Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva

by Marina Tsvetaeva, Ilya Kaminsky (Translator), Jean Valentine (Translator)

Overview

"A poet of genius."—Vladimir Nabokov

Via what Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine call "readings"—not translations—of fragments of Marina Tsvetaeva's poems and prose, Tsvetaeva's lyrical genius is made accessible and poignant to a new generation of readers. By juxtaposing fragments of her poems with short pieces of prose, we begin to know her as poet, friend, enemy, woman, lover, and revolutionary.

From "Poems for Moscow (2)":

From my hands—take this city not made by hands,

my strange, my beautiful brother.

Take it, church by church—all forty times forty churches,
and flying up over them, the small pigeons;

And Spassky Gates—in their flower—
where the Orthodox take off their hats;

And the Chapel of Stars—refuge chapel—
where the floor is—polished by tears;

Take the circle of the five cathedrals,
my soul, my holy friend.

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892 and died in 1941. Her poetry stands among the greatest works of twentieth century Russian writers.

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the Whiting Writers' Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship awarded annually by Poetry magazine.

Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets award for Dream Barker in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass, from Copper Canyon Press. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781882295944
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	12/04/2012
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892 and died in 1941. Her poetry stands among the greatest works of twentieth century Russian writers.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived in the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the Whiting Writer's Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. In 2008, Kaminsky was awarded the Lannan Foundation's Literary Fellowship, and in 2009, poems from his manuscript, Deaf Republic, were awarded Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize. Currently, Kaminsky teaches Contemporary World Poetry, Creative Writing, and Literary Translation in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at San Diego State University.

Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass, from Copper Canyon Press. Her previous collection, Little Boat was published by Wesleyan in 2007. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. The recipient of the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, Valentine has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia. She was the New York State Poet Laureate from 2008 until 2010.

Table of Contents

Rhythms of the Soul: Marina Tsvetaeva Stephanie Sandler xi

There are four of us Anna Akhmatova xvii

from Poems for Moscow 1

"I won't leave you!" 2

My "I don't want to" is always "I cannot." 2

I bless our hands' daily labor 3

I am happy living simply 3

In the Commissariat 4

My little thefts 4

from Poems for Moscow 5

I don't eavesdrop, I listen in 6

It was forbidden 6

Where does such tenderness come from? 7

A kiss on the forehead 8

from Poems for Blok 9

The cruel words of Blok about very early Akhmatova 10

from Poems for Akhmatova 11

The mysterious disappearance 12

Not long ago 12

You throw back your head 13

I wake with the sun 14

I know the truth 15

Assassination Attempt on Lenin 16

from Poem of the End 17

For complete concurrence 19

from New Year's Letter 20

But today I want Rilke to speak 22

from An Attempt at Jealousy 23

To love 25

from The Desk (1) 26

from The Desk (2) 27

You can't buy me 29

from Poems to Czechoslovakia 30

Today (September 26, Old Style) 32

Afterword Ilya Kaminsky 35

Editorial Reviews

Famously passionate, and terrifyingly responsive to the disasters of the early 20th century, Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) stands among the best of Russian poets, but her short lyric forms and her spiritual depths have made her work hard to render persuasively in English. “I am happy living simply/ like a clock, or a calendar,” says a poem of 1919, but her life could not stay simple. Tsvetaeva rose along with other Russian modernists in the 1910s, conducting a love affair with Osip Mandelstam, taking later inspiration from Rilke; near starvation after the Bolshevik triumph, living in exile from 1922 to 1939, she left behind work that reflects her difficult days. ”You can buy me only with the whole sky in yourself, “she announced in 1919, “he whole sky in which, perhaps, there is no place for me.” Kaminsky (himself a Russian émigré) and Valentine insist that their short, moving volume contains not translations but “readings,” very free renderings, along with fragments from Tsvetaeva’s journals and other prose. Two attractive essays on Tsvetaeva, from Stephanie Sandler at the start and from Kaminsky at the end, fill out the book. For every reader frustrated by its focus on fragments and by its brevity, there may be another transported by the careful words and the emotional extremes that characterize Tsvetaeva in English as in her original tongue. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly