Tag Akhmatova

Not an old fool: an antithesis

Neal Ascherson gets a free pass from me for this: But icons are difficult to write about critically. How good a poet was she really? To me as a non-Russian, her contemporary Marina Tsvetaeva seems as a writer to be…

Black as a Toast

There’s one poem by Akhmatova that keeps getting translated into English over and over; it’s about drinking, of course. I’ve dug up a few links — English versions by Eric Gillan, William Minor, and Judith Hemschemeyer — the (sub)Standard Version…