Graduate Program

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2006

Thesis Director

Rosemary Buck

Thesis Committee Member

Terri Fredrick

Thesis Committee Member

Christopher Hanlon

Abstract

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), a Russian post-Symbolist poet, published a variety of poems in the Russian language, which were later translated into English. Her works include the collections Evening (1912), Rosary (1914), White Flock (1917), Plantain (1921), Anno Domini (1922), From Six Books (1940), Seventh Book (1936- 1964), Poems (1958), Requiem (1963), and Poem Without a Hero (1940-1966). This work focuses on her early poetry collections Evening, Rosary, White Flock, and Anno Domini and analyzes the semantic relationship between color and concrete objects in order to discover how Akhmatova conveys the image, mood, and state of the persona's transforming self through color in her experience of domestic objects, objects in the natural environment, and concrete parts of the body within temporal and spatial contexts.

After the first introductory chapter, I will begin the second chapter by talking about how we understand color as a semantic category. I am going to concentrate on basic colors, such as white, yellow, red, green, blue, gray, and black, because their usage is predominant in Akhmatova's poetry. Continuing the discussion on color, I will use the etymology of selected color terms to demonstrate the intricate nature of color-naming in the English and Russian languages. Throughout the third chapter, I will explore the usage of basic colors mentioned above and other colors as the mediums conveying the essence of the persona in Akhmatova's early poetry at various temporal stages of past and present. The fourth chapter of my thesis will focus on a variety of different versions of the translated early poetry by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward, Richard McKane, D.M.Thomas, Judith Hemschemeyer, Jane Kenyon and Vera Sandomirsky Dunham. The examination of the translations will show what is taking place in the poems linguistically.

The study of Akhmatova's poetry and its translations anchored in the semantics of color, its etymology, and relation to various objects will help to reveal the stylistic devices the poet uses to show how the persona finds herself in the objects through concrete visual sensations and the exploration of things past, present, and future.

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