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Selected Poems
An admired contemporary of Rilke, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam, Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva bore witness to the turmoil and devastation of the Revolution, and chronicled her difficult life in exile, sustained by the inspiration and power of her modern verse.
The poems in this selection are drawn from eleven volumes published over thirty years.
The poems in this selection are drawn from eleven volumes published over thirty years.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
About the author
Marina Tsvetaeva
522 books500 followers Марина Цветаева
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow. Her father, Ivan Tsvetaev, was a professor of art history and the founder of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her mother Mariya, née Meyn, was a talented concert pianist. The family travelled a great deal and Tsvetaeva attended schools in Switzerland, Germany, and at the Sorbonne, Paris. Tsvetaeva started to write verse in her early childhood. She made her debut as a poet at the age of 18 with the collection Evening Album, a tribute to her childhood.
In 1912 Tsvetaeva married Sergei Efron, they had two daughters and one son. Magic Lantern showed her technical mastery and was followed in 1913 by a selection of poems from her first collections. Tsvetaeva's affair with the poet and opera librettist Sofiia Parnok inspired her cycle of poems called Girlfriend. Parnok's career stopped in the late 1920s when she was no longer allowed to publish. The poems composed between 1917 and 1921 appeared in 1957 under the title The Demesne of the Swans. Inspired by her relationship with Konstantin Rodzevich, an ex-Red Army officer she wrote Poem of the Mountain and Poem of the End.
After 1917 Revolution Tsvetaeva was trapped in Moscow for five years. During the famine one of her own daughters died of starvation. Tsvetaeva's poetry reveals her growing interest in folk song and the techniques of the major symbolist and poets, such as Aleksander Blok and Anna Akhmatova. In 1922 Tsvetaeva emigrated with her family to Berlin, where she rejoined her husband, and then to Prague. This was a highly productive period in her life - she published five collections of verse and a number of narrative poems, plays, and essays.
During her years in Paris Tsvetaeva wrote two parts of the planned dramatic trilogy. The last collection published during her lifetime, After Russia, appeared in 1928. Its print, 100 numbered copies, were sold by special subscription. In Paris the family lived in poverty, the income came almost entirely from Tsvetaeva's writings. When her husband started to work for the Soviet security service, the Russian community of Paris turned against Tsvetaeva. Her limited publishing ways for poetry were blocked and she turned to prose. In 1937 appeared MOY PUSHKIN, one of Tsvetaeva's best prose works. To earn extra income, she also produced short stories, memoirs and critical articles.
In exile Tsvetaeva felt more and more isolated. Friendless and almost destitute she returned to the Soviet Union in 1938, where her son and husband already lived. Next year her husband was executed and her daughter was sent to a labor camp. Tsvetaeva was officially ostracized and unable to publish. After the USSR was invaded by German Army in 1941, Tsvetaeva was evacuated to the small provincial town of Elabuga with her son. In despair, she hanged herself ten days later on August 31, 1941.
source: http://www.poemhunter.com/marina-ivan...
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow. Her father, Ivan Tsvetaev, was a professor of art history and the founder of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her mother Mariya, née Meyn, was a talented concert pianist. The family travelled a great deal and Tsvetaeva attended schools in Switzerland, Germany, and at the Sorbonne, Paris. Tsvetaeva started to write verse in her early childhood. She made her debut as a poet at the age of 18 with the collection Evening Album, a tribute to her childhood.
In 1912 Tsvetaeva married Sergei Efron, they had two daughters and one son. Magic Lantern showed her technical mastery and was followed in 1913 by a selection of poems from her first collections. Tsvetaeva's affair with the poet and opera librettist Sofiia Parnok inspired her cycle of poems called Girlfriend. Parnok's career stopped in the late 1920s when she was no longer allowed to publish. The poems composed between 1917 and 1921 appeared in 1957 under the title The Demesne of the Swans. Inspired by her relationship with Konstantin Rodzevich, an ex-Red Army officer she wrote Poem of the Mountain and Poem of the End.
After 1917 Revolution Tsvetaeva was trapped in Moscow for five years. During the famine one of her own daughters died of starvation. Tsvetaeva's poetry reveals her growing interest in folk song and the techniques of the major symbolist and poets, such as Aleksander Blok and Anna Akhmatova. In 1922 Tsvetaeva emigrated with her family to Berlin, where she rejoined her husband, and then to Prague. This was a highly productive period in her life - she published five collections of verse and a number of narrative poems, plays, and essays.
During her years in Paris Tsvetaeva wrote two parts of the planned dramatic trilogy. The last collection published during her lifetime, After Russia, appeared in 1928. Its print, 100 numbered copies, were sold by special subscription. In Paris the family lived in poverty, the income came almost entirely from Tsvetaeva's writings. When her husband started to work for the Soviet security service, the Russian community of Paris turned against Tsvetaeva. Her limited publishing ways for poetry were blocked and she turned to prose. In 1937 appeared MOY PUSHKIN, one of Tsvetaeva's best prose works. To earn extra income, she also produced short stories, memoirs and critical articles.
In exile Tsvetaeva felt more and more isolated. Friendless and almost destitute she returned to the Soviet Union in 1938, where her son and husband already lived. Next year her husband was executed and her daughter was sent to a labor camp. Tsvetaeva was officially ostracized and unable to publish. After the USSR was invaded by German Army in 1941, Tsvetaeva was evacuated to the small provincial town of Elabuga with her son. In despair, she hanged herself ten days later on August 31, 1941.
source: http://www.poemhunter.com/marina-ivan...
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July 27, 2020
Стихотворения = Marina Tsvetaeva: Selected Poems, Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (8 October [O.S. 26 September] 1892 – 31 August 1941) was a Russian and Soviet poet.
Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger.
Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939.
Her husband Sergei Efron and her daughter Ariadna Efron (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; and her husband was executed. Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941.
As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her as a striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.
I Know the Truth
I know the truth—give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look—it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?
The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.
"I know the truth" Tsvetaeva (1915).
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز هفدهم ماه می سال 2004 میلادی
عنوان: مارینا تسوه تایوا: گزینه اشعار؛ شاعر مارینا تسوه تایوا؛ مترجم به انگلیسی: ایلین فاینستاین؛ مترجم از انگلیسی به فارسی فریده حسن زاده (مصطفوی)؛ تهران، نسیم دانش، 1380؛ در هفده ص، و 205ص؛ مصور؛ عنوان روی جلد مارینا تسوه تایوا شاعره ی برگزیده ی قرن بیستم؛ شابک 9647145012؛ موضوع شعرهای شاعران، روسیه - سده 20م
مارینا ایوانوونا تسوتایوا شاعر و نویسنده ی اهل روسیه در سوربن فرانسه درس خواندند، و در روز سی و یکم ماه اوت سال 1941میلادی مدتی پس از آنکه همسرش به جرم خیانت در شوروی تیرباران شد با حلقآویز کردن خود از درختی خودکشی کردند
عشق گوشت و خون است
!گلی خیس از خون
آیا به گمانت عشق
گپی است بیهوده از دو سوی میز؟
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 06/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (8 October [O.S. 26 September] 1892 – 31 August 1941) was a Russian and Soviet poet.
Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger.
Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939.
Her husband Sergei Efron and her daughter Ariadna Efron (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; and her husband was executed. Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941.
As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her as a striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.
I Know the Truth
I know the truth—give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look—it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?
The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.
"I know the truth" Tsvetaeva (1915).
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز هفدهم ماه می سال 2004 میلادی
عنوان: مارینا تسوه تایوا: گزینه اشعار؛ شاعر مارینا تسوه تایوا؛ مترجم به انگلیسی: ایلین فاینستاین؛ مترجم از انگلیسی به فارسی فریده حسن زاده (مصطفوی)؛ تهران، نسیم دانش، 1380؛ در هفده ص، و 205ص؛ مصور؛ عنوان روی جلد مارینا تسوه تایوا شاعره ی برگزیده ی قرن بیستم؛ شابک 9647145012؛ موضوع شعرهای شاعران، روسیه - سده 20م
مارینا ایوانوونا تسوتایوا شاعر و نویسنده ی اهل روسیه در سوربن فرانسه درس خواندند، و در روز سی و یکم ماه اوت سال 1941میلادی مدتی پس از آنکه همسرش به جرم خیانت در شوروی تیرباران شد با حلقآویز کردن خود از درختی خودکشی کردند
عشق گوشت و خون است
!گلی خیس از خون
آیا به گمانت عشق
گپی است بیهوده از دو سوی میز؟
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 06/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
September 20, 2018
The poetry of Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) has always left me with a lump in the throat.
And this collection of searingly truthful, fierce, and emotionally intense poems is no different. Her themes cry out of the darkness and are immediately relevant: the desperate need for love, and the tension between a passion and dedication to poetry and the harsh domestic responsibilities of living through some of the worst Russian times. Famine, civil war, and a plague of cold sadness. These poems contain several sequences which suggest the source of Tsvetaeva's own inspiration, and the longing for intimacy with poems of equal genius, whilst dealing with the troubling world outside.
At fourteen she lost her mother to tuberculosis, and abandoned her musical studies to focus on her passion for literature, thus becoming a poet. I knew of her bond with other Russian poets, but what I didn't realise is that in 1926 she exchanged correspondences briefly with one Rainer Maria Rilke, who we are told, was an admirer of her work. Sadly though, he fell silent due to being mortally ill, and feeling rejected Tsvetaeva wrote him a despairing postcard that simply read -
Dear Rainer,
This is where I live.
Do you still love me?
Marina.
Yes I know, heartbreaking isn't it. For poor Marina though her life would only get worse, when all I wanted was for it to get better. The thought of how her life ended years later is just so tragic.
But she still shares her staggering poems with us, it is like she is in the room with a tear in her eye whilst reading them.
A couple stick in my mind. Although all are grade A material.
I’m glad your sickness -
I’m glad your sickness is not caused by me.
Mine is not caused by you. I’m glad to know
the heavy earth will never flow away
from us, beneath our feet, and so
we can relax together, and not watch
our words. When our sleeves touch
we shall not drown in waves of rising blush.
I’m glad to see you calmly now embrace
another girl in front of me, without
any wish to cause me pain, as you
don’t burn if I kiss someone else.
I know you never use my tender name,
my tender spirit, day or night. And
no one in the silence of a church
will sing their Hallelujahs over us.
Thank you for loving me like this,
for you feel love, although you do not know it.
Thank you for the nights I’ve spent in quiet.
Thank you for the walks under the moon
you’ve spared me and those sunset meetings unshared.
Thank you. The sun will never bless our heads.
Take my sad thanks for this: you do not cause
my sickness. And I don’t cause yours.
It's not like waiting for post -
It's not like waiting for post.
This is how you wait for
the one letter you need:
soft stuff bound with
tape and paste.
Inside a little word.
That's all. Happiness.
Waiting for happiness?
It's more like waiting for death.
The soldiers will salute
and three chunks of lead
will slam into your chest.
Your eyes will then flash red.
No question of joy.
Too old now, all bloom gone.
Waiting for what else now but
black muzzles in a square yard.
A square letter. I think
there may be spells in the ink.
No hope. And no one is
too old to face death
...or such a square envelope.
And this collection of searingly truthful, fierce, and emotionally intense poems is no different. Her themes cry out of the darkness and are immediately relevant: the desperate need for love, and the tension between a passion and dedication to poetry and the harsh domestic responsibilities of living through some of the worst Russian times. Famine, civil war, and a plague of cold sadness. These poems contain several sequences which suggest the source of Tsvetaeva's own inspiration, and the longing for intimacy with poems of equal genius, whilst dealing with the troubling world outside.
At fourteen she lost her mother to tuberculosis, and abandoned her musical studies to focus on her passion for literature, thus becoming a poet. I knew of her bond with other Russian poets, but what I didn't realise is that in 1926 she exchanged correspondences briefly with one Rainer Maria Rilke, who we are told, was an admirer of her work. Sadly though, he fell silent due to being mortally ill, and feeling rejected Tsvetaeva wrote him a despairing postcard that simply read -
Dear Rainer,
This is where I live.
Do you still love me?
Marina.
Yes I know, heartbreaking isn't it. For poor Marina though her life would only get worse, when all I wanted was for it to get better. The thought of how her life ended years later is just so tragic.
But she still shares her staggering poems with us, it is like she is in the room with a tear in her eye whilst reading them.
A couple stick in my mind. Although all are grade A material.
