By Don Mager

You can access two PDF files of my Tsvetaeva translations:  A Selection of Poems by Tsvetaeva to Other Poets and Poem of Air.   

Of the major Russian poets of the 20^th Century with their complex and difficult lives under the Soviet regime, Marina Tsvetaeva’s (1892-1941) was one of the most painful to read about.  Despite extreme poverty as an émigré in first Czechoslovakia and later France, despite complex and overwrought love affairs, despite her separation, reunion and later abandonment by her husband whom she supported up to his execution, despite arrests of her husband and daughter, despite her desperate situation after her return to the Soviet Union in 1939, she wrote prodigiously.  Her letters present an impulsive person of wide interests who was engaged with daily life with eagerness and absorption.  The facts of her life are readily available.   

A Selection of Poems by Tsvetaeva to Other Poets  (click here to access PDF file)

Throughout her career, Tsvetaeva wrote poems to other poets.  Some were adulatory and almost gushy, dedicated to writers whom she hardly knew or had never met: Akhmatova, Blok and Rilke.  Others responded to the shock of death, sometimes suicide: Esenin and Maiakovskii, but also Blok and Rilke.  Tsvetaeva‘s reply to Rilke‘s elegy to her is cast as a letter written to him after his death.   By contrast, the poems to Mandel’shtam and Pasternak were written in the heat of passion, an affair with the first and an epistolary infatuation with the latter.  She knew both men well and admired them fiercely.  The friendship with Pasternak was long-lived and deep.  The seven poems to Mandel’shtam came during a few months in 1915 while they had a brief affair; he wrote poems to her at the same time.

The astonishing four-month exchange of letters and books in 1926 between Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva and Rilke is fully told in Letters Summer 1926, edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak and Konstantin M. Azadovsky. They did not meet as Pasternak and Tsvetaeva wished and Rilke‘s leukemia treatments and death brought the correspondence to an end. The story is far too rich and fascinating to be summarized here. In a sense it culminated in an elegy that Rilke wrote to Tsvetaeva which she always referred to as the eleventh “secret” Duino elegy. Rilke‘s first letter to her, before the correspondence flourished fully, included signed copies of Duino Elegies (click here to access PDF file) and Sonnets to Orpheus. The Elegies were inscribed with a quatrain. The notion that a poet is a force bigger than persons and appears from time to time by dictation separate from a writer‘s life and person was very appealing to Tsvetaeva. In her letters to Rilke she repeatedly acclaims him as “poet”—an embodiment of the origin of all poetry, the mythic Orpheus, and her “A New Year‘s” (included here) exfoliates the theme of “poet” in her inimitable way.  Here is Rilke’s quatrain.

Марина Илановна Цветаева

Wir rühren uns, womit? Mit Flügel-Schlägen,

mit Fernen selber rühren wir uns an.

Ein Dichter einzig lebt, und dann seid wann

kommt, der ihm trägt, dem, der ihn trug, entgegen.

Val Mont Glion, Canton Vaud. 3 Mai 1926 (Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Rilke, photocopy between pp.84-85)

For Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva

We touch each other with what? With beating wings

across the distances we touch each other.

A single poet lived, and now and then came

among those who bore him, those whom he bore.

Val Mont Glion, Canton Vaud. 3 May 1926

Editions of her poetry group “New Year’s” with the poemy.  Poema is a distinctly Russian genre of long poem, usually narrative, but sometimes meditative or descriptive. During the decade of Rilke‘s death, she wrote three other poems on poets’ deaths.  Aleksandr Blok (b.1880) died in 1921. She had written a cycle of poems celebrating him, whom she viewed like Rilke as the embodiment of poetry. After his death she added several poems and the cycle was published as a small volume. As with “New Year‘s,” she rings changes on his name in almost untranslatable inventions of sound and pun. Unlike Rilke and Blok, she personally knew Vladimir Maiakovskii (1893-1930) and Sergei Esenin (1895-1925) from her Moscow years. Esenin committed suicide in 1925 a year before Rilke died. Tsvetaeva wrote a short poem of empathy addressing him as “brother” which she sent to Pasternak in a letter.  Maiakovskii wrote an angry poem denouncing Esenin’s cowardice in taking his own life. But he himself committed suicide in 1930; Tsvetaeva read about it in émigré newspapers in France and wrote a passionate response imagining both poets under interrogation in the afterlife. Thus her memorial poems fall into two patterns. With Esenin and Maiakovskii, she responds to suicide not poetic achievement. With Blok and Rilke she reifies each as transcendent “poet” and almost ignores the circumstances of their lives or deaths.

Poem of Air   (click here to access PDF file)

Throughout her career, Tsvetaeva wrote a number of long poemy: The Tsar-Maiden, The Swain, The Ratcatcher, Poem of the Mountain, Poem of the End and Poem of Air.  Her poemy build on a narrative scaffold a rich orchestration of conversational diction, breathless interruptions and syncopations, powerful rhythms and dazzling patterns of sound and rhyme.  Pasternak said when he read the draft of The Ratcatcher (based on the legend of the ratcatcher of Hamlin) that he heard the clicking of mouse claws and they marched into the city.  These effects are impossible for translators, but surprisingly, Tsvetaeva has been more fortunate in her translators  than most Russian poets.  Angela Livingstone’s translation of The Ratcatcher: A lyrical Satire (Northwestern University, 2000) is a marvel of a translator’s ingenuity and intuition.  I recommend it highly.

            Almost opposite to the clattering racket inside the words of The Ratcatcher, Poem of Air finds language that brings airiness (the essence of air) into the flow of its words in a sustained performance of breathing and breathlessness.  I know no other poem remotely like it.  The ostensible narrative scaffold is Lindbergh’s May 20–21, 1927 flight from Long Island to Paris.  Tsvetaeva lived in a Paris suburb at the time and followed the newspaper coverage avidly.   The title Poem of Air can be read in five distinct ways: “Poem of Flight,” “Poem about Air,” “Poem about Lindberg’s Flight,” “Poem about Air as Breath and Breathing” and “Poem made out of Air.”  In inimitably subtle and intuitive way, it is all five.