Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation, July 29th 2015. I’m Curtis Fox. This week, For Love of Russia. Anna Akhmatova was one of the great if not the great Russian poet of the 20th century. Iris DeMent is a celebrated American singer and song writer. Anna Akhmatova was a Russian modernist, known for the classical restraint and emotional powerful of her poems. Iris DeMent has written and performed some of the most beautiful country and folk inflected songs of her generation. They seem like they would have nothing in common, these two, but they do. Iris DeMent’s latest album, The Trackless Woods, takes poems by Anna Akhmatova in translation and turns them into very American sounding songs.

Iris DeMent: (singing)

You led me into the trackless woods,

My falling stars, my dark endeavor.

Curtis Fox: Iris DeMent joins me now from a studio in Iowa City to talk about Anna Akhmatova and about her new album which will be released on August 7th. Iris, give us a thumbnail sketch of Anna Akhmatova. I know she had a difficult and tragic life like a lot of writers in the former Soviet Union, but give us a little thumbnail of her.

Iris DeMent: Everything I learned about Anna I learned after I set about half of these poems to music, so it was all very after the fact. I do know that she was born in 1889, she was born in Odessa and moved to I want to say St. Petersburg pretty earlier on in her life, and lived most of her life there. She lived just during that very tumultuous time in Russian history, through the revolution, through World War 1, World War 2, was trying to be a poet during the time that Stalin was running the country. She just had a tremendous amount of challenge and difficulty and obstacles in her way.

Curtis Fox: Including friends being killed, a husband being killed, a son being imprisoned more than once. That sort of stuff.

Iris DeMent: That’s right. A lot of her friends left the country. She stayed through the bitter end, and paid a great price for it but I think spiritually in terms of being true to herself she also reaped a great reward.

Curtis Fox: There’s one poem you said called “Not With Deserters”. It’s from 1923, this is just after the Russian Revolution but before Stalin came to power, where she plainly states that she’s not ever leaving Russia. I know you’re uncomfortable reading rather than singing the poem, but I was wondering if we could get you to read the poem just before we hear your song.

Iris DeMent: Yeah, I’ll do my best, knowing this isn’t my gift. It’s called “Not With Deserters”.

Not with deserters from the battle

That tears my land do I belong.

To their coarse praise I do not listen.

They shall not have from me one song.

Poor exile, you are like a prisoner

To me, or one upon the bed

Of sickness. Dark your road, O wanderer,

Of wormwood smacks your alien bread.

Here, into smoking fires that blacken

Our lives, the last of youth we throw,

Who in the years behind us never

Sought to evade a single blow.

We know that in the final reckoning

No hour will need apology;

No people in the world are prouder,

More tearless, simpler, than are we.

Curtis Fox: That poem was translated by the late Babette Deutsch. So now let’s hear what you did with this very very Russian poem.

(song playing)

Curtis Fox: That was Iris DeMent with harmony by Greg Brown and guitar by Leo Kottke from her new album. Iris, you had a lot of Anna Akhmatova poems to choose from. What drew you to this one in particular?

Iris DeMent: This whole project is so mysterious to me it’s hard to even answer that question. It’s just this weird thing that happened instantaneously upon the first reading of the very first poem of hers I ever read which was “Like a White Stone”. In that period of time, within an hour or so I’d set three or four of them to music, and “Not With Deserters” was one of them. It happened so instantly that anything I tell you is retrospective.

Curtis Fox: So within the first hour of reading her poetry, you’d already written four songs?

Iris DeMent: I hadn’t written them. The melody came to me just like that. The others weren’t like that, don’t get me wrong. But my spirit or whatever just met with her, with what she was saying instantly. I think looking back “Not With Deserts”, I guess I could say I relate to that devotion, that connection to place. I have a lot of that with the place I came from with my family, the south Delta. My country in the broader sense too. But there was a lot of place in my world, the family I came out of, and all tangled up in hymns and such. There’s a quality to her poems that are very hymn like to me.

