They didn't bring me a letter today:
He forgot, or went on one of his trips;
Spring's the trill of silver laughing on the lips,
I see the boats in the harbor sway.
They didn't bring me a letter today . . .

This is the first stanza of a brief untitled Anna Akhmatova poem dated 1911. The translator of this version is Lyn Coffin, and I am currently waiting for two other translations to arrive: one by Jane Kenyon, the other by Judith Hemschemeyer.

I think what I love above all about Akhmatova's poems is the way in which so many of them live simultaneously in her terrible Stalinist present and in the timelessness of fairy tales. They are so extraordinary in their mythical geography and their medieval cadence, in the way in which the characters reflect both the speaking twentieth-century narrator and the ancient storytelling voices of poets such as Marie de France and Christine de Pisan. Here, for instance, is one of Christine's 14th-century lyrics:

It is a month today
Since my lover went away.
My heart remains gloomy and silent;
It is a month today.
"Farewell," he said, "I am leaving."
Since then he speaks to me no more.
It is a month today.

The two poets are not only telling the same tale but offering it to us in a similar mode: both speak directly of their loneliness, of being caught in a web of waiting, but both also accept that role. Their task is to long for their lover and to be patient. Whether or not the lover returns is immaterial to this narrative. The waiting is all.