100 Poems to Break Your Heart Read online

  In the title of this poem Akhmatova uses the initials, rather than the full name, of the deceased. This is the first clue that the poet is writing under precarious political conditions that require extreme secrecy and discretion. Bulgakov had personally been blacklisted by Stalin. Most of his work was banned during his lifetime, very few of his plays were permitted to be performed, and he was prevented from leaving the country when he desperately desired to emigrate. Given his outcast status when he died, it was probably too dangerous to refer to him by his full name. Akhmatova instead addresses Mikhail Bulgakov directly, in the present tense, reinforcing a sense of a private communication between two intimates.

  The poem’s first lines, “Here is my gift, not roses on your grave, / not sticks of burning incense,” also allude to the public erasure of figures thought to be political dissidents. For fear of reprisals the speaker doesn’t dare observe traditional rituals of public mourning; instead, she must write a poem in private as her funereal offering. Just a title and two lines have already hinted at ways in which a tyrannical government silences its opponents. Silence and speech, private and public expression, will become one of the main themes of the poem.

  As Joanna Trzeciak points out, this poem in Russian consists of a single stanza in what Russian scholars call “undivided quatrains.” This means that each four-line unit acts as if it were a stand-alone quatrain. Akhmatova established an elaborate formal system, impossible to replicate in translation, involving a regular abab rhyme scheme with alternating masculine and feminine rhymes, as well as a pattern of metrical symmetry, switching between iambic pentameter and iambic hexameter.

  Osip Mandelstam once observed that the roots of Akhmatova’s art lie in the nineteenth-century novel, in Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, and that her poetic form “was developed with a glance at psychological prose.” In the first stanza the poet brings a prose writer’s eye to her characterization of Bulgakov. She paints a portrait of a writer who, as much as he wanted to see his work published and performed, refused to become a mouthpiece for the government; rather, he bravely, stubbornly maintained his “magnificent disdain.” Though he kept up a cosmopolitan persona, drinking wine and telling “the wittiest jokes,” privately he “suffocated inside stifling walls.” Here Akhmatova literalizes as “stifling walls” the oppressive political forces that prevented him from traveling outside the country to live in artistic and political freedom.

  Akhmatova also effectively characterizes the isolation Bulgakov must have felt for much of his life, given both his blacklisting by Stalin and his ongoing poor health. He suffered from serious injuries sustained on the front as a Red Cross doctor in World War I, from a near-fatal bout with typhus, and from an inherited kidney disorder. Emphasizing his dignity, his aloofness, and his private, solitary suffering, the speaker ends the stanza with the end of Bulgakov’s life: “Alone you let the terrible stranger in, / and stayed with her alone.” Reversing the usual idea of death as an active force, hunting people down and taking them away, she describes Bulgakov as an active participant in his own end, as he lets in death, “the terrible stranger,” and stays with her, as if he’s faced death stoically, with great poise.

  The second stanza begins with a powerful depiction of a double silence: “Now you’re gone, and nobody says a word / about your troubled and exalted life.” Here the speaker refers to both the silence of the deceased and the silence of his would-be mourners, who can’t publicly grieve a person who’s been deemed a “non-person.” Then there is the silence of the “dumb funeral feast,” which the speaker must counter with her “voice, like a flute.” Trzeciak points out that the diction and language Akhmatova uses to begin the second stanza are strongly reminiscent of early nineteenth-century elegies from the Russian Golden Age. Even though the poet will mourn Bulgakov, the flute’s piercing notes can sound only in the poem, in silence rather than performed in public, like the “gift” from the first stanza. The flute is also a reference to the elegiac tradition in poetry: ancient Greek elegies were chanted aloud and traditionally accompanied by a flute, the instrument of grief.

