27-10-2000
Марина Цветаева
Marina Tsvetaeva
(1892 - 1941)
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Considered one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century, Marina Ivanova Tsvetaeva wrote poetry born of great pain. Her poetry is lyrical, linguistically inventive and complex, and deeply philosophical. From the time that she was a child to the end of her life she struggled, but the traumas of her life found expression in her writing. Born into the upper class to an art historian father and a musician mother, from an early age Marina was exposed to the leading intellectuals of Moscow. Her mother wanted her to be a great musician, but Marina's talent was for writing, not for music. To try to discourage her early interest in poetry, Marina's mother destroyed all her work, but Marina kept at it despite the lack of support, and once her mother died, Marina gave up music and focused on her writing. She was an accomplished linguist in Russian, French, and German. Her first book of poems was published in 1910, and the book's success brought her acceptance among the members of the Russian literary circle. She married and moved to the Crimea with her husband. But once the Russian Revolution began, Marina was caught up in its consequences. Her husband fought on the wrong side, supporting the White Army against the Bolsheviks. Marina moved back to Moscow with her children, in the hope of meeting her husband there, but she had no way to support her family and instead found herself in the midst of a famine that claimed the life of one of her daughters. During her five-year separation from her husband, Marina wrote a series of political poems called The Demesne of the Swans and also wrote several plays for her friend, the actress Sofia Gollidey, but existence was difficult and unpredictable. She finally heard from her husband who had escaped to Berlin, and Marina joined him there in 1922. During their exile, the family lived in increasing poverty in Germany, Prague, and finally Paris, remaining there until 1939. Marina continued to write both poetry and prose, and through letters developed a lasting friendship with Russian author Boris Pasternak. But a number of factors were at work that would eventually lead her to disaster. Her husband became a Soviet spy and eventually had to flee France to escape indictment for the murder of another Soviet agent. Although by all accounts Marina had no idea that her husband was a spy, the Paris intelligentsia blamed her for his actions and turned their backs on her. So with remarkably bad timing and judgment, Marina returned to Russia during the height of the Stalin terror. Her husband was arrested and executed (his attempt to gain Communist acceptance with his spying activities had failed), and she was totally ostracized and prevented from supporting herself and her son (Marina's other daughter had deserted her in Paris and returned to Russia where she was imprisoned). When Germany attacked Russia, Marina's son joined the army and was lost at the front. Marina was evacuated from Moscow to the Tartar Autonomous Republic where penniless, alone, and unknown, she hanged herself in 1941. Marina was born on October 9, 1892. |
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Мне
нравится, что
вы больны не
мной, Мне
нравится еще,
что вы при мне Спасибо
вам и сердцем
и рукой 3 мая 1915
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I'm
glad that I long not for you That
the heavy sphere of Earth Does
not flow under our feet I
am glad that it's allowed to be funny-- --spoiled--and
waste no words for games; And
not to be chocked by a wave of blushing When our sleeves touch ever so slightly.
I
also like that in my presence undisturbed Your
arms surround another woman, That
you don't ask me to burn in poisoned Flames
when I am kissing not you; That,
sweetheart, you don't call my sweet name Any
day nor night, at any time, That
in the calm of an Eastern Church They'll
never sing for us: hallelujah!
I
thank you with my heart and hand For
your--unknown to you!--love of me, For
my peace at night, for the seldomness Of
our meetings at the sunset hour; For
our non-walks under the moon, For
the sun not over our heads, For
your longing--alas!--not for me, For my longing--alas!--not for you.
3.05.1915
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Идешь, на
меня похожий, Прочти -
слепоты
куриной Не думай,
что здесь -
могила, И кровь
приливала к
коже, Сорви
себе стебель
дикий Но только
не стой
угрюмо, Как луч
тебя
освещает! 3 мая 1913
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You're
me in the way. I used to Walk
so, without looking up. Stop,
passerby! Don't refuse to. I
beg and I pray you -- stop!
You'll
read, as you lay the glowing Red
blossoms on the mound of grass: Marina.