I’m glad your sickness -
I’m glad your sickness is not caused by me.
Mine is not caused by you. I’m glad to know
the heavy earth will never flow away
from us, beneath our feet, and so
we can relax together, and not watch
our words. When our sleeves touch
we shall not drown in waves of rising blush.
I’m glad to see you calmly now embrace
another girl in front of me, without
any wish to cause me pain, as you
don’t burn if I kiss someone else.
I know you never use my tender name,
my tender spirit, day or night. And
no one in the silence of a church
will sing their Hallelujahs over us.
Thank you for loving me like this,
for you feel love, although you do not know it.
Thank you for the nights I’ve spent in quiet.
Thank you for the walks under the moon
you’ve spared me and those sunset meetings unshared.
Thank you. The sun will never bless our heads.
Take my sad thanks for this: you do not cause
my sickness. And I don’t cause yours.
It's not like waiting for post -
It's not like waiting for post.
This is how you wait for
the one letter you need:
soft stuff bound with
tape and paste.
Inside a little word.
That's all. Happiness.
Waiting for happiness?
It's more like waiting for death.
The soldiers will salute
and three chunks of lead
will slam into your chest.
Your eyes will then flash red.
No question of joy.
Too old now, all bloom gone.
Waiting for what else now but
black muzzles in a square yard.
A square letter. I think
there may be spells in the ink.
No hope. And no one is
too old to face death
...or such a square envelope.
October 7, 2022
Without choice. Without anger.
One long moan. Stubbornly.
A cry that reaches up to heaven,
—Mother!
Under normal circumstances with poetry I always like an in-depth read up on the writer prior to reading if it's somebody that I know nothing about, in the case of Marina Tsvetaeva my knowledge of her was non-existent, but hastily threw myself into the deep end instead of getting my feet wet first, so I had to stop and get the background on the poet first to truly appreciate the poems, it certainly helped.
What another tragic story I learned of for Marina and her family, a life in turmoil as a result of the Russian revolution of 1917, and this is the theme that clearly dominates this collection, written from the gut and the fragments of a broken heart, this was earth shattering and almost unbearable poetry, that had me on edge throughout and at times almost knocked the living daylights out of me. I only hope that in the end she found peace - because she bloody well deserved it.
Thank you for loving me like this,
for you feel love, although you do not know it.
Thanks you for the nights I've spent in quiet.
Thank you for the walks under the moon
you've spared me and those sunset meetings unshared.
Thank you. The sun will never bless our heads.
Take my sad thanks for this: you do not cause
my sickness. And I don't cause yours.
- - -
My ear attends to you,
as a mother hears in her sleep.
To a feverish child, she whispers
as I bend over you.
At the skin, my blood calls out to
your heart, my whole sky craves
an island of tenderness.
My rivers tilt towards you.
- - -
And into the hollow waves
of darkness—hunched and level—
without trace—in silence—
something sinks like a ship.
- - -
For my country has taken so little care
of me that even the sharpest spy could
go over my whole spirit and would
detect no native stain there.
January 3, 2013
When in 1941 the Nazis started bombing Moscow, Marina Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Yelabuga, a town in the Tatar Soviet Socialist Republic (now Tatarstan).
She desperately sought work and even applied for a dishwashing position but was refused. On 31 August 1941, Tsvetaeva hanged herself. Marina Tsvetaeva’s exact burial place was never found. Her husband, Sergey Efron, was executed in August 1941 – the same month that she committed suicide. Her 19-year-old son Mur was killed in World War II, in 1944.
Critics and translators of Tsvetaeva’s work often comment on the passion in her poems, their swift shifts and unusual syntax, and the influence of folk songs. She is also known for her portrayal of a woman’s experiences during the “terrible years” (as the period in Russian history was described by Aleksandr Blok). Tsvetaeva's great body of work, that broke new ground for women poets, has increasingly attracted attention in the English-speaking world. This is what the great poet Joseph Brodsky says about her: "Represented on a graph, Tsvetaeva's work would exhibit a curve--or rather, a straight line--rising at almost a right angle because of her constant effort to raise the pitch a note higher, an idea higher (or, more precisely, an octave and a faith higher.) She always carried everything she has to say to its conceivable and expressible end. In both her poetry and her prose, nothing remains hanging or leaves a feeling of ambivalence. Tsvetaeva is the unique case in which the paramount spiritual experience of an epoch (for us, the sense of ambivalence, of contradictoriness in the nature of human existence) served not as the object of expression but as its means, by which it was transformed into the material of art."
As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.
She desperately sought work and even applied for a dishwashing position but was refused. On 31 August 1941, Tsvetaeva hanged herself. Marina Tsvetaeva’s exact burial place was never found. Her husband, Sergey Efron, was executed in August 1941 – the same month that she committed suicide. Her 19-year-old son Mur was killed in World War II, in 1944.
Critics and translators of Tsvetaeva’s work often comment on the passion in her poems, their swift shifts and unusual syntax, and the influence of folk songs. She is also known for her portrayal of a woman’s experiences during the “terrible years” (as the period in Russian history was described by Aleksandr Blok). Tsvetaeva's great body of work, that broke new ground for women poets, has increasingly attracted attention in the English-speaking world. This is what the great poet Joseph Brodsky says about her: "Represented on a graph, Tsvetaeva's work would exhibit a curve--or rather, a straight line--rising at almost a right angle because of her constant effort to raise the pitch a note higher, an idea higher (or, more precisely, an octave and a faith higher.) She always carried everything she has to say to its conceivable and expressible end. In both her poetry and her prose, nothing remains hanging or leaves a feeling of ambivalence. Tsvetaeva is the unique case in which the paramount spiritual experience of an epoch (for us, the sense of ambivalence, of contradictoriness in the nature of human existence) served not as the object of expression but as its means, by which it was transformed into the material of art."
As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.
February 9, 2017
And overflowing their rims,
into the black earth, to nourish
the rushes unstoppably
without cure, gushes
verse
This was a necessary refuge, a raft where the sea's bed is murky. There is so much doubt, singed with hunger on these pages, yet there's a human exuberance. There's agency, not tr potlatch, no Cleopatra dissolving a priceless pearl in and drinking the dregs, as Calasso noted. There are quests and memorials. There is rapt ardor even when the soul's been steeped in grief. There's a determination to right the course when fate has proved abusive.
The last concept, of sense-making within the delirium of an overturned world is evidenced in the sublime An Attempt At Room, a poem which appears to me to be the analogy of making a home in a collapsing building.
For a rendezvous is a locality,
A list - calculation, sketch -
Of words that are not always apposite,
Of gestures all wrong, simply out of touch.
Reading her lines, one can inhale the ancient perseverance, the ability to manage the ignoble and the banal with no chance for posterity. There's a line in a novel I broached recently, an exile is a refugee with a library.
into the black earth, to nourish
the rushes unstoppably
without cure, gushes
verse
This was a necessary refuge, a raft where the sea's bed is murky. There is so much doubt, singed with hunger on these pages, yet there's a human exuberance. There's agency, not tr potlatch, no Cleopatra dissolving a priceless pearl in and drinking the dregs, as Calasso noted. There are quests and memorials. There is rapt ardor even when the soul's been steeped in grief. There's a determination to right the course when fate has proved abusive.
The last concept, of sense-making within the delirium of an overturned world is evidenced in the sublime An Attempt At Room, a poem which appears to me to be the analogy of making a home in a collapsing building.
For a rendezvous is a locality,
A list - calculation, sketch -
Of words that are not always apposite,
Of gestures all wrong, simply out of touch.
Reading her lines, one can inhale the ancient perseverance, the ability to manage the ignoble and the banal with no chance for posterity. There's a line in a novel I broached recently, an exile is a refugee with a library.
March 8, 2022
The poems collected here are rapturous and melancholic and very intense, and yet never feel excessive. Reading through them I couldn't help but feel that my mind was engaged with work shaped by immense talent. While reading I soon realized Tsvetaeva was going to be a writer I'd want to return to, and the desire to hold onto the words I'd just discovered, for as long as I can, conflicted with the urge to read and absorb the words as fast as I could. It isn't a new feeling, I've had this experience with other writers before, and certainly it isn't unique to myself.
Typically after I'm finished I want to read all the writer might've written, including the letters they sent and the journal entries they made–and where possible, the interviews they gave. And to discover facts about their life, both vital and mundane, and while I did a brief search of Marina I couldn't help but feel awed at the level of brilliant art created despite great pressures. I try not to romanticize struggles individuals, including the suffering of working artists, go through. But I couldn't help but feel sad about Marina's life troubles including a war fled, exile, poverty, turmoil in her personal relationships, state surveillance upon her return, losing those close to her, and opportunities drying up as doors were shut to her, and even familiar and once friendly backs turned from her, and all culminating in tragic death. I don't think anyone wouldn't be impressed knowing all that she went through and the incredible art produced in spite of it.
Typically after I'm finished I want to read all the writer might've written, including the letters they sent and the journal entries they made–and where possible, the interviews they gave. And to discover facts about their life, both vital and mundane, and while I did a brief search of Marina I couldn't help but feel awed at the level of brilliant art created despite great pressures. I try not to romanticize struggles individuals, including the suffering of working artists, go through. But I couldn't help but feel sad about Marina's life troubles including a war fled, exile, poverty, turmoil in her personal relationships, state surveillance upon her return, losing those close to her, and opportunities drying up as doors were shut to her, and even familiar and once friendly backs turned from her, and all culminating in tragic death. I don't think anyone wouldn't be impressed knowing all that she went through and the incredible art produced in spite of it.
June 13, 2022
Either love is
-A shrine?
or else a scar.
What a harrowing and torturous lives some people live!
Marina Tsvetaeva, one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, went through the ordeals of the revolution, lost her 2 year old daughter Irina to hunger during the Moscow famine and her husband to the firing squad, saw her other daughter Ariadna arrested and put to jail for eight years on the charges of espionage and was evacuated along with her son in 1941.
We shall call for the sun and it will not rise.
She committed suicide at the age of 48.
Bent with worry, God
paused, to smile.
And look, there were many
holy angels with bodies of
the radiance he had
given them,
some with enormous wings and
others without any,
which is why I weep
so much
because even more than God
himself I love his fair angels.
The themes of this brilliant and sincere poet’s works are centered on Moscow, faith, hell, love, separation and despair.
A kiss on the forehead—erases misery.
I kiss your forehead.
A kiss on the eyes—lifts sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.
A kiss on the lips—is a drink of water.
I kiss your lips.
A kiss on the forehead—erases memory.
Marina Tsvetaeva is passionate and her fierce and lively emotions are manifested distinctly in her lyrical and Satirical poems.
You loved me. And your lies had their own probity.
There was a truth in every falsehood.
Your love went far beyond any possible
boundary as no one else’s could.
Your love seemed to last even longer
than time itself. Now you wave your hand —
and suddenly your love for me is over!
That is the truth in five words.
-A shrine?
or else a scar.
What a harrowing and torturous lives some people live!
Marina Tsvetaeva, one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, went through the ordeals of the revolution, lost her 2 year old daughter Irina to hunger during the Moscow famine and her husband to the firing squad, saw her other daughter Ariadna arrested and put to jail for eight years on the charges of espionage and was evacuated along with her son in 1941.
We shall call for the sun and it will not rise.
She committed suicide at the age of 48.
Bent with worry, God
paused, to smile.
And look, there were many
holy angels with bodies of
the radiance he had
given them,
some with enormous wings and
others without any,
which is why I weep
so much
because even more than God
himself I love his fair angels.
The themes of this brilliant and sincere poet’s works are centered on Moscow, faith, hell, love, separation and despair.
A kiss on the forehead—erases misery.
I kiss your forehead.
A kiss on the eyes—lifts sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.
A kiss on the lips—is a drink of water.
I kiss your lips.
A kiss on the forehead—erases memory.
Marina Tsvetaeva is passionate and her fierce and lively emotions are manifested distinctly in her lyrical and Satirical poems.
You loved me. And your lies had their own probity.
There was a truth in every falsehood.
Your love went far beyond any possible
boundary as no one else’s could.
Your love seemed to last even longer
than time itself. Now you wave your hand —
and suddenly your love for me is over!
That is the truth in five words.
Read
February 13, 2015
Though born into a family of means, Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) soon fell victim to the same disasters that crushed so many Russians during that time. Though I may write about her life elsewhere, for now I'll just mention that it became so trying for her that she hung herself from a nail in a cottage in the Tatar Republic...
