spittle: the original poem is headed by a sentence from the newspapers of March 1939: ‘The Czechs went up to the Germans and spat.’

p. 2 give back to God his ticket: this is a reference to Ivan Karamazov (in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov), who defiantly offered back to God his entrance ticket to Heaven so long as Heaven is built upon or despite the suffering of children on earth.

Select Bibliography of Works in English

Joseph Brodsky, Less than One: Selected Essays (New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1986)

Lily Feiler, Marina Tsvetaeva: The Double Beat of Heaven and Hell (Durham NC and London, Duke University Press 1994)

Elaine Feinstein, A Captive Lion: The Life of Marina Tsvetaeva (London, Hutchinson 1987)

Elaine Feinstein (trans.), Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Oxford University Press 1971; paperback enlarged edition, Oxford University Press 1981; third edition re-issued Hutchinson 1986; fourth, further enlarged, edition, with revised introduction, Oxford Poets, Oxford University Press 1993; enlarged fifth edition Carcanet Press 1999)

Simon Karlinsky, Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World and Her Poetry (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1985)

Robin Kemball (trans.), Marina Tsvetaeva, The Demesne of the Swans: a bi-lingual edition (Ann Arbor, Ardis 1980)

J. Marin King (ed.), A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose of Marina Tsvetayeva (Ann Arbor, Ardis 1980)

Nina Kossman (trans.), Poem of the End: Selected Lyrical and Narrative Poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva, with facing Russian text (Ann Arbor, Ardis 1995)

Irma Kudrova, Death of a Poet: The Last Days of Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. Mary Ann Szporluk (London, Duckworth 2004)

Angela Livingstone (trans.) Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva (London, Bristol Classical 1992)

Angela Livingstone (trans.), Marina Tsvetaeva, The Ratcatcher: A Lyrical Satire (London, Angel Press 1999)

David McDuff (trans.), Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems (Newcastle, Bloodaxe 1987)

Boris Pasternak, An Essay in Autobiography, trans. Manya Harari (London, Collins and Harvill Press 1959)

Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak and Konstantin M. Azadovsky (eds), Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters, Summer 1926, trans. Margaret Wettlin and Walter Arndt (London, Jonathan Cape 1986)

Ellendea Proffer, Tsvetaeva: A Pictorial Biography, trans. J. Marin King (Ann Arbor, Ardis 1980)

Viktoria Schweitzer, Tsvetaeva, trans. Robert Chandler and H.T. Willetts (London, HarperCollins 1992)

Jane A. Taubman, A Life Through Poetry: Marina Tsvetaeva’s Lyric Diary (Columbus, OH, Slavica Publishers 1989)

Appendix

Note to 1971 edition: On Working Method

No poet’s voice can be exactly recorded in the medium of another language. Marina Tsvetaeva’s is particularly difficult to capture, both because her consistent adherence to rhyme and to metrical regularity would, if copied in the English poems, probably enfeeble them, and because so many of the linguistic devices which she powerfully exploits (such as ellipsis, changes of word-order, the throwing into relief of inflectional endings) are simply not available in English. On the whole, the English versions are consciously less emphatic, less loudly-spoken, less violent, often less jolting and disturbing than the Russian originals. Most noticeable of all in Tsvetaeva’s poems, especially the later ones, are the very strong rhythm and the unprecedently vigorous syntax. There is, too, a somewhat idiosyncratic and highly emotional use of punctuation, particularly of exclamation marks and dashes.

Except in the case of the ‘Poem of the Mountain’, a literal version of which was prepared by Valentina Coe, and a number of earlier poems, where the literal version was dictated on to a tape-recorder, Elaine Feinstein and I worked as follows: I would write out each poem in English, keeping as close as made sense to the word-order of the Russian; joining by hyphens those English words which represented a single Russian word; indicating by oblique lines words whose order had to be reversed to be readable, and by asterisks phrases where several changes had had to take place; adding notes on metre, sound properties, play with word-roots, and specifically Russian connotations. All this material was then changed into poetry by Elaine Feinstein, who took those liberties with it that the new English poem demanded, but returned constantly to the Russian text to check the look, sound, and position of Tsvetaeva’s own words.

To give one example – the opening of lyric 6 of ‘Poem of the End’. One of the most original and effective features of the poems making up this cycle is the way they tend to be structurally based each upon a single syntactic unit which is several times repeated almost identically. This determines the structure of every stanza in which it appears, throwing into different kinds of relief the words and phrases that are not part of it, and bringing a peculiar rhythm into the expressed emotions. When it ceases to recur, we read the rest of the poem in strong recollection of its shape.

In lyric 6 the dominant phrase (italicised, by me, in the extract below) is one that has the verb ‘to hand’ as its final and basic element, and involves the prominent use of the dative case. Each time, the phrase is in brackets and, each time, its last word comes as an enjambment. It occurs in stanzas 2, 3 and 5; is implied in stanza 4; and is referred to (through similar enjambment and rhythm) in stanza 6, where a sharp irony arises from the combination of the rhythm and pattern of that unit with the idea of ‘dividing’ – the opposite, one would think, of ‘handing’. Here are those six stanzas, in Russian and ‘literal’ English. (I omit my notes on diction, connotations, etc.)