She took her own life there by hanging herself from a nail on 31 August 1941.

*

All translation is difficult; Tsvetaeva is a particularly difficult poet. Her pauses and sudden changes of speed are felt always against the deliberate constraint of the forms she had chosen. Perhaps the exact metres could not be kept, but some sense of her shapeliness, as well as her roughness, had to survive. For this reason I usually followed her stanzaic patterning, though I have frequently indented lines where she does not. This slight shift is one of many designed to dispel any sense of the static solidity which blocks of lines convey to an English eye, and which is not induced by the Russian.

English poetry demands a natural syntax, and in looking for that I observed that some of Tsvetaeva’s abruptness had been smoothed out, and the poems had gained a different, more logical scheme of development. There were other problems. Tsvetaeva’s punctuation is strongly individual; but to have reproduced it pedantically would often have destroyed the tone of the English version. In my first drafts I experimented with using extra spaces between words, but sometimes restored Tsvetaeva’s dash, at least in the early poems; in later poems a space has often seemed closer to the movement of her lines. Dashes that indicated the beginning of direct speech are retained, but for this edition I have made clearer who is speaking in lyrics 5 and 6 of ‘Poem of the End’. I frequently left out exclamation marks where their presence seemed to weaken a line that was already loud and vibrant. Furthermore, there were difficulties of diction. Words with echoes of ancient folksongs and the Bible were particularly hard to carry across into English.

I am not sure how far a discussion of methods of translation attracts much useful reflection. Yet some word seems necessary, especially since I have worked with different linguists. Some of the poems, such as ‘Poem of the End’, as Angela Livingstone describes in her detailed Note on Working Method, p. 164, below, were transliterated into English, as well as written out in word-for-word literal versions, which indicated, by hyphenation, words that represented a single Russian word. Other poems, such as the ‘Insomnia’ cycle and ‘Verses about Moscow’, also prepared for me by Angela Livingstone, were first read on to tape in Russian; and then (on the same tape) as literal versions which I wrote out myself and used alongside the printed Russian text. For ‘An Attempt at Jealousy’ I used the literal prose version at the foot of the page in the Penguin Book of Russian Verse. For the 1981 edition, Simon Franklin produced written literal versions very much as Angela Livingstone had done, though without transliterations; and he too gave full indications in his notes of changes of rhythm, musical stress and word-play.

The poems are arranged in order of their original composition, with the new translations fitted into the chronology. Chronological order is particularly important for an understanding of many of the poems.

All my collaborators are listed in full on p. vii, but I should particularly like to acknowledge the work of Tatiana Retivov, once a student of Joseph Brodsky, who made literal versions of all the new lyrics for this edition, alongside the Cyrillic text, and made useful comments. Naturally, all distortions introduced in order to turn these versions into English poems are my responsibility.

Elaine Feinstein

January 2009

Notes

1 Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. Elaine Feinstein (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).

2 ‘Mother and Music’, in J. Marin King (ed.), A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose of Marina Tsvetayeva (Ann Arbor, Ardis 1980), p. 276.

3 Irma Kudrova, Death of a Poet: The Last Days of Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. Mary Ann Szporluk (London, Duckworth 2004), pp. 99–114.

4 Elaine Feinstein, A Captive Lion: The Life of Marina Tsvetayeva (London, Hutchinson 1987), p. 65.

5 ‘On a Red Horse’, p. 60, below.

6 Nina Berberova, The Italics are Mine: Memoirs of the Russian Literary Emigration, trans. Philippe Radley (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World 1969), passim.

7 Viktoria Schweitzer, Tsvetaeva, trans.