Shared Rooms: Poems by Anna Akhmatova with Translations by Natalie Staples and Imitations by Rosemary Dobson and David Campbell. Letterpress and monoprints on Zerkal Wove paper, housed in screenprinted acetate envelopes, contained in a bookcloth-covered box with a perspex drawer (boxed) or a printed card slipcase (softbound ). English text handset in Perpetua and Times; Russian text set in Latinski and printed by letterpress using photopolymer plates.

2 edns: 5 boxed, 6 softbound. Canberra: PM&D and EABS, National Institute of the Arts, 2002.
Still available, price on application.

This was my Honours project for the completion of my Visual Arts degree. See below for more information.

Around the year 2000, I came across a pile of drafts of these poems in the bottom drawer of a cupboard at Rosemary Dobson's house. Immediately I saw their potential for an artist's book.

Rosemary Dobson (1920- ) and David Campbell (1915-79), both celebrated Australian poets, would for many years meet with Natalie Staples (1933- ), a scholar of Russian literature then working at the Australian National University. Natalie, knowing their tastes in poetry, provided excellent literal translations of poems by Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) and her colleague Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), as well as by other lesser-known Russian poets. Rosemary and David would discuss them, then take them away and write their own versions, coming back for the next session to discuss what they had produced and start the process again with another poem.

These shared poems were twice given an opportunity to emerge publicly: Moscow Trefoil (Canberra: ANU Press, 1975), and Seven Russian Poets (St Lucia: UQP, 1979), now both out of print. In the former, Natalie's versions were joined by both or either versions by Rosemary and David; in the latter, only one version was printed, without the literal translations. There has never been a book with all four states: the original Russian, the literal translation, and both 'imitations'. Using letterpress, I was only able to reproduce four poems in the time available; in the National Library of Australia, where the papers are now housed, I have found over 150 poems shared by this group of writers.

Anna Akhmatova is regarded as Russia's greatest female poet. She was extremely popular before the Russian Revolution, and suffered great tribulations as a consequence of her fame after the Revolution. She and Mandelstam were persecuted by Stalin, banned from writing and treated as enemies of the State. Mandelstam was exiled to a labour camp, where he died; Akmativa was followed, spied upon, and her family jailed and harassed. Her life was lived in shared rooms, and her poetry written in secret expect for two periods: 1923-40 and 1946-56, when for various reasons she found herself in tenuous favour. Like Mandelstam, whose poetry survives because his wife stashed it and his friends memorised it, Akhmatova's poetry is famous because it has been shared by people who appreciate it, and by translation. Each poem is a room in which many minds have sat and discussed the world and its nuances; just like the rooms in which David, Rosemary and Natalie shared their interpretations.

I wanted a layout that allowed the poems to be read in any order, mixed and matched, allowed to flow between or away from interpretations. They are presented like letters in a drawer, collated in envelopes (themselves overprinted with original manuscript reproductions) and able to be arranged within the drawer spaces to be read and reread in myriad combinations.

A note on my choice of poems: three of the four poems are most of a series called Northern Elegies (also sometimes called the Leningrad Elegies). 'Three Autumns', the poem I have placed first, is not part of this series. I decided to include it as an introduction because the first of the Northern Elegies is less universal in theme than the other three: it is heavily rooted in Russian culture and geography and requires more knowledge of Akhmatova's context. 'Three Autumns' was written around the same time as Northern Elegies II, segues nicely into NE II's first line, and shares similar themes to the other poems, so I have substituted it as the first of the four poems.