Marina Tsvetaeva- the Essential Poetry Read online

  MARINA TSVETAEVA

  THE ESSENTIAL POETRY

  Marina Tsvetaeva

  MARINA TSVETAEVA: THE ESSENTIAL POETRY

  Translated by

  Michael M. Naydan and Slava I. Yastremski With a Translator’s Introduction and

  With a special poet’s Guest Introduction by Tess Gallagher

  Book created by Max Mendor

  © 2015, Glagoslav, Nederland

  Glagoslav Publications Ltd

  88-90 Hatton Garden

  EC1N 8PN London

  United Kingdom

  www.glagoslav.com

  ISBN: 9781784379605

  This book is in copyright. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This translation is dedicated to Carol Ueland,

  a fellow traveler along the poetry road

  and a great friend and colleague over the years.

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  Acknowledgments

  “There is an hour for those words…” first appeared in Confrontation No. 48-49 (Spring/Summer 1992). The following translations appeared initially in Marina Tsvetaeva After Russia Trans. Michael M. Naydan with Slava Yastremski (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1992): “Nocturnal whispers: a hand…,” “The Balcony,” “Someone rides to mortal victory...,” “With what inspiration…,” “There are ashes of treasures…,” “Ophelia to Hamlet,” “Ophelia in Defense of the Queen,” “Wires,” “In Praise of Time,” “Dialogue of Hamlet with his Conscience,” “A Minute,” “The Prague Knight,” “Nocturnal Places,” “An Attempt at Jealousy,” and “A yataghan? A fire?….” Most of the translations published in the After Russia collection have been revised for this edition.

  Extra special thanks to Tess Gallagher for her insightful suggestions on the final version of this manuscript that have served to fine tune these translations and also for her kindness in providing her poet’s guest introduction to the volume.

  Our special gratitude to Max Mendor for his patience and all his meticulous efforts in designing this volume.

  Translating the fine excess of spirit in Marina Tsvetaeva

  Marina Tsvetaeva holds a very special place in my memory of the search for women writers who might offer examples of what to admire and to which we might aspire.

  The early 1970s female models for young women poets like myself, as we began to form our poetic voices, were either hermetic such as Emily Dickinson—who was shuttered away, with her bounty hidden in mason jars because her genius had been thwarted by male publishing predilections—or at the other end of the scale, the explosive cauldron of pent up righteous anger and truth-telling of Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton—for which one was grateful, while feeling guiltily that one had perhaps been ritually saved by their suicides from similar psychic trauma.

  When translations by Stanley Kunitz and others of Tsvetaeva’s contemporary luminary Anna Akmatova began to be published, I consequently felt myself drinking deeply of the latter’s gravitas, a kind of dignity and regal purity, a seemingly uncrushable spirit, a poet who, while representing the weight of oppression of those times under Stalin, had managed to become a fortress unto herself, yet who would come to embody that time.

  But Marina Tsvetaeva was another equally powerful and compelling voice emerging from Russia. I truly believe that Kunitz (an excellent translator of Akhmatova and, who eventually became my mentor after I wrote thanking him for those poems) was really thinking of Tsvetaeva’s influence on me when he referred to my work as possessing a “fine excess of spirit.” Akhmatova held her truths close to the bone so we were able to suck the marrow of those cold Russian realities, but Tsvetaeva’s spirit could not articulate or survive without soaring.

  In my early readings of Tsvetaeva it is precisely this excess, this sense that life is at once abundant and dire that attracted me, and further, that at life’s bleakest moments, one might be lifted by love and language into something surpassing the merely mortal. These new rangier, emotionally freighted translations of Tsvetaeva by Michael Naydan and Slava Yastremski, the latter a native Russian speaker and professor at Bucknell University, and the former a professor and translator at Penn State University, who have translated Russian prose and poetry for the past forty years, make these qualities much more strongly available to me. Across the translations of Akhmatova there still remains only one Akhmatova for me. But with Tsvetaeva there exist many Tsvetaevas, and these further inflections are worth discovering in this considerable accomplishment.

  The truth of this multiplicity of Tsvetaevas was brought strongly home to me when I was fortunate enough to attend a marvelous program presented in Dublin of Tsvetaeva’s work translated into Irish. The translator herself, Dairena Ní Chinnéide, gave an unforgettable voicing of these poems, against the excellent English translations read commandingly by their creator Elaine Feinstein. Next to the English emerged this Irish spitfire Tsvetaeva, who was guttural and utterly tenacious, imperious even. Her language in Irish, a spiritual spiraling to a pinnacle, carried us into the vastness of Tvetaeva’s imagination, which is always a feeling of going toward something as much as it is a rendering of what one could actually possess.

  These translations offered by Naydan and Yastremski seem to closely accompany the Tsvetaeva who really wants to love like the gods, not like a mere human being. She changes the entire scale of our expectation of how one loves and whom one loves. For her personally, this became a recipe for loss since it was not easy to find lovers who could soar with her. And of course those heights could not be maintained, even when she chose poets as love mates whether actualized (such as her early female lover Sophia Parnok) or kindred in spirit (Blok, Rilke, Akhmatova) or somewhere in between (Mandelstam and Pasternak).

