On Context

Been picking away since December at a volume of Anna Akhmatova's poetry in translation (this new blog takes its name from the publisher of just this volume) and had, this morning, a thought about context and poetry -- I think specifically poetry, though I haven't sorted the matter through entirely -- my intention for this space is that it be used for the sorting-through of thoughts on books I'm reading. This space is doomed, on the evidence of all my previous Blogspot beginnings. And yet!

For a long time the New Critics held sway -- I don't think they've ever entirely gone away, nor do I really think they should be relegated completely; "what, without its context, is this?" remains a good question to ask, sometimes. (I'd even make a case, if this were a music page instead of a book one, that the New Critics retain their strongest hold on discourse in music crit, where subjective critique without reference to theory is certainly the dominant mode as far as the musical end of things is concerned; I find this, as one can probably infer from my tone, a lamentable state of affairs.) But in recent years, the habit of asking good questions about texts has become more widespread: who is this book for? what is the author's standing to speak the questions their text addresses? what's in this text that excludes other things from being in this text?

I like all these questions and think they tend to enrich things for both the reader and the read, and for the writers who follow in the wake of the questioning. Anna Akhmatova's poems spring from and exist within a context so rich that any attempt to extricate them from it -- to read them "as they are" -- feels foolhardy at best; you have to know who she was, you have to know how others thought and think of her, you have to know about her life to understand her poems. 

On Poetry

to Vladimir Narbut

It is the husks of sleepless nights, 

it is the congealed wax of crooked candles, 

it is the first morning chime

of a hundred white bells...

It is the warm windowsill

under the Ukrainian moon, 

it is bees, it is clover,

it is dust and gloom and intense heat.

[Moscow, April 1940)

The date is an annotated added by the translator. Is a middle way, where context works like stage lights, flipping them on or off as the scene requires, worth hunting out? At first I think so -- I know, for example, from history, what the state of play was in Moscow in 1940, more or less, when I read this poem. I don't really know what a white bell is, but it's an image. I don't know why the moon is Ukrainian, but the phrase feels allusive, speaking to poetry's power to invoke place. But until I know that the poet Vladimir Narbut,  when young, was arrested by the anti-Communist White Guards and later liberated by the Red Guard, and until I know that he was again arrested on October 26, 1936, this time and was thereafter sentenced to five years in the gulag, where he probably died in 1938, I can't really understand this poem in any meaningful way; and, even then, until I consider who Akhmatova is, and what her relationship may have been to her fellow poet, missing for two years when she writes these eight lines for him, I can only say what the images mean in the context of my own life, which is a useless sort of response. Indeed, we only scratch at the context of this poem when we give spare details about Vladimir Narbut; the dedication situates the poem in a context which we could spend considerable time apprehending. The poem resonates in the absence of these details because Akhmatova is a poet. The poem attains stature when we understand that Narbut was a Bolshevik poet accused nineteen years after the revolution of belonging to a Ukrainian nationalist group, and that these details help us understand Akhmatova's writing, too, whose biographical details come to use through many layers of loss and erasure.