[In the following review, Ketchian praises that The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova is an important resource for lovers of Russian poetry, but complains that further editions need better editing to correct mistakes in translation.]

Judith Hemschemeyer's handsome two-volume verse translation of Anna Akhmatova's poetry with parallel Russian texts and a substantial biographical introduction, "Masks and Mirrors" by Roberta Reeder, was a milestone in 1990 for English-speaking enthusiasts of Russian literature and for admirers of Akhmatova in particular. It drew on the texts and notes of Anna Akhmatova, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (1976) and also A. Akhmatova, Sochineniia (Vols. 1-2. 2nd ed., 1967–1968; vol. 3, 1983). Although the first edition was labeled as complete, it is only this new expanded edition that comes closer to being complete by adding some seventy new poems, mainly from the edition, Anna Akhmatova, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (1990). A fair number of decisions about texts, some arguable, have been influenced by this new imprint.

By omitting the Russian texts, this volume focuses on serving the English-speaking literary community. An indispensable link to the Russian poems is the "Index to Poems by Source"; the "Index of First Lines" includes titles of poems as well. Judith Hemschemeyer's preface is a reworked version of her previous preface, which begins with facts about Akhmatova, discusses the works and continues with the process of translating the present volume. Her careful explanation there of amphibrachs would lead a reader to believe that the book is geared toward high school students or persons with no preparation in poetry. The introduction by Anatolii Naiman is excellent as is the memoir by Sir Isaiah Berlin; the latter, however, veers the volume toward a miscellany; the chronology of Akhmatova's life from the first edition would have been more useful to the book's audience. The index of proper names has been modified to this edition without removing the telling words "covers both volumes." The brief bibliography has several extraneous listings, such as the out-of-print Life of Mayakovsky by Wiktor Worosylski but not the ground-breaking, out-of-print Anna Akhmatova by Sam Driver.

Over one hundred pages of pictures, some rare, and facsimiles of original title pages, some using Reeder's verbal biography as long captions, overwhelm the intended reader of the poetry but are of interest to scholars and Akhmatova specialists. In fact, no other imprint, even Anna Akhmatova, Stikhi, perepiska, vospominaniia, ikonografiia (1977), contains so many pictures, some of which run counter to Akhmatova's practice of controlled moderation—pictures only of trees, a trial of workers, a prison camp, Tashkent, the title page of Annenskii's Cypress Chest.

Hemschemeyer's verse translations of the poems, written in collaboration with a bevy of persons providing literal translations, generally keep close to the originals semantically and syntactically. There are a number of excellent renditions ("Rachel," "The visit at night," "Under an oaken slab in the churchyard") and felicitous choices of words ("tawny hand"; "benighted"; "Sweet-smelling April spills"). For anyone conversant with Russian, a major drawback is the general lack of "physical" correspondence between the poems, which the translator addresses in her preface. While the reader missing the aesthetic impact of Akhmatova's meticulously chosen, sophisticated rhymes attributes their absence to current English verse practice, the abrupt departure from Akhmatova's superb rhythm is unsettling. For example, where Akhmatova presents delicately crafted trochaic lines of seven syllables in the poem "V kazhdykh sutkakh est' takoi," the English version "In every twenty-four hours there is one" offers highly uneven lines ranging from three to eleven syllables.

Moreover, the verse translations are marred by a number of errors. In addressing a sampling of these semantic inaccuracies, I allow for poetic license and minor inaccuracies. Errors occur when the translator confuses the short form adjective, used only predicatively in modern Russian, with the long form. The failure to distinguish between homonymic oblique cases of words leads to several instances of rhythmically correct "raven" (and in one case the unambiguous genitive plural form "voronov") being mistaken for "crow." In "Veet veter lebedinyi" ("The wind of swans is blowing") "chary" is not "goblets," in "Molius' okonnomu luchu" ("I pray to the sunbeam from the window") "khramina" is not a "temple," in "Tot avgust, kak zheltoe plamia" ("That August was like a yellow flame") "smotr" is not a "vista," and in "Otvet" ("The Reply") "Strastnaia nedelia" is Passion Week as indicated by the stress. Finally, in "Novogodniaia ballada" ("New Year's ballad") the entire tenor of the poem changes if the host is not dead; in fact, the first tacit ban on Akhmatova's work may not have occurred in 1925 if this were the case. For this volume's readership "Piter" in "Zdravstvui, Piter! Plokho, staryi" ("Hello, Peter. It's bad, old boy") requires annotation as St. Petersburg. Regretfully, this expanded edition, with few exceptions, has made almost no effort to correct mistakes in translation. A careful editing of this useful publication will long render it a dependable staple for lovers of Russian poetry and for scholars with little or no Russian.