Post by moira on Sept 19, 2008 16:10:46 GMT 2
MARINA TSVETAEVA (1892-1941)
introduced by Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi.
Born in Moscow, the daughter of Professor Ivan Tsvetaev, the art historian who founded the Pushkin Museum of Art in Moscow Tsvetaeva finished school in 1908 and went to Paris where she attended lectures on literary history at the Sorbonne. Her first poems were printed when she was sixteen. Her first book - An Evening Album - which came out in 1912, was praised by the critics, including Valery Bryusov. Tsvetaeva emigrated in 1922. She lived at first in Berlin and later moved to Prague and to Paris. Self-willed and proud, she eventually came to disagree more and more sharply with the ultra-reactionary emigre circles. She lived in dire poverty and suffered from homesickness. Her poems at that time were full of contempt and hatred for the rising wave of fascism in Europe. In 1939 she returned to the Soviet Union with her family but was not accepted by the new regime. She was forced to suicide by the unbearing circumstances that she was surrounded with by the communists.
1
Every verse is a child of love,
A destitute bastard slip,
A firstling -- the winds above --
Left by the road asleep.
Heart has a gulf, and a bridge,
Heart has a bless, and a grief.
Who is his father? A liege?
Maybe a liege, or a thief.
Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, April 1994,
2
These my poems, written so early
That I did not know then I was a poet,
Which having tore, like droplets from a fountain,
Like sparks from a rocket,
Into a sanctuary, where there is sleep and incense
Like little devils having burst,
These my poems about youth and about death,
This unread verse!
Scattered through shops in piles of dust
Where nobody picked them up or does,
These my poems, like precious wine,
Will have their time.
Translated by Ilya Shambat
3
Who's made of stone, who's made of mud,
And I'm made from silver and shine.
My act is betrayal, my name is Marina,
The fragile sea foam am I.
Who is made from mud, who is made from flesh -
There's coffin and coffin plates..
Baptized in a sea font and unceasingly
Broken in my flight!
Through every heart, through every net
Will poke its head my will.
You will not make me the salt of the earth
Can you see these my loose curls?
I resurrect with each wave, pounding
Against your granite knees!
May be well the foam - the high foam -
The high foam of the seas!
Translated by Ilya Shamba
Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi is a poet, translator and freelance journalist. Her first book of poetry was published when she was twenty-two. Her poems appear in the anthologies Contemporary Women Poets of Iran and Anthology of Best Women Poets. She is the author of The Last Night with Sylvia Plath: Essays on Poetry. She has extensively translated World literature into Persian. Among her several publications are: Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, Marina Tsvetaeva, Blaga Dimitrova, Iroslav Seifert, Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry, Women Poets of the World, Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry Pablo Neruda:(A Passion for Life), and The Beauty of Friendship: Selected Poems by Khalil Gibran. Her latest work is Anthology of American Poetry.