Customer Reviews

Selected Poems

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Finestein's translations are so awful, it is no wonder that few English speakers want to know who Tsvetaeva is. She loses the rhythm, rhyme, literary devices, and everything for which Tsvetaeva's poetry is so loved. The duality of meanings and word play is also completely lost. Try Angela Livingstone's translations - they are excellent.

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892, published her first poems at 18, and was married with two children when the Russian Revolution began. She endured numerous hardships -- one of her children died of malnutrition -- and a period of exile. She returned to Russia in 1939, but was so beset by her circumstances that she committed suicide in 1941. These passionate and autobiographical poems are deep and important. I don't know Russian, so cannot comment on the translation. From them one learns about Tsvetaeva the artist: her subjects are love and transformation, nature, poetry, love, and her complicated, exasperating country -- and, later, the bleakness which enveloped her. Poetry was serious business in Russia, and this poet was one of the greats.

Read this book! and read about her life. She witnessed so much darkness and her words open up these experiences, lay them bare. I really wonder what her writing would have been if she had lived a different life, one without so much tragedy. She also recognized, as did Virginia Woolfe, that it is difficult for women to write amidst the responsibilities of everyday life -- "I have no time to think . . . I have only ever been myself in notebooks . . . for all my life I have been leading a child by the hand." Her work stays with you long after the book closes.

I do not know Russian. I cannot comment on whether or not Elaine Feinstein has captured or missed completely the supposedly brilliant aural qualities of the original verse.
What I can say is that reading these poems I have a sense of true poetry. There is a depth of feeling and a passion, a soul being revealed in depth, a life in its sufferings and straining for beauty.
Perhaps more words are irrelevant, and I shall just give a few excerpts from the book.

From ' I know the truth'

'The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet,
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth,we
who never let each other sleep above it. '

From 'What is this gypsy passion for separation'

'that no one turning over our letters has
yet understood how completely and
how deeply faithless we are, which is
to say: how true we are to ourselves.'

From ' You loved me'

You loved me. And your lies had their own probity.
There was truth in every falsehood
Your love went far beyond any possible
boundary as no one else's could.

Your love seemed to last even longer
than time itself. Now you wave your hand-
and suddenly your love for me is over!
That is the truth in five words."

Tsvetaeva's life was filled with tragedy (she lived through and in Revolutionary Russia (her husband fought for the White Army) and in Czechoslovakia during the German occupation) her heart shouted for a personal love the message which rings echoing through her words as she has deep philosophical understanding and awareness of her world which she rides over like gravel in fodder for her clinging to the personal loves of her heart which reigned supreme. She spat her poverty and desperation with pride at the shallow, whoever they might be, and challenged the dignity of heaven. She was a powerful poet who believed in living each moment for what it was and holding love at an undisputable high.

Some of my favorite quotes from segments of the book...

Because even more than God
himself I love his angels.
From: Bent with Worry

He is the one that mixes
Up the cards
And confuses arithmetic and weight
Demands answers from the school bench
Who altogether refutes Kant
From: The Poet

We entered one another's eyes
As if they were oases

All poets are Jews

Everything that I love changes from an external thing into an inward one, from the moment of my love, it stops being external (from the Introduction).

I can't attest to the authenticity of the translations, as I know little Russian, Reviews seem mixed; but Feinstein, for me, makes some engrossing connections of words that must ring true to some extent.

A contemporary of Akhmatova, Blok and Rilke, Tsvetaeva is not well known outside her native Russia. She was apparently demanding, difficult, and hard to get along with. One certainly gets a sense of this from her writing. Her poetry, given the time she wrote (the collection here spans from 1916 - 1936) is dark and melancholy, as one would expect. From this translation alone, I would consider her a second-rate poet, far behind Akhmatova. To do so, however, would be to do Tsvetaeva (and her legion of fans) a great disservice. Simply put, this translation is clunky. The images, meter, even the enjambment of the poems simply doesn't resonate. My Russian is admittedly weak; even so, comparing the original with the translations here presented a striking difference in substance.

To be fair to the translator Feinstein, translation is extremely difficult, especially so with poetry. Yet it *can* be done well, capturing the flavor, emotion and (in exceptional cases) the sense of word-play that is so critical to this art form. I was disappointed, then, that in this instance, Tsvetaeva's voice was not captured as well as it deserves to be. I have not given up on this poet - but I cannot recommend this particular edition.

Check out exceprts from the New York Review of Books on this atrocity of a "translation" (see below). Lack of verbal, literary, and source-language-ability is no excuse for this travesty of a translation! You know *less* about Tsvetayeva after reading this translation, because even if you had no knowledge to begin with, you'd end by being poisoned with a complete and utter misrepresentation of the poet that Tsvetayeva IS and WAS. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

NYR Books

Volume 29, Number 6 · April 15, 1982
Poet of Sacrifice

By David McDuff
Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva
translated by Elaine Feinstein
"Elaine Feinstein's translations of Marina Tsvetayeva's poetry have been widely praised since they first appeared in 1971. The present volume contains an additional twenty-four pages of poems. These are welcome, though one might have hoped that a substantial revision and expansion of the book would have made room for poems which are not to be found in the Soviet editions of Tsvetayeva's poetry. As it is, the additions--mostly chosen from Tsvetayeva's later work--come without exception from the "Soviet canon" of Tsvetayeva and do nothing to counter the officially accepted Soviet view of the poet: as an émigré, miserably unhappy amid the evils of life in the West, and inexorably drawn toward her homeland ("Home-sickness").

