Last Toast by Anna Akhmatova

Translated from the Russian by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky

I drink to our ruined house
To the evil of my life
To our loneliness together
And I drink to you—
To the lying lips that have betrayed us,
To the dead-cold eyes,
To the fact that the world is brutal and coarse
To the fact that God did not save us.

Born in Odessa, Anna Akhmatova is one of the four most important Russian poets of the 20^th century, others being Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and Pasternak. She was associated with the Akhmeism movement.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, Ukraine and currently lives in San Diego.

Katie Farris is the author of Boysgirls (Marick Press) and co-editor of Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poets (Tupelo Press). She teaches in the MFA Program at SDSU.