And then more slowly: The dates -- of my birth and death.
Yes,
there is a grave, but leave it And
hount you I won't, no fear. I
too, you can well believe it, Once laught in the midst of tears.
The
blood through my veins coursed freely, The
locks curled around my face. Stop,
passerby! Can't you feel it? I
too, passerby, once was.
A
strawberry. Pluck it, eat it! It's
there, near the very ground. No
berries are ever sweeter Then
those in a graveyard found.
But
only no gloom, no tightly Closed
lips, do not brood or fret. Think
lightly on me, and lightly My
name, passerby, forget.
The
sun's dust-like beams caress you, Your
shoulders and head they lave. Please
don't let the voice distress you That
cames to you from grave.
3.05.1913
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Это пеплы сокровищ: Утрат, обид. Это пеплы, пред коими В прах - гранит. Голубь голый и светлый, Не живущий четой. Соломоновы пеплы Над великой тщетой. Беззакатного времени
Грозный мел.
Значит Бог в мои двери -
Раз дом сгорел!
Не удушенный в хламе,
Снам и дням господин,
Как отвесное пламя
Дух - из ранних седин!
И не вы меня предали,
Годы, в тыл!
Эта седость - победа
Бессмертных сил.
27 сентября 1922
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Cinzas dos tesouros. (*) Das perdas, ofensas. Cinzas ante as quais O granito é pó.
Pombo nu e claro, Sozinho, sem par. De Salomão as cinzas Sobre a grande vaidade.
Cal ameaçando O tempo sem ocaso. Deus passou-me à porta – Já que a casa ardeu!
Livre da tralha velha, O espírito, chama recta, É amo de sonhos, dias E do – precoce encanecer!
Não foram os anos quem Me traiu na retaguarda! Cabelo branco é a vitória Dos poderes imortais.
27 de Setembro de 1922 |
ПоэтПоэт — издалека
заводит речь.
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POETAS (*)
O poeta – começa a falar de longe. Ao poeta – a fala leva-o longe.
Por planetas, agoiros, buracos de fábulas Sinuosas… Entre sim e não, mesmo Ao lançar-se do campanário fará Um rodeio… Porque a roda dos cometas –
É a rota dos poetas. Com os elos dispersos Da causalidade – se liga! Com a fronte Virada ao alto – te desespera! Não constam Do calendário os eclipses do poeta.
É aquele que baralha as cartas, ilude O peso e a medida, o que faz perguntas Interrompendo a professora, é aquele Que desbarata o Kant.
É ele quem, no pétreo caixão das Bastilhas, Se ergue como árvore em toda a sua beleza. Aquele de quem se perdem sempre as pegadas, É aquele comboio que toda a gente Perde…- Porque a rota dos cometas
É a rota dos poetas: queimando sem calor, Arrancando sem semear – explodir, romper – O teu rumo, a tua curva de crinas, Não consta do calendário!
8 de Abril de 1923
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(*)Tradução de Nina Guerra e Filipe Guerra, Marina Tsvetáeva, Depois da Rússia, 1922-1925, Relógio de Água, Novembro de 2001. |
Some sites about Marina Tsvetaeva:
Poems: http://www.stihi-rus.ru/1/Cvetaeva/
Poems: http://slova.org.ru/cvetaeva/index/
Russian: http://www.richardboffin.com/poets/index.html
http://www.poetryloverspage.com/index.html
Andrey Kneller - Translations into English: http://home.comcast.net/~kneller/tsvetaeva.html
http://www.angelfire.com/tn/tysovska/tsvetaeva.html
http://www.kulichki.com:8101/poems/Poets/mt/Eng/mt.html
http://www.silverage.ru/poets/cvetaeva_poet.html
Kirjasto: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tsveta.htm
Published: 22 May 2012
Marina Tsvetayeva came of age in Moscow during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the famine that followed. She published her first collection of poems, Vechemy Albom (Evening Album) in 1910, at the age of eighteen; her Selected Poems were translated into English, by Elaine Feinstein, in 1971, followed by translations of A Captive Spirit (1994), and Earthly Signs: The Moscow diaries, 1917–1922, which appeared last year. Throughout her career, Tsvetayeva drew on the work of Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke and Anna Akhmatova, among others, but she bore more than her share of grief, too. During the Moscow famine in 1919, she attempted to save her younger daughter, Irina, from starvation by placing her in a state orphanage; the child died soon after. Her husband, Sergei Efron, who had worked for the Soviet secret police, was executed in 1939, while her surviving daughter, Ariadna, was sent to a labour camp. On August 31, 1941, not long after the German army invaded the Soviet Union, Tsvetayeva hanged herself.