It cannot be denied that the initial impression to be gained from the experience of hearing Feinstein's versions read aloud is that of a faithful rendering into the English of the meaning of the original poems. Yet unfortunately this initial impression is misleading. If one studies Feinstein's book carefully, reading both introduction and notes, not only does one discover that Feinstein knows no Russian; she also makes, it would appear, substantial claims for her translations, maintaining that they are "transformations" (she borrows the term from Octavio Paz) of the original, achieved through the reworking of literal versions. In her "Note on Working Method" at the end of the book, Angela Livingstone asserts that "All this material [i.e., semantic, phonetic, and metrical description of the Russian text prepared for Feinstein's use] was... changed into poetry by Elaine Feinstein."

Changed into what kind of poetry, may one ask? Tsvetayevan, or Feinsteinian? Joseph Brodsky in a recent interview suggested that "if you could conjure up a combination of Hart Crane and Hopkins, that would be something like Tsvetayeva."[7] There is no evidence in Feinstein's translations that she has made even the slightest attempt in this direction. If her versions are meant as literal guides to the sense of Tsvetayeva's poems, well and good. If they claim to have the status of poetry, then one must insist that with a poet of the uniqueness and greatness of Tsvetayeva they must make at least some gesture in the direction of the formal and prosodic qualities of the original. This, with the possible exception of an eccentrically indented preservation of Tsvetayeva's stanzaic patterns (minus the rhymes), Feinstein's versions singularly fail to do. And no matter how pleasing the result to English or American ears, one must again, out of respect for Tsvetayeva, insist that this result has little to do with Tsvetayeva's art, that it is a deception: not a willful one, perhaps, but a deception nevertheless.

For although Feinstein's versions may look and sound like the kind of poetry to which English and American readers are accustomed, they contain almost nothing of what Kassner calls "Grösse des Mythischen" ("greatness of the mythical")--to which Tsvetayeva gave ecstatic utterance. Tsvetayeva's art is one of poetic music--of rhythm, assonance, meter, and above all, rhyme. She wrote to Pasternak:

This world contains its rhymes.
Prise them apart, it trembles.
The importance of rhyme to Tsvetayeva, both symbolically and as a technical device, cannot be overstated. To overlook it is to ignore the very heart, the central meaning, of this artist's titanic work.

Tsvetayeva's poems are a blend of metaphysical cunning and daring with a profound tonal dexterity, the like of which I have not found in any other poet. For the nearest aesthetic equivalent to the effect in the original of Tsvetayeva's collection Posle Rossii ("After Russia," 1928), one has to turn to the work of a composer: Stravinsky's neoclassical compositions of the 1920s. It is hard to see how any non-Russian-reader studying Feinstein's translations could even begin to guess at such a connection.

The argument is frequently raised that what is possible or acceptable in Russian rhyme and meter is not similarly available in English. Thus, Angela Living-stone asserts that "Marina Tsvetayeva's [voice] is particularly difficult to capture... because her consistent adherence to rhyme and to metrical regularity would, if copied in the English poems, probably enfeeble them." This seems a dubious claim--surely it is at least worth the effort to try? The fact is that rhyme and meter are unfashionable now among English and American poets. That is altogether another matter. Unusual rhymes and shifting meters (which are much more characteristic of Tsvetayeva than is "adherence to rhyme and to metrical regularity") are just as available in English as they are in Russian. It is the motivation among poets and translators to go and look for them that is missing.

On at least one important occasion, Feinstein's lack of Russian and her reliance on literal versions let her down badly. "Poema kontsa" ("Poem of the End") contains, in its ninth section, the following chilling sequence:

Ya ne bolee chem zhivotnoye,
Kem-to ranennoye v zhivot.
Feinstein renders this as:

I am no more than an animal that someone has stabbed in the stomach.
This is literally correct, although perhaps "wounded" would be more faithful to the original than "stabbed." Literal correctness, however, is not enough in this, as in many other poems by Tsvetayeva. What Tsvetayeva has written is a pun on the root zhiv ("alive"); zhivotnoye means "an animal," and zhivot, a word whose close relation to the one for "animal" cannot escape even those who know no Russian, means "a stomach." A conscientious translator might attempt to make some play with two similarly related English words such as "animal" and "anima." "Wounded in the anima" is, after all, what Tsvetayeva means.

As an introduction to Tsvetayeva's poetry, Elaine Feinstein's Selected Poems goes perhaps halfway to being successful. There is much of Tsvetayeva's poetry that remains to be translated: "The New Year's Letter" to Rilke, the "Attempt at a Room," the "Poem of Air," to name but a few long and important poems. But, above all, what cries out to be translated is the rhyming language of Tsvetayeva's poems. Without that, we miss what is distinctive and great about her work.

Notes
[3] My translation.

[4] Rudolf Kassner, "Erinnerungen an Rilke" in Buch der Erinnerung (Eugen Rentsch Verlag, Zurich, 1954).

[5] Translated by Elaine Feinstein.

[6] My translation.

[7] Quarto, No. 24, December 1981, p. 10.

Marina Tsvetaeva is simply amazing. Feinstein does a superb job here translating, considering Tsvetaeva is nearly impossible to translate out of Russian.
This book is cheap, wonderful and most people I know end up getting a copy from me as a gift at some time.