  What I became more aware of while reading these translations is how Tsvetaeva uses her poetry to regain her emotional balance. Instead of cutting a lover off for leaving her, or becoming the victim, she turns the tables on them and lets them feel what they have lost in abandoning their love of her. This was a newly articulated paradigm for women poets all over the world trying to do more than lick wounds in the stance of a victim.

  In placing Tsvetaeva’s appeal to American contemporary poetry of the present and myself in the 1970s, I believe she has been the more dangerous and unwieldy model when compared to Akhmatova, who became so important to us as a sign of stature under political and emotional duress, attracting translators such as Jane Kenyon whose own work was greatly emboldened by Akhmatova. For all the possible range of voices open to women poets, what still claims central respect in the American canon and critical arena, truncated as that apparatus may be, seems fairly “reeled in”—selves in chiarascuro—emotional cargoes held close to the chest. We seem to have a kind of “cool hand Luke” censor built into both female and male engendered poetry—but especially operative toward poetry written by women.

  When one reads Tsvetaeva in Naydan and Yastremksi’s translations, I find something restored to her that I had deeply sensed, yet could not quite experience: a rough grasping toward language that is willing for the inelegant if it serves the passion of her impulse in the moment. Also present here is the Tsvetaeva who lets—rather who encourages—the poem to carry her off on its wild galloping back. The wonder is how she revisits the enigma of her life situations in the poems and extends this wildness, line-by-line, verse-by-verse, bringing that untamed quality forward as a virtue.


  How much we would have lost had Tsvetaeva not formed this incremental way of working backward and forward at the same time. This process, visible to me in these translations, certified and extended her power as we follow her, reassessing and adding like box cars, the next installment of her emotional but galvanized offering.

  Unlike what I sense about Akhmatova, I never feel Tsvetaeva towering apart from me. She is always a woman loving like a woman—heedless and remorselessly, full of savoring and overreach, but haughty too and in the plenitude of her beauty, both physical and spiritual. Because of that very face-to-face quality, that open admission of love, given in a holy register, yet human too in its loss and sorrow, we all the more accompany her. There is something swashbuckling and Joan of Arcish, something dashing in her when one has more of the punctuation as she used it given in this translation. The plenitude of dashes and exclamations are important musical scorings for her and rendered closely here.

  Perhaps one can say these translations excel in not being too smoothed out with housekeeping that could subdue the spirit in Tsvetaeva’s case. We need both kinds of translations, of course, those that let a writer wear fully the stature of the English she might have given us, had she written in English, but also a translation, such as this one, which allows us the sometimes ragged and see-through of English as a cracked vessel, which can’t quite carry, but miraculously does carry—this most venturing, most high stakes Russian spender of the heart’s meaty core—Marina Tsvetaeva.

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  Tess Gallagher

  Bay Street, Pt. Angeles, Washington

  August 2014

  The seven snakeskins of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry

  Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry is at times not easy to comprehend in the original Russian, much less in translation. A terse, elliptical style with myriad dashes and exclamation points characterizes much of her mature verse, as does a verbal playfulness that has multiple layers of meaning both direct and implied or echoed. Her poems often contain auditory rebuses that require some effort to solve. Readers solve them by filling in the gaps left by ellipses. We as translators must do the same. Other poetic features that Tsvetaeva’s readers encounter include, for example, colloquialisms that she puts into conversation with Old Church Slavonicisms, fusing elements of the past and a lofty style with her colloquial present, all done in an innovative way. As Tsvetaeva herself has indicated, she was happy for the “miracle of understanding” of just a single reader. That “miracle of understanding” over time has increased exponentially as more and more readers have taken the time to delve more deeply into her poetry. The reader’s task of decoding her may be difficult, but, nevertheless, highly rewarding.

  Tsvetaeva herself has written about the “seven snake skins” of her poetic personae and, by implication, a complex variety of styles that has developed over time. Her poetry has changed markedly over the course of her creative lifespan from collection to collection, from her unimposing juvenilia to her consistently compelling poetry that begins to blossom between 1915 and 1916. On occasion in her early poetry she does manage to create a minor masterpiece as in her outstanding poem “A Prayer,” written on her birthday in 1909. To borrow her own locution from the title of one of her essays, you might say that Tsvetaeva is a “poet with a history” as opposed to one without—a poet such as Anna Akhmatova, whom Tsvetaeva notes was virtually born writing in a remarkable style that never changed over the course of her creative lifetime. Moreover, to appropriate Tsvetaeva’s description of Boris Paternak’s poetry as a “downpour of light,” one might say that Tsvetaeva’s poetry functions as a downpour of sound: the acoustic properties of her verse are best understood when read aloud. We try to imitate those acoustic elements of her poetry whenever possible in the translations, or present it at times in a compensatory way.