The turmoil and depression of her last years had stilled her poetic sources, but she had already produced the work for which she is now widely recognized as one of the finest Russian poets of the twentieth century. Like most artists, she had moments of self-doubt, but she knew her quality:
Verse
Written so long ago, I didn't even
know I was a poet,
my lines fell like spray from a fountain
or flashes from a rocket,
like imps, they burst into sanctuaries
filled with sleep and incense,
to speak of youth and dying.
All my unread pages
lie scattered in dusty bookshops
where nobody picks them up
to this day. Like expensive wines,
your time will come, my lines.
Tsvetaeva wrote quite a bit of love poetry for her various lovers, including a lyric cycle Girlfriend (1914-1915) for Sophia Parok, but also for Boris Pasternak and Rainer Maria Rilke, to whom she had conceived a verbally passionate love at a distance.(*) Though I am highly allergic to conventional love poetry, I rarely felt the urge to sneeze, for she nearly always found a tack, an image, a tone that floated her poem over the leaden clichés without losing contact with the communalities of experience which are our receptors.
She also wrote four lengthy narrative poems influenced by fairy tale or folklore, excerpted in this collection, and she wrote some very biting satires. But her primary gift is that of a lyric poet for whom, though she was viewed as a modernist poet in her time, clarity, beauty and drama are the main values.
One more short lyric:
I opened my veins
I opened my veins. Unstoppably
life spurts out with no remedy.
Now I set out bowls and plates.
Every bowl will be shallow.
Every plate will be small.
And overflowing their rims,
into the black earth, to nourish
the rushes unstoppably
without cure, gushes
poetry...
Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems (2009) is the second, revised and expanded version of Elaine Feinstein's rendering of a selection of Tsvetaeva's poems into English. Though Feinstein has occupied herself with Tsvetaeva for forty years (also writing a biography of the poet), Bride of Ice belongs to that subgenre in which the "translator" works from literal translations provided by others having a better grasp of the original language. Though I am a bit leery of such translations in general, Ezra Pound's famous and very influential Cathay is one such, and Feinstein's poems are very fine. She explains in her brief introduction that she tried to maintain Tsvetaeva's "stanzaic patterning" and capture the pauses and swift changes of pace that are said to be typical of her work. With these attractive versions I am just commencing my acquaintance with Tsvetaeva's poetry.
(*) She never met either man. Rilke was already sinking into his final illness, and at the later opportunities to meet Pasternak, she hesitated and stalled. But her relationships to these men (one-sided for Rilke, mutual if epistolary for Pasternak) served as muses to her poetry. Here is one of the poems from Wires, containing poems to Pasternak.
5
Patiently, as tarmac under hammers,
patiently, as what is new matures,
patiently, as death must be awaited,
patiently, as vengeance may be nursed.
So I shall wait for you. (One look down to earth.
Cobblestones. Lips between. And numb.)
Patiently, as sloth can be prolonged,
patiently, as someone threading beads.
Toboggans squeak outside, the door answers
Now the wind's roar is inside the forest.
What has arrived is writing, whose corrections
are lofty as a change of reign, or a prince's entrance.
And let's go home!
This is inhuman -
yet it's mine.
Rating
http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/111...
April 3, 2015
List of Collaborators
Introduction
--I know the truth
--What is this gypsy passion for separation
--We shall not escape Hell
--Some ancestor of mine
--I'm glad your sickness
--We are keeping an eye on the girls
--No one has taken anything away
--You throw back your head
--Where does this tenderness come from?
--Bent with worry
--Today or tomorrow the snow will melt
Verses about Moscow
--1
--2
--5
--7
--8
From Insomnia
--2
--3
--5
--6
--7
--8
--9
--10
Poems for Akhmatova
--1
--2
--3
--4
Poems for Blok
--1
--2
--3
--5
--8
--9
--6
--10
--A kiss on the head
--From Swans' Encampment
--Yesterday he still looked in my eyes
--To Mayakovsky
--Praise to the Rich
--God help us Smoke!
--Ophelia: in Defence of the Queen
--Wherever you are I can reach you
From Wires
--1
--7
--Sahara
--The Poet
--Appointment
--Rails
--You loved me
--It's not like waiting for post
--My ear attends to you
--As people listen intently
--Strong doesn't mate with strong
--In a world
--Poem of the Mountain
--Poem of the End
--An Attempt at Jealousy
--To Boris Pasternak
From The Ratcatcher
--From Chapter 1
--From Chapter 2: Dreams
--From The Children's Paradise
--From Poems to a Son
--Homesickness
--I opened my veins
--Epitaph
--Readers of Newspapers
--Desk
--Bus
--When I look at the flight of the leaves
From Poems to Czechoslovakia
--6
--8
Note to 1971 edition: on Working Method
Notes
Introduction
--I know the truth
--What is this gypsy passion for separation
--We shall not escape Hell
--Some ancestor of mine
--I'm glad your sickness
--We are keeping an eye on the girls
--No one has taken anything away
--You throw back your head
--Where does this tenderness come from?
--Bent with worry
--Today or tomorrow the snow will melt
Verses about Moscow
--1
--2
--5
--7
--8
From Insomnia
--2
--3
--5
--6
--7
--8
--9
--10
Poems for Akhmatova
--1
--2
--3
--4
Poems for Blok
--1
--2
--3
--5
--8
--9
--6
--10
--A kiss on the head
--From Swans' Encampment
--Yesterday he still looked in my eyes
--To Mayakovsky
--Praise to the Rich
--God help us Smoke!
--Ophelia: in Defence of the Queen
--Wherever you are I can reach you
From Wires
--1
--7
--Sahara
--The Poet
--Appointment
--Rails
--You loved me
--It's not like waiting for post
--My ear attends to you
--As people listen intently
--Strong doesn't mate with strong
--In a world
--Poem of the Mountain
--Poem of the End
--An Attempt at Jealousy
--To Boris Pasternak
From The Ratcatcher
--From Chapter 1
--From Chapter 2: Dreams
--From The Children's Paradise
--From Poems to a Son
--Homesickness
--I opened my veins
--Epitaph
--Readers of Newspapers
--Desk
--Bus
--When I look at the flight of the leaves
From Poems to Czechoslovakia
--6
--8
Note to 1971 edition: on Working Method
Notes
September 17, 2022
Bất cứ người phụ nữ nào, trong những cơn bĩ cực của cuộc đời (mà tính cả, rất tệ hại, những suy sụp không lý do cụ thể) cũng có thể tìm được ở Marina Tsvetaeva một bàn tay chìa ra giữa đêm tối câm lặng. Trong cuộc đời của mình, Marina đã nếm đủ nỗi đau thương đến từ tổ quốc, gia đình, người yêu, bạn bè và, ở những ngày cuối đời, từ đứa con của mình.
Một người chìm lặn trong bóng tối nhạy cảm hơn với mọi thứ, nhất là sự xúc phạm có thể đối với nỗi buồn. Người đó sẽ tìm lại được nụ cười trong thơ Marina. Nụ cười khi thấy mọi điên loạn, mọi đau đớn, mọi yêu thương nồng nhiệt nhất đều được phát tiết không chút e dè, ở một phẩm chất nghệ thuật đỉnh cao.
Nhiều người sẽ đồng tình chọn Marina là nhà thơ vĩ đại nhất của nước Nga ở thế kỷ XX. Tôi cũng vậy. Cái đẹp trong thơ của Marina vừa lớn lao lại rất cá nhân, luôn giàu hình ảnh và nhạc tính. Một người chỉ cần viết được 1 bài thơ như Marina viết là đã đủ cho cuộc đời thi ca.
Cuốn tôi đọc là tuyển tập Tâm do Phạm Vĩnh Cư dịch. Tiếng Việt của Vĩnh Cư rất đẹp nhưng đánh đố. Thật sự là nhiều bài đọc chỉ thấy đẹp như khi ngắm tranh trừu tượng chứ chả hiểu gì. Khi so sánh nó ở một bản dịch khác thì thấy hóa ra thơ cũng có nghĩa mà (!) và hài nhất là thật ra ông Vĩnh Cư dịch cũng chẳng sai. Chỉ là cách diễn đạt thật ngoắt nghoéo. Nhưng về tiếng Việt thì không ai qua được Vĩnh Cư.
Ban đầu tôi đọc Marina vì thích mảng thơ tình của bà này. Rất là đàn bà với đủ cả thiên thần và ác quỷ. Đó là những bài thơ mà tôi muốn đọc cho crush của mình nghe. Sau đó thì tôi rơi vào một cơn trầm cảm không rõ lý do lắm. Tệ nhất là mắc covid khiến thể chất, và kéo theo là tinh thần, xuống sâu chưa từng có. Ngọn lửa vốn luôn chỉ le lói ở tôi dần mất hút như ném que diêm tàn xuống giếng không đáy. Ngủ là cách duy nhất giúp tôi quên đi cảm giác mất trọng lực này. Trong những lúc không thể trốn tránh, tôi chỉ còn lờ mờ một vài hình ảnh của thiên nhiên, những người mẹ và rất hiếm hoi là crush. Hơn 1 tháng tôi không đọc được gì nên hồn. Cuối cùng thì hôm nay, tôi mới chính thức được Marina kéo lên. Ngọn lửa lại le lói trở lại. Tôi lại có thể chơi nhạc, nghe nhạc, ngắm mây và muốn về bên anh ngủ trên ngực =))) đúng là đi tới tận cùng tuyệt vọng sẽ gặp được đóa hoa tuyệt vọng =)) thật ra thì nó khá đẹp và khiến mình muốn mỉm cười =))) tóm lại là rất nên đọc thơ bà này đó mọi người ạ =))))))))))
Một người chìm lặn trong bóng tối nhạy cảm hơn với mọi thứ, nhất là sự xúc phạm có thể đối với nỗi buồn. Người đó sẽ tìm lại được nụ cười trong thơ Marina. Nụ cười khi thấy mọi điên loạn, mọi đau đớn, mọi yêu thương nồng nhiệt nhất đều được phát tiết không chút e dè, ở một phẩm chất nghệ thuật đỉnh cao.
Nhiều người sẽ đồng tình chọn Marina là nhà thơ vĩ đại nhất của nước Nga ở thế kỷ XX. Tôi cũng vậy. Cái đẹp trong thơ của Marina vừa lớn lao lại rất cá nhân, luôn giàu hình ảnh và nhạc tính. Một người chỉ cần viết được 1 bài thơ như Marina viết là đã đủ cho cuộc đời thi ca.
Cuốn tôi đọc là tuyển tập Tâm do Phạm Vĩnh Cư dịch. Tiếng Việt của Vĩnh Cư rất đẹp nhưng đánh đố. Thật sự là nhiều bài đọc chỉ thấy đẹp như khi ngắm tranh trừu tượng chứ chả hiểu gì. Khi so sánh nó ở một bản dịch khác thì thấy hóa ra thơ cũng có nghĩa mà (!) và hài nhất là thật ra ông Vĩnh Cư dịch cũng chẳng sai. Chỉ là cách diễn đạt thật ngoắt nghoéo. Nhưng về tiếng Việt thì không ai qua được Vĩnh Cư.
Ban đầu tôi đọc Marina vì thích mảng thơ tình của bà này. Rất là đàn bà với đủ cả thiên thần và ác quỷ. Đó là những bài thơ mà tôi muốn đọc cho crush của mình nghe. Sau đó thì tôi rơi vào một cơn trầm cảm không rõ lý do lắm. Tệ nhất là mắc covid khiến thể chất, và kéo theo là tinh thần, xuống sâu chưa từng có. Ngọn lửa vốn luôn chỉ le lói ở tôi dần mất hút như ném que diêm tàn xuống giếng không đáy. Ngủ là cách duy nhất giúp tôi quên đi cảm giác mất trọng lực này. Trong những lúc không thể trốn tránh, tôi chỉ còn lờ mờ một vài hình ảnh của thiên nhiên, những người mẹ và rất hiếm hoi là crush. Hơn 1 tháng tôi không đọc được gì nên hồn. Cuối cùng thì hôm nay, tôi mới chính thức được Marina kéo lên. Ngọn lửa lại le lói trở lại. Tôi lại có thể chơi nhạc, nghe nhạc, ngắm mây và muốn về bên anh ngủ trên ngực =))) đúng là đi tới tận cùng tuyệt vọng sẽ gặp được đóa hoa tuyệt vọng =)) thật ra thì nó khá đẹp và khiến mình muốn mỉm cười =))) tóm lại là rất nên đọc thơ bà này đó mọi người ạ =))))))))))
February 16, 2015
And I won’t be seduced by the thought of
my native tongue, its milky call.