Curtis Fox: When I hear this song and I read this poem, I think of Vladimir Nabokov, who did leave Russia, and who continued to write in Russian for very many years before beginning to write in English when he came to the United States, finally. But Anna Akhmatova took a different path. She stayed in the Soviet Union where she was an enemy of the people according to Stalin and persevered. This is kind of a prophecy of the difficulty of that life that she has chosen.

Iris DeMent: Yeah, this is kind of early on in the game for her when she’s making this statement, because things really dramatically deteriorate after this and through the rest of her life. Who knows if she would’ve written this song 30 years later. My guess is so. My sense of her is that she had a calling and a work to do, and it was to give voice to people who couldn’t speak for themselves. I’m sure you’re familiar with “Requiem” which is a poem I did not touch.

Curtis Fox: I was going to ask you about that. That’s her most famous poem, it was written during World War 2 at some of the most dire points in the war. Why didn’t you touch that one?

Iris DeMent: I had to tread lightly as it was. I’m not Russian and these are translations. It felt like that was so unique to the Russian people, but I did draw a couple of lines from that poem and there’s a song on the album called “The Souls of All My Dears” where I merged lines from several different poems, “Requiem” being one of them. I took a little creative liberty there. They’re all Anna’s words but they’re just lines and verses from different poems that I loved so much I couldn’t leave them behind, but I couldn’t work with the poem as a whole.

(song playing)

Curtis Fox: Now it comes up in your letter notes to the album that your daughter is Russian born. How does that connect with this project?

Iris DeMent: There’s no doubt I would not have done it were it not for my daughter and how she’s affected my world. She was almost six, and she has a lot of Russianness in her. She was a Russian speaker when we got her. Beyond that, just my curiosity about the world that made this little human that’s in my life now. As a result of that, a lot of people gave my husband and I Russian books and this that and the other which is where these poems were found. When I opened up the book to these poems, it was just like a door opened. A light just went off, and I went that’s the road I can travel into her world.

Curtis Fox: Let’s listen to another song from the album. This one’s based on a poem call “The Last Toast”. The song itself is called “Last Toast”. It’s dated 1934, which is after Stalin came to power and things were not looking good for Anna Akhmatova and her circle. This one is translated by Lyn Coffin.

(song playing)

Iris DeMent:

I drink to the house already destroyed;

To my whole life, too awful to tell;

To the loneliness we together enjoyed,

I drink to you as well;

To the eyes the deadly cold imbued,

The lips that betrayed me with lies;

To the world for being so cruel and rude,

And God, who didn’t save us or try.

Curtis Fox: Iris, that last line is just devastating. “To God who didn’t save us or try”. That black pessimism seems very Russian to me, but in the American sound of your song it’s really devastating, probably because we’ve come to expect uplift in American songs and this one just doesn’t give it to us.

Iris DeMent: I think that was one thing that drew me to her so much. Just so over entertained these days, there’s none of that. It was a relief to get away from that. I think it was also home to me in that regard, because I grew up on the pentecostal church with these old hymns that were … hope wasn’t just thrown out there in it’s fullness. It was like here’s how bad it is, here’s how bad it’s going to get, here’s a little glimmer of hope. That makes sense to me, that feels real, that feels like my day. I’ve felt that poem for a few minutes here and there, thanking God for not saving us or trying.

Curtis Fox: I think for some reason I was reading Stalin into it, when she says “To the eyes the deadly cold imbued, The lips that betrayed me with lies; To the world for being so cruel and rude, And God, who didn’t save us or try.” I have no idea if this is a correct reading but it seems like she’s talking about Stalin there.

Iris DeMent: Well she had a long list of people and experiences that that line could have been attributed to, that’s for sure.

Curtis Fox: Iris DeMent congratulations on this wonderful album, and thanks for coming on the podcast.

Iris DeMent: Thank you so much for having me!

Curtis Fox: The album is called The Trackless Woods. It’s being released on August 7th. If you want to hear her perform in person, check out her touring schedule on her website irisdement.com. You can find this podcast in iTunes or on SoundCloud where you can link to it on your Facebook or Twitter feed, or you can let us know directly what you think of this podcast. Email us at [email protected]. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off The Shelf, I’m Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.