Bride of Ice

by Marina Tsvetaeva

  Dear Rainer,

  This is where I live.

  Do you still love me?

  Marina9

  The elegy she wrote for his death at the end of 1926 has been analysed with great eloquence in an essay of Joseph Brodsky, ‘Footnote to a Poem’ 10 He praises the amazing energy miraculously sustaining a sequence which has the nerve, as he puts it, to open on ‘High C’. In it, we are transported from the ordinary chat of the literary world to look back on the earth as if from a theatre box far out in the universe.

  Do you ever – think about me, I wonder?

  What do you feel now, what is it like up there?

  How was your first sight of the Universe,

  a last vision of the whole planet –

  which must include this poet remaining in it,

  not yet ashes, still a spirit in a body –

  seen from however many miles stretch

  from Creation to eternity, far above

  the Mediterranean in its crystal saucer –

  where else would you look, leaning out

  with your elbows on the edge of your box seat

  if not on this poet, with her many griefs…11

  Seryozha and Marina had one more child, a son, Georgy, before they moved to Paris. For a time, Seryozha found work as a film extra, but he was often ill, and Tsvetaeva tried to sustain their finances by writing articles for the Russian-language press and accepting charitable handouts from richer friends. She gave the occasional reading, for which she had to beg a simple washable dress from her Czech friend Anna Teskovà. As she wrote in a letter to Teskova: ‘We are devoured by coal, gas, the milkman, the baker… the only meat we eat is horsemeat.’12

  Seryozha moved from support of the Eurasian Movement to working directly for the Union of Repatriation of Russians abroad. From this organization, he drew a small salary. Tsvetaeva inquired very little into the nature of this work. Her own isolation among White émigrés grew, and not only because of her refusal to sign a letter condemning Mayakovsky’s talents as a poet after his suicide. ‘In Paris,’ she wrote to her Czech friend Anna Teskova, ‘with rare personal exceptions, everyone hates me; they write all sorts of nasty things about me, leave me out in all sorts of ways, and so on.’13 Sadly, she came to feel equally isolated in her own home. Alya, once so close, had begun to find it easier to relate to her father. Both Seryozha and Alya moved towards the ideals of socialism as the 1930s went on. As soon as Alya was given a passport by the Soviet regime, she made her own way back to Russia. It was never going to be easy for Seryozha to do the same. The Soviet authorities had not forgotten that he once fought for the White Army and demanded some evidence of a change of heart; hence, although he was an unlikely hit-man, Seryozha’s involvement in the murder of the defector Ignace Reiss in September 1937. Tsvetaeva guessed nothing of his activities until the Soviet regime arranged for his passage back to Russia to prevent his arrest. Even when the French police interrogated her, she found it impossible to believe that Seryozha was guilty of such treachery.

  With his departure, she no longer had any source of income. No émigré journal would publish her. Friends who had once supported her, turned their backs. She hesitated, nevertheless, even though her teenage son Georgy was eager to return to Russia. For a time she toyed with living once again in Prague. The German invasion made that impossible. By 1939, she and Georgy had little choice but to follow Efron back to Russia, as she had once followed him into exile; ‘like a dog’, as she noted in the journal she wrote aboard the Maria Ulyanova on 12 June 1939, echoing her earlier promise.

  Nobody had warned her about Stalin’s Terror, not even Pasternak, who had met her briefly in Paris in 1935 during a Peace Conference – a ‘non-meeting’ she called it. In any case, that great weariness which she evoked in her poem ‘Bus’ already consumed her. She found Efron had been given a small house in Bolshevo, a little way outside Moscow. Other news was bewildering. Both her sister Asya and her nephew had been arrested. Her old friend Prince Mirsky, a dedicated Communist and brilliant literary critic, had also been imprisoned. Osip Mandelstam was dead.

  Tsvetaeva felt lonely in Bolshevo even while her own surviving family were still with her. Other members of the household were members of the group of Soviet agents Seryozha had recruited in France. Her son, a good-looking young man, enjoyed teenage flirtations. Tsvetaeva had neither time nor energy to write more than scraps. ‘Dishwater and tears’, she jotted in a notebook. The year of the Nazi–Soviet pact was a crisis. Worse was to follow. First Alya was arrested, and interrogated brutally; as a result she implicated Seryozha as a French spy. Alya was sentenced to fifteen years in the Gulag in spite of her ‘confession’. Then Seryozha himself was arrested.

  When Tsvetaeva visited Moscow, she found old friends were afraid to meet her, as a relation of convicted criminals. Even Ehrenburg was brusque and preoccupied. Pasternak received her without the least intimacy during a party for Georgian friends. Anna Akhmatova, however, agreed to meet her at the flat of Viktor Ardov on the Ordynka, an act of some courage since her own son, Lev, was already held in the Camps. Akhmatova never discussed what was said between them, but in later conversations she remembered reading Tsvetaeva part of ‘Poem Without a Hero’, noting ironically that Tsvetaeva objected to her use of figures from commedia dell’arte. Tsvetaeva read her part of her ‘Attempt at a Room’, which Akhmatova thought too abstract.

