Last year I wrote a "best of 2009" post for Arcade. This year I want to do something different. I want to share someone else's list. Part of it, anyway.
I've returned from Poland. It will take me a while to process the amazing things I've seen, from the Baltic to the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. For now, I thought I'd just rave a little bit more about Anna Akhmatova.
Here at the University of Washington, our over-long academic year is finally ending, and I am eager to be gone. Quick as I can, I'll be at a spa near Poznań in Poland, first stop on a East European vacation. I thought I'd post a poem about departures: Anna Akhmatova's "Pesnia poslednei vstrechi" (Song of the Last Meeting).
Kopna means stook or haycock. Skird means rick. I'm looking up words in my trusty Russian-English dictionary, and things remain clear as mud. Sometimes translation from one language to another is only a prelude to figuring out what a text says.
This week I'm far from the mountains, orcas, and raincoat-clad hipsters of the Pacific Northwest. To visit family, I've traveled to a Midwestern cornfield. I've brought along Ivan Turgenev's play Mesiats v derevne (A Month in the Country) (1850) to keep me company.