Her poetry, verse plays and collected prose still speak for the voiceless of that time, particularly the young women and mothers driven to desperate measures. “Rails”, as translated by Feinstein, quietly captures the chaos of those “departing, deserting” a country they had once called home. In the first lines of the poem, Tsvetayeva compares the railroad tracks to a bed with “tidy sheets”, a place of comfort, before switching to a metaphor in which “parallel tracks ruled out / as neatly as staves” resemble sheets of music instead. One imagines how the musical qualities of verse often soothed the poet’s sorrows. Yet “Rails” asserts that that no amount of hope can muffle “the note of pain always rising / higher than love”; only acceptance of pain might help us to transcend our suffering. “Despair”, which she compares to an “arranged marriage”, may come, but may also lead to transformations. Even as the speaker becomes “Sappho with her voice gone” – perhaps contemplating the loss of her own muse – she seems to rejoice. She becomes “a simple seamstress”, then “a marsh heron”, able to rise above the scene, to contemplate it from a distance. She will see the train move along the tracks “and slice through them like scissors”. The last lines of the poem are cutting, too, with their allusions to both suicide and marriage at once. “Rails” shows us a poet at the height of her creative powers, yet powerless to halt the division and destruction that shaped her life and the lives of so many others.
Рельсы
В некой разлинованности нотной
Нежась наподобие простынь —
Железнодорожные полотна,
Рельсовая режущая синь!
Пушкинское: сколько их, куда их
Гонит! (Миновало — не поют!)
Это уезжают-покидают,
Это остывают-отстают.
Это — остаются. Боль как нота
Высящаяся… Поверх любви
Высящаяся… Женою Лота
Насыпью застывшие столбы…
Час, когда отчаяньем как свахой
Простыни разостланы. — Твоя! —
И обезголосившая Сафо
Плачет как последняя швея.
Плач безропотности! Плач болотной
Цапли… Водоросли — плач! Глубок
Железнодорожные полотна
Ножницами режущий гудок.
Растекись напрасною зарею
Красное напрасное пятно!
…Молодые женщины порою
Льстятся на такое полотно.
10 июля 1923
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Rails
And over them people are driven
And yet lag behind and linger,
Despair has appointed an hour for me
with a cry of passive lament –
Colours blur in my eye,
Translated by Elaine Feinstein
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31-1-2017
‘We are keeping an eye on the girls’
“What I want from all of poetry and from each line of a poem: the truth of this moment. That’s as far as truth goes. Never turns to wood – always to ashes”, Marina Tsvetayeva wrote to Rainer Maria Rilke in a love letter in the summer of 1926, which would become their last correspondence before Rilke’s death from leukemia at the age of fifty-one. “We are keeping an eye on the girls” was written in March 1916, a year before the Russian Revolution in 1917, when Tsvetayeva was a twenty-three-year-old mother and yet to suffer five terrible years of famine in Moscow before leaving the Soviet Union in 1922. “What have I seen of live? Throughout my youth (from 1917 on) – black toil”, she wrote.
