Product Description

Elaine Feinstein is a poet of lyrical directness. That clear, passionate voice which she brought to her celebrated translations of Marina Tsvetayeva's poetry is her own. She writes about love, loss, jealousy, the fear of abandonment. Her powerful rhythms flow down the page, seeking to draw a coherent shape out of the inner uncertainties. She also writes with tenderness about an ageing father, a child on a swing, old films, a flowering cactus. Hers is a poetry which can contain and welcome. The rare landscape poems are always peopled, and the considerable narrative and dramatic skills of a major novelist give urgency to her evocation of the classical figures of Dido and Eurydice. She has also found a poignant lyricism in writing of the inhabitants of her local streets and the ordinary pleasures of daily life. The poems in this selection are drawn from eleven volumes published over thirty years.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2204756 in Books
• Published on: 1988-01-01
• Original language: Russian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Although generally less well known here than Pasternak, Akhmatova and Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva is counted by some critics as the greatest of these four major poets of postrevolutionary Russia. However, as veteran translator McDuff indicates in his introduction, the sounds of Russian poetrywhich to this day remains formally traditional in its use of rhyme and metercan never be captured in English. Further, Tsvetaeva presents a particularly difficult problem to the translator because her transcendent reputation rests precisely on the aural values of her verse. That said, McDuff must be congratulated for his brave attempt to reproduce those formal qualities. If we cannot have Tsvetaeva herself, these stand on their own as creditable English-language poems. The selection represents the entire scope of her remarkable career from her simple and charming early lyrics, first published in 1910 when she was 18, through those recounting her privations and hardships during the years of upheaval in Russia, to the poignant poems written in exile after 1922. It includes all her major long poems, such as the stunning Poem of the End. Although it is unclear whether Tsvetaeva was officially ostracized on her own account or because of the political actions of her husband Sergey Efron, her poems are heart-rending in view of her tragic life and eventual suicide. Love, the loss of youth, poetry and the Motherland are the core subjects of her poems, which are infused with high passion and a heroic tenacity of spirit. For non-Russian speakers, this volume is a new window on poetry in the Stalinist era.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes
Text: English, Russian (translation)

About the Author
ELAINE FEINSTEIN grew up in Leicester. In 1990 she received an Honorary D.Lit. from the University there. She read English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has published over thirty books, including fiction and biography, and written for radio and television and reviews for The Times and Poetry Review. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1980. In 1990 she received a Cholmondeley Award and was given an Honorary DLit from the University of Leicester. She has received three Arts Council Translation awards. Carcanet publish her Selected Poems.

Customer Reviews

Terrible Translations
Finestein's translations are so awful, it is no wonder that few English speakers want to know who Tsvetaeva is. She loses the rhythm, rhyme, literary devices, and everything for which Tsvetaeva's poetry is so loved. The duality of meanings and word play is also completely lost. Try Angela Livingstone's translations - they are excellent.

Poems by a reliable witness
Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892, published her first poems at 18, and was married with two children when the Russian Revolution began. She endured numerous hardships -- one of her children died of malnutrition -- and a period of exile. She returned to Russia in 1939, but was so beset by her circumstances that she committed suicide in 1941. These passionate and autobiographical poems are deep and important. I don't know Russian, so cannot comment on the translation. From them one learns about Tsvetaeva the artist: her subjects are love and transformation, nature, poetry, love, and her complicated, exasperating country -- and, later, the bleakness which enveloped her. Poetry was serious business in Russia, and this poet was one of the greats.

Art in life
Read this book! and read about her life. She witnessed so much darkness and her words open up these experiences, lay them bare. I really wonder what her writing would have been if she had lived a different life, one without so much tragedy. She also recognized, as did Virginia Woolfe, that it is difficult for women to write amidst the responsibilities of everyday life -- "I have no time to think . . . I have only ever been myself in notebooks . . . for all my life I have been leading a child by the hand." Her work stays with you long after the book closes.