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 distant 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.

Poem of the End

p. 1 There are fourteen poems in this cycle (some divided into two or three lyrics); the eleventh poem is not translated.
The love affair with Rodzevitch was over by December 1923, and this poem records exactly how she learns of his decision to end their relationship, as they meet, walk about the city of Prague with its many bridges, and talk over café tables.

p. 2 a window under the roof…/it is burning?: a rephrasing of lines from a poem by Blok.
who shall I tell my sorrow: words from the Psalter.

p. 3 Semiramis: Assyrian princess (c.800 BC) famous for her hanging gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

p. 4 Star of Malta: the emblem of a medieval knightly order.

p. 5 powder/made by Berthold Schwartz: gunpowder.

p. 6 The stamp left on your heart/would be the ring on your hand: an allusion to the Song of Songs (8:6): ‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart…’

p. 7 Khlebnikov: a Russian Futurist poet.

p. 8 Marinkas: Marinka is a diminutive of Marina, a common Polish name (and well-known to Russians from the princess in Pushkin’s Boris Godunov).

New Year’s Greetings

p. 1 Ariadna Efron writes that the correspondence between Tsvetaeva and Pasternak began in 1922, and continued until 1935. It was at its most intense in the mid-1920s. The correspondence between Tsvetaeva and Rilke was set in motion by a letter from Leonid Pasternak written to congratulate Rilke on his fiftieth birthday. Rilke, then in a sanitorium with leukaemia, replied warmly, mentioning that the fame of Leonid’s son Boris had reached him from all sides, and praising particularly poems which had been translated into French by Helene Izvolskaya and published in Paul Valéry’s journal Commerce. Boris had to wait for his father to send him a copy of Rilke’s letter, which was too precious to be risked in the post. In his first letter to Rilke Pasternak asked the poet he so admired to send a copy of Duino Elegies to Marina Tsvetaeva, whom he described as ‘a born poet, a great talent…’ More practically, he asked Rilke to send any reply through Tsvetaeva, since there was no direct post between the USSR and Switzerland. The first exchanges between Tsvetaeva and Rilke were ecstatic on both sides. But Tsvetaeva longed for greater intimacy and even a meeting, unaware that Rilke was already in the final months of his life.