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Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was one of the four great Russian poets of the 20th century, along with Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Pasternak. Her richly diverse essays provide incomparable insights into poetry, the poetic process, and what it means to be a poet. First published in English in 1992, Art in the Light of Conscience includes an introduction by the translator, textual notes, and a glossary, as well as revised translations of 12 poems by Tsvetaeva on poets and poetry. ... Read more

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"There are four of us," wrote Anna Akhmatova, naming Marina Tsvetaeva, with herself, Pasternak and Mandelstam as the poets who during what Blok called `the terrible years' in Russia continued to express in their work the deepest values of their country. Tsvetaeva led a life that was a history of loss: she watched the devastation of her country by a revolution she did not support; during the Moscow famine one of her children died in a State orphanage; her marriage and her many love-affairs were ill-fated; she lived abroad most of her adult life, and soon after her return to Russia, she killed herself. Elaine Feinstein's translations of Tsvetaeva have been greatly admired. In this edition she includes ten further translations and a new introduction. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Disappointed with the translation rather than the poet
A contemporary of Akhmatova, Blok and Rilke, Tsvetaeva is not well known outside her native Russia. She was apparently demanding, difficult, and hard to get along with.One certainly gets a sense of this from her writing.Her poetry, given the time she wrote (the collection here spans from 1916 - 1936) is dark and melancholy, as one would expect.From this translation alone, I would consider her a second-rate poet, far behind Akhmatova.To do so, however, would be to do Tsvetaeva (and her legion of fans) a great disservice.Simply put, this translation is clunky.The images, meter, even the enjambment of the poems simply doesn't resonate.My Russian is admittedly weak; even so,comparing the original with the translations here presented a striking difference in substance.

To be fair to the translator Feinstein, translation is extremely difficult, especially so with poetry.Yet it *can* be done well, capturing the flavor, emotion and (in exceptional cases) the sense of word-play that is so critical to this art form.I was disappointed, then, that in this instance, Tsvetaeva's voice was not captured as well as it deserves to be.I have not given up on this poet - but I cannot recommend this particular edition.

Feinstein Admits She Doesn't Know Russian
Check out exceprts from the New York Review of Books on this atrocity of a "translation" (see below).Lack of verbal, literary, and source-language-ability is no excuse for this travesty of a translation!You know *less* about Tsvetayeva after reading this translation, because even if you had no knowledge to begin with, you'd end by being poisoned with a complete and utter misrepresentation of the poet that Tsvetayeva IS and WAS.Avoid, avoid, avoid.

NYR Books

Volume 29, Number 6 · April 15, 1982
Poet of Sacrifice

By David McDuff
Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva
translated by Elaine Feinstein
"Elaine Feinstein's translations of Marina Tsvetayeva's poetry have been widely praised since they first appeared in 1971. The present volume contains an additional twenty-four pages of poems. These are welcome, though one might have hoped that a substantial revision and expansion of the book would have made room for poems which are not to be found in the Soviet editions of Tsvetayeva's poetry. As it is, the additions--mostly chosen from Tsvetayeva's later work--come without exception from the "Soviet canon" of Tsvetayeva and do nothing to counter the officially accepted Soviet view of the poet: as an émigré, miserably unhappy amid the evils of life in the West, and inexorably drawn toward her homeland ("Home-sickness").

It cannot be denied that the initial impression to be gained from the experience of hearing Feinstein's versions read aloud is that of a faithful rendering into the English of the meaning of the original poems. Yet unfortunately this initial impression is misleading. If one studies Feinstein's book carefully, reading both introduction and notes, not only does one discover that Feinstein knows no Russian; she also makes, it would appear, substantial claims for her translations, maintaining that they are "transformations" (she borrows the term from Octavio Paz) of the original, achieved through the reworking of literal versions. In her "Note on Working Method" at the end of the book, Angela Livingstone asserts that "All this material [i.e., semantic, phonetic, and metrical description of the Russian text prepared for Feinstein's use] was... changed into poetry by Elaine Feinstein."

