In Love and Revolution: Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova, translated by Stephen Capus
Poetry Book Society Translation Choice Spring 2025
Spanish held up for examination and

held up for examination and made to chime like struck glass

and settle into a velvet chaise longue to read

its collaged contents betray a figure profoundly disturbed by the vicissitudes of island life

Written as a daily sonnet throughout the first lockdown

But this is a doubtful sort of hope: hope for life on earth

In Love and Revolution: Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova, translated by Stephen Capus<br><b>Poetry Book Society Translation Choice Spring 2025</br> Spanish held up for examination andAnna Akhmatova was born near Odesa, Ukraine, in 1889, as Anna Gorenko. She adopted her pen name from the family of her mother. She attended school in Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg, and lived most of her life in that city with which so much of her poetry is intimately connected. She frequented the Tower, the famous literary salon of the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, and in 1910 she married fellow poet Nikolay Gumilev. The couple were divorced