Monument to Marina Tsvetayeva

Ria Novosti said "..One of the brightest stars of the Silver Age in Russian literature, Marina Tsvetayeva (1892-1941) focused her poetry on unrequited love. Her Romantic pre-revolutionary verse was haunted by a pained presentiment of the approaching upheavals and horror in the face of all-pervading violence to come. The first years after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution plunged the poet into abject poverty. She emigrated in 1922 but followed her daughter and husband back to the Soviet Union in 1939. Her near and dear were arrested the same year. Negligibly few poems came from her pen while in the U.S.S.R. She made a living as a translator. Crushed by fate, Tsvetayeva committed suicide in 1941."

The sounds of Russian poetry and the formal use of rhyme and meter can never be captured in English. Tsvetaeva presents a particularly difficult problem to the translator because her reputation rests precisely on the aural values of her verse.

Here, ashes of treasures:

Of bereavements, of hurt.

These are aches before which

Granite becomes dust.

The dove naked and bright,

Not living in a pair.

Ashes of Solomon

Over vanity that's great.

The threatening chalk mark

Of sunsetless time.

God is at my doors --

As the house has burnt!

Not having stifled in trash,

A master of my dreams and days,

Like a flaming thunderbolt --

The Spirit of early gray hair.

It's not you who have betrayed me,

Years, behind me!

This gray hairness is a victory

Of immortal strength.

27 September 1922

By Marina Tsvetayeva

From After Russia (1922-1925)

Translated by Ljubov V. Kuchkina

Notes: A poem sent to Boris Pasternak in a letter of

19 November 1922