Changed into what kind of poetry, may one ask? Tsvetayevan, or Feinsteinian? Joseph Brodsky in a recent interview suggested that "if you could conjure up a combination of Hart Crane and Hopkins, that would be something like Tsvetayeva."[7] There is no evidence in Feinstein's translations that she has made even the slightest attempt in this direction. If her versions are meant as literal guides to the sense of Tsvetayeva's poems, well and good. If they claim to have the status of poetry, then one must insist that with a poet of the uniqueness and greatness of Tsvetayeva they must make at least some gesture in the direction of the formal and prosodic qualities of the original. This, with the possible exception of an eccentrically indented preservation of Tsvetayeva's stanzaic patterns (minus the rhymes), Feinstein's versions singularly fail to do. And no matter how pleasing the result to English or American ears, one must again, out of respect for Tsvetayeva, insist that this result has little to do with Tsvetayeva's art, that it is a deception: not a willful one, perhaps, but a deception nevertheless.

For although Feinstein's versions may look and sound like the kind of poetry to which English and American readers are accustomed, they contain almost nothing of what Kassner calls "Grösse des Mythischen" ("greatness of the mythical")--to which Tsvetayeva gave ecstatic utterance. Tsvetayeva's art is one of poetic music--of rhythm, assonance, meter, and above all, rhyme. She wrote to Pasternak:

This world contains its rhymes.
Prise them apart, it trembles.
The importance of rhyme to Tsvetayeva, both symbolically and as a technical device, cannot be overstated. To overlook it is to ignore the very heart, the central meaning, of this artist's titanic work.

Tsvetayeva's poems are a blend of metaphysical cunning and daring with a profound tonal dexterity, the like of which I have not found in any other poet. For the nearest aesthetic equivalent to the effect in the original of Tsvetayeva's collection Posle Rossii ("After Russia," 1928), one has to turn to the work of a composer: Stravinsky's neoclassical compositions of the 1920s. It is hard to see how any non-Russian-reader studying Feinstein's translations could even begin to guess at such a connection.

The argument is frequently raised that what is possible or acceptable in Russian rhyme and meter is not similarly available in English. Thus, Angela Living-stone asserts that "Marina Tsvetayeva's [voice] is particularly difficult to capture... because her consistent adherence to rhyme and to metrical regularity would, if copied in the English poems, probably enfeeble them." This seems a dubious claim--surely it is at least worth the effort to try? The fact is that rhyme and meter are unfashionable now among English and American poets. That is altogether another matter. Unusual rhymes and shifting meters (which are much more characteristic of Tsvetayeva than is "adherence to rhyme and to metrical regularity") are just as available in English as they are in Russian. It is the motivation among poets and translators to go and look for them that is missing.

On at least one important occasion, Feinstein's lack of Russian and her reliance on literal versions let her down badly. "Poema kontsa" ("Poem of the End") contains, in its ninth section, the following chilling sequence:

Ya ne bolee chem zhivotnoye,
Kem-to ranennoye v zhivot.
Feinstein renders this as:

I am no more than an animal that someone has stabbed in the stomach.
This is literally correct, although perhaps "wounded" would be more faithful to the original than "stabbed." Literal correctness, however, is not enough in this, as in many other poems by Tsvetayeva. What Tsvetayeva has written is a pun on the root zhiv ("alive"); zhivotnoye means "an animal," and zhivot, a word whose close relation to the one for "animal" cannot escape even those who know no Russian, means "a stomach." A conscientious translator might attempt to make some play with two similarly related English words such as "animal" and "anima." "Wounded in the anima" is, after all, what Tsvetayeva means.

As an introduction to Tsvetayeva's poetry, Elaine Feinstein's Selected Poems goes perhaps halfway to being successful. There is much of Tsvetayeva's poetry that remains to be translated: "The New Year's Letter" to Rilke, the "Attempt at a Room," the "Poem of Air," to name but a few long and important poems. But, above all, what cries out to be translated is the rhyming language of Tsvetayeva's poems. Without that, we miss what is distinctive and great about her work.

Notes
[3] My translation.

[4] Rudolf Kassner, "Erinnerungen an Rilke" in Buch der Erinnerung (Eugen Rentsch Verlag, Zurich, 1954).

[5] Translated by Elaine Feinstein.

