Extremes of a militant soul

“A poet of extremes” – such was Joseph Brodsky’s estimation of his erstwhile compatriot Marina Tsvetaeva. Yet while few other words may seem so apt in summing up the poet’s famously eccentric, uncompromising character (Boris Pasternak described her soul as “militant”), Brodsky preferred to see the extremity in artistic terms. Tsvetaeva’s attraction to the limits, he claimed, was fundamentally epistemological: “for her”, he wrote, “an ‘extreme’ is not so much the end of the known world as the beginning of the unknowable one”.

Such venturesome beginnings and endings are typical of the narrative poems presented in Three by Tsvetaeva, which groups two of Tsvetaeva’s best-known works, “Poem of the Mountain” and “Poem of the End”, both in fine new translations by Andrew Davis, with a comparatively unknown work, “Backstreets”, now appearing in English in its entirety for the first time. Written in the brief window between 1922 and 1924, as the life Tsvetaeva had known in Russia came to an end and the curtain rose on her agonizing years of emigration, each of the three works is the product of this intensely creative time in her career – a pivotal stage that marked a transition between her early and mature periods.

“Backstreets”, the newcomer of the trio, is a haunting work that has long baffled critics, despite a reputation as one of the poet’s personal favourites. As cryptic as it is carnal, the poem was so abstruse to contemporary audiences that the critic George Ivask wrote to Tsvetaeva in the 1930s, seeking an explanation. “‘Backstreets’”, she replied enigmatically, “is the story of the ultimate seduction.”

Ivask would have to wait another two years before Tsvetaeva clarified that the motif of the work was taken from one of Russia’s traditional epic poems, or byliny. A reimagining of the story of Dobrynya and Marinka, it pares down this violent, cautionary tale of the hero’s seduction by a witch and his transfiguration into an aurochs. At the same time Tsvetaeva introduces notes of menace and erotic rapture as her measures bound ecstatically towards the climactic metamorphosis:

Toward azure – the destroyer,
From first aura – to aurora;
Bellow, in harness,
Under the charm!:
The vacant glance,
The furrowed brow,
The golden horn.

Whether Davis has shown “Backstreets” to rank “among Tsvetaeva’s greatest achievements” remains to be seen, but his translation, which captures the work’s uncanny combination of elusiveness and immediacy, is an excellent starting point.

Love and its pains predominate in the remainder of the collection, too. Having left the Soviet Union to join her husband in Czechoslovakia, Tsvetaeva tempered the bleakness of poverty and European exile with a passionate love affair, the demise of which provided the poetic inspiration for the two other works presented here. In both “Poem of the Mountain” and “Poem of the End” – and indeed in their new translations – Tsvetaeva’s verse is more direct, more explicit than in “Backstreets”, although it still pushes the possibilities of technique. Syntactic and metrical boundaries diverge; verbs are replaced by ever more rapid dashes, turning the lines into arresting aphorisms, while the couple’s love strives towards unattainable empyrean heights:

Not Sinai, not Parnassus,
A naked hill like a barracks –
Ready! Aim! Fire! –
Then why, to my eyes
(The time not May, but October)
Was that mountain – paradise?

Davis, who has also translated Tsvetaeva’s notoriously tricky colleague Osip Mandelstam for NYRB Poets, has succeeded in reproducing the jarring, occasionally disorienting and often electrifying qualities of Tsvetaeva’s verse. This is no easy task, in and of itself. Yet to do it with such energy and lucidity, as Davis does, is little short of miraculous.

“To live – without hope / Is the fate of lovers”, writes Marina Tsvetaeva in “Poem of the End”. Yet in Andrew Davis’s translations these three poems strike notes not of hopeless despair, but of stridency, defiance, even transcendence. What this slender collection captures, perhaps better than any other on the market, is the poet’s quiddity in the extremes of love. “For Tsvetaeva, the end of an affair was not a failure of love but the expression of its very essence”, the translator comments. “It is a play of agony, but it is not a tragedy. Suffering, yes; but in no sense defeat.”

Bryan Karetnyk is a British writer and translator. He teaches Russian at the University of Cambridge

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