  Tsvetaeva’s life, to which she alludes continually in her poetry, was a tragic one. She lost her mother at an early age, her child Irina to starvation, her homeland through emigration to Europe in 1922 after the Russian Civil War, numerous loves including the poet Sophia Parnok and the former White Army officer Konstantin Rodzevich; her husband, who was executed by the Bolsheviks; and, eventually, her own life—to suicide in 1941 after she had returned to the USSR two years earlier to follow her husband to his and her own impending doom in a final courageous act of duty. Yet Tsvetaeva transcended tragedy by using it to animate her poetic imagination. Her losses served as a constant source of creativity for her. To borrow a phrase from an interview the bard Leonard Cohen once gave in response to a question about his muse, I would call one of Tsvetaeva’s sources of inspiration the muse of psychic catastrophe. For her readers, Tsvetaeva bares her soul and most intimate emotional experiences. That means she shares both her ecstasy as well as her despair.

  Love was essential for Tsvetaeva’s sense of being. Her notion of love, though, never seemed to quite fit her reality and those with whom she came into intimate personal contact. In a letter, she once described herself as lava (lavina) in the way she overwhelms the object of her affection. She also loved people such as the poets Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak from afar, in absentia (zaochno), but with extraordinary intensity. Manic moments when she was completely infatuated and in a transcendent realm led her to a desperate desire that those she loved love her back in the same lofty way—with their entire being. Yet the objects of her desire never materialized that kind of sustained, idealized love for her; at best their love was short-lived. For Tsvetaeva, a deep well of sadness would ensue upon crashing back down to the earthly realm to her often dismal reality.

  Through poetry that is intimately and inexorably tied to her biography—poems that are often overtly or covertly addressed to or associated with a particular person—she transcended her mundane and difficult life (what she calls her byt). She reached spiritual transcendence and the state of elation (her bytiyo) she so desired. Indeed, poetry was one of her main sources of salvation. At a Tsvetaeva symposium at Yale University in 1984, I recall Joseph Brodsky, in his keynote speech, calling Tsvetaeva one of the most metaphysical of Russian poets and on par with John Donne. He also compared her to Gerard Manley Hopkins for her linguistic playfulness. I wholly agree with Brodsky’s intuitive pronouncements and would add that Tsvetaeva’s quest for absolute love and her striving for transcendence through the metaphysical are closely intertwined. The physical aspect of love often seemed to impede her search for love’s true spiritual essence.

  *

  My first foray into translating Tsvetaeva comprised tackling her most complex collection – After Russia (1928). That translation underwent at least six redactions before it was published in 1992. It was accomplished with the enormous assistance of my long-time friend and native Russian collaborator Slava Yastremski, who is extremely knowledgeable in all things literary regarding the Russian language and culture. It was aided as well by the perspicacious suggestions of my editor at Ardis Publishers at the time—Mary Ann Szporluk, who helped to make the English versions more accessible for the Anglophone reader. I initiated drafts of that translation at the urging of my dissertation advisor John Malmstad at Columbia University in part with the hope of gaining that Tsvetaevan “miracle of understanding” for my dissertation, which focused on the omnipresent theme of time (both quotidian and sacred) in Tsvetaeva’s collection. Since then I have also wanted to create a more complete picture of Tsvetaeva’s numerous poetic snakeskins in translation. This book attempts to do that by translating poems from each of Tsvetaeva’s published collections of lyric poetry, several poems not published in collections, as well as Tsvetaeva’s two most famous dramatic long poems “Poem of the Mountain” and “Poem of the End,” which comprise variations on the same theme of love lost regarding the same events and time period in Tsvetaeva’s life. Tsvetaeva, too, had a penchant for writing what she called “flocks” of poems, cycles. Limitations of space do not permit the inclusion of many of the longer cycles such as “Girlfriend” and “Poems for Blok” in th
eir entirety here.

  In translating Tsvetaeva, I should say a few words about her unique use of punctuation in her poetry, particularly the dash (that divides and links words or parts of words or also serves as a natural pause) and the exclamation mark (that indicates her high level of emotionality). We do largely maintain Tsvetaeva’s dashes in these translations, which promote her penchant for parallelism and invoke a visual response from the reader. In some instances, the dash indicates quoted speech or the absent “to be” verb in the present tense in Russian. The reader should be able to intuit when that is the case by the context.

  We also have provided a number of footnotes in this edition. Besides an exceedingly complex poetics, Tsvetaeva has an enormous number of literary, mythological, Biblical, and personal references in her poetry. Thus those notes serve as a guide for the reader for quick reference if s/he so desires.

  By nature, all translation comprises a process of interpretation. At some points we feel a necessity to fill in the gaps of Tsvetaeva’s elliptical verse and present our understanding of what she means. As all great works of art, Tsvetaeva’s poetry is subject to not just a single interpretation. In our translations we also attempt to present Tsvetaeva’s predilection for auditory effects in her poetry by imitating or approximating her alliterations and meaningful rhymes whenever we can. That has not been possible in every case.

  These translations do comprise our attempt to best approximate Tsvetaeva’s high art for an Anglophone audience. She, of course, cannot help but be infinitely better and the genius that she was (and continues to be for contemporary readers) in the original Russian.

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