Anna Akhmatova
Tsarskoye Selo

Tsarskoye Selo, “Czar’s Village,” is the Russian Versailles, fifteen miles south of Saint Petersburg, with two palaces set in eight hundred acres of park, extending the implausible three-dimensional paisley of its lawns and topiary, obelisques and follies admiring themselves in a man-made lake wide enough to sail on — groves and gardens populated by random classical statues, while, outside this perfect world — a no less perfect town, broad boulevards lined with great family mansions. —

A note from the translator.

1

Along these broad tree-shaded ways
they promenade horses with manes as long
and wavy, and carefully combed
as a lady’s hair. Magical,
impossible town
whose very existence seems a riddle.
Sad as I am, I must love you.

Here I longed for a man with all my soul,
panted, delirious, like a dying woman —
it now seems so unreal.

Somehow, I turned into a toy,
like everything else in Tasrskoye Selo’s
clockwork, music-box world —
a splendid pet, like my pink cockatoo.

I no longer feel that tension in my chest,
that anticipation of pain.
Don’t believe me? Look into my eyes.

If I seem glum, it’s because
I’ve never liked that last afternoon hour
before sunset, or the chilling wind
that blows in off the sea,
or the words “time to go.”

2

And here’s my marble counterpart, sprawled,
propped up on one elbow, leaning defeatedly
under an ancient maple:
a done-in Adonis.

This dying god hearkens
to the green, the muffled rustling
of leaves, possibly comforting
to a dying and reviving vegetation god —

but he’s given his full attention to the lake
which faithfully returns his perfect face.
Pale rainwater washes
the immortal gore of his marble-carven wound.

Wait, my cold, white other self,
I will, in my own way, also turn
into woeful stone
and feel as little as you.

3

Along these paths and through this park
wandered once a swarthy young man —
his great grandfather was a nobleman from Africa
captured by the Ottoman Turks who gave him
as a present to Peter the Great.

The young man was Pushkin, who thoroughly enjoyed
his un-Russian complexion
which made him visibly as well as inwardly
an exotic breed.

Along the shores of this lake he sadly
strolled, in Byronic melancholy.
A century later we’re still thrilled to think
he, even as we, walked here,

supposing we hear in the rustle of our footsteps
among these autumn leaves
a faint echo of his.

Beneath those pines, where the roots protrude
from the thick and prickly carpeting of needles,
perhaps it was there he set down
his tricornered hat,
and a dog-eared volume of his favorite poet.

Translated by Seraphina Powell