  The speaker’s sorrow expands from mourning the friend she has lost to mourning the life she has lost. Writing about Eugenio Montale, Joseph Brodsky observed that “death as a theme always produces a self-portrait.” That becomes apparent here. Like Bulgakov, Akhmatova suffered from a ban on her work. Her ex-husband was prosecuted and shot; her son was arrested and imprisoned; many of her friends were killed, including Mandelstam, her greatest ally, who had been deported and died in a Siberian labor camp. She lived in poverty, trying to get her son released. No wonder Akhmatova’s speaker describes herself as “half-crazed” and “smoldering on a slow fire,” which parallels Bulgakov’s “suffocating inside stifling walls.” Given that she is “sick with grief for the buried past”—another devastating sort of silence exercised by tyrannical governments is erasure of the past—and “having lost everything and forgotten all,” she is astonished that it has fallen to her to remember “a man / so full of strength and will and bright inventions.” The poem closes with an indelible snapshot of the deceased writer, “who only yesterday, it seems, chatted with me, / hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.” Even as he is speaking to his friend, Bulgakov is hiding his suffering, which summarizes in microcosm life during the Stalinist era.

  Bulgakov diligently worked on The Master and Margarita until the month before his death, but the book wasn’t published until 1967, in Paris. Similarly, although Akhmatova penned her elegy in 1940 from her house in Leningrad, it wasn’t published until 1966. And yet, as Bulgakov puts it in one of the most memorable lines from his brilliant satire, “manuscripts don’t burn.” “In Memory of M. B.” is a poem of memorialization and self-preservation. Here Akhmatova quietly but defiantly speaks on behalf both of Bulgakov and herself. She speaks against the many silences imposed by an autocratic regime, but especially against death, the ultimate silence.

  Miklós Radnóti

  * * *

  “The Fifth Eclogue”

  (1943)

  Miklós Radnóti’s poems have a doleful intimacy and intensity. This Hungarian poet of the first half of the twentieth century clung with a desperate serenity to the classical values of the Western poetic tradition at a time when those values had been undermined by the horrors of two world wars. Like his Russian contemporary Osip Mandelstam, Radnóti wrote with a deeply felt subjectivity about thoroughly modern concerns, and his poems were filled with a growing sense of uncertainty and dread. However, both poets tried to impose a sense of personal control over the era’s horrific and uncontrollable social calamities by their insistence on the aesthetic and moral ideals of antiquity, such as the clarity of poetic form, the virtues of reason, and the philosophical rectitude of Stoicism.

  The eclogue is a short dialogue or soliloquy with a formal poetic structure. The term originated with Virgil’s Eclogues (originally titled Bucolics), which dates from the mid-30s BCE, though an underlying theme of many eclogues—an urban poet turning to the countryside for sustenance—was first established by Theocritus in the Idylls (third century BCE). In 1938, Radnóti translated Virgil’s ninth eclogue, an experience that instigated his own dark pastorals. Radnóti’s eight eclogues comprise a discontinuous series that he wrote in the late 1930s and early 40s. The sixth eclogue is missing, though many scholars now identify the poem “Fragment” (“Töredék”) as the sixth.

  Radnóti’s eclogues are written in hexameters, the classical six-foot metrical line that is well-suited to Hungarian if somewhat long for English, in which the five-foot pentameter line serves as a baseline. Radnóti calls on the shepherd muse to assist him in trying to preserve the values of civilization against the barbarities of war. “Pastoral Muse, O help me!” he exclaims in “The Third Eclogue,” “this age must murder its poets.” These poems sing to overcome terror, invoking the splendors of memory, the landscape of childhood, and the necessity of love when “reason falls apart.”

  Here
is the bluntest and most startling poem in the sequence:

  The Fifth Eclogue

  FRAGMENT

  To the memory of György Bálint

  Dear friend, you don’t know how cold this poem made me quake,

  how afraid I was of words. Even today I tried to escape them.

  I wrote half-lines.

  I tried to write about other things,

  but it was no use. This terrible, hidden night calls me:

  “Talk about him.”

  Fear wakes me, but the voice

  is silent, like the dead out there in the Ukrainian fields.

