Selected Poems
Marina Tsvetaeva
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During the Stalin years Russia had four great poets to voice the feelings of her oppressed people: Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetayeva. The first two survived the terror, but Mandelstam died in a camp and Tsvetayeva was driven to hang herself in 1941.
This comprehensive selection of Tsvetayeva's poetry includes complete versions of all her major long poems and poem cycles: Poem of the End, An Attempt at a Room, Poems to Czechia and New Year Letter. It was the first English translation to use the new, definitive Russica text of her work. It also includes additional versions ascribed to F.F. Morton which first appeared in The New Yorker: these rhyming translations are actually the work of Joseph Brodsky (who lived at 44 Morton Street in New York).
'Tsvetayeva is one of the great poets of the century and David McDuff's translations are very good. This is all the more remarkable because, like the poems they translate, they rhyme. There are overlaps with Elaine Feinstein's excellent but unrhyming translations of the same poet, but not too many. McDuff conveys Tsvetyeva's commitment to poetry's musical force, Feinstein substitutes a beautifully nuanced syntax for music; Tsvetayeva shines and appals in both' - Martin Dodsworth, Guardian
'It must be said right away that those who want to have an inkling of what Tsvetayeva is actually like, and that includes her form, her rhyme, and the tone of that accompanies form and rhyme, will have to go to McDuff. His diligence with metre and rhyme is remarkably successful, and is the only proper tribute to the poet's linguistic virtuosity. Readers may find that Feinstein comes across more fluently, but that fluency is not Tsvetaevan. McDuff has caught her abruptness, her veering and tacking, and has tried to show something of the curious modern music this produces - "modern" not through free verse but by dint of straining traditional patterns to breaking point' - Cencrastus
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although generally less well known here than Pasternak, Akhmatova and Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva is counted by some critics as the greatest of these four major poets of postrevolutionary Russia. However, as veteran translator McDuff indicates in his introduction, the sounds of Russian poetrywhich to this day remains formally traditional in its use of rhyme and metercan never be captured in English. Further, Tsvetaeva presents a particularly difficult problem to the translator because her transcendent reputation rests precisely on the aural values of her verse. That said, McDuff must be congratulated for his brave attempt to reproduce those formal qualities. If we cannot have Tsvetaeva herself, these stand on their own as creditable English-language poems. The selection represents the entire scope of her remarkable career from her simple and charming early lyrics, first published in 1910 when she was 18, through those recounting her privations and hardships during the years of upheaval in Russia, to the poignant poems written in exile after 1922. It includes all her major long poems, such as the stunning Poem of the End. Although it is unclear whether Tsvetaeva was officially ostracized on her own account or because of the political actions of her husband Sergey Efron, her poems are heart-rending in view of her tragic life and eventual suicide. Love, the loss of youth, poetry and the Motherland are the core subjects of her poems, which are infused with high passion and a heroic tenacity of spirit. For non-Russian speakers, this volume is a new window on poetry in the Stalinist era.