[6] My translation.

[7] Quarto, No. 24, December 1981, p. 10.

Criminally under read.
Marina Tsvetaeva is simply amazing. Feinstein does a superb job here translating, considering Tsvetaeva is nearly impossible to translate out of Russian.
This book is cheap, wonderful and most people I know end up getting a copy from me as a gift at some time.

This sounds like true poetry
I do not know Russian. I cannot comment on whether or not Elaine Feinstein has captured or missed completely the supposedly brilliant aural qualities of the original verse.
What I can say is that reading these poems I have a sense of true poetry. There is a depth of feeling and a passion, a soul being revealed in depth, a life in its sufferings and straining for beauty.
Perhaps more words are irrelevant, and I shall just give a few excerpts from the book.

From ' I know the truth'

'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. '

From 'What is this gypsy passion for separation'

'that no one turning over our letters has
yet understood how completely and
how deeply faithless we are, which is
to say: how true we are to ourselves.'

From ' You loved me'

You loved me. And your lies had their own probity.
There was 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."

Reigning love
Tsvetaeva's life was filled with tragedy (she lived through and in Revolutionary Russia (her husband fought for the White Army) and in Czechoslovakia during the German occupation) her heart shouted for a personal love the message which rings echoing through her words as she has deep philosophical understanding and awareness of her world which she rides over like gravel in fodder for her clinging to the personal loves of her heart which reigned supreme. She spat her poverty and desperation with pride at the shallow, whoever they might be, and challenged the dignity of heaven. She was a powerful poet who believed in living each moment for what it was and holding love at an undisputable high.

Some of my favorite quotes from segments of the book...

Because even more than God
himself I love his angels.
From: Bent with Worry

He is the one that mixes
Up the cards
And confuses arithmetic and weight
Demands answers from the school bench
Who altogether refutes Kant
From: The Poet

We entered one another's eyes
As if they were oases

All poets are Jews

Everything that I love changes from an external thing into an inward one, from the moment of my love, it stops being external (from the Introduction).

I can't attest to the authenticity of the translations, as I know little Russian, Reviews seem mixed; but Feinstein, for me, makes some engrossing connections of words that must ring true to some extent. ... Read more

Product Description
Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life beset by loss and hardship. This volume presents for the first time in English a collection of essays published in the Russian émigré press after Tsvetaeva left Moscow in 1922. Based on diaries she kept from 1917 to 1920, Earthly Signs describes the broad social, economic, and cultural chaos provoked by the Bolshevik Revolution. Events and individuals are seen through the lens of her personal experience -- that of a destitute young woman of upper-class background with two small children (one of whom died of starvation), a missing husband, and no means of support other than her poetry.

These autobiographical writings, rich sources of information on Tsvetaeva and her literary contemporaries, are also significant for the insights they provide into the sources and methodology of her difficult poetic language. In addition, they supply a unique eyewitness account of a dramatic period in Russian history, told by a gifted and outspoken poet. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

"diaries" rather than poetry
The subtitle of _Earthly Signs_ is "Moscow Diaries, 1917 - 1922."I had taken this metaphorically, with the expectation and hope that Tsvetaeva's poems would be illuminated with a biography.Instead, the subtitle is literal, which was a disappointment; I had hoped for a different translation than Selected Poems (Tsvetaeva, Marina) (Twentieth-Century Classics), which I was unhappy with.Nonetheless, her diaries did give me some insight into the character and personality of the poet, as well as a micro-cosmic view into the chaos, uncertainty and fear that many Russians felt during the Russian Revolution and the Civil War, hence the three stars.

Tsvetaeva was a melancholy woman.This is apparent in her poetry, but it is vividly shown in her dairy.Not caught up in the romance and drama of the revolution, Tsvetaeva instead was concerned with more basic things: safety, food, and the nagging worry of the safety of her family.This is a common thread throughout the diary as she travels from the Crimea to Moscow to elsewhere.The faces, conversations and concerns of those who cross her path are meticulously documented, along with her own reflections and thoughts.One passage in particular struck me, as Tsetaeva meditates on the grief that war inflicts, writing, "A daughter whose father has been killed - is an orphan.A wife whose husband has been killed is a widow.But a mother whose son has been killed?"This is fairly representative of thoughts that occupy the majority of the book.