  The two women were very different creatures. Tsvetaeva did not perceive herself as a beautiful woman. She once remarked scornfully that, although she would be the most important woman in all her friends’ memoirs, she ‘had never counted in the masculine present’. After her affair with Rodzevich ended, she wrote poignantly to her young friend Bakhrakh in Berlin: ‘To be loved is something of which I have not mastered the art…’14 Yet Tsvetaeva had her own sense of grandeur. She knew herself to belong among the finest poets of her century. She did not make the mistake of blurring the distinction between serving poetry and serving God, any more than she would ever allow for poetry the utilitarian hope that Art can do civic good. In the closing passage from ‘Art in the Light of Conscience’ she makes that clear: ‘To be a human being is more important, because it is more needed… The doctor and the priest are humanly more important, all the others are socially more important.’15 Tsvetaeva had written no more than scraps of journal for nearly two years.

  When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, Tsvetaeva evacuated Georgy and herself to Yelabuga in the Tatar Republic, just across the river Kama from Christopol where the Writers’ Union was housing key writers. Tsvetaeva was not denied lodging there, but she feared there would be no job for her. Her indecision was obvious to Ludia Chukovskaya, Akhmatova’s friend. It may be that she heard then that Seryozha had already been shot in the Lubianka. Whatever the trigger, the depression which gripped her was deepened by Georgy’s hostility when she returned to the village hut in Yelabuga. 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 som
etimes 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. Robert Chandler and H.T. Willetts (London, HarperCollins 1992), p. 242.

  8 Letter from Boris Pasternak, 13 June 1922, in Elaine Feinstein, Marina Tsvetaeva (Lives of Modern Women, Harmondsworth, Penguin 1989), p.102.

  9 Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak and Konstantin M. Azadovsky (eds), Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters, Summer 1926, trans. Mararet Wettlin and Walter Arndt (London, Jonathan Cape 1986), p. 264.

  10 ‘Footnote to a Poem’, in Joseph Brodsky, Less than One: Selected Essays (New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1986), p. 195.

  11 ‘New Year’s Greetings’, p. 121, below.

  12 Feinstein, A Captive Lion, p. 186.

  13 Feinstein, A Captive Lion, p. 146.

  14 Feinstein, A Captive Lion, ibid.

  15 Marina Tsvetaeva, Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry, trans. Angela Livingstone (London, Bristol Classical 1992).

  POEMS

  Verse

  Written so long ago, I didn’t even

  know I was a poet,

  my lines fell like spray from a fountain

  or flashes from a rocket,

  like imps, they burst into sanctuaries

  filled with sleep and incense,

  to speak of youth and dying.

  All my unread pages

  lie scattered in dusty bookshops

  where nobody picks them up

  to this day. Like expensive wines,

  your time will come, my lines.

  May 1913

  from GIRLFRIEND

  1

  Are you happy? You never tell me.

  Maybe it’s better like this.

  You’ve kissed so many others –

  which makes for sadness.

  In you, I see the heroines

  of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

  You, unhappy lady, were

  never saved by anybody.

  You have grown tired of repeating

  the familiar words of love!

  An iron ring on a bloodless hand

  is more expressive,

  I love you – like a storm burst

  overhead – I must confess it;

  all the more fiercely because you burn

  and bite, and most of all

  because our secret lives take

  very different paths:

  seduction and dark fate

  are your inspiration.

  To you, my aquiline demon,

  I apologise. In a flash –

  as if over a coffin – I realise

  it was always too late to save you!

  Even as I tremble – it may be

  am dreaming – there

  remains one enchanting irony:

  for you – are not he.

  16 October 1914

  2

  Beneath this caressing, plush blanket

  I call up yesterday’s dream.

  What was it? Whose was the victory?

  Who was defeated?

  As I think it over again and again

  I keep trying to find

  the words for what happened:

  Was it love?

  Who was the hunter? Who the prey?

  The roles reverse.

  What does the Siberian tiger

  understand as he purrs?

  Who in our duel of wills

  was left holding a bauble?

  Was it your heart – or mine

  flew off at a gallop?

  And, after all, what did happen?

  Something desired – or regretted?

  I can’t decide if I won

  or if I was conquered,

  23 October 1914

  3

  Today it thawed, today

  I stood by the window

  soberly, with my lungs free,

  almost satisfied.

  I don’t know why – maybe,

  my soul is tired –

  I had no wish to touch

  my mutinous pencil.

  Instead I stood in a mist

  neither good nor wicked,

  with my finger quietly prodding

  the window pane.

  My soul felt no better and no worse

  than that passer-by over there

  or those puddles of mother-of-pearl

  splattered by the sky,

  the bird flying above

  or a dog running;

  even a beggar’s song does not

  move me to tears.

  Sweetly and cleverly, forgetfulness

  has already taken over –

  and by today another huge emotion

  has melted in my soul.

  24 October 1914

  4

  You were too lazy to dress yourself,

  or get up from the armchair.

  – When I go towards you, the day

&n
bsp; is joyful with my happiness.

  You were troubled about leaving

  so late at night in the cold.

  – Any hour when I approach you

  is healthy with my joy.

  You mean no harm by any of this,

  unchangeably innocent,

  – I am your youth, which already

  begins to pass you by.

  25 October 1914

  5

  About eight this evening, a sleigh

  rushed past me, recklessly,

  along Bolshaya Lubyanka

  like a bullet or a snowball.

  I heard your tinkling laugh

  in the distance and froze,

  staring: your fawn-coloured fur,

  the tall figure at your side…

  You are enjoying the pleasures

  of a sleigh with someone else,

  a chosen lover, already more

  desired than I was!

  – Oh, je n’en puis plus, j’étouffe,

  you screamed at me today.

  And now, boldly, you cover her

  with the furs inside the sleigh.

  The rest of the world is happy.

  The evening glamorous.

  Gifts and muffs… and you both rushing

  into the blizzard – fur to fur.