How can it matter in what tongue I
am misunderstood by whoever I meet
(or by what readers, swallowing
newsprint, squeezing for gossip?)
They all belong to the twentieth
century, and I am before time,
stunned, like a log left
behind on an avenue of trees.
from ‘Homesickness', 1934
This is a challenge to review. First, the co-translator Angela Livingstone (who did about half of the literal translations that Elaine Feinstein turned into English verse) tells you:
Then the original Russian must be pretty wild. Tsvetaeva had more insanely passionate love affairs than most high school graduating classes put together, and they are spilled out here for all to see. Along with poems about her passionate intellectual relationships with the other great Russian poets of the time.
However, unlike most adolescent heartbroken bards, Tsvetaeva is a terrific poet. I am bored stiff by love poetry, so the five stars is for the great writing and her later poems, which treat a wider array of subjects and emotions with great depth and startling originality of metaphor and style. Feinstein is to be congratulated on capturing this in English. (I presume, since this is monolingual and having the Russian wouldn’t help me judge, anyway.) Livingstone provides one example of the literal translation that she provided to Feinstein, along with the transliterated Russian, to give you an idea of what was involved.
from 'Poems to Czechoslovakia'
6
They took quickly, they took hugely,
took the mountains and their entrails.
They took our coal, and took our steel
from us, lead they took also and crystal.
....
Bullets they took from us, they took our rifles
minerals they took, and comrades too.
But while our mouths have spittle in them
the whole country is still armed.
(1938)
from 'Poems of the End'
...
Wait! Is it even correct in Serbian or
Croatian? Is it a Czech whim, this word.
Sep aration! To sep arate!
It is insane unnatural
a sound to burst the eardrums, and spread out
far beyond the limits of longing itself.
Separation--the word is not in the Russian
language. Or the language of women. Or men.
Nor in the language of God. What are we--sheep?
To stare abous us as we eat.
Separation--in what language is it,
when the meaning itself doesn’t exist?
or even the sound. Well--an empty one, like
the noise of a saw in your sleep perhaps.
...
(1924)
my native tongue, its milky call.
How can it matter in what tongue I
am misunderstood by whoever I meet
(or by what readers, swallowing
newsprint, squeezing for gossip?)
They all belong to the twentieth
century, and I am before time,
stunned, like a log left
behind on an avenue of trees.
from ‘Homesickness', 1934
This is a challenge to review. First, the co-translator Angela Livingstone (who did about half of the literal translations that Elaine Feinstein turned into English verse) tells you:
Marina Tsvetaeva’s [voice] is particularly difficult to capture, both because her consistent adherence to rhyme and metrical regularity would, if copied into English poems, probably enfeeble them, and because so many of the linguistic devices which she powerfully exploits (such as ellipsis, changes of word order, the throwing into relief of inflectional endings) are simply not available in English.On the whole, the English versions are consciously less emphatic, less loudly-spoken, less violent, often less jolting and disturbing than the Russian originals.
Then the original Russian must be pretty wild. Tsvetaeva had more insanely passionate love affairs than most high school graduating classes put together, and they are spilled out here for all to see. Along with poems about her passionate intellectual relationships with the other great Russian poets of the time.
However, unlike most adolescent heartbroken bards, Tsvetaeva is a terrific poet. I am bored stiff by love poetry, so the five stars is for the great writing and her later poems, which treat a wider array of subjects and emotions with great depth and startling originality of metaphor and style. Feinstein is to be congratulated on capturing this in English. (I presume, since this is monolingual and having the Russian wouldn’t help me judge, anyway.) Livingstone provides one example of the literal translation that she provided to Feinstein, along with the transliterated Russian, to give you an idea of what was involved.
from 'Poems to Czechoslovakia'
6
They took quickly, they took hugely,
took the mountains and their entrails.
They took our coal, and took our steel
from us, lead they took also and crystal.
....
Bullets they took from us, they took our rifles
minerals they took, and comrades too.
But while our mouths have spittle in them
the whole country is still armed.
(1938)
from 'Poems of the End'
...
Wait! Is it even correct in Serbian or
Croatian? Is it a Czech whim, this word.
Sep aration! To sep arate!
It is insane unnatural
a sound to burst the eardrums, and spread out
far beyond the limits of longing itself.
Separation--the word is not in the Russian
language. Or the language of women. Or men.
Nor in the language of God. What are we--sheep?
To stare abous us as we eat.
Separation--in what language is it,
when the meaning itself doesn’t exist?
or even the sound. Well--an empty one, like
the noise of a saw in your sleep perhaps.
...
(1924)
September 5, 2011
Of the great 'silver age' poets (Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Blok, Mayakovsky...) I find myself returning more and more to Tsvetaeva--the expansive emotion is most like Mayakovsky's--explosive--but the she has the control and compressed power of an Akhmatova. They're astonishingly good. She's a great lover, a great hater, sarcastic, vulnerable, more emotionally ragged than Akhmatova. But no less precise as an artist.
I've found a couple of wonderful girls reading Tsvetaeva poems on Youtube, and listening has made me turn to the poems in Russian--which I read abysmally--and try to translate them. Not for anyone else to read, but just to understand the actual words, the compression, the punch of brilliant rhymes, the very music of them. Even if you don't understand a word, check out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1orui...
which are six or seven poems read by this wonderful girl with a high light voice, reading it just as it should be read, no sturm und drang (too easy to go over the top with this stuff), and another girl, with a graver voice, also exactly the right delivery, doing other poems
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC_gT8...
I've found a couple of wonderful girls reading Tsvetaeva poems on Youtube, and listening has made me turn to the poems in Russian--which I read abysmally--and try to translate them. Not for anyone else to read, but just to understand the actual words, the compression, the punch of brilliant rhymes, the very music of them. Even if you don't understand a word, check out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1orui...
which are six or seven poems read by this wonderful girl with a high light voice, reading it just as it should be read, no sturm und drang (too easy to go over the top with this stuff), and another girl, with a graver voice, also exactly the right delivery, doing other poems
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC_gT8...
April 18, 2013
Elaine Feinstein has been reading and translating Tsvetaeva for more than 40 years. It is perhaps only through such lengthy and profound engagement that a poet as unique as Marina could ever be convincingly rendered in another language.
Tsvetaeva’s life was as brutal as many of her Russian compatriots during the dark Soviet years, and ended with her suicide. Her daughter died of starvation during the Civil War. Her other daughter and husband were imprisoned. She was wild and passionate and self-destructive (and self-obsessed of course, as all good poets must be). She was loved by Pasternak and Rilke (and their wonderful correspondence has also been translated into English). She would have been a terrible person to fall in love with.
Her poetry is romantic, lyrical, doomed in that uniquely Slavic way. It deconstructs the Russian language, breaks sentences open into emotional units, into short, ragged breaths. She is unbridled, in fear of her own wildness.
“The Poem of the End” (written in 1924) is a masterpiece. I first discovered it, and the rest of her poetry, whilst living in Prague and having my heart broken by a similarly Slavic force of nature. It is hard to separate my love for these poems from the sense of being sat on Petřín hill in early spring, shattered from a night of emotional turbulence, finding reassurance and justification in her words.
Lovers for the most
part are without hope: passion
also is just
a bridge, a means of connection
Hers is the true poetry of the heart unfiltered. It stands in opposition to the Real. Its pain is amplified by mirror upon mirror, by words reflecting words. We must stand in pity and in awe of those who hold themselves at the centre of these echoes - a degenerative feedback loop that so often leads to an early death (Celan, Plath, Sexton….). They are possessed of a kind of bravery few of us will ever be lucky enough to witness.
Tsvetaeva’s life was as brutal as many of her Russian compatriots during the dark Soviet years, and ended with her suicide. Her daughter died of starvation during the Civil War. Her other daughter and husband were imprisoned. She was wild and passionate and self-destructive (and self-obsessed of course, as all good poets must be). She was loved by Pasternak and Rilke (and their wonderful correspondence has also been translated into English). She would have been a terrible person to fall in love with.
Her poetry is romantic, lyrical, doomed in that uniquely Slavic way. It deconstructs the Russian language, breaks sentences open into emotional units, into short, ragged breaths. She is unbridled, in fear of her own wildness.
“The Poem of the End” (written in 1924) is a masterpiece. I first discovered it, and the rest of her poetry, whilst living in Prague and having my heart broken by a similarly Slavic force of nature. It is hard to separate my love for these poems from the sense of being sat on Petřín hill in early spring, shattered from a night of emotional turbulence, finding reassurance and justification in her words.
Lovers for the most
part are without hope: passion
also is just
a bridge, a means of connection
Hers is the true poetry of the heart unfiltered. It stands in opposition to the Real. Its pain is amplified by mirror upon mirror, by words reflecting words. We must stand in pity and in awe of those who hold themselves at the centre of these echoes - a degenerative feedback loop that so often leads to an early death (Celan, Plath, Sexton….). They are possessed of a kind of bravery few of us will ever be lucky enough to witness.
June 12, 2020
"A weak shaft of light through the blackness of hell is
your voice under the rumble of exploding shells"
Tsvetaeva is overflowing with kindness and ruthless beauty.
Her poetry is like being stabbed while she gently strokes your face and tells you she loves you. Not that she is violent, but she threatens it. There's an urgency, a recurring terror and a bleakness to her. And yet incredible beauty, wonder and immense love. A love that stretches out so thin and so wide you think it'll tear itself apart. But it doesn't.
You won't be the same after reading her. I wasn't. I read "Where does this tenderness come from" and the I that I was became someone else. Literature can do that, if it's done right, it dislocates us and arriving back we find we're not the same.
Emily Dickinson wrote "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.", and that's how I felt. That's how Tsvetaeva makes me feel. She comes at me with her axe and chops and chops and chops.
She offers a portrait of Russia, of Moscow, of the artist, of herself, the inner workings of her soul and a glimpse at something grander beyond. The soul, perhaps, of the world itself.
Is this what she was trying to do? Perhaps not. But it's what she did to me.
"For love is flesh, it is a
flower flooded with blood.
Did you think it was just a
little chat across a table?
a snatched hour and back home again
the way gentlemen and ladies
play at it? Either love is
- A shrine?
or else a scar."
I want to reach back across generations and stroke her hair. She'll speak to me in a language I won't understand and I'll reply with even less comprehension. And yet I'll feel seen.
It saddens me greatly that I only have translations of her work, because I don't (yet?) know Russian. But for what it's worth I found this particular translation excellent.
Here is a poet who will follow me through life.
"I have no need of holes
for ears, nor prophetic eyes:
to your mad world there is
one answer: to refuse!"
your voice under the rumble of exploding shells"
Tsvetaeva is overflowing with kindness and ruthless beauty.
Her poetry is like being stabbed while she gently strokes your face and tells you she loves you. Not that she is violent, but she threatens it. There's an urgency, a recurring terror and a bleakness to her. And yet incredible beauty, wonder and immense love. A love that stretches out so thin and so wide you think it'll tear itself apart. But it doesn't.
You won't be the same after reading her. I wasn't. I read "Where does this tenderness come from" and the I that I was became someone else. Literature can do that, if it's done right, it dislocates us and arriving back we find we're not the same.
Emily Dickinson wrote "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.", and that's how I felt. That's how Tsvetaeva makes me feel. She comes at me with her axe and chops and chops and chops.
She offers a portrait of Russia, of Moscow, of the artist, of herself, the inner workings of her soul and a glimpse at something grander beyond. The soul, perhaps, of the world itself.
Is this what she was trying to do? Perhaps not. But it's what she did to me.
"For love is flesh, it is a
flower flooded with blood.
Did you think it was just a
little chat across a table?
a snatched hour and back home again
the way gentlemen and ladies
play at it? Either love is
- A shrine?
or else a scar."
I want to reach back across generations and stroke her hair. She'll speak to me in a language I won't understand and I'll reply with even less comprehension. And yet I'll feel seen.
It saddens me greatly that I only have translations of her work, because I don't (yet?) know Russian. But for what it's worth I found this particular translation excellent.
Here is a poet who will follow me through life.
