The Greatest Woman Poet Since Sappho : THE COMPLETE POEMS OF ANNA AKHMATOVA Two Volumes <i> translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited and with an introduction by Roberta Reeder (Zephyr Press: $85; 1,530 pp., illustrated) </i>

The ship dwindles to the horizon and disappears; it is the watcher on the shore whose heart is shrunk by absence. The sailor, for better or worse, is where he is, life-size.

The night of Stalin’s repression has been told in all kinds of ways, most famously by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s books about the prison camps and their inmates. But in the literature of Soviet suffering there may be no pages more powerful than the cycle of poems by Anna Akhmatova entitled “Requiem.”

Nothing inside the prison walls so fiercely expresses deprivation and injustice--with such a large intensity that it stands for an entire order of human loss--as her chronicle of the women who stood, year after year, outside those walls. After the death of both hope and despair, they waited for word of the fate of those within, and for the chance to hand a knitted cap through, or a pair of shoes. Like the mothers of Argentina’s Plaza de Mayo, years later, who turned the “disappeared” into a visible presence, the Russian women, by standing outside the city’s jails, jailed the entire city:

“That was when the ones who smiled

Were the dead, glad to be at rest . . .

And like a useless appendage, Leningrad

Swung from its prisons.”

It is quite reasonable to think of Akhmatova, who died in 1966 at age 76, as the greatest woman poet in the Western World since Sappho. In a monumental endeavor, seemingly poised upon the frailest of underpinnings, the tiny Zephyr Press of Somerville, Mass., has brought out the first complete collection of her poems published anywhere in the world.

With original Russian versions and a supple translation that all but turns the facing pages warm to the touch, the two-volume edition, more than 1,500 pages in length, includes more than 700 poems--some previously unprinted--copious notes, several introductions, prefaces and memoirs, and about 75 photographs and drawings.

Among the introductory materials are recollections by the poet Anatoly Naiman, one of Akhmatova’s proteges, and Sir Isaiah Berlin, whose visit to Akhmatova in 1945 stirred up a mix of platonic and prophetic passions. Her poems reflecting the visit are firestorms:

“For a while you were my Aeneas--

It was then I escaped by fire.

We know how to keep quiet about one another.

And you forgot my cursed house.

You forgot those hands stretched out to you

In horror and torment, through flame,

And the report of blasted dreams . . .”

Sir Isaiah’s memoir, in almost comic contrast, is a mixture of awe and reticence.

Roberta Reeder, who edited the collection and the notes, contributes a monograph placing the poems in their historical and biographical context. Judith Hemschemeyer, the translator, provides additional commentary. Among her perceptive remarks is the point that Akhmatova’s poetry, unlike that of many of her contemporaries, nearly always addresses a second person, explicitly or implicitly. The reader receives this burning gaze face to face.

Hemschemeyer’s translations are not simply a work but a pilgrimage. A poet, she read a few of Akhmatova’s poems in translation about 25 years ago. She then learned Russian so that, with the help of word-by-word literal versions, she could translate them all. “I became convinced that Akhmatova’s poems should be translated in their entirety and by a woman, and that I was that person,” she writes.

Akhmatova’s imperial largeness of spirit is catching, clearly. So is a portion of her art. Hemschemeyer chose a very direct rendering, stressing clarity, intimacy and an unforced syntax over any effort to pursue the original’s rhymes and sonorities. But she uses assonance and slant rhyme, and her seeming plain style is governed by a lyrical ear. In truth, her translations are not so much plain as transparent. If I did not know English, I would learn it to read them.

Akhmatova’s life and her poetry were brutally cut in two by history. Born to a well-to-do family, living a privileged childhood, she became a glittering figure in the Bohemian literary world of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg. She was a member of the Acmeist circle of poets--Osip Mandelstam, her lifelong brother in poetry and suffering, was another--and her first husband was a poet.

She was a flaming creature. Taking into account her bipolar candle-burning, and the long purgatory she underwent later on, one thinks of Edna St. Vincent Millay turned into Mother Courage. Except that the poetry of her youth, hugely successful, was also incomparably better. She wrote of childhood, of the countryside, of the city, and of all varieties of love from girlish to adult and adulterous.

She had a blinding sense of place and time. She fused the richness of things and passions with a premonition--and later, the memory--of their transience. Thus, an early poem evokes her sumptuous childhood garden together with a stone bust, toppled beside the water:

“He has given his face to the waters of the lake/And he’s listening to the green rustling./And bright rainwater washes/His clotted wound . . ./Cold one, white one, wait,/I’ll become marble too.”

There is the young girl considering her new-found sexuality:

“In my room lives a beautiful/Slow black snake;/It is like me, just as lazy,/Just as cold . . .”

The quick desolation of an early marriage:

“The heart’s memory of the sun grows faint./The grass is yellower./A few early snowflakes blow in the wind,/Barely, barely . . ./The willow spreads its transparent fan/Against the empty sky./Perhaps I should not have become/Your wife . . .”

The excitement and insomnia of an affair:

“Both sides of the pillow/Are already hot./Now even the second candle/Is going out, and the cry of the crows/Gets louder and louder./I haven’t slept all night/And now it’s too late to think of sleep .../How unendurably white/Is the blind on the white window./Hello.”

There was the pride of a woman and a poet in her prime, addressing a no doubt not imaginary lover:

“Oh it was a cold day/In Peter’s miraculous city./Like a crimson fire the sunset lay,/And slowly the shadow thickened./Let him not desire my eyes,/Prophetic and fixed./He will get a whole lifetime of poems/The prayer of my arrogant lips.”

The revolution came, and suddenly poverty gnawed away her life and, worse, her writing went out of favor. Poetry had to be hard and elevating. By 1925, the literary leaders were saying that she should have had the intelligence to be dead.

Hardship and the impossibility of publishing; expulsion from the Writers Union. Worse was to come. The purges of the mid-1930s spared her, but her only son, Lev, was arrested. For a year-and-a-half, she joined the lines outside the Leningrad prison. And, in “Requiem,” she found a voice again: harsh with knowledge, powerful with anger, yet with all the lovely particularity of her youth. Here, for example, comes word of the sentencing:

“And the stone word fell/On my still-living breast./Never mind, I was ready./I will manage somehow./Today I have so much to do:/I must kill memory once and for all,/I must turn my soul to stone/I must learn to live again--

“Unless . . . Summer’s ardent rustling/Is like a festival outside my window./For a long time I’ve foreseen this/Brilliant day, deserted house.”

The introduction to this molten cycle is a paragraph of prose.

A woman in line behind her, she writes, “woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):

“ ‘Can you describe this?’

“And I answered: ‘Yes, I can.’

“Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.”

Bowed down with personal tragedy that is the tragedy of a nation, perhaps of the world, the poet answers: “Yes, I can.” She could.