Bride of Ice Page 12

  A moist, wood-twig smoke of green

  flowed through our veins’ gutters.

  Green struck my head open.

  It overflowed me completely!

  Inside me, warmth and birdsong.

  You could drink both of them from

  the two halves of my skull –

  (Slavs did that with enemies).

  Green rose, green shoots, green

  fused to a single emerald.

  The green smell of the earth had

  struck deeply. (No buffalo feels that.)

  Malachite. Sapphire. Unneeded.

  The eye and ear restored –

  Falcons don’t see tillage,

  prisoners don’t hear birds.

  My eye is ripe with green.

  Now I see no misfortune

  (or madness – it was true reason!)

  to leave a throne and fall

  on all fours like a beast

  and dig his nose in the grass…

  He wasn’t mad, that sovereign

  Nebuchadnezzar, munching

  stalks of grass – but a Tsar,

  a herbivorous, cereal-loving

  brother of Jean-Jacques Rousseau…

  This green of the earth has given

  my legs the power to run

  into heaven.

  I’ve taken in so much

  green juice and energy I am

  as powerful as a hero.

  The green of the earth has struck

  my cheeks. And there it glows.

  For an hour, under cherry trees,

  God allowed me to think

  that my own, my old, face

  could be the same colour as these.

  Young people may laugh. Perhaps

  I’d be better off standing under

  some old tower, than mistaking

  that cherry-tree colour

  for the colour of my

  face…

  With grey hair like mine? But then,

  apple blossom is grey. And God has brought me close

  to everyone of his creatures

  I am closer as well as lower…

  a sister to all creation

  from the buttercup to the mare –

  So I blew in my hands, like a trumpet.

  I even dared to leap!

  As old people rejoice

  without shame on a roundabout,

  I believed my hair was brown

  again, no grey streak in it.

  So, with my branch of green

  I could drive my friend like a goose,

  and watch his sail-cloth suit

  turn into true sails –

  Surely my soul was prepared

  to sail beyond the ocean.

  (The earth had been a seabed –

  it laughed now with vegetation.)

  My companion was only slender

  in the waist. His heart was thick.

  (How his white canvas puckered,

  and came to rest in the green.)

  Faith. Aurora. Soul’s blue.

  Never dilute or measured.

  Idiot soul! And yet Peru

  will yield to the madness of it!

  My friend became heavy to lead,

  as a child does for no reason,

  (I found my own bold web

  as lovely as any spider’s).

  Suddenly like a vast frame

  for a living miracle: Gates!

  Between their marble, I could

  stand, like an ancient sign,

  uniting myself and the landscape;

  a frame in which I remain,

  between gates that lead to no castle,

  gates that lead to no farmhouse,

  gates like a lion’s jaws

  which let in light. Gates

  leading to where? Into

  happiness came the answer,

  twofold…

  Happiness? Far away. North of here.

  Somewhere else. Some other time.

  Happiness? Even the scent is cold.

  I looked for it once, on all fours.

  When I was four years old, looking

  for a clover with four leaves.

  What do these numbers matter?

  Happiness? Cows feed on it.

  The young are in ruminant company

  of two jaws and four hooves.

  Happiness stamps its feet.

  It doesn’t stand looking at gates.

  The wood block and the well.

  Remember that old tale?

  Of cold water streaming past

  an open, longing mouth,

  and the water missing the mouth

  as if in a strange dream.

  There’s never enough water,

  (the sea’s not enough for me).

  From opened veins, water

  flows on to moist earth –

  Water keeps passing by

  as life does, in a dream.

  And now I’ve wiped my cheeks

  I know the exact force

  of the streams that miss my hands

  and pass my thirsting

  mouth

  The tree, in its cloud of blossom,

  was a dream avalanche over us.

  With a smile, my companion compared it

  to a ‘cauliflower in white sauce’.

  That phrase struck into my heart, loud

  as thunder. Now grant me encounters

  with thieves and pillagers, Lord, rather

  than bed in the hay with a gourmand!

  A thief can rob – and not touch your face.

  You’ll be fleeced, but your soul will escape.

  But a gourmand must finger and pinch, before

  he puts you aside, to eat later.

  I can throw off my rings. Or my fingers.

  You can strip my hide, and wear it.

  But a gourmand demands the brain and heart

  to the last groan of their torment.

  The thief will go off. In his pockets

  my jewels, the cross from my breast.

  A toothbrush ends all romance

  with gourmands.

  Don’t fall in their hands!

  And you, who could be loved royally

  as an evergreen, shall be

  as nameless as cauliflower in my mouth:

  I take this revenge – for the tree!