Much of the power of _Earthly Signs_ is the result of Tsvetaeva herself, to be sure.But I can't help but think that the translator and editor, Jamey Gambrell, also played a role in this.As Gambrell writes in the introduction, "Every translation, like every poem or novel, is a voyage of sorts.My hope is that I have managed to read these earthly signs well enough, to follow Tsvetaeva's path closely enough to repave enough of her singullar road, for English readers to be translated across the river."I believe these hopes have been realized.A pity, then, that Gambrell has not (at least yet), translated her poetry in addition to these diaries. ... Read more

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Milestone is a bilingual edition of a diary in verse from one of the great Russian poets. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Tsvetaeva's first truly mature work in English translation
MILESTONES is Robin Kemball's translation of Marina Tsvetaeva's VERSTY I, a collection of eighty-four poems written beyond January and December 1916 when the poet was twenty-four and still a resident of Imperial Russia. Beyond the translation of the poems, the book also contains the original Russian text, as well as an introduction and commentary by the translator.

Some of Tsvetaeva's poetry here belongs still to the juvenile, overtly feminine style of her earliest work. Lyrics like "Whence cometh such tender rapture" (written to Osip Mandelstam, a verse notably orchestrated by Shostakovich) are fairly insubstantial. However, overall the collection stands out as her first truly mature work due to its elegant centering around several related themes. At this time, Tsvetaeva was a fan and correspondent of the poets Osip Mandelstam, Alexander Blok, and Anna Akhmatova, all of whom were based on Saint Petersburg. MILESTONES represents a sort of presentation of Tsvetaeva's cherished hometown Moscow to them. The city's many churches is one promiment donation, as when she writes in poem 28 "Seven hills--like seven church bells, / Round seven church bells stand---belfries. / There are forty times forty in all," or in poem 26 we find "Above the city Peter spurned of old, / the thunder of her belfry chimes has rolled." Elsewhere Tsvetaeva contemplates Blok walking alongside the Neva in Saint Petersburg, as she delights in the Moskva river.

Another powerful feature of the collection is its juxtaposition throughout of the bloom of youth and the inevitability of death. Already in the first poem we read "And over me---the owl to cry, / And over me--the grass to sigh...", and in poem 33 "Eat drink, and be merry, my soul! / But there'll come the day--, / Lay me in the wold, / At the four crossroads." And though Tsvetaeva was only nominally Orthodox, and lead quite the scandalous life, we find many poignant observations of the beauty of Orthodox liturgy here. Poem 18, a chronicle of a visit to the liturgy of the Feast of the Annunciation, is my favourite of all the lyrics here in its intense combination of reflection on the self and of feeling part of an ancient tradition: "A group of peasant / Women, gray and old, ... / Crossing themselves severalfold, ... / Before the candles' rays. / As for me, I merrily ... / Thrust my way through the crowd. / I run down to the river Moskva / To watch the ice flow there."

I read the collection in the original Russian, and came to the English translation and notes only in preparing to review the volume here. Kimball's introduction is very enlightening on the context and prosody of the poems. Similarly the notes, though sparing, are quite helpful. I'm less satisfied with his translation, which tries to reflect the sound of the original in English. I am not a fan of adaption translations which are meant to work on their own, instead, I prefer that translations only be a crib for the reader to use until he can read the poetry in the original language. Still, Kimball does deserve praise for being generally faithful to the exact Russian wording, and especially for retaining the dash, Tsvetaeva's favourite punctuation, which many translators eliminate to the detriment of their supposedly faithful English renderings.

