Marina
Tsvetaeva
A
Life in Poems
Nobody
loves her,
Some hate her with a vengance,
Only a few truly like
her
or have ever read
her poetry.
Yet
Marina Tsvetaeva is, among her contemporaries Vladimir Mayakovsky,
Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak,
arguably the most prolific and possibly the greatest poet of
20th-century Russia.
I encountered Tsveteva on one of my
sojourns in Moscow in the 1980s. A physicist coleague in a choked
voice recited “Мне нравится,
что вы больны
не мной,... - I like that you're
not mad about me,...” [Poems,
May 1915].
It was the time of Tsvetaeva's belated rehabilitation in the Soviet
Union, and everyone seemed to have heard and seen Alla Pugacheva in
the film Ирония
судьбы, или С
лёгким паром!
“Irony
of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath”,
(1975).
Curious, because I had not heard of Tsvetaeva (I never saw the
film!), I asked a Russian-German friend. She sent me a bilingual
anthology of Tsvetaeva's poems, in which I found the following
poem to Boris Pasternak:
|
Б.
Пастернаку
|
To
B. Pasternak |
Fascinated
by Tsvetaeva's reductive use of Russian, I spent several weeks
translating the verses, discussing every word with my friend by mail.
- The above English version is the result of this co-operative
exercise. This was in 1994. Professional and personal events
interfered, and only now am I able to return to a close examination
of Tsvetaeva's poetry – and life.
Early on I learned
that one cannot understand her poetry separate from her biography:
Tsvetaeva wrote from her full “Быть и
Бытие - Life and Being”, baring
her soul and emotions without restraint. A biographical essay woven
around her poems appeared indispensable: Describing the often tragic
events in her life, it takes up the larger part of this essay.
Born
1892 into an highly educated, bourgeois family, she loses her mother
to tuberculosis when she was 14, publishes her first book of poems
three years later, marries Sergey Efron at 20, and gives birth to
their first child, Alya in 1913. The first World War passes almost
unnoticed, but then history begins to accelerate and rapidly
overtakes her. Sergey disappears during the Revolution. She and Alya
barely survive the Famine Years. A second daughter dies from
starvation. In 1921 her husband resurfaces in Prague. Marina escapes
with Alya to Berlin. Supported by a Czech grant they spend 3 years in
Czechoslovakia. Restlessness and the hope of making a living from her
writing persuade them to move to Paris, the center of Russian émigré
life. There she gets caught in the internecine fighting and intrigues
between the pro- and anti-Soviet factions – and Sergey Efron
turns into a willing pawn of the NKVD. When in 1937 the French police
takes notice, he is spirited away to the Soviet Union. Alya had
already left for Moscow. Marina with their third child, Murg follows
Sergey and returns to the “Motherland” in 1938, during
the worst Stalin years. Alya and Sergey are arrested in 1939. In
desperation Marina hangs herself in 1941. Efron is executed in the
same year, Mur dies in the second World War – only Alya is
released alive from the Gulag and “rehabilitated” after
Stalin's death.
A cruel fate, however, not that different from
what many Russian emigrants suffered, but Tsvetaeva lived her life to
the last bitter truths in her poetry... Nothing drives her poetic
power like distress and - love. One “affair” follows the
other, with women as well as with uncounted men, poets, actors,
writers, famous and infamous, worthy and unworthy. Sergey watches
quietly from the wings, knowing that after every crash she will
return to him. Her “immorality” and her self-centredness
seem to be two of the reasons why certain people hate her. -
Tsvetaeva
has nerver denied or replied to any of the often abusive attacks on
her [VS
p.268-273].
They were below her level.
The
severe criticism of her personal conduct is in part based on a
misunderstanding. Only two or three of her “affairs” were
consummated. Despite her search for new loves in her exalted poems,
sex is not the object of her dreams. – Eminently Russian, she
longs for an Empyrean that will transport her out of the misery of
daily existence, that might conjure-up a kindred soul with whom she
can share her spiritual loneliness. She is not religious in the
conventional sense, “I never obeyed the commandments and never
went to confession...” - Yet the beauty of her imaginary,
transcendental “Other World” recalls the golden domes of
the churches that rise equally other-worldly from the drab Russian
landscape.
Tsvetaeva's morality – in the conventional
sense – and her ideological position between the two Russian
emigrant camps is best explained by Russians. An enlightening
conversation on the subject has been recorded by Solomon Volkov in
his “Conversations
with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet's Journey Through the 20th Century, 2002”
[VB
p.40-47].
It pits
young Volkov's summary dislike of her against Brodsky's superior
understanding of the moral (ideological) dilemma of Tsvetaeva. An
excerpt of this interview is available online through Google
Books.
Late
in Tsvetaeva's
torrential
life Boris Pasternak befriended her. The only man who did not run
scared from the on-surges of her emotions. Together they lived
through the summer of 1926 and the stellar meeting with Rilke –
all by letter! Prevented by fate and mutual reluctance, the two would
not meet until 1940 in Moscow. During Marina's most difficult émigré
years she turned him into the last god of her imaginary world, her
first equal love. Notwithstanding, that she disjoins
herself
from Pasternak
in an attack of jealousy and haughty disdain, when he divorced his
wife and married a mutual friend of theirs. He remains spiritually
faithful to her beyond her death. - The above poem was written at the
height of their relationship.
A detailed knowledge of the
circumstances associated with her poems may help in understanding,
but is of little use in translating them. Her verses are inherently
difficult to translate, especially into English. The grammatical
structure of Russian – five cases, a complex system of
inflections of the verb, and the lack of articles and personal
pronouns – poses nearly unsurmountable difficulties. To make
things worse, Tsvetaeva has a way of making-up or using archaic
words, which are not found in dictionaries. The poem to Pasternak is
an example of that.
However, the lexicographic hurdles are but
one obstacle to the appreciation of Tsvetaeva's poetry. The beauty of
her verses, especially her late poems, lies in their
sound
when
recited in Russian. Her musical rhythms cannot be reproduced in any
other language. Her poems need to be heard
- in
Russian.
To this effect I included the Russian texts of all selected poems and
added a number of links to audio readings. Antokolsky's reading of
the Pasternak poem is attached above. Listen to it, its resounding
alliterations are the bones of her stanzas.
The other, even
more fundamental observation is that her poems lack the visual
imagery we are used to depend on in reading poetry. In her essay on
Natalya Gontsharova Tsvetaeva says, “I am no painter, may
others speak about that... What for? Painting is of no meaningful
importance to me.” For the sake of its rhythm she plays a
disturbingly cerebral game with the language, deconstructing (her
word) Russian like few others – a quality of her poetry which
intrigued this foreigner. Tsvetaeva's has a highly developed sense
for music and rhythm, beyond that she is blind. This might be the
reason why her poems taken out of context often leave a dull
impression with the non-Russian reader.
Nevertheless, to ease
my translation dilemma, I decided to dispense with all attempts to
reproduce her rhyme and rhythm in favor of a more modest, literal
reading of her words and their meanings. Some readers may not
recognize “their” Tsvetaeva in my translations. I ask for
their indulgence: This is an attempt to elucidate Tsvetaeva's poetry
to uninitiated
English
readers, as well as to some Russians. I do not endeavor to present
new superior English renditions of her poems or to compete with
existing critical examinations of her life and writings.
I
would be grateful for corrections and all constructive
criticism.
Send
mail to: rolf357@gmail.com
Pacific Palisades, June 2010