  1934-6

  When I look at the flight of the leaves

  When I look at the flight of the leaves in

  their floating down on to the paving of cobbles

  and see them swept up as if by an

  artist who has finished his picture at last

  I think how (already nobody likes either

  the way I stand, or my thoughtful face)

  a manifestly yellow, decidedly

  rusty leaf – has been left behind on the tree.

  1936

  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.

  They took the sugar, and they took the clover

  they took the North and took the West.

  They took the hive, and took the haystack

  they took the South from us, and took the East.

  Vary they took and Tatras they took,

  they took the near at hand and far away.

  But worse than taking paradise on earth from us

  they won the battle for our native land.

  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.

  8

  What tears in eyes now

  weeping with anger and love

  Czechoslovakia’s tears

  Spain in its own blood

  and what a bla
ck mountain

  has blocked the world from the light.

  It’s time – It’s time – It’s time

  to give back to God his ticket.

  I refuse to be. In

  the madhouse of the inhuman

  I refuse to live.

  With the wolves of the market place

  I refuse to howl.

  Among the sharks of the plain

  I refuse to swim down

  where moving backs make a current.

  I have no need of holes

  for ears, nor prophetic eyes:

  to your mad world there is

  one answer: to refuse!

  1938

  Notes

  Girlfriend

  p. 1 Sophia Yakovlevna Parnok (originally Parnokh; 1885-1933) was a poet, dramatist, librettist and a translator of Baudelaire. She was born into a Jewish pharmacist’s family in Taganrog on the Black Sea coast of Russia. She studied in Geneva, where she lived for a time, and thereafter moved between St Petersburg and Moscow. Her brother Valentin Parnokh was also a well-known poet. Sophia married Vladimir Volkenstein in June 1906; they were divorced in 1909. She was seven years older than Tsvetaeva when they began their love affair in 1914. Parnok’s first book of poems spoke openly of lesbian desire. By 1928 Soviet censorship decided her poetry was unlawful, and from then until her death she was unable to publish.

  We are keeping an eye on the girls

  p. 1 kvass: a common Russian drink, non-alcoholic, made from fermented rye bread. Razin: Stenka Razin was a Cossack leader of the seventeenth-century peasant rebellion in Russia. According to legend, he sacrificed a Persian girl whom he loved to the river Volga.

  No one has taken anything away

  p. 1 This poem is addressed to Osip Mandelstam (1892–1938); he and Tsvetaeva were lovers for a short while in 1916.

  Derzhavin: (1743–1816) the most important Russian poet writing before Pushkin.

  You throw back your head

  p. 1 Also written for Mandelstam, who recorded a similar excitement in walking about Moscow in his own poem ‘With no confidence in miracles of redemption’ (Tristia, 1922).

  Where does this tenderness come from?

  p. 1 Again addressed to Mandelstam.

  Today or tomorrow the snow will melt

  p. 1 Rogozhin: character in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot, who sets out to kill Prince Myshkin.

  Verses about Moscow

  p. 1 I lift you up: the first lyric from this cycle is addressed to Tsvetaeva’s daughter, Alya.

  forty times forty [churches]: a phrase often used of Moscow. Vagankovo: well-known cemetery in Moscow, where Tsvetaeva’s parents were buried.

  p. 2 Strange and beautiful brother: the second lyric is addressed to Mandelstam, who lived in St Petersburg, and to whom Tsvetaeva offers her native city, Moscow.

  Spassky gate/five cathedrals: in the Kremlin. Inadvertent Joy: a wonder-working icon of the Virgin Mary, not far from the Kremlin.

  Peter: Peter the Great (1689–1725) founded St Petersburg, which replaced Moscow as his capital.

  p. 3 Child Panteleimon: a saint revered in the Orthodox Church, supposed to protect people’s health.

  Iversky heart: another wonder-working icon of the Virgin Mary, for which a special chapel was built, and which was taken to the city of Vladimir in 1812.

  Poems for Akhmatova

  p. 1 Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966).

  Ah!: in Russian ‘akh’, the first syllable of the poet’s name.

  p. 2 Tsarskoselsky: Akhmatova spent much of her youth in, and thereafter frequently revisited, the imperial town of Tsarskoe Selo, near St Petersburg.

  Poems for Blok

  p. 1 Alexander Blok (1880–1921), Symbolist poet, with whom Tsvetaeva was never personally acquainted, although she met him briefly on two occasions.

  five signs: in the old orthography (altered after the Revolution, but always appealing to Tsvetaeva) Blok’s name was spelt with five letters – these four, plus a ‘hard sign’.

  spectre/knight/snow/wind: examples of images that deliberately recall images and words from poems by Blok himself.

  p. 2 Poem 3: the first two lines and the penultimate line of this poem are a rephrasing of words from a well-known prayer sung in the Orthodox Church.

  your river Neva: Blok’s native city was St Petersburg. The first phrase of this poem ‘U menya v Moskve’ could also be translated, to emphasise the contrast, ‘In my Moscow’.

  red calico of Kaluga: literally, ‘Kaluga native calico’. Tsvetaeva evokes a typical peasant scene at Tarusa, in Kaluga, where she spent her childhood summers in the family dacha.

  p. 3 Poem 9 is dated 9 May 1920, and Tsvetaeva notes on her manuscript: ‘On the day when the powder cellars were blown up in the Khodynka and the window panes were shattered in the Polytechnic Museum, where Blok was reading.’

  blue cloak: an image from Blok’s poem ‘O podvigakh, o doblesty-akh, o slave’, written in 1908 and addressed to his wife.

