Akhmatova wrote this particular piece in 1934, the same year that she watched one of her dearest friends be arrested and dragged to a concentration camp, the same year that she burned her verses and plays for fear of government reprisals. "The Last Toast" embodies the tumult of those days.
The composer Alexander Levkovich used this poem as inspiration for his work "There is No End to My Sorrow". A good recording of the piece can be found at the Canadian Music Centre's webpage.
[ Ссылка ]
The Last Toast
By Anna Akhmatova
I drink to our ruined house,
to the dolor of my life,
to our loneliness together;
and to you I raise my glass,
to lying lips that have betrayed us,
to dead-cold, pitiless eyes,
and to the hard realities:
that the world is brutal and coarse,
that God in fact has not saved us.
Anna Akhmatova 1934, Translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward
Kunitz and Hayward are some of my favorite translators of Akhmatova. If you are interested in reading more of the work, I encourage you to take a look at there masterpiece, "Poems of Akhmatova: Izbrannye Stikhi".
