Marina Tsvetaeva- the Essential Poetry Read online

  Life is a suburb. —

  You must build outside the city!

  * * *

  Eh, a lost

  Court case, ladies and gentlemen!

  Everything there is nothing but suburbs!

  Where are the cities?!

  * * *

  The rain rips and

  Rages. We stand and rip.

  * * *

  For the past three months

  The first time together!

  * * *

  And what did God want

  To borrow from Job?

  It just didn’t come off:

  We’re outside of town!

  Outside of town! Understand? Outside!

  Out of it! Having walked across the rampart!

  Life is a place where it’s impossible to live:

  A Jew — ish quarter...

  * * *

  Isn’t it a hundred times more commendable

  To become the Wandering Jew?77

  Because for anyone who isn’t a scum

  Life is a Jew — ish —

  * * *

  Pogrom. It’s alive only through converts!

  By the Judases of faith!

  To islands for lepers!

  To hell! — anywhere! — but not to

  * * *

  Life, — it tolerates only converts — only

  Sheep — to give them to a butcher!

  With my fe — et I trample

  My right to residence!

  * * *

  I trample! — Revenge

  For David’s shield! — Into the mash of bodies!

  Isn’t it thrilling that the Yid

  Didn’t want — to live?!

  The ghetto of chosenness! A rampart and moat.

  Don’t expect any mer — cy!

  In this most Christian of worlds

  The poets are Yids!

  * * *

  13

  This way knives are sharpened on a stone,

  This way the shavings are swept

  By brooms. Beneath hands

  There is something furry, wet.

  * * *

  Where are you, my twins:

  This masculine dryness, power?

  Beneath a palm are —

  Tears, not rain!

  * * *

  About what other temptations

  Are we talking about? Property is like water!

  After your diamond eyes

  Pouring beneath my palm,

  * * *

  There is no death

  For me. An end to the end!

  I stroke — I stroke —

  I stroke your face.

  * * *

  All us Marinas have such

  Arrogance, — we, the Polish women.78

  After your eagle’s eyes,

  Crying beneath your palm...

  Are you crying? My friend!

  All is mine! Forgive me!

  O, how large tears are

  And salty in my hand!

  * * *

  A man’s tear is cruel:

  The blunt part of an ax to the head!79

  Cry, with others you’ll make up

  The embarrassment you lost with me.

  * * *

  We are — fish from — the same

  Sea! A wave of a hand:

  ...Like a dead shell

  Lips on lips.

  Covered with tears.

  A saltbush

  To your taste.

  “But what will it be

  Tomorrow when

  I wake up?”

  * * *

  14

  Like a sheep’s trail —

  Down. The din of the city.

  Three girls coming toward us.

  Laughing. Laughing

  * * *

  At our tears — with all the afternoon

  Of their depths, with the sea’s crest!

  They’re laughing!

  — at those inappropriate,

  Shameful, male

  * * *

  Tears of yours, visible

  Through the rain — in two rows of sutures!

  As though — at shameful pearls

  On the bronze of a warrior.

  * * *

  At your first tears,

  At your last — o, pour them out! —

  At your tears — the pearls

  In my crown!

  * * *

  I don’t visibly lower my eyes.

  Through the downpour — I stare.

  Venus’ dolls,

  Stare! This union

  * * *

  Is closer than just

  Allure and the bed.

  Speech is replaced for us

  By the Song of Songs itself.

  * * *

  To us, to unknown birds,

  Solomon bows down

  To the ground — for this shared

  Lament is more than a dream!

  And into the hollow waves

  Of gloom — hunched over and equal —

  Without trace — silently — you leave

  The way a ship sinks.

  Prague, February 1 — Ilovishchi, June 8, 1924

  Endnotes

  1The note echoes a passage in Song of Songs 8:6: “ibo krepka, kak smert’, liubov’” (for love is strong as death; King James version).

  2Tsvetaeva’s birthday.