First published in Elaine Feinstein’s translation in the TLS in 1970, the poem portrays the anxiety and restlessness among women in Russian homes during the early stages of the First World War. The collective “we” are making sure that the girls get the “kvass” (Russian beer) right, passing traditions safely down to the next generation. The smoke of incense “ceremoniously” fills the house, a symbol commonly used by the Church to represent the prayers of the faithful rising to heaven, but here it surrounds the speakers as soon as the “ancient whisper” of death is heard. “You‘ll rise then as smoke to the sky, / you‘ll have a grave then in the clouds”, reads Paul Celan’s Death Fugue (Celan was one of Tsvetayeva’s many admirers) – and in Tsvetayeva’s poem the incense becomes a similar threat; a cloud that “wraps [their] coals about”, turns the pigeons grey and the apples “white, like angels”.
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За девками доглядывать, не скис ли в жбане квас, оладьи не остыли ль, Да перстни пересчитывать, анис Всыпая в узкогорлые бутыли.
Кудельную расправить бабке нить, Да ладаном курить по дому росным, Да под руку торжественно проплыть Соборной площадью, гремя шелками, с крёстным.
Кормилица с крикливым петухом В переднике — как ночь ее повойник! — Докладывает древним шепотком, Что молодой — в часовенке — покойник.
И ладанное облако углы Унылой обволакивает ризой, И яблони — что ангелы — белы, И голуби на них — что ладан — сизы.
И странница, прихлебывая квас Из ковшика, на краешке лежанки, О Разине досказывает сказ И о его прекрасной персиянке.
26 марта 1916
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We are keeping an eye on the girls
We are keeping an eye on the girls, so that the kvass
straightening tow thread for the peasant woman:
The wet nurse has a screeching cockerel
And an incense cloud wraps our coals about
And the pilgrim woman sipping kvass from the ladle
MARINA TSVETAYEVA
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SEPTEMBER 11, 2018
By taking up writing as a career, Marina Tsvetaeva disappointed her mother a
concert pianist with musical aspirations for her daughters. Tsvetaeva insisted
she was “not born a musician”, but years of rigid piano training left a residue
in her pedantically punctuated poems: “Mother gave us drink from the opened vein
of Lyricism”. The struggle between music and words persists in Tsvetaeva’s
largely experimental oeuvre. In 1967, a TLS review of Simon Karlinsky’s biography of Tsvetaeva called
her: “a poets’ poet . . . scarcely intelligible even to specialists”.
Translating her work is notoriously difficult. In her translation of
“Appointment” (first published in the TLS in 1980), Elaine Feinstein
made sacrifices: the poet’s characteristic dashes were replaced with extra
spaces or enjambment to work with the natural syntax of the English version.
Feinstein realized that “some of Tsvetayeva’s abruptness had been smoothed out
and the poems had gained a different, more logical scheme of development”.
Although Tsvetaeva disapproved of prying into poets’ lives, it is helpful to
approach her work chronologically. “Appointment” was written in 1923, soon after
the Russian Civil War ended in Bolshevik victory and Tsvetaeva joined her exiled
husband, Sergei Efron, in Prague. Here she wrote some of her greatest poetry,
subsequently published in the collection After Russia (1928). The collection is pervaded by a feeling of
exclusion from love and life – in Prague, an intensely desired meeting with
Boris Pasternak failed, sparking an obsession with “non-meetings” and her
conviction that poets were doomed to solitude. At the time, Ophelia became an
important figure in her poetry, standing in for the unfulfilled woman.
Tsvetaeva’s was an emotionally tormented life: married, she had ruinous affairs
with both men and women. “Appointment” most likely addresses her epistolary
romance with Pasternak. As with Ophelia, the reticence of a potential lover in
the face of a lower form of love has led the speaker to her demise: “She gulped
at love, and filled her mouth with silt”.
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«На назначенное свиданье…»
На назначенное свиданье
Буду годы идти — не дрогнул
Землю долго прожить! Трущоба —
Той, что страсти хлебнув, лишь ила
18 июня 1923
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Appointment
I’ll be late for the meeting
I shall walk with this bitterness for years
Living on. As the earth continues,
She gulped at love, and filled her mouth
MARINA TSVETAEVA (1923)
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