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     This is a revised and enlarged selection of translations from the work of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Tsvetaeva was a member of the generation of Russian poets who began their careers in the years before the revolution. In 1922 she left Soviet Russia to join her husband in exile, first in Prague and then later Paris, and it was here, in the face of poverty and neglect, that she wrote much of her greatest poetry.

     Since their first appearance in 1971 Elaine Feinstein’s translations have acquired a considerable reputation. Their favourable reception, however, remains puzzling, since for the most part they fail to capture the qualities which have established Tsvetaeva as a major Russian poet. A number of the translations are marred by misreadings of the original Russian which result in English which is quite simply meaningless. To take one of the more conspicuous examples, many readers must have wondered what precisely is meant by the following lines from ‘The Poet’:

in his hands even sweeping gestures from a bell-tower
become hook-like...

The answer is that these lines mean nothing at all, since they are based on a misunderstanding of two key words from the Russian text – vymorochit’ (to obtain by deception) and kryuk (a hook or a detour). A literal translation of these lines should read as follows: “Even when [the poet] leaps from the top of a bell-tower/ He’s able to wangle a detour...”. In a poem presenting the poet as the exceptional individual who evades the laws to which ordinary mortals are subject, this makes perfect sense: when he jumps from a tower he does not fall straight to earth according to the laws of gravity but is able to execute a detour on the way down. Apart from spoiling the individual poems in which they occur, such misreadings give a distorted view of the kind of poet Tsvetaeva is. For Tsvetaeva, although often difficult, is rarely obscure: her poetry generally makes good sense within the terms of her idiosyncratic neo-romantic outlook.

     The second serious shortcoming of these translations is the result of Feinstein’s decision not to replicate the formal aspects of Tsvetaeva’s verse – her rhythms and rhymes and her extensive use of syntactic and phonetic parallelism. This turns out to be a fatal decision because in Tsvetaeva’s poetry such formal features are not simply a superficial embellishment but belong to the very substance of her art. The crucial role which these formal elements play in Tsvetaeva’s work is closely bound up with its semantic structure. Much of Tsvetaeva’s  mature poetry is non-discursive in character. In these poems the development of a continous line of argument or narrative plays a reduced role. Instead they tend toward the principle of creative repetition: a basic image or idea is reiterated through a succession of variations and elaborations. It is the prominence of this mode of composition in the later Tsvetaeva which led Simon Karlinsky in his pioneering study to describe certain of her poems as “magic chants and incantations”.

     In the mature work the element of dynamic cohesion which might otherwise have been provided by narrative and argument is supplied instead by metre, rhyme and parallelism. And it is because Feinstein makes no attempt  to reproduce these crucial formal elements that her translations so often seem to degenerate into a static series of images. Feinstein is evidently aware of this problem when, in her introduction, she speaks of the strategies she adopts in order to make her translations “move forward in a natural English syntax” and “dispel any sense of static solidity”. But the devices which she employs, such as enjambement and the welding of Tsvetaeva’s abrupt, elliptical syntax into more complex sentences, are largely ineffective.

     ‘Sahara’ illustrates these problems. (It should be mentioned in passing that the translation again contains a number of misreadings; for example, in the first stanza it is surely the soul of the poet-speaker which will remain silent about the young man). The poem is based on a single idea – that of the soul of the speaker as a vast, inhospitable desert in whose fierce terrain her admirers disappear without trace. In the course of the poem the idea is examined from various angles, with cohesion and momentum being provided by a distinctive ternary rhythm, rhyme and the pervasive use of parallelism. However Feinstein, having denied herself these devices, is obliged to try and hold the poem together through the use of enjambement and by elaborating Tsvetaeva’s short, simple sentences into more complex syntactic units. The result, however, is merely to make the Russian poet sound mannered and clumsy:

He once rode into me as if
  through lands of
miracles and fire, with all
  the power of poetry and

I was: dry, sandy, without day.

     The most successful translations in this volume, for the same reasons as those given above, tend to be of the more discursive early poems as well as of the longer narrative poems of Tsvetaeva’s maturity such as ‘Poem of the End’. Also more effective are the satirical poems written during Tsvetaeva’s exile where the sheer force of her anti-bourgeois invective still manages to shine through the informal English of the translations. However, the English reader who wishes to get an idea of the power of Tsvetaeva’s Russian would do better to turn first to the translations of David McDuff, Robin Kemball and Angela Livingstone. Or, if he or she knows some French, there are the remarkable versions by Eve Malleret which remain the most convincing reincarnation of Tsvetaeva in any language.