Böcker av Marina Tsvetaeva

"This collection is valuable for its steady faithfulness to the original, its breadth of poems, and in particular for so many of the pre-revolutionary poems." Emily Lygo, Modern Poetry in Translation 2009

From 1912 to 1920 Marina Tsvetaeva wrote copiously but published no books. Later she would claim that at least three major collections had fallen by the wayside in those years. The poems translated here offer readers the flavour of those vanished books, covering the period roughly from her daughter Alya's first birthday to the Tsar's abdication in March 1917 and the summer which followed. They reflect involvements with the poet Sonya Parnók and with a married economist of Polish origin, Nikodim Plutser-Sarnya. But there are also evocations of the Middle East, tributes to the Jews and to her sister Asya, plus a cycle in which Don Juan accosts Carmen and is buried in a grave amidst the Russian snow. Generally appearing in English for the very first time, they include several of the most accomplished and unforgettable poems Tsvetaeva was ever to write.

Three of the legendary Russian dissident writer's greatest poems, two autobiographical and one based on a Russian folktale, now in a new, invigorating English translation. Three by Tsvetaeva collects three dazzling and devastating reckonings with love and the end of love by a poet celebrated for the unequaled verbal inventiveness and emotional intensity of her work. “Backstreets,” translated into English for the first time, is a retelling of a Russian fairy tale that offers a witches’ brew of temptation, bodily transformation, marriage, and murder. “Poem of the Mountain” and “Poem of the End,” perhaps the most celebrated of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetic sequences, explore the shifting dynamics of a love affair. The voices of the lovers, the voice of the narrator, and the voice of poetry combine and recombine, circle each other and split, engaging the reader in a constantly shifting spectrum of emotion, from unbridled passion to rawest grief, and discovering at last a strange triumph in loss.  Andrew Davis’s translations of Tsvetaeva bring out the wild brilliance of an incomparable artist.

"These poems by Tsvetaeva positively scorch the page. What other poet, of this or any century, can match her for ferocity? Wrested from the maelstrom, her imagery alone is a perpetual revelation: unadorned, unprecedented, brutally on target. English-language readers owe a profound debt of gratitude to Mary Jane White for these brilliant translations." -Linda Gregerson, Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI"Mary Jane White's translations reflect her profound commitment to Tsvetaeva. What impresses me most is the consistency and integrity of the poetic voice that emerges from these pages - a voice that echoes Tsvetaeva's tense, resonant Russian but is also entirely, naturally Anglophone."- Boris Dralyuk, co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015)"White's remarkable translations have an empathic genius that not only offers Tsvetaeva in English but anticipates a poetry in American English that has not existed before. Tsvetaeva in English translation becomes Tsvetaeva's English poetry. These translations are works of imaginative discovery--of Tsvetaeva's visionary language as it transforms American poetry with an alien intensity." - Tony Brinkley, Professor of English, University of Maine"Marina Tsvetaeva's syntactically condensed, syncopated verse, the 'Russianness' of her cultural allusions, the emotional pitch of her voice and the relative paucity of such shadings in English, present nearly insurmountable difficulties that make her, in my opinion, the most 'untranslatable' of Russian poets. Brodsky valued Tsvetaeva's gift above all others in modern Russian verse. Akhmatova's sense of her adroitness speaks volumes: 'In comparison with Pushkin and Tsvetaeva, I'm just a little cow.' Mary Jane White's life-long engagement with Tsvetaeva and her own remarkable gifts as a poet give this volume genuine depth, breath, and voice." -Alex Cigale, NEA Fellow in Literary Translation, Author of Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected WritingsMary Jane White is a poet and translator who practiced law at her home, the O. J. Hager House in Waukon, Iowa. She was born and raised in North Carolina, earned degrees from The North Carolina School of the Arts, Reed College, The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and studied law at Duke University, graduating from The University of Iowa. Her poetry and translations received NEA Fellowships in 1979 and 1985. She taught lyric poetry and poetry workshops briefly at the University of Iowa and at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and served for a decade as an Iowa Poet in the Schools, before her son, Ruffin, was born in 1991.

The poems in Youthful Verses cover the years between 1913 and 1915, a period of unparalleled freedom in Tsvetaeva's life. Recently married and with a baby daughter, she chronicles in a sequence of astonishing honesty and frankness her love for a slightly older woman poet.

After Russia is Marina Tsvetaeva's last collection, published in Paris 13 years before she died. Containing many poems addressed to Pasternak, the book also, towards the end, contains many references to Russia-studiously avoided in earlier poems - making the final obeisance to a Russian peasant woman and to Pasternak in Moscow a fitting close.

After Russia is considered to mark the high point in Tsvetaeva's output of shorter poems. She told Pasternak that all that mattered in the book was its anguish. Technical mastery and experimentation are underpinned by suicidal thoughts, a sense of exclusion from human love and companionship, and an increasing alienation from life itself.

This comprehensive selection of Marina Tsvetayeva's poetry includes complete versions of all her major long poems and poem cycles: Poem of the End, An Attempt at a Room, Poems to Czechia and New Year Letter. It was the first English translation to use the new, definitive Russica text of her work.