  We shall call for the sun…: referring to Blok’s poem ‘Golos iz khora’ (1910), with its lines: ‘You will call for the sun’s rising –/the sun will lie low’ (in the version by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France, in Alexander Blok, Selected Poems, Manchester, Carcanet 2000).

  Swans’ Encampment

  p. 1 This is one lyric from a long cycle of poems written in Moscow between 1917–21, which was never published in Tsvetaeva’s lifetime. In many of them she adapts the lay of Prince Igor, and the tone of a lamenting Yaroslavna, to describe the heroic nobility of the White Army’s self-sacrifice. When she returned to the Soviet Union in 1939 she left the ms at the University of Basel. It has been suggested that she was persuaded by accounts of her husband, Sergei Efron’s experiences in the White Army (which he found very different from the legendary heroes she describes) not to publish it. This is not so: only an accident, namely a quarrel with the Paris editors of Latest News, prevented the poems appearing there in 1928. Ironically, the quarrel arose out of Tsvetaeva’s admiration for poetry written in the Soviet Union.

  p. 2 Ry-azan: the voice names a town near Moscow, and Tsvetaeva breaks the word, drawing out the long syllable to mime the accent of peasants who live there.

  On a Red Horse

  p. 1 This poem was written in five days in January 1921.

  God help us Smoke!

  p. 1 Written on 30 September 1922, shortly after Tsvetaeva and her daughter Alya joined Efron in Czechoslovakia.

  necklace of coins: the note on p. 748 of the Moscow-Leningrad edition suggests the reference is to a doorman or hall-porter wearing many medals.

  Ophelia: In Defence of the Queen

  p. 1 One of a run of epistolatory poems; there is another written as if from Ophelia to Hamlet on the same date (28 February 1923).

  Wires

  p. 1 A note on p. 749 of the 1965 edition says: ‘from a cycle of 10 poems… inspired by the correspondence with Pasternak which began in June 1922, soon after Tsvetaeva went abroad, and which continued for many years. Under Tsvetaeva’s draft of no. 4 there is a note which later went into a letter to Pasternak: “Poems are the tracks by which I enter your soul. But your soul recedes and I get impatient, I jump ahead, blindly on the off chance, and then I wait in trepidation: will it turn my way?”…’

  p. 2 Poem 1: rigging: a number of puns in the Russian original make this a less conventional image than it might appear. ‘Atlantic’, for example, is contrasted with ‘Pacific’ meaning tranquil.

  distance: again much word-play is lost in translation: ‘receding’ contains a syllable ‘dal’ meaning distance, and ‘zhal’ (pity) picks this up as a rhyme.

  still implored: the Russian makes clear that it is the distance that is being implored by the voices.

  p. 3 Poem 4: The Leila of your lips: this is puzzling. Tatiana Retivov suggests a reference to Bizet’s heroine Leila in The Pearl Fishers, with whom several characters in the opera fall in love.

  p. 4 Poem 8: The white book of the dist
ant River Don: Tsvetaeva is contrasting the black books of sorcery with her passionate reading about the fate of the White Army, who made an important stand on the River Don.

  Sahara

  p. 1 This poem is written at the height of Tsvetaeva’s passionate correspondence with the twenty-year-old critic, Alexander Bakhrakh, whom she had never met, but upon whose loving support she depended so strongly that a break in his flow of letters brought her almost to collapse.

  Poem of the Mountain

  p. 1 After helping to settle her daughter Alya in a boarding-school in Moravia during August 1923, Tsvetaeva took a flat alone on the wooded hill at the centre of Prague. During the autumn of 1923 she had the most passionate love affair of her life with Konstantin Borisovich Rodzevitch, regarded by the émigrés of Prague as a White officer, though he had in fact fought with the Red Navy.

  p. 2 Hagar: Abraham’s slave and concubine, who bore him a son, Ishmael, was sent away at the insistence of Abraham’s wife Sarah and went to live in the Arabian desert.

  p. 3 twelve apostles: Tsvetaeva is probably referring to the clock tower on the Old Town Square in Prague, where the twelve apostles appear as the hour strikes.