Marina Tsvetaeva- the Essential Poetry Read online

  61A reference to one of the wonders of the world – the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, created by the legendary Assyrian Queen Semiramis.

  62Possibly a reference to the blind bard Homer.

  63A possible reference to the river Vltava running through Prague. The Vltava was a symbol of the river Lethe for Tsvetaeva. (See: http://www.ruskerealie.zcu.cz/texts/text2-12-11.php).

  64Tsvetaeva is playing on the saying “u nego ryl’tse v pushku” (literally: he has down all over his snout, that is, face in the trough (i.e., the guilt is evident). Special thanks to Slava Yastremski for point this out.

  65Berthold Schwartz is considered to have been the inventor of gunpowder.

  66The character from the 18th century epistolary novel Clarissa (1748) by Samuel Richardson. In the novel Lovelace seduces the 16-year old Clarissa. In the Russian cultural tradition Lovelace’s name became synonymous with profligate men.

  67This is an exact quote from the Song of Songs 8:6. In the Russian Bible it is: “kak pechat’, na serdtse tvoe, kak persten’ na ruku tvoiu.”

  68A reference to Cleopatra, who dissolved a precious black pearl in a glass of wine to impress Mark Antony.

  69Holkonda is a mountain in India famous for its diamond mines.

  70Tsvetaeva is referring to Rembrandt’s famous painting “Danaë,” which is located in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, in which Zeus comes to the naked Danaë as a shower of gold.

  71A reference to King Solomon in Tarot fortune telling where he is associated with astrological signs of the planets. The pentacles of all the planets should be made on Mercury day (Wednesday) and Mercury hour, with the Moon in an air or earth sign, as well as waxing, and on an even day after the New Moon. Greater Key of Solomon & the Pentacles of Solomon.

  72This can also be read as “Wow! Yes to that!”

  73The first part of “den’ – ga” (den’) separately means “day.” So the line can also have the echoed reading of “A day for death.”

  74Tsvetaeva’s realized metaphor is untranslatable. In the original “Ras—staemsia” has four syllables and paronomastically breaks down into the components “raz” (meaning “one”) and the second syllable “sta” (“one hundred” in the genitive case meaning “of a hundred”).

  75A reference to the Russian Cubo-Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, who was the most innovative and daring of all Russian Futurists. He claimed to be an inventor of “trans-rational language,” that is, a language whose meaning lies in the linguistic meaning of the phonetic components of words. In particular the reference to the swan is attributed to Khlebnikov’s longer poem “Lightworld” (Svetomir), in which we see white, black and red swans crying for the world.

  76Literally two-pood soles. A pood is a Russian measurement roughly weighing 36 pounds.

  77Tsvetaeva had great empathy for the Jewish people for their being persecuted. The fact that her husband Sergei Efron came from a Jewish family caused her stern Orthodox Christian father considerable consternation. Tsvetaeva’s empathy always stood with the downtrodden. See especially her poem “To the Jewish People” (1916), in which she writes that “all poets are Jews.”

  78A reference to Tsvetaeva’s Polish origins and to the character of the Polish woman Marina Mnishek, who became first a concubine and then the wife of the False Dimitry (the supposedly dead son of Ivan the Terrible, who fought Boris Godunov for the Russian throne).

  79A reference to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, in which the young man Raskolnikov kills an old woman pawnbroker in order to prove his idea that everything is permitted for him because he is an extraordinary man.