Tomas Venclova - Anna Akhmatova (32/88)

To listen to more of Tomas Venclova’s stories, go to the playlist: Born in 1937, Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian scholar, poet, author and translator. He lectured at University of California, Berkeley, where he became friends with the poets Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky. He is currently a full professor at Yale University. [Listener: Andrzej Wolski; date recorded: 2011] TRANSCRIPT: I told you last time that I visited Boris Pasternak the one time in my life and for only half an hour. He died not long after that and I had to attend his funeral. That was in Moscow, and in St Petersburg I got to know [Anna] Akhmatova – at the time, following Pasternak’s death, the best known female Russian poet. She was no longer a young woman, she was about 70 years old. I managed to translate some of her poems. And together with Judita Vaičiūnaitė, my good friend from university who, alas, is no longer alive, we published a small book of Akhmatova’s work translated into Lithuanian. Well, I took that book to St Petersburg to present it to her and received an invitation to her home. I went there and Akhmatova then asked me, ‘Read some of those translations. I, of course, don’t know Lithuanian but perhaps at least I’ll be able to understand something from the sounds’. And I knew that Akhmatova... that hundreds of young men and women visited Akhmatova carrying their own poems. The majority of them were graphomaniacs – completely untalented poets. But she used to find a good word to say to everyone. But there were times, of course, when she would say, ‘You rhyme well’, or, ‘There are interesting metaphors in your verse’, and that meant that your verse is good for nothing. If she liked the verse, as she did, for example [Joseph] Brodsky’s verse, then she would say, ‘There is something mysterious in these lines’.