Moscow in the Plague Year
Poems
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- USD 13.99
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- USD 13.99
Descripción editorial
Written during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed, these poems are suffused with Tsvetaeva's irony and humor, which undoubtedly accounted for her success in not only reaching the end of the plague year alive, but making it the most productive of her career. We meet a drummer boy idolizing Napoleon, an irrepressibly mischievous grandmother who refuses to apologize to God on Judgment Day, and an androgynous (and luminous) Joan of Arc.
"Represented on a graph, Tsvetaeva's work would exhibit a curve - or rather, a straight line - rising at almost a right angle because of her constant effort to raise the pitch a note higher, an idea higher ... She always carried everything she has to say to its conceivable and expressible end. In both her poetry and her prose, nothing remains hanging or leaves a feeling of ambivalence. Tsvetaeva is the unique case in which the paramount spiritual experience of an epoch (for us, the sense of ambivalence, of contradictoriness in the nature of human existence) served not as the object of expression but as its means, by which it was transformed into the material of art." --Joseph Brodsky
While your eyes follow me into the grave, write up the whole caboodle on my cross! 'Her days began with songs, ended in tears, but when she died, she split her sides with laugher!'
--from Moscow in the Plague Year: Poems
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Those who can read Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) in the original Russian describe her as passionate, volatile, and breathtaking in the sensuous flights of her erotic poems, but also as a gifted writer in traditional rhymed forms, a poet of great control, even when the experiences described involve a near-fatal loss of control. Such is the case for these cycles of lyric poems, mostly about erotic love pursued, lost or won (some address her young daughter). Together the many stanzas and fragments record a year of mostly unrequited devotions, a year spent near Hvation in the disastrous Moscow of 1919. The translation can sound slightly old-fashioned; though Tsvetaeva's passion comes through in these unrhymed translations (printed without the originals), the sonic acuity does not: "With youth's last gaps, beneath the shade/ of dry fig trees, I sing the women/ fated to be your lovers in/ the future you've ahead of you!" Even though the individual pages some never before translated do not stand up as poetry in English, together they tell a hair-raising and heartbreaking story: a self-destructive, almost compulsively productive poet, roaming a broken city, hearing and learning from the writers she loved, writing immortal scraps and heartbroken fragments, "not hiding the emotion in my voice."