"I have no need of holes
for ears, nor prophetic eyes:
to your mad world there is
one answer: to refuse!"
January 11, 2008
her poems feel as if she is drawing a straight line from her guts to your heart. it's almost too much, and i found myself physically buckling at points, snapping the book shut to save myself from the fire. Tsvetaeva brings all of my favorite dinner guests together: unyielding authorial voice, raw honesty and unflinching self-reflection, a keen eye for that porous gauze between the self and the other, she reads as one of the last honest witnesses of human history. i only wish i could read the original russian.
Want to read
June 17, 2010Your name is a -- bird in my hand
a piece of -- ice on the tongue
one single movement of the lips.
Your name is: five signs,
a ball caught in flight, a
silver bell in the mouth
a stone, cast in a quiet pool
makes the splash of your name, and
the sound is the clatter of
night hooves, loud as a thunderclap
or it speaks straight into my forehead,
shrill as the click of a cocked gun.
Your name -- how impossible, it
is a kiss on the eyes on
motionless eyelashes, chill and sweet.
Your name is a kiss of snow
a gulp of icy spring water, blue
as a dove. About your name is: sleep.
This poem is actually from another volume of hers. I don't get to read this one any time soon since the one copy has been stolen from the library. Grr.
a piece of -- ice on the tongue
one single movement of the lips.
Your name is: five signs,
a ball caught in flight, a
silver bell in the mouth
a stone, cast in a quiet pool
makes the splash of your name, and
the sound is the clatter of
night hooves, loud as a thunderclap
or it speaks straight into my forehead,
shrill as the click of a cocked gun.
Your name -- how impossible, it
is a kiss on the eyes on
motionless eyelashes, chill and sweet.
Your name is a kiss of snow
a gulp of icy spring water, blue
as a dove. About your name is: sleep.
This poem is actually from another volume of hers. I don't get to read this one any time soon since the one copy has been stolen from the library. Grr.
February 1, 2016
On the whole, the English versions are consciously less emphatic, less loudly- spoken, less violent, often less jolting and disturbing than the Russian originals, says Elaine Feinstein in her afterword, and her translation is regarded as one of the best incarnations, if not the best, of Tsvetaeva in English. Often, though not always, Tsvetaeva's verse - far more so the earlier stuff (by the end I felt attuned to the changes in content and expression as she aged) - was not quite as powerful as I'd expected it to be: bland even, something missing; I would look at the words convinced that there existed a more powerful way to say the same thing (but probably one that didn't scan). Thought perhaps I should stare at each poem and meditate on the basic emotion of its contents, trying to amplify it inside. But the poetry I connect with best does not need that; it mainlines words in a way prose rarely can. And there were still some knockout moments here that made me conclude that the hypothetical expenditure of time on staring at the rest was unnecessary; there are better things to do.
So four stars not five because of all the times it was like low-alcohol beer given to someone expecting a triple vodka, or that lacklustre live album that makes you crave the studio recordings. It sounds as if more gets lost in translation from Tsvetaeva than from plenty of other writers. Yet there was more than enough interest here, with the right balance of connecting somewhat but not overwhelmingly, that I'd be happy to study these at length, examining lines, their content and meaning, without feeling like I was forced to dissect and depersonalise something precious.
Tsvetaeva's biography of intense loves and friendships with both men and women, in person and letters, reminded me of Iris Murdoch's, but she did not have the intellectual and academic career that was Murdoch's equal passion and, likely, anchor - nor her geographical luck. Tsvetaeva was born at an unfortunate time and place in history (though at least one where she was able to write and publish in the first place); regardless of social class or personal attributes, life as a Russian in the first half of the twentieth century was turbulent and perilous, and hardly conducive to becalming the craving, anxiety and loss that floods her love poems.
It was during the poems about Russian history and customs from 1915-16 that I started to get drawn into whole poems, not only odd lines: 'Some ancestor of mine'; 'Keeping an eye on the girls', 'Verses About Moscow'. I like poetry about places and things - not, perhaps among Tsvetaeva's main subjects, but good to see some here as a little relief and distraction.
Whilst the earlier love poetry had felt like faint echoes, certain verses and lines from the 1920s hit me full force as a sonic boom - and also provided a different form of relief to be found in great writing, saying things you once wanted to say, phrased better. This happened first in mourning one she had never had any personal contact with, Aleksander Blok. I had to re-read these after re-realising they had never met or written to one another, puzzled by such an outpouring and worship that speaks of sense of physical proximity. But for me they made the connection; there is another particular person they were/are about for me, as well as being an illustration of the rapture with which a religious upbringing may prime one to view a beautiful, brilliant, suffering - and in one's head, implicitly or explicitly, Christlike - present-day man. (Though it's all ecstasy and sorrow; there is no treatment of what a bloody nuisance it is besides, and of the unconscious expectations and disappointments it sets up. The scenario is different and Tsvetaeva isn't into that kind of analysis, although she can prompt it.)
Though no other whole poems struck such chords, particular lines from 'Yesterday he still looked in my eyes', and some of the 1923 poems, had the power I'd once anticipated from Tsvetaeva and stopped expecting after the dilute early verse.
Yesterday he lay at my feet. He even
compared me to the Chinese empire! Then
suddenly he let his hands fall open, and
my life fell out like a rusty kopeck.
A child-murderer, before some court
I stand loathsome and timid I am.
And yet even in Hell...
[That would feel far nearer literal to Tsvetaeva because of her daughter who died during a famine, but transposed personally as an expression of someone turning on you and suddenly hating you in a way thankfully never experienced before or since, as if you were one of the most despised things in existence. But at least later explained in textbooks.]
I ask this chair, I ask the bed: Why?
Why do I suffer and live in penury?...
He taught me to live in fire...
and then abandoned me on steppes of ice.
Though the interceding lines apportioning blame were unlike my own sense of neutral, unarguable-with event, beyond petition or reasoning like the weather is, (because that was the only way to be decent and not reduce another person's humanity by pathologising them) - this poem was an almighty flashback to years ago howling on a friend's floor [Quote from old Blur album acknowledgements: "Friends. You know who you are. You know we're grateful."] having allowed through without irony or criticism this hurricane of unique and utter bereftness and damnation, because it needed to blow itself out and be felt completely for there to be any hope of ever getting rid of it. Steppes; steppes? I visualised being in a desert; the horizon-wide flat bleakness is the same, differing only by what she and I saw in books as children. Quietly ripped open again, I curled in a ball to allow the sides to knit back together once more.
(Later I question whether the words would have had so much power without some common experience, but these, I think, are still among the more powerful images in this translation, especially compared with the early poems.)
I have limited time for those who dismiss consuming romantic love as only immature, or who invoke semantic quibbling to deem it not love at all; it is a breathtaking peak experience, an understanding of so much that has been written and thereby of others, a biochemical process; and the disapproval comes from a puritanical and authoritarian place of "we know what's good for you" rather than respecting the self-determination of people doing stuff one personally wouldn't. But that doesn't mean that in reading the chronological sequence of poems I didn't hope for Tsvetaeva to get to a point of having finally fulfilled whatever need it was and give the rollercoaster a rest - perhaps having found the ultimate person who fitted all one's ancient templates and could not be bettered, and/or the sense of having oneself become what was once seen only in those few others. Because living like that is tiring, time-consuming, disruptive and sometimes expensive, and year-on-year she seems to have been through it more than most who know it in the first place. It was tiring to read too; I kept thinking, "you poor thing". It inspires poems, but did she find the experience itself inspiring and exhilarating despite - or even partly because of - the pain? Here it just sounds like it hurts. And sometimes I was shaking my head at her lack of hesitation and doubt about her adherence to lovers. Guiltily recognising the peculiar form of jealousy of some successor who wasn't as interesting as she was, merely less complicated, but tutting at her lack of tutting at herself. (Wanted to ask did she admire and like successors who were as interesting and less complicated, glad for the pair of them, as I do, but then there are far fewer in the world of her magnitude.) Sad that she never seemed to have a break with less fraught, more fun encounters, felt that equal never mates with equal, and that she apparently never had her turn as more worshipped than worshipper. Strange in a way, because she was so brilliant, and in her own time acknowledged to be so: despite various artistic counterexamples, I always felt on some level that if one was brilliant enough and able to use one's talents sufficiently, there was no reason or need to end up in such abject worship of all aspects of another; one may end up being that person for someone else, but then they might just obstruct one's work. It was a reminder that the psychology of these things obviously does not work the same for everyone; attachment style and talent don't necessarily correlate. Who knows how much of this love drama was some attachment thing more or less regardless of gender? (There are certainly men like that too and they've churned out a lot of poetry of wildly varying quality.)
Tsvetaeva apparently idealised her female and male lovers in similar ways. (I was disappointed that the 'Girlfriend' sequence wasn't more powerful in translation, though the underlying feelings were similar to those in other poems.) But it was men about whom she seems to have felt the greater pain: how much did that, as Tsvetaeva felt in some poems, result from the conditioning of women and men and their attitudes and behaviour to one another?
After some practice with the idea:
(Doesn’t love me? I’ll mount a horse,
and ride off into battle...
until I am carried high
into the blue above us
at last – on a red horse –
by my own Genius! )
from 1921, before she fell harder than ever before, I wonder if she later really got there on some level; the late poems here feel like it (for it seems to have been the prospect of starvation and the impossibility of getting work that prompted her to do herself in, not a relationship). This collection is not the entire corpus, so it's hard to tell, but a long and substantial poem about a trusty desk, and transcendent multi-topic verses including the metaphysical and political hint at a wider consciousness.
I'd planned to read two versions of Tsvetaeva in succession when the poems initially did not seem that heavy - not so now, though I did like what I've seen of the David McDuff translation, which also has an excellent introduction.
So four stars not five because of all the times it was like low-alcohol beer given to someone expecting a triple vodka, or that lacklustre live album that makes you crave the studio recordings. It sounds as if more gets lost in translation from Tsvetaeva than from plenty of other writers. Yet there was more than enough interest here, with the right balance of connecting somewhat but not overwhelmingly, that I'd be happy to study these at length, examining lines, their content and meaning, without feeling like I was forced to dissect and depersonalise something precious.
Tsvetaeva's biography of intense loves and friendships with both men and women, in person and letters, reminded me of Iris Murdoch's, but she did not have the intellectual and academic career that was Murdoch's equal passion and, likely, anchor - nor her geographical luck. Tsvetaeva was born at an unfortunate time and place in history (though at least one where she was able to write and publish in the first place); regardless of social class or personal attributes, life as a Russian in the first half of the twentieth century was turbulent and perilous, and hardly conducive to becalming the craving, anxiety and loss that floods her love poems.
It was during the poems about Russian history and customs from 1915-16 that I started to get drawn into whole poems, not only odd lines: 'Some ancestor of mine'; 'Keeping an eye on the girls', 'Verses About Moscow'. I like poetry about places and things - not, perhaps among Tsvetaeva's main subjects, but good to see some here as a little relief and distraction.
Whilst the earlier love poetry had felt like faint echoes, certain verses and lines from the 1920s hit me full force as a sonic boom - and also provided a different form of relief to be found in great writing, saying things you once wanted to say, phrased better. This happened first in mourning one she had never had any personal contact with, Aleksander Blok. I had to re-read these after re-realising they had never met or written to one another, puzzled by such an outpouring and worship that speaks of sense of physical proximity. But for me they made the connection; there is another particular person they were/are about for me, as well as being an illustration of the rapture with which a religious upbringing may prime one to view a beautiful, brilliant, suffering - and in one's head, implicitly or explicitly, Christlike - present-day man. (Though it's all ecstasy and sorrow; there is no treatment of what a bloody nuisance it is besides, and of the unconscious expectations and disappointments it sets up. The scenario is different and Tsvetaeva isn't into that kind of analysis, although she can prompt it.)
Though no other whole poems struck such chords, particular lines from 'Yesterday he still looked in my eyes', and some of the 1923 poems, had the power I'd once anticipated from Tsvetaeva and stopped expecting after the dilute early verse.
Yesterday he lay at my feet. He even
compared me to the Chinese empire! Then
suddenly he let his hands fall open, and
my life fell out like a rusty kopeck.
A child-murderer, before some court
I stand loathsome and timid I am.
And yet even in Hell...
[That would feel far nearer literal to Tsvetaeva because of her daughter who died during a famine, but transposed personally as an expression of someone turning on you and suddenly hating you in a way thankfully never experienced before or since, as if you were one of the most despised things in existence. But at least later explained in textbooks.]