  3A cycle of 17 poems dedicated to Tsvetaeva’s lover in 1914-15, the poet Sophia Parnok (1885-1933).

  4 “He-Him” is presumably Tsvetaeva’s husband Sergei Efron.

  5The cemetery is located in the Krasnaya Presnya district of Moscow in the northwest part of the city. Many well-known Russian cultural figures are buried there.

  6Although the word “shal’noe” primarily means “wild,” we feel that Tsvetaeva is playing with the word for “shawl” (shal’) in Russian here and creating an adjectival neologism from it. Akhmatova often wore a shawl. In perhaps the most famous portrait of her by Natan Altman in 1914, she is wearing a yellow shawl. Note also Tsvetaeva’s 1916 poem “To Akhmatova,” in which she writes: “A shawl from Turkish lands/Has fallen like a cloak.” We have opted for the literal meaning of the word here, but the echoed meaning seems to fit Tsvetaeva’s penchant for word play. The echoed reading of the line would be “shawled offspring of the white night.”

  7Tsvetaeva is referring to Akhmatova being a Petersburg poet—on the backdrop of the city’s famous white nights in June. “Rus” is the old name for the civilization that had its origins in present-day Kyiv, Ukraine as its capital. Akhmatova was born and raised in Kyiv. The Church of the Savior in Blood is one of the landmark churches of St. Petersburg: it was built on the spot where Tsar Alexander I was assassinated in 1861. Tsvetaeva is a Moscow poet with the cupolas of the Kremlin churches as one of the main landmarks of her city.

  8“Proshchenyi den’” suggests “Proshchenyi vtornik” – Shrove Tuesday (the day before Lent begins) or “Proshchenoe voskresen’e” (Shrove Sunday), the Sunday before Lent begins. On that day all Orthodox Christians ask forgiveness from each other. We’ve chosen a literal translation here instead of “Shrovetide.” Shrovetide is the time of carnival before the beginning of Lent. Many thanks to Slava Yastremski for pointing this out.

  9Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921). The most famous of the Russian Symbolist poets and author of the long poem “The Twelve” about the Russian Revolution.

  10Blok’s name with the hard sign at the end of the name was originally five letters long. With orthographic reforms after the Russian Revolution it became four letters long when the hard signs at the end of nouns was dropped.

  11Tsvetaeva’s collection The Swan’s Encampment consisted of poems about the Russian Civil War between the Bolshevik Red Army and the White Army, which lasted from 1917-1922. Tsvetaeva’s husband Sergei Efron served on the side of the White Army in southern Russia while Tsvetaeva remained in Moscow with their children Ariadna and Irina. At the end of the war Efron was evacuated from the Crimea
, and he and Tsvetaeva were reunited in emigration in Prague in 1922.

  12Andre Chenier was a French poet, who was a precursor of the Romantic movement. He was executed during the French Revolution allegedly for “crimes against the state.” Tsvetaeva is unmistakably associating herself with the French poet. He was taken from the La Conciergerie prison in Paris to his execution on July 25, 1794.

  13A reference to the image in the Revelation of St. John the Divine 12:3, 12:7-9.

  14A reference to the representation of Paradise/The Garden of Eden as a white circle that includes images of trees on it in Russian icons, such as the icon “O Thee Rejoiceth.” For visual examples of it, see: http://www.vidania.ru/icony/icon_o_tebe_raduetsya.html.

  15The epigraph comes from Fedor Tiutchev’s famous poem of 1820—“Videnie” (A Vision); “There is a certain hour, in the night, of universal silence (Est’ nekii chas, v nochi, vsemirnogo molchan’ia).”

  16Literally a bed sheet. In Tsvetaeva’s poetics, the sheet is an emblem of physicality, which leads to death and destruction. The poet instead seeks salvation in the spiritual. Thus for Tsvetaeva the image suggests a “winding sheet.”

