In the Inmost Hour of the Soul

Vox Humana

In the Inmost Hour of the Soul Selected poems of Marina Tsvetayeva

Translated by Nina Kossman

On the Bridge by David Cope

The Promise Is by Kip Zegers

Quiet Lives by David Cope

A Song Out of Harlem by Antar S. K. Mberi

In the Inmost Hour of the Soul

Selected poems of

Marina Tsvetayeva

Translated by

~Nina Kossman

Humana Press • Clifton, New Jersey

ISBN-13: 978-1-4612-8220-4 DOl: 10.1007/978-1-4612-3706-8

e-ISBN-13: 978-1-4612-3706-8

© Copyright 1989 by The Humana Press Inc. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989

Crescent Manor PO Box 2148 Clifton, NJ 07015

All rights of any nature whatsoever reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval sytem, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, computer database entry, or networking, orin any manner whatsoever without written permis­sion from the publisher.

Some of these translations have appeared in: City Lights, Vassar Review, Prism International, The Raddle Moon, Gryphon, Russian Literary Triquanerly

Translator's Introduction

" .. .1 have no love for life as such; for me it begins to have significance, i.e., to acquire meaning and weight, only when it is transformed, i.e., in art. If I were taken beyond the sea­into paradise-and forbidden to write, I would refuse the sea and paradise. I don't need life as a thing in itself." This, written by Tsvetayeva in a letter to her Czech friend, Teskova, in 1925, could stand as an inscription to her life.

Marina Tsvetayeva was born in Moscow on September 26, 1892. Her fathel~ a well-known art historian and philolo­gist, founded the Moscow Museum of the Fine Arts, now known as the Pushkin Museum; her mother, a pianist, died young, in 1906. Marina began writing poetry at the age of six. Her first book, Evening Album, contained poems she had writ­ten before she turned seventeen, and enjoyed reviews by the poet, painter, and mentor of young writers, Max Voloshin, the poet Gumilyov, and the Symbolist critic and poet, Valerii Bryusov. Voloshin and Gumilyov welcomed the seventeen­year-old poet as their equal; Bryusov was more critical of her, though he too, in his own belligerent way, acknowledged her talent.

In 1912, Tsvetayeva married Sergei Efron, whose high­mindedness and chivalry she glorified in many poems; later that year her daughter Ariadna (Alya) was born. Though still a schoolboy, Sergei seemed to belong among the Romantic heroes who inspired Tsvetayeva at different points of her youth -Napoleon, Rostand, Don Juan, Andre Chenier. Her passionate search for perfection in art, in men, and in real or literary heroes of the past is best summed up in her own words: "Literature is propelled by passion, power, vitality, partiality." 1

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During the Russian ci viI war, Sergei Efron served on the side of the Whites. Stranded in Moscow with their two little daughters, Tsvetayeva wrote to him: IIIf God performs a mir­acle and leaves you among the living, I will serve you like a dog." After the terrible hungry years in Moscow, where her youngest daughter died of malnutrition, Tsvetayeva emi­grated, following her husband first to Czechoslovakia (via Berlin), then to France.

Her collection of poems, Versts I, was published in Moscow the year she emigrated (1922). It was this book that started a correspondence between Tsvetayeva and Pasternak -he admired Versts, while she extolled his new collection of poems, My Sister, Life. One more poet joined this lyrical cor­respondence for four months in 1926: Rilke, the German poet, worshiped by Tsvetayeva and Pasternak as the very incarna­tion of poetry. Tsvetayeva considered Pasternak and Rilke "the only equals in strength" she ever met.

Despite the poverty in which she lived there, it was in Prague that Tsvetayeva wrote some of her most accomplished lyric poems, printed in Paris under the title After Russia. 1922-1925. Other books published by Tsvetayeva in her emi­gre period include Parting (Berlin, 1921); Poems to Blok (Berlin, 1922); Craft (Berlin, 1923); Psyche (Berlin, 1923).