I ask this chair, I ask the bed: Why?
Why do I suffer and live in penury?...
He taught me to live in fire...
and then abandoned me on steppes of ice.
Though the interceding lines apportioning blame were unlike my own sense of neutral, unarguable-with event, beyond petition or reasoning like the weather is, (because that was the only way to be decent and not reduce another person's humanity by pathologising them) - this poem was an almighty flashback to years ago howling on a friend's floor [Quote from old Blur album acknowledgements: "Friends. You know who you are. You know we're grateful."] having allowed through without irony or criticism this hurricane of unique and utter bereftness and damnation, because it needed to blow itself out and be felt completely for there to be any hope of ever getting rid of it. Steppes; steppes? I visualised being in a desert; the horizon-wide flat bleakness is the same, differing only by what she and I saw in books as children. Quietly ripped open again, I curled in a ball to allow the sides to knit back together once more.
(Later I question whether the words would have had so much power without some common experience, but these, I think, are still among the more powerful images in this translation, especially compared with the early poems.)
I have limited time for those who dismiss consuming romantic love as only immature, or who invoke semantic quibbling to deem it not love at all; it is a breathtaking peak experience, an understanding of so much that has been written and thereby of others, a biochemical process; and the disapproval comes from a puritanical and authoritarian place of "we know what's good for you" rather than respecting the self-determination of people doing stuff one personally wouldn't. But that doesn't mean that in reading the chronological sequence of poems I didn't hope for Tsvetaeva to get to a point of having finally fulfilled whatever need it was and give the rollercoaster a rest - perhaps having found the ultimate person who fitted all one's ancient templates and could not be bettered, and/or the sense of having oneself become what was once seen only in those few others. Because living like that is tiring, time-consuming, disruptive and sometimes expensive, and year-on-year she seems to have been through it more than most who know it in the first place. It was tiring to read too; I kept thinking, "you poor thing". It inspires poems, but did she find the experience itself inspiring and exhilarating despite - or even partly because of - the pain? Here it just sounds like it hurts. And sometimes I was shaking my head at her lack of hesitation and doubt about her adherence to lovers. Guiltily recognising the peculiar form of jealousy of some successor who wasn't as interesting as she was, merely less complicated, but tutting at her lack of tutting at herself. (Wanted to ask did she admire and like successors who were as interesting and less complicated, glad for the pair of them, as I do, but then there are far fewer in the world of her magnitude.) Sad that she never seemed to have a break with less fraught, more fun encounters, felt that equal never mates with equal, and that she apparently never had her turn as more worshipped than worshipper. Strange in a way, because she was so brilliant, and in her own time acknowledged to be so: despite various artistic counterexamples, I always felt on some level that if one was brilliant enough and able to use one's talents sufficiently, there was no reason or need to end up in such abject worship of all aspects of another; one may end up being that person for someone else, but then they might just obstruct one's work. It was a reminder that the psychology of these things obviously does not work the same for everyone; attachment style and talent don't necessarily correlate. Who knows how much of this love drama was some attachment thing more or less regardless of gender? (There are certainly men like that too and they've churned out a lot of poetry of wildly varying quality.)
Tsvetaeva apparently idealised her female and male lovers in similar ways. (I was disappointed that the 'Girlfriend' sequence wasn't more powerful in translation, though the underlying feelings were similar to those in other poems.) But it was men about whom she seems to have felt the greater pain: how much did that, as Tsvetaeva felt in some poems, result from the conditioning of women and men and their attitudes and behaviour to one another?
After some practice with the idea:
(Doesn’t love me? I’ll mount a horse,
and ride off into battle...
until I am carried high
into the blue above us
at last – on a red horse –
by my own Genius! )
from 1921, before she fell harder than ever before, I wonder if she later really got there on some level; the late poems here feel like it (for it seems to have been the prospect of starvation and the impossibility of getting work that prompted her to do herself in, not a relationship). This collection is not the entire corpus, so it's hard to tell, but a long and substantial poem about a trusty desk, and transcendent multi-topic verses including the metaphysical and political hint at a wider consciousness.
I'd planned to read two versions of Tsvetaeva in succession when the poems initially did not seem that heavy - not so now, though I did like what I've seen of the David McDuff translation, which also has an excellent introduction.
February 10, 2016
Bloodaxe edition, translated by David McDuff
4.5 for the introduction, about a quarter of the book
3 for the poems in translation
I don't think modern rhymed translation necessarily makes poems sound trivial in English, but it needs to be done very carefully so that doesn't happen. Regardless, for me, too much of Tsvetaeva seems to get lost in translation whether rhymed or un. When particular lines, or occasionally whole poems felt most alive, it was different bits in this version and in Feinstein's Bride of Ice . McDuff's rhymed translation works best when the lines, whether there is actual enjambment or not, are constructed so that emphasis does not fall on the end of the line if the poem is spoken naturally as sentences, making the rhyme elegant, subtle and unobtrusive, and that's especially the case for poems with shorter lines. (One of the few short-lined poems that worked well here was 'The Window', which used half-rhyme.) I had hoped that the sing-song line-ends would tail off along with Tsvetaeva's juvenilia, but they always reappeared from time to time.
My greatest disappointment in Bride of Ice was the 'Girlfriend' sequence, which rarely had the magnitude of emotional power I'd expected; here it was 'Attempt at a Room'. Such a spikily modernist title, and the complex, varied, sometimes abstract subject matter, was particularly ill-suited to rhymed verse with emphasis quite often at line-end. Feinstein's translation of 'The Desk' is greatly superior to McDuff's 'Table'. Among the best in McDuff, I thought, were 'From Bon Voyages (to Osip Mandelstam) – notably, translated by an F.F. Morton - 'From Insomnia' (half-rhyme), and 'From Poems to Akhmatova' whose words were so vivid they overshadowed the rhyme.
Despite initial optimism about McDuff's translations after skimming a few, I didn't feel that much from closer reading; with Feinstein's, even if quite a lot of the poems didn't grab, there were supercharged moments which stayed with me for some time. (The next day, dialling down, I played XTC's 'The Disappointed' on repeat: same feelings; lower, very liveable magnitude; sense of universality.)
It was nonetheless interesting to see different takes on the poems in a short space of time – McDuff does at least give some idea of Tsvetaeva's structures (one just has to imagine them feeling different in another language). To read poetry of her contemporaries, I'd have to buy it, so have been making the most of access to these different Tsvetaeva translations instead. McDuff's introduction to this edition was well worth reading, for the biographical detail, the cultural context and how these relate to the poems.
Various insights from it I appreciated:
On controversial aspects of Tsvetaeva's life:
Tsvetayeva’s younger daughter, Irina, was less fortunate: weak and sickly, she developed slowly and poorly, and could hardly walk by the time she was three. The years of privation and hunger had their effect: in 1920 Irina died of malnutrition in the orphanage where Tsvetayeva had been compelled to leave her.
she had an excellent knowledge of both French and German. Yet she seems to have shared with Mandelstam an inability to “sell herself”, to have a “job”... her unconventional, uncompromising personality made her many enemies on both sides of the literary-political barricades... She was temperamentally unsuited to hackwork and worked very slowly on the translations ... which Pasternak helped to find for her. Often she went hungry.
Nonetheless, she and Mur, then aged 16½, boarded a Volga steamship with other writers’ families, bound for Kazan’ and Chistopol’. Lidia Chukovskaya, the memoirist and daughter of the poet Kornoy Chukovsky, recalls how in the course of the voyage Tsvetayeva kept returning to the subject of suicide. ‘What can you be thinking of?’ Chukovskaya remembers replying – ‘I have two children to look after.’ According to Chukovskaya, Tsvetayeva’s retort to this was: ‘But I know that my son will be better off without me….’ The boat reached Kazan’, and then Chistopol’, where most of the writers’ families got out. Tsvetayeva was not permitted to disembark there, however, and she and Mur went further, to the even more remote Yelabuga. Here she tried to find work, without success. She wrote to the Tartar Union of Writers with a plea for translation work. No reply came. [Feinstein mentions that she also travelled to Chistopol in the days before her death to look for menial work, but was not taken on.]
Cultural & artistic:
This was the period before Russia and the West became completely cut off from one another, and there was still a good deal of movement between Berlin and Paris, then the artistic capitals of Europe, and the cities of Leningrad and Moscow. The poems of Remeslo reflect the artistic and cultural ferment of the time, and indeed they are the nearest thing to “modern” poems in the whole of Tsvetayeva’s poetic output which, like that of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, is essentially conservative in aesthetic and formal terms. Some of the poems also clearly show the influence of Bely – the abundant use of the dash, and the heavily-marked rhythms derive from him.
1925. This was also the period of the great poemy (long poems) Poem of the Mountain (Poema gory) and Poem of the End (Poema kontsa). These exalted and psychologically elaborate constructions seem to reflect some intense and passionate love affair – but the details of this are hazy, and there is some reason to suppose that the poems’ basis in experience was slight, that more than anything else Tsvetayeva was “composing” life as well as poetry. This is not to say that there is anything false or artificial in the poems – rather that, as at other times in her life, Tsvetayeva used the raw material of her own existence in order to transcend it, to go beyond it. The relentless rhythms and jagged, leaping lines exude a recklessness of spirit, a Nietzschean disdain for the here and now.
4.5 for the introduction, about a quarter of the book
3 for the poems in translation
I don't think modern rhymed translation necessarily makes poems sound trivial in English, but it needs to be done very carefully so that doesn't happen. Regardless, for me, too much of Tsvetaeva seems to get lost in translation whether rhymed or un. When particular lines, or occasionally whole poems felt most alive, it was different bits in this version and in Feinstein's Bride of Ice . McDuff's rhymed translation works best when the lines, whether there is actual enjambment or not, are constructed so that emphasis does not fall on the end of the line if the poem is spoken naturally as sentences, making the rhyme elegant, subtle and unobtrusive, and that's especially the case for poems with shorter lines. (One of the few short-lined poems that worked well here was 'The Window', which used half-rhyme.) I had hoped that the sing-song line-ends would tail off along with Tsvetaeva's juvenilia, but they always reappeared from time to time.
My greatest disappointment in Bride of Ice was the 'Girlfriend' sequence, which rarely had the magnitude of emotional power I'd expected; here it was 'Attempt at a Room'. Such a spikily modernist title, and the complex, varied, sometimes abstract subject matter, was particularly ill-suited to rhymed verse with emphasis quite often at line-end. Feinstein's translation of 'The Desk' is greatly superior to McDuff's 'Table'. Among the best in McDuff, I thought, were 'From Bon Voyages (to Osip Mandelstam) – notably, translated by an F.F. Morton - 'From Insomnia' (half-rhyme), and 'From Poems to Akhmatova' whose words were so vivid they overshadowed the rhyme.
Despite initial optimism about McDuff's translations after skimming a few, I didn't feel that much from closer reading; with Feinstein's, even if quite a lot of the poems didn't grab, there were supercharged moments which stayed with me for some time. (The next day, dialling down, I played XTC's 'The Disappointed' on repeat: same feelings; lower, very liveable magnitude; sense of universality.)
It was nonetheless interesting to see different takes on the poems in a short space of time – McDuff does at least give some idea of Tsvetaeva's structures (one just has to imagine them feeling different in another language). To read poetry of her contemporaries, I'd have to buy it, so have been making the most of access to these different Tsvetaeva translations instead. McDuff's introduction to this edition was well worth reading, for the biographical detail, the cultural context and how these relate to the poems.
Various insights from it I appreciated:
On controversial aspects of Tsvetaeva's life:
Tsvetayeva’s younger daughter, Irina, was less fortunate: weak and sickly, she developed slowly and poorly, and could hardly walk by the time she was three. The years of privation and hunger had their effect: in 1920 Irina died of malnutrition in the orphanage where Tsvetayeva had been compelled to leave her.
she had an excellent knowledge of both French and German. Yet she seems to have shared with Mandelstam an inability to “sell herself”, to have a “job”... her unconventional, uncompromising personality made her many enemies on both sides of the literary-political barricades... She was temperamentally unsuited to hackwork and worked very slowly on the translations ... which Pasternak helped to find for her. Often she went hungry.