  17The Jordan has numerous Biblical associations. Firstly, it represents the eastern border of the Promised Land, the river that Joshua crossed with the Israelites. Also in the Old Testament in the Book of Kings (II: 5) it marks the place where Naaman the Syrian was directed to wash seven times to cure his leprosy. In the New Testament, John the Baptist baptizes Christ in the Jordan. In the Russian tradition, Jordan also means the hole in the ice on a river made during the January Holiday of Theophany, from which water is taken to symbolically cleanse Orthodox Christians of their sins and to bless their houses.

  18The cycle is dedicated to Tsvetaeva’s close Czech friend Anna Antonovna Teskova (1872-1954), whom she befriended in Prague in 1924. After moving to Paris, Tsvetaeva continued a lengthy correspondence with Teskova until Tsvetaeva’s return to the Soviet Union in 1939.

  19Tsvetaeva was herself prematurely gray, a fact that she considered to be a sign of her mature and highly developed inner spirit. Especially see her poem “Gray Hair” (Sedye volosy) for her poetic meditation on this topic. She curiously left that poem out of her collection After Russia even though it was written in the same time period.

  20Or: “inflamed” or “burning” blood.

  21The cycle began as a reaction to Boris Pasternak’s impending return to Russia from Berlin on March 18, 1923.

  22An inexact quote from Johann Christian Hölderlin’s (1770-1843) Hyperion. The translation from the German is as follows: “The billow of the heart would not froth up so beautifully and would become spirit, if the old silent rock, fate, did not stand against it.” My gratitude to Marcia Morris for assisting me with the translation of this passage.

  23Among the ancients, the highest heaven, a region where pure light and fire exist.

  24“Sryv” can also be translated as “failure.”

  25“Prostite” can also be translated as “forgive.”

  26In Greek mythology, Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, falls in love with the Athenian Theseus and helps him escape from the Minotaur in the labyrinth on Crete. She gives him a ball of twine, which he unravels as he enters the labyrinth. Theseus slays the Minotaur, escapes the labyrinth, and sails away with Ariadne and his crew. He leaves her on the isle of Naxos to recover from her seasickness and a storm sweeps the ship away. Ariadne lies dead on the shore when Theseus returns with his crew. The god Dionysus, enthralled by the beauty of the dead Ariadne, takes her for his immortal wife. In the Gustav Schwab version of the myth—which Tsvetaeva certainly used as her source—Dionysus appears to Theseus in a dream, in which he declares Ariadne to be his bride. In order not to bring down the wrath of the god, Theseus complies and gives up his bride.

  27(1895?-1930). A childhood friend of Tsvetaeva’s and the sister of Yuri Zavadsky, an actor in the Third Studio of MKhAT. Tsvetaeva later met her again in the emigration in Paris. In depictions of her, Tsvetaeva concentrates on describing her pale beauty and her infirmity, the latter of which resulted in a premature death.

  28Or: a griffin.

  29A reference to the legendary inscription on Solomon’s seal.

  30This poem coincides with the end of Tsvetaeva’s unhappy love affair with Konstantin Rodzevich in mid-to-late September 1923. The long poems “Poem of the Mountain” and “Poem of the End” chronicle her relationship with him. Her depressed emotional state led her back to walk to her favorite Prague sights for her meditations, particularly to the statue of the Knight Bruncvik at the Charles Bridge overlooking the Vltava River in Prague. A picture of the statue can be found online here: http://www.kralovskacesta.cz/en/tour/objects/statue-of-bruncvik.html.

  31We have opted to translate Tsvetaeva’s neologism created by the dash in the middle of the word “mosto—viny,” which literally means “bridge planks” without the dash, but in this instance suggests a bridge of guilt or the guilt of the bridge.

  32The addressee of the poem is Mark Slonim (1894-1976), a literary critic and editor of the Prague émigré journal The Will of Russia (Volia Rossii), in which Tsvetaeva often published.

  33Zeus is depicted in Plato’s Phaedrus as holding the reins of a winged chariot. His steeds were born of the four winds.

  34An Italian town renowned for its marble and for its academy of sculpture.