  You’re missing.

  And even autumn doesn’t bring news.

  In the forest

  the promise of another furious winter whistles today. In the sky,

  clouds heavy with snow fly past and halt.

  Who knows if you’re alive?

  Even I don’t know today. I don’t shout

  angrily if they wave their hands painfully and cover their faces

  and don’t know anything.

  But are you alive, wounded?

  Do you walk among dead leaves, circled by the thick smell of forest mud,

  or are you a smell too?

  Snow drifts over the fields.

  He’s missing—the news hits.

  And inside, my heart pounds, freezes.

  Between two of my ribs, a bad, ripping pain starts up,

  quivers, and in my memories, words you spoke a long time ago

  come back sharply and I feel your body’s as real

  as the dead’s—

  And I still can’t write about you today!

  November 21, 1943

  (Translated by Steven Polgar, Stephen Berg, and S. J. Marks)

  In the spring of 1943, Radnóti was serving a ten-month stint of forced labor. When he heard that a close friend, the essayist and critic György Bálint, had been dispatched as a labor serviceman to Ukraine, he got the idea for “The Fifth Eclogue” (“Őtödik ecloga”). After returning home in November, with the grim news of his friend’s plight on his mind, Radnóti wrote and dated the poem, which he dedicated to the memory of Bálint. Radnóti’s fifth eclogue seems composed in a state of confusion, uncertain as to whether his friend is dead or alive. But the dedication suggests a darker truth, which he unconsciously knows but cannot accept: his friend has already died. Later, he learned that Balínt had in fact perished in a field hospital in Ukraine.

  Radnóti formally modernizes the classical eclogue by marking it as a fragment, which suggests something broken off or detached from the whole, something imperfect or incomplete. The Romantic poets treated the fragment as a radiant moment freed from temporality, but the modernists reinvented it as an acutely self-conscious mode of writing that breaks the flow of time, leaving gaps and tears. It is a form of disruption. Radnóti designates his pastoral a “fragment” because his knowledge of its subject’s fate is incomplete. He dreads the closed circle, the completeness, of an elegy.

  Radnóti dedicates the poem to the memory of his friend and then addresses Bálint in the present tense, as if conversing with him, a move reminiscent of Akhmatova’s in “In Memory of M. B.” In Hungarian the poem begins with some hard percussives, a persistent knocking of d and r sounds: “Drága barátom, hogy didergtem e vers hidegétol.” They mimic the poet’s quaking—from the cold and from his fear of words. With its clipped sentences and dropped lines, the poem visually reflects the difficulty of writing a poem one fears writing, which is why it keeps breaking off and interrupting itself—“I wrote half-lines. / I tried to write about other things, / but it was no use.”

  As in many of the poems in this anthology, including Thomas Hardy’s “The Voice” and Edward Thomas’s “The Owl,” a nonhuman natural element, the night, cries out to the poet, saying, “Talk about him.” The line then drops to “Fear wakes me,” as if the speaker has been in a sort of dream state. Now that he’s awake, the voice of the “terrible, hidden night . . . is silent, like the dead out there in the Ukrainian fields.” This reference to the dead brings his friend’s plight back to mind in the following line: “You’re missing.” After this, the line drops again, as if the shock of this statement sends the poet’s pen jolting downward. Notice that the poem repeats this pattern to the end; the line drops whenever Radnóti forces himself to write something he finds hard to accept.

  In addition to his fragmenting of the classical eclogue form, Radnóti also updates it by giving nature a radically different role. His agonized version might be considered a sort of anti-eclogue. Whereas nature in the eclogue usually served as a place of escape, a peaceful idyll harkening back to a more innocent, Eden-like past, a simple refuge from the bustle and confusion of the city, in this eclogue the natural world offers no escape from the horrors of the so-called civilized world. The speaker characterizes the night as “terrible, hidden,” “the Ukrainian fields” as full of corpses, the winter as “furious.” Autumn brings no news of his friend, and clouds “halt” like soldiers and “wave their hands painfully and cover their faces / and don’t know anything.” Throughout the poem elements of the natural world offer none of the usual consolations and only reinforce the sense of dread.

