertory Theatre, the American Repertory Theatre, the Guthrie, and other companies, he translated Euripides, Chekhov, Brecht, Genet, Gogol, Marivaux, and Mayakovsky, and wrote three plays of his own, winning the Helen Hayes and Kesselring awards for best play for Black Sea Follies. Providing text and often performing, he collaborated with the Wooster Group and with the avant-garde directors Robert Wilson, JoAnne Akalaitis, David Schweitzer, and Peter Sellars. He also acted in film and television, and in the 1970s devised "The Lost Art of Melodeclamation," a program of nineteenth-century works for voice and orchestra, which he toured and performed with the pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, who transposed the works for keyboard. The Plays of Anton Chekhov, Schmidt's translation of twelve of Chekhov's plays, was published in 1997. From 1993 until the end of his life, he taught translation and dramaturgy at the Yale School of Drama.

This Issue

December 21, 2006