For me, Tsvetaeva's best work came later, after her emigration to Czechoslovakia after the establishment of the Soviet Union, in such works as "Hour of the Soul" and "Poem of the End". Still, MILESTONES is generally a very entertaining, occasionally awe-inspiring work. ... Read more

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Sbornik memuarov ob odnom iz samykh izvestnykh poetov 20 veka. Vospominaniya okhvatyvayut bolee soroka let zhizni M.Tsvetaevoj - ot ee detstva do tragicheskogo kontsa. Ochen' raznye po svoemu soderzhaniyu, oni sozdayut ob'emnyj, udivitel'no zhivoj portret nezauryadnoj lichnosti.Naibolee yarkie stranitsy posvyascheny ee zhizni v emigratsii, a strashnye - vozvrascheniyu na rodinu i poslednim dnyam zhizni v Bolsheve i Elabuge.V razdel "Prilozheniya" organichno voshli printsipial'no vazhnye stat'i o tvorchestve M.Tsvetaevoj.Izdanie podgotovleno L.A.Mnukhinym. ... Read more

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This is a Ph.D. dissertation. Although quite a few researchers have pointed to the significance of the childhood theme in Tsvetaeva's work, no systematic analysis of her work has been done from this perspective. Nor have her childhood reminiscences been treated as a thematically consistent whole, but have rather been read as instances of the poet's prose in general.

The present study examines Marina Tsvetaeva's memories of childhood in the context of her work and in the context of the cultural and political reality to which these reminiscences refer and in which they were written - i.e., Russia around the turn of the century and the Russian émigré world of 1930-1937. The study also touches upon the symbolic and allegorical dimension of the texts - Tsvetaeva's "otherspeak" in her prose.

It is shown that the central scenes of these texts author's narrative of childhood also appears to have been a suitable medium for articulating controversial aesthetic statements and taking a stand for a historical past and literary tradition that at the time seemed doomed to oblivion. ... Read more

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Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva's powerful poetic voice and her tragic life have often prompted literary commentators to treat her as either a martyr or a monster. Born in Russia in 1892, she emigrated to Europe in 1922, returned to the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalinist Terror, and committed suicide in 1941. Alyssa Dinega focuses on the poetry, rediscovering Tsvetaeva as a serious thinker with a coherent artistic and philosophical vision. ... Read more

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Bilingual Edition of selected poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Finally!A translation and collection that makes sense!
I've been interested in reading Tsvetaeva's poetry for some time now, with little success.Her Selected Poems (Tsvetaeva, Marina) (Twentieth-Century Classics) were disappointing, my frustration the result of not knowing if my ambivalence was a function of translator or poet.Andrey Kneller provides the answer I was searching for.

First, a remark about translating poetry - as Kneller writes in the introduction, poetry is ridiculously difficult to translate: "(translators) focus so much on word choice and literal meaning that in the end all of the supporting details are lost, and the reader is left with a skeleton of what used to be a beautiful poem.This is not a *translation*, this is a *transgression*."Towards these ends, Kneller has made a noble effort to both "preserve details, without losing sight of the big picture.Meter, rhyme, line length - al these elements are essential in understanding the complexity and beauty of Marina Tsvetaeva's work."He has brilliantly succeeded with the collection here.

The collection is dual-language, as those with even a passing familiarity with Russian will be able to get a sense of the work.The English translations are excellent as well, as meter and especially rhyme are preserved, while still maintaining the overall poetic sensability.This is no easy feat, and I am very impressed with Kneller's work.In fact, his translation is why I give the book a 5-star review rather than 3 or 4 stars.

I like Tsvetaeva - a number of her poems are beautiful and lyric ("Here in my Moscow" and "To kiss the forehead" are among my favorites) - but much of her work is a bit angsty for me, and (by comparison), Anna Akhmatova and Aleksander Blok are much better at the craft - something I had suspected, now confirmed.In fact, for 20th century Russian poets, I would recommend Poems of Akhmatova: Izbrannye Stikhi ahead of this.Given Kneller's obvilious talent and clear gift of translation, Final Meeting: Selected Poetry Of Anna Akhmatova may also be a good choice. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Best translation of any Tsvetaeva's work
This book is the best introduction to Tsvetaeva's work available in English. It's punchy, incredibly witty and drenched with irony. Livingstone does an amazing job preserving the poet's energy, imagery, rhythm and even rhyme schemes. The most sensitive translation ever. Enjoy!

A vivid, rhythmically exciting translation of a great poem
Tsvetaeva's version of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn legend is one of herfinest and most complex works.Angela Livingstone's translation is endowedwith remarkable vitality. ... Read more