  35The mythical first wife of Adam and the mother of evil spirits according to Talmudic legend.

  36Literally a person from Shulem. The Shulamite is the object of King Solomon’s affection and the heroine of the Song of Songs.

  37A reference to Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, based on the famous epic The Lay of Igor’s Campaign (Slovo o polku Igoreve). The choreographer Mikhail Fokin included the Polovtsian Dances in the first season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe in Paris that quickly became a sensation for its energy and non-classical approach to ballet.

  38A reference to Alexander Pushkin’s long poem “The Gypsies” (“Tsygany”; 1824).

  39A reference to Alexander Pushkin’s poem “Song of Oleg’s Prophecy” (“Pesn’ o veshchem Olege”; 1822), in which the legendary Prince Oleg, who defeated the Greeks at Constantinople (Tsargrad, as it was known to the Russians in Oleg’s time), was told a prophecy that he would die because of his horse. Oleg exiled the horse, but after the horse died, went to visit his remains. When he placed his foot on the skull of his horse, a snake came out of it and killed him with its venom.

  40Literally “bogatyr” here, the superheroes of Russian folktales and legends such as Ilya Muromets and Alyosha Popovich.

  41A possible reference to the revolutionary ballet by Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring (1913), performed during the second season of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, in which the dancing is accompanied by shouts of the dancers –“ Ah, Oh, Eh.”

  42Tsvetaeva has indicated that this poem is addressed to Boris Pasternak. In the poem she plays extensively on the Russian prefix “raz-”, meaning “to divide” or “to scatter in many directions.”

  43Tsvetaeva likely has in mind the Orthodox marriage ceremony, during which the choir sings the liturgical chant of alleluia (praise to the Lord), as well as in the Divine Liturgy.

  44The art of (sexual) love in Latin.

  45The 23-poem cycle is dedicated to the actor Yuri Zavadsky (1894-1977).

  46The famous Italian goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571).

  47From the “Poems for Pushkin” cycle.

  48A reference to Tsar Nicholas I, who appointed himself Alexander Pushkin’s censor and persecuted him. It is generally believed that he was responsible for Pushkin’s death in a duel in 1837.

  49A reference to the suppression of the so-called November or Cadet Uprising of 1830-1831, which was eventually harshly subdued by superior Russian Imperial forces.

  50From Hölderlin’s Hyperion. The translation would be: O, my love! Does this speech surprise
you? Everyone who parts speaks as though they are drunk and loves solemnity.

  51“Mir,” translated as “world” here, could also be translated as “peace.”

  52According to the Greek myth, Persephone was abducted by Hades, who tricked her into eating pomegranate seeds, the food of the underworld, and because of that she had to spend the winter months there. Homer describes her as the formidable, venerable majestic queen of the underworld, who carries into effect the curses of men upon the souls of the dead.

  53A reference to Revelations 22: 12.

  54Hagar was Abraham’s wife Sarah’s slave. Sarah gave her to Abraham to bear children, and Hagar gave birth to Ishmael. Then Sarah, fearing that Ishmael could be competition for her son Isaac, wanted to eliminate him. God told Abraham to give Hagar and her son freedom, which Abraham did, sending them away into the desert. A well that appeared miraculously saved their lives.

  55The Latin mori (from the expression memento mori, meaning, remember that you will die) sounds in Russian just like “more” (the sea), which is what Tsvetaeva writes in the original.

  56A reference to the famous Bear Moat in the Czech Krumlow Castle that goes back to the 17th century when it was built as a means of protection and then became one of the main attractions of Southern Czechia.

  57I.e., Instead of that stone (mountains on me) there will be a flat one (a gravestone). [Tsvetaeva’s note]

  58It is considered good luck in the Eastern Slavic tradition to have a stork build a nest on your roof.

  59That is, “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.”

  60A quote from the spiritual verses “The Lament of Joseph the Beautiful upon Being Sold by His Brothers into Slavery in Egypt” based on Genesis 37.