  Questioning his friend directly as to his circumstances, the speaker asks if he is “alive, wounded? / Do you walk among dead leaves, circled by the thick smell of forest mud . . .” Then, at a devastating line break, he wonders, “or are you a smell too?” After this awful question the line again drops, to “Snow drifts over the fields.” In another context drifting snow could be a peaceful image. However, as the speaker contemplates the decomposition of his friend’s body, this snow seems to cover over and annihilate everything. In the next line, the earlier sentence “You’re missing” turns into “He’s missing—the news hits.” It’s as if, after the dropped line combining the smell of decomposition with the obliterating snow, he must tell himself the news again and let it sink in, as if for the first time. After his heart “pounds, freezes,” recalling the first line’s “cold” and “quake,” he feels “a bad, ripping pain” between his ribs. The memory of his friend’s voice, the very words he spoke, come back to him. Where the speaker states, “I feel your body’s as real / as the dead’s—” the line breaks hard after the dash, like a lash of pain. Now he can no longer avoid knowing what he has suspected all along. But it’s too much to bear, and in the final dropped line the speaker must fragment this elegy, which he can’t seem to complete: “And I still can’t write about you today!”

  Radnóti finished his seventh and eighth eclogues after he had been drafted for hard labor and assigned to work in a copper mine in Bor, Yugoslavia. He was taken from the mine and driven westward across Hungary in a forced march, and there, near the town of Abda sometime between November 6 and November 10, 1944, along with a group of twenty-one other prisoners, he was killed and tossed into a mass grave by members of the Hungarian armed forces. He was thirty-five years old. After the war, Radnóti’s wife had his body exhumed, and his last poems were found in his field jacket, written in pencil in a small Serbian exercise book that is now known as “The Bor Notebook.” These poems have literally risen from the grave to give Radnóti’s final testimony.

  Czesław Miłosz

  * * *

  “Café”

  (1944)

  What occurred in Poland was an encounter of a European poet with the hell of the twentieth century, not hell’s first circle, but a much deeper one,” Czesław Miłosz declared in his 1983 collection of lectures, The Witness of Poetry. “This situation is something of a laboratory, in other words: it allows us to examine what happens to modern poetry in certain historical conditions.” What Miłosz meant by “historical conditions” was the complete disintegration of European culture—“the sudden crumbling of all current notions and criteria”—between 1939 and 1945. Polish poets felt the need to respond in a radical way to the disgrace of Europe—how it was sinking into inhumanity, how it was complicit in genoc
ide—by trying to remake poetry from the ground up. It was starting over again after what seemed like the end of the world.

  The poet in Poland experienced history on his pulse, Miłosz argued, and by writing his own experiences he was also writing the experiences of others, speaking the unspeakable. “What can poetry be in the twentieth century?” he wondered. “It seems to me there is a search for the line beyond which only a zone of silence exists, and that on the borderline we encounter Polish poetry. In it a peculiar fusion of the individual and the historical took place, which means the events burdening a whole community are perceived by a poet as touching him in a most personal manner. Then poetry is no longer alienated.” Part of Miłosz’s lifelong project was to write as if poetry “is no longer a foreigner in society.” He had made a poetic model out of shared trauma.

  Many of Miłosz’s friends and fellow poets died during the Nazi occupation, especially during the Warsaw Uprising, an extensive though ultimately unsuccessful attempt waged by the Polish underground resistance to liberate Warsaw from the Germans in the summer of 1944. All his early war and postwar poems are haunted by survivor’s guilt. Here is his poem “Café”:

  Café

  Of those at the table in the café

  where on winter noons a garden of frost glittered on windowpanes

  I alone survived.

  I could go in there if I wanted to

  and drumming my fingers in a chilly void

  convoke shadows.

  * * *