Nonetheless, she and Mur, then aged 16½, boarded a Volga steamship with other writers’ families, bound for Kazan’ and Chistopol’. Lidia Chukovskaya, the memoirist and daughter of the poet Kornoy Chukovsky, recalls how in the course of the voyage Tsvetayeva kept returning to the subject of suicide. ‘What can you be thinking of?’ Chukovskaya remembers replying – ‘I have two children to look after.’ According to Chukovskaya, Tsvetayeva’s retort to this was: ‘But I know that my son will be better off without me….’ The boat reached Kazan’, and then Chistopol’, where most of the writers’ families got out. Tsvetayeva was not permitted to disembark there, however, and she and Mur went further, to the even more remote Yelabuga. Here she tried to find work, without success. She wrote to the Tartar Union of Writers with a plea for translation work. No reply came. [Feinstein mentions that she also travelled to Chistopol in the days before her death to look for menial work, but was not taken on.]
Cultural & artistic:
This was the period before Russia and the West became completely cut off from one another, and there was still a good deal of movement between Berlin and Paris, then the artistic capitals of Europe, and the cities of Leningrad and Moscow. The poems of Remeslo reflect the artistic and cultural ferment of the time, and indeed they are the nearest thing to “modern” poems in the whole of Tsvetayeva’s poetic output which, like that of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, is essentially conservative in aesthetic and formal terms. Some of the poems also clearly show the influence of Bely – the abundant use of the dash, and the heavily-marked rhythms derive from him.
1925. This was also the period of the great poemy (long poems) Poem of the Mountain (Poema gory) and Poem of the End (Poema kontsa). These exalted and psychologically elaborate constructions seem to reflect some intense and passionate love affair – but the details of this are hazy, and there is some reason to suppose that the poems’ basis in experience was slight, that more than anything else Tsvetayeva was “composing” life as well as poetry. This is not to say that there is anything false or artificial in the poems – rather that, as at other times in her life, Tsvetayeva used the raw material of her own existence in order to transcend it, to go beyond it. The relentless rhythms and jagged, leaping lines exude a recklessness of spirit, a Nietzschean disdain for the here and now.
August 28, 2022
(have re-read, both in Russian and English this time, much broken meaning in the translations but she still packs a tragic punch regardless, well worth reading.)
Fair, tragic, talented Marina. The Sylvia Plath of Russia.
I recommend her Poem of the Mountain (with a semi-decent translation here and the ever fascinating Poem of the End (with a semi-decent translation here).
"В ворохах сонного пуха:
Водопад, пены холмы —
Новизной, странной для слуха,
Вместо: я — тронное: мы…"
(In heaps of sleepy fluff, and
waterfalls, hills of foam, there is
a new sound, strange to my hearing,
instead of I - a regal we...
* * *
Previous review:
Excerpt from Letters: Summer 1926, about the three-way correspondence between Rilke, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak:
"Anyway, what happened next was that Tsvetayeva began to feel more deeply for Rilke than she felt for Pasternak, and wrote to him that she wanted to come to Germany to meet him. “You can’t,” he wrote back. “You can’t meet me.”
This only inflamed her passion. She kept writing, kept insisting she was coming to meet him—and then he wrote, “You can’t meet me—I’m dying.”
“I forbid you to die,” she wrote back. But he died anyway, and the triangle was broken.
Tsvetayeva and Pasternak continued to write sonnets to each other, she in Moscow, he in Paris. Then, because she was married to a White Russian who’d been imprisoned by the Communists, she had to leave Russia. She went to the south of France, but then her money ran out and she had to go back to Russia. And she and Pasternak decided that, after four or five years of this passionate correspondence, she would stop in the Gare de Lyon in Paris on her way home, and they would actually meet for the first time.
Both of them were terribly nervous when they met at last. She had an old Russian suitcase with her, so overstuffed with her belongings that it was falling apart: seeing her struggle to close the bag, Pasternak ran off and got a piece of rope. He tied the suitcase shut.
Now they were just sitting there, barely able to speak—their writing had taken them so far that when they actually found themselves in each other’s presence, the emotions were overpowering. Pasternak told her he was going to get a pack of cigarettes—and he went off again, and never came back. Tsvetayeva sat there, waiting and waiting, and finally it was time to board her train. So she took the suitcase fixed with the rope and went back to Russia.
She returned to Moscow. Her husband was in prison; she had no money. So she went to Odessa, and
there, desperate to survive, she wrote a letter to the writers’ club, asking if she could be their cleaning woman. They wrote back that her help was not needed.
And so she took the same rope Pasternak had used to fix her broken suitcase, and hanged herself."
* * *
In the heaps of gorse, coloured dim
among islands of tortured pines ...
(In delirium above the level of
life)
-Take me then. I'm yours.
* * *
I catch a movement of his
lips, but he won't
speak -You don't love me?
-Yes, but in torment
drained and driven to death
(He looks round like an eagle)
-You call this home? It's
in the heart. - What literature!
For love is flesh, it is a
flower flooded with blood.
Did you think it was just a
little chat across a table
a snatched hour and back home again
the way gentlemen and ladies
play at it? Either love is
-A shrine?
or else a scar.
* * *
Separation-in what language is it,
when the meaning itself doesn't exist?
To separate
means we have to become
single creatures
we who had grown into one.
Fair, tragic, talented Marina. The Sylvia Plath of Russia.
I recommend her Poem of the Mountain (with a semi-decent translation here and the ever fascinating Poem of the End (with a semi-decent translation here).
"В ворохах сонного пуха:
Водопад, пены холмы —
Новизной, странной для слуха,
Вместо: я — тронное: мы…"
(In heaps of sleepy fluff, and
waterfalls, hills of foam, there is
a new sound, strange to my hearing,
instead of I - a regal we...
* * *
Previous review:
Excerpt from Letters: Summer 1926, about the three-way correspondence between Rilke, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak:
"Anyway, what happened next was that Tsvetayeva began to feel more deeply for Rilke than she felt for Pasternak, and wrote to him that she wanted to come to Germany to meet him. “You can’t,” he wrote back. “You can’t meet me.”
This only inflamed her passion. She kept writing, kept insisting she was coming to meet him—and then he wrote, “You can’t meet me—I’m dying.”
“I forbid you to die,” she wrote back. But he died anyway, and the triangle was broken.
Tsvetayeva and Pasternak continued to write sonnets to each other, she in Moscow, he in Paris. Then, because she was married to a White Russian who’d been imprisoned by the Communists, she had to leave Russia. She went to the south of France, but then her money ran out and she had to go back to Russia. And she and Pasternak decided that, after four or five years of this passionate correspondence, she would stop in the Gare de Lyon in Paris on her way home, and they would actually meet for the first time.
Both of them were terribly nervous when they met at last. She had an old Russian suitcase with her, so overstuffed with her belongings that it was falling apart: seeing her struggle to close the bag, Pasternak ran off and got a piece of rope. He tied the suitcase shut.
Now they were just sitting there, barely able to speak—their writing had taken them so far that when they actually found themselves in each other’s presence, the emotions were overpowering. Pasternak told her he was going to get a pack of cigarettes—and he went off again, and never came back. Tsvetayeva sat there, waiting and waiting, and finally it was time to board her train. So she took the suitcase fixed with the rope and went back to Russia.
She returned to Moscow. Her husband was in prison; she had no money. So she went to Odessa, and
there, desperate to survive, she wrote a letter to the writers’ club, asking if she could be their cleaning woman. They wrote back that her help was not needed.
And so she took the same rope Pasternak had used to fix her broken suitcase, and hanged herself."
* * *
In the heaps of gorse, coloured dim
among islands of tortured pines ...
(In delirium above the level of
life)
-Take me then. I'm yours.
* * *
I catch a movement of his
lips, but he won't
speak -You don't love me?
-Yes, but in torment
drained and driven to death
(He looks round like an eagle)
-You call this home? It's
in the heart. - What literature!
For love is flesh, it is a
flower flooded with blood.
Did you think it was just a
little chat across a table
a snatched hour and back home again
the way gentlemen and ladies
play at it? Either love is
-A shrine?
or else a scar.
* * *
Separation-in what language is it,
when the meaning itself doesn't exist?
To separate
means we have to become
single creatures
we who had grown into one.
December 16, 2020
Review
Selected Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva
A great work is scattered throughout this collection of the Russian Contemporary poet whose fondness is shared by many other Literary gems like Rilke, Akhmatova (whom she later confronts in her poems) and Mandelstam. This not only shares the reflection of her genius powerplay in words but also the ridicules and tragedies in her life.
Starts with the light coo of an early born infant, the poems in the first few pages are free verse with languid lines and verses contributing to stanzas. In "I know the Truth" Tsvetaeva ends the poem with one powerful verse and it's extension whose affect I did not anticipate in the later section of the collection. And it goes;
"And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we who never let each other sleep above it."
Yes, there are so many expressions that I could say to that. Can I use the word "Goddamn"? It isn't poetic but that's how I felt throughout the book, trust me on this because I never let any seriousness get off about poetry.
The first few poems will feel like a light pat on the readers' backs. After Verses about Moscow, everything sounds as if it is tormented but honey dipped in passion. But, tell me, which poet or person could be passionate and not tormented? (See, there is no question of 'Either', 'Or')
Tsvetaeva starts to cast a spell on you from/after From INSOMNIA. There are a few verses that I would like to highlight in order to give examples on the mastery of this contemporary gem:
/Look at my steps—following—nobody,/ look at my shadow, nothing's here for me/
Sometimes I feel and wonder how poets bleed out and with reading them how we too slightly get cuts all over the body. But that is the most and least we could feel, the truly tormented is the poet.
In addition to writing poems to cities in Russia (formerly USSR) Tsvetaeva also contributed her sacredness in her words to other Russian poets like Akhmatova, Blok, Mayakovsky. One of the verses go like, "I stand head in my hands thinking how unimportant are the traps we set for one another". What I further witnessed in this collection is that Marina not only imposes passion in all her poems but also questions the very nature of humanity and conscience—which—I found—brilliant.
In addition to that, Tsvetaeva challenges how in the classic writings of Shakespeare, women are seldom saved. To critique in the form of poetry in a weapon that looks like a double-edged sword. Something that I can amplify with her own verse:
/this is inhuman— yet it's mine/
The poet talks about longing as though this word has masked her soul and has not left even after she slept in her grave. This is how poets haunt us, their words are truly enough.
The poet has philosophical refrences too. Yes! Just when I thought this couldn't diversify more. I always fail myself with my anticipations and heal my failure with devouring more poetry.
There is no rigid form although Free-Verse is mostly present. Tsvetaeva asks, questions her readers and strikingly herself (so it seems) in her poems when there are torments beyond answers from the universe.
/what is it the brain alerts to and the heart drops at?/
Tsvetaeva intimidates. Her poems and specific verses are enough to raise chills down to each neuron of an existing being with knowledge.
To end, I would like to add a few lines that left me how her poems portrayed her in From INSOMNIA:
"In this most Christian of worlds
all poets are Jews."
"So let us not use up our rhymes over nothing."
—Tiyasha Chaudhury
To find more posts on books please find me on Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr as @tiyashachaudhuryreads
Listed Reviewer for Major Global Publication Houses.
Selected Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva
A great work is scattered throughout this collection of the Russian Contemporary poet whose fondness is shared by many other Literary gems like Rilke, Akhmatova (whom she later confronts in her poems) and Mandelstam. This not only shares the reflection of her genius powerplay in words but also the ridicules and tragedies in her life.
Starts with the light coo of an early born infant, the poems in the first few pages are free verse with languid lines and verses contributing to stanzas. In "I know the Truth" Tsvetaeva ends the poem with one powerful verse and it's extension whose affect I did not anticipate in the later section of the collection. And it goes;
"And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we who never let each other sleep above it."
Yes, there are so many expressions that I could say to that. Can I use the word "Goddamn"? It isn't poetic but that's how I felt throughout the book, trust me on this because I never let any seriousness get off about poetry.
The first few poems will feel like a light pat on the readers' backs. After Verses about Moscow, everything sounds as if it is tormented but honey dipped in passion. But, tell me, which poet or person could be passionate and not tormented? (See, there is no question of 'Either', 'Or')
Tsvetaeva starts to cast a spell on you from/after From INSOMNIA. There are a few verses that I would like to highlight in order to give examples on the mastery of this contemporary gem:
/Look at my steps—following—nobody,/ look at my shadow, nothing's here for me/
Sometimes I feel and wonder how poets bleed out and with reading them how we too slightly get cuts all over the body. But that is the most and least we could feel, the truly tormented is the poet.
