Volume 50, Number 2 · February 13, 2003
Tsvetaeva: The Tragic Life
By Charles Simic
Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922
by Marina Tsvetaeva, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Jamey Gambrell
Yale University Press, 250 pp., $24.95
Milestones
by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated and with an introduction by Robin Kemball
Northwestern University Press, 272 pp., $24.95
When it comes to the Russian poetry of the last century, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Boris Pasternak are reasonably familiar names, but not Marina Tsvetaeva, who is their equal. Because she is extraordinarily difficult to translate, her work is almost unknown, and even when it becomes available it makes little impression. She seems foreign and beyond reach with her elliptical syntax and her unusually tangled metaphors. There's also the sheer volume and range of her writing. One of her long poems, for instance, celebrates Lindbergh's transatlantic flight, while others derive their plots from fairy tales. She has hundreds of poems, a number of near epic length in addition to a fair amount of prose, including memoirs, diaries, and letters, as well as several plays in verse. Not everything she wrote is, of course, first-rate, but a lot is. Is she as good as Eliot or Pound, one may ask for the sake of comparison. She is as good as they are, and may have more tricks up her sleeve as a poet.
Review, 4107 words
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