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White Night by Anna Akhmatova [trans. by Liz Rosenberg and Nadia Zarembo)
I did not lock the door
I didn’t light the candles
You don’t know how, tired as I was,
I didn’t dare go to sleep.
To watch the streaks of light dying
in the twilight dark of the pines
I am getting drunk on the sound
of a voice like yours in the hall.
And to know that everything is lost,
that life—is a cursed hell.
O, I was so certain
you would come back.
Translator's note: In early summer, Russia experiences nearly twenty-four hours of light a day, a time period called a "white night." "White night" is also an expression used to describe insomnia, a condition in which one doesn't sleep at all. With this poem, as it happens, both meanings are correct.
I did not lock the door
I didn’t light the candles
You don’t know how, tired as I was,
I didn’t dare go to sleep.
To watch the streaks of light dying
in the twilight dark of the pines
I am getting drunk on the sound
of a voice like yours in the hall.
And to know that everything is lost,
that life—is a cursed hell.
O, I was so certain
you would come back.
Translator's note: In early summer, Russia experiences nearly twenty-four hours of light a day, a time period called a "white night." "White night" is also an expression used to describe insomnia, a condition in which one doesn't sleep at all. With this poem, as it happens, both meanings are correct.