In addition to writing poems to cities in Russia (formerly USSR) Tsvetaeva also contributed her sacredness in her words to other Russian poets like Akhmatova, Blok, Mayakovsky. One of the verses go like, "I stand head in my hands thinking how unimportant are the traps we set for one another". What I further witnessed in this collection is that Marina not only imposes passion in all her poems but also questions the very nature of humanity and conscience—which—I found—brilliant.
In addition to that, Tsvetaeva challenges how in the classic writings of Shakespeare, women are seldom saved. To critique in the form of poetry in a weapon that looks like a double-edged sword. Something that I can amplify with her own verse:
/this is inhuman— yet it's mine/
The poet talks about longing as though this word has masked her soul and has not left even after she slept in her grave. This is how poets haunt us, their words are truly enough.
The poet has philosophical refrences too. Yes! Just when I thought this couldn't diversify more. I always fail myself with my anticipations and heal my failure with devouring more poetry.
There is no rigid form although Free-Verse is mostly present. Tsvetaeva asks, questions her readers and strikingly herself (so it seems) in her poems when there are torments beyond answers from the universe.
/what is it the brain alerts to and the heart drops at?/
Tsvetaeva intimidates. Her poems and specific verses are enough to raise chills down to each neuron of an existing being with knowledge.
To end, I would like to add a few lines that left me how her poems portrayed her in From INSOMNIA:
"In this most Christian of worlds
all poets are Jews."
"So let us not use up our rhymes over nothing."
—Tiyasha Chaudhury
To find more posts on books please find me on Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr as @tiyashachaudhuryreads
Listed Reviewer for Major Global Publication Houses.
June 25, 2010
Wait, I'm confused. The book description above is the same as for the Tsvetaeva collection Elaine Feinstein translated for Penguin, and carries the same reader reviews. The Bloodaxe book I'm holding is translated by David McDuff, and it's awful. It's awful because it rhymes. I know Tsvetaeva in Russian rhymes, and the boxy quatrains he favors are probably hers, too. I know the temptation clever translators feel to stretch their chops and replicate rhyme in English. I know that given the rich milieu she wrote in, with its Symbolists and Supremacists, Acmeists and Absurdits, Formalists and Futurists, Constructivites and ZAUMites, Tsvetaeva's choice, when she chose it, to write in rhyme and traditional Russian meters was a significant one, and we ought to know about it. But please, please can we learn it in a footnote? Since Modernism, rhyme connotes to the English ear cleverness, primness, children's games, comic verse, and conservative "New Formalist" poetics. Doesn't matter how well it's done, or how common it is in the home language; rhyme in English sounds like everything the last 100 years isn't. We've lost the ability to hear it. Translators shouldn't use it. They shouldn't use it for Dante, they shouldn't use it for Baudelaire, and they should be banned absolutely from using it on any poet who wrote in the 20th century, especially one like Tsvetaeva who's known for her dense viruosto experiments with sound. In McDuff's hands, Tsvetsaeva sounds a few steps below AE Stallings, and several floors down from Lewis Carroll. I doubt it's this that makes Tsvetaeva one of the most valued Russian poets of the last century, and if it is, McDuff fails to explain why with industrial-grade versifying like his.
March 31, 2017
I'm not normally one to jump into poetry. I could probably count on one hand the number of anthologies I've read. It's not that I have a particular dislike for it, more that I tend to be swayed by context and the sense of progression found in novels. As thats the case, thematic poetry books, absent from any real personal context irk me a bit.
Given the frankly more than ample amount of free time I find myself with recently It felt it right to expand my literary horizons a bit. Tsvetaevna wasn't somebody I was familiar with when I began reading. It turns out that lack of context didn't in any way hamper the enjoyment of her poems. The poems, written as they are in chronological order from 1909 to 1938, tell a story of increasing despair and loss. Progressing through the book, I felt I began to comprehend how her mindset and emotional state developed as she aged. Unrequited love, abandoning her child and The Russian Revolution seemed to pull her apart. Marina Tsvetaevna was obviously an individual that suffered, and her poems speak volumes to this effect.
Given the frankly more than ample amount of free time I find myself with recently It felt it right to expand my literary horizons a bit. Tsvetaevna wasn't somebody I was familiar with when I began reading. It turns out that lack of context didn't in any way hamper the enjoyment of her poems. The poems, written as they are in chronological order from 1909 to 1938, tell a story of increasing despair and loss. Progressing through the book, I felt I began to comprehend how her mindset and emotional state developed as she aged. Unrequited love, abandoning her child and The Russian Revolution seemed to pull her apart. Marina Tsvetaevna was obviously an individual that suffered, and her poems speak volumes to this effect.
October 9, 2019
Fortuitous timing to be reading the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva on this day, the 127th anniversary of her birth in Moscow.
"Black as - the centre of an eye, the centre, a blackness that sucks at light.
I love your vigilance
Night, first mother of songs, give me voice to sing of you..."
From 'Insomnia' by Tsvetaeva in SELECTED POEMS, translated from the Russian by Elaine Feinstein / original 1916, English 1971.
A tragic life, spanning the Revolution, exile in Paris and Prague, deaths of her husband and daughter, and finally her own suicide... Her words remain, and as one critic put it:
"Her poetry is a mighty Niagara of passion, pain, metaphor, and music."
Also of great interest and follow up reading required - she had a long and lively three-way letter correspondence with Boris Pastenak and Rainer Maria Rilke in the 1920s/30s. Added the book of translated correspondence (from NYRB) to my list. Haven't read Pastenak yet, but loved Rilke's Letters to A Young Poet...
"Black as - the centre of an eye, the centre, a blackness that sucks at light.
I love your vigilance
Night, first mother of songs, give me voice to sing of you..."
From 'Insomnia' by Tsvetaeva in SELECTED POEMS, translated from the Russian by Elaine Feinstein / original 1916, English 1971.
A tragic life, spanning the Revolution, exile in Paris and Prague, deaths of her husband and daughter, and finally her own suicide... Her words remain, and as one critic put it:
"Her poetry is a mighty Niagara of passion, pain, metaphor, and music."
Also of great interest and follow up reading required - she had a long and lively three-way letter correspondence with Boris Pastenak and Rainer Maria Rilke in the 1920s/30s. Added the book of translated correspondence (from NYRB) to my list. Haven't read Pastenak yet, but loved Rilke's Letters to A Young Poet...
March 24, 2015
He once rode into me as if
through lands of
miracles and fire, with all
the power of poetry, and
I was: dry, sandy, without day.
He used poetry
to invade my depths, like those of
any other country!
Listen to this story of two
souls, without jealousy:
we entered one another's eyes
as if they were oases–
I took him into me as if he were
a god, in passion,
simply because of a charming tremor
in his young throat.
Without a name he sank into me. But now
he's gone. Don't search for him.
All deserts forget the thousands of
those who sleep in them.
And afterwards the Sahara in one
seething collapse will
cover you also with sand like sprinkled
foam. And be your hill!
through lands of
miracles and fire, with all
the power of poetry, and
I was: dry, sandy, without day.
He used poetry
to invade my depths, like those of
any other country!
Listen to this story of two
souls, without jealousy:
we entered one another's eyes
as if they were oases–
I took him into me as if he were
a god, in passion,
simply because of a charming tremor
in his young throat.
Without a name he sank into me. But now
he's gone. Don't search for him.
All deserts forget the thousands of
those who sleep in them.
And afterwards the Sahara in one
seething collapse will
cover you also with sand like sprinkled
foam. And be your hill!
July 19, 2014
Tsvetaeva is one tough nut to crack. Her poetry has this searingly personal intensity. Like you're with her in a hermetically sealed room watching her stab wildly out at the dark with a knife. I could never figure out who or what she's trying to confront, her absentee husband? an affair? the stalinist purges? having to put her daughter in an orphanage because she couldn't afford to feed her? She has so much to be burned up and consumed by emotionally. Maybe she's just railing against life itself. It certainly dealt her a shitty shitty hand.
February 10, 2021
Olha, eu posso tolerar um poeta russo que seja anti-revolução desde o início como a Tsvetayeva foi desde que os poemas injetem uma potência extra-humana enquanto arte, mas você pega uma antologia dela e um dos destaques é algo intitulado "Em louvor dos ricos" e seu conteúdo é real e não irônico, então você não quer ter nada a ver com esses escritos e a admiração pelos outros poemas se esvai em um segundo.
December 26, 2018
El libro se cae en la traducción. La opción conservadora de mantener la rima limita en exceso los poemas, que en el caso de esta autora, son potentes más por su fondo que por su forma. No obstante, como obra de iniciación es buena tanto por lo completo del estudio preliminar que funciona como prólogo, como en la exploración de los leitmotivs de la poeta.
February 14, 2016
No he leído esta antología sino una pequeña selección que encontré en pdf por la red. El documento contiene una breve biografía de Marina Tsvetaeva y los siguientes poemas: El poeta, Insinuarse, Yo te reconquisto, A Ajmatova, A Alia, A Boris Pasternak, A Rainer María Rilke, A ti, dentro de un siglo, Bendigo la labor nuestra de cada día, Comediante 4, En la frente besar-penas borrar..., Es sencilla mi ropa..., Insomnio 2, Insomnio 10, Insomnio 11, Libertad salvaje, Magdalena, Mis versos, escritos tan temprano..., Nostalgia de la patria: ¡Qué fastidio!..., Poema del fin, Psique, Regreso del líder, Se ha ido. Ya no como..., Tu alma y la mía son gemelas...y Versos a Blok.
Poesía que te lleva, que te sacude y que te emociona.
Ganas inmensas de salir corriendo a la librería para comprar todo lo que escribió esta mujer.
Poesía que te lleva, que te sacude y que te emociona.
Ganas inmensas de salir corriendo a la librería para comprar todo lo que escribió esta mujer.
March 5, 2021
Qué ganas de saber ruso para poder leer estos poemas en su idioma original. Aún así, la intensidad de Marina traspasa la traducción españolísima, directo de sus vísceras a mi corazón. Esta mujer ufff, para la próxima que me mate no más. No hay respiros.
"¡Dios, no juzgues - ¡Tú no has sido mujer en la tierra!"
"¡Dios, no juzgues - ¡Tú no has sido mujer en la tierra!"
June 21, 2009
It's generally agreed that there were four great 20th-century Russian poets: Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Pasternak. Akhmatova herself, with her characteristic lack of false modesty, acknowledged this fact in her poem "There Are Four of Us." For me, the fact of this tetrad (two females and two males) brings to mind the fact that Leda, when impregnated by Zeus-disguised-as-a-swan, had four offspring: two girls (Helen and Clytemnestra) and two boys (Castor and Pollux). Akhmatova, who was conventionally beautiful and had many admirers, was the most like Helen of Troy; Tsvetaeva, who was more sallow, snappish, abrasive, and unfeminine (by conventional standards), was more like the embittered Clytemnestra, in my opinion. Perhaps this is why I identify more with Tsvetaeva than with Akhmatova; her poems about longing for love are that much more real...
I was first drawn to Tsvetaeva because she seemed to share my fascination with Penthesilea and Lilith, two of the most interesting female characters in Greek mythology and Judeo-Christian mythology, respectively: two strong, fierce, exotic, somewhat-superhuman females who were spurned and/or martyred by their soulmates (Achilles and Adam) in order to make room for more conventional wives (Deidamia and Eve). One can't help but like a woman poet who seems to consider these two characters to be among her spiritual forebears.
On an unrelated note, I think an illuminating parallel could be drawn between Tsvetaeva's poem "Bus" and Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Moose," two long meandering poems about long meandering bus journeys that take a magical, unexpected turn near the end. I wonder if this has been done yet.
I was first drawn to Tsvetaeva because she seemed to share my fascination with Penthesilea and Lilith, two of the most interesting female characters in Greek mythology and Judeo-Christian mythology, respectively: two strong, fierce, exotic, somewhat-superhuman females who were spurned and/or martyred by their soulmates (Achilles and Adam) in order to make room for more conventional wives (Deidamia and Eve). One can't help but like a woman poet who seems to consider these two characters to be among her spiritual forebears.
On an unrelated note, I think an illuminating parallel could be drawn between Tsvetaeva's poem "Bus" and Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Moose," two long meandering poems about long meandering bus journeys that take a magical, unexpected turn near the end. I wonder if this has been done yet.
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