In 1925 her son Mur was born in the tiny Czech village, V senory. That same year the family moved to Paris where, in addition to poverty, they suffered isolation from the emigre literary community. In her 1933 letter to her friend George Ivask, the emigre poet, she wrote: " ... My husband is ill and can't work. My daughter earns five francs a day knitting bonnets, and on this four of us .. .live, that is, slowly starve to death." Tsvetayeva was not exaggerating, but stating a fact. Her literary income amounted to hardly anything: even the more liberal emigre publications stopped publishing her work since it did not serve any of the political! religious dog­mas propagated by the various literary cliques that controlled the different presses. Besides, her husband's pro-Soviet sym-

Introduction vii

pathies began to be apparent. At the time, Tsvetayeva did not yet know that, already working for the Soviet secret police, Efron had participated in planning the murder of a former secret police agent, as well as that of Trotsky's son. Her daughter, Alya, had already gone back to the Soviet Union; Efron, too, eventually returned there, having escaped through Republican Spain. Despite the shock she experi­enced upon learning of her husband's political activities in 1937, Tsvetayeva considered it her duty to join him and her daughter in Russia (1939). Though ostracized by the emigres in Europe, she had few illusions about what life in the Soviet Union had to offer her. Rereading the diary in which she wrote tha~ she would serve Efron "like a dog," she added, on the same page: "And here I'm going-like a dog (21 years later)."

Tsvetayeva and her son arrived in Moscow on June 18, 1939. Though exposed as a Soviet agent by French and Swiss authorities, Sergei Efron, upon his return to Moscow, was suspected of working against the Soviet government; he was arrested not long after Marina's arrival. Her daughter was also arrested and sent to a labor camp. Tsvetayeva wrote in her diary: "I have been trying death on for size. It's all ugly and terrifying. To swallow is disgusting, to jump is inimical, my inborn revulsion to water. I do not want to frighten (posthumously) .. .! do not want to die. I want not to be. Non­sense. As long as I'm needed ... but God ... how little I can do! To live my life out is to chew bitter wormwood to the end."2

The exact date of Efron's execution in unknown, but it might have happened in the summer of 1941. On June 22nd of that year the Germans attacked Russia; soon afterwards, Tsvetayeva and her son Mur were evacuated from Moscow, where she had been shunned because of her emigre past and the arrests of her family members, to the reI,llote town of Ela­buga. There, having no money to provide food for her son and herself, she made a trip to a nearby town, Chis topol, where she applied to work as a dishwasher in a writers' cafe-

viii Introduction

teria. On August 31, she hanged herself. Nobody went to her burial; her son volunteered for the front and was soon re­ported killed.

In her 1933 letter to Ivask, Tsvetayeva had written: ''No, my friend, neither with those, nor with these, nor with third persons, and not only with 'politicians,' but also with writers, I am-not; with no one, alone, my whole life through, without books, without readers, without friends-without circle, without hearth, without protection, belonging nowhere, worse than a dog."3

Many point to Tsvetayeva's haughtiness, her difficult character as the reason for her isolation; others say it was caused by her having been caught between two warring camps. In one of his poems, Mandelstam compared his time to a wolfhound; Tsvetayeva said srhe was born outside of time, and therefore the present had no place for her. The only coun­try to which she was totally devoted was that of her imagina­tion, her art: "I never, no matter what, cared for anything but poetry!" she said to Ivask. To those who would see this as egocentrism, there was an answer: liThe only task of man on earth is truth of self; real poets are always prisoners of them­selves; this fortress is stronger than that of Peter and Paul.'"

Tsvetayeva's poems plunge the reader into an atmos­phere of emotional intensity, limitless feelings e'this limit­lessness in the world of limits!"S), constant dramatic conflicts wi th the norms of the surrounding world. Never calm and contemplative, Tsvetayeva's poetry is work of dynamism, strength, and a rapturous, "heathen" love of life. ''To love the sea means to become a fisherman, a sailor, and still better-a Byron (a sailor and a singer, in one!). To lie by the sea ... does not mean to love it.,,6

In her life this immensity of feeling had disastrous re­sults: people were "horrified by the dimensions of emotions they aroused in me."7 Yet the nature of Tsvetayeva's feelings was not what it often seemed to the men who were targets of

Introduction ix

her obsessions. In her letter to Pasternak (July la, 1926), she wrote of "the ancient, insatiable hate of Psyche for Eve-Eve, of whom there is nothing in me. Of Psyche-everything." In the same letter she wrote: "I do not understand flesh as such and deny that it has any rights .... Do you know what I want­when I want? ... The most remote headland of another's soul­and my own. Words that one will never hear or speak. The improbable. The miraculous. A miracle." And in her letter to Rilke (August 22,1926): ''Love lives on words and dies of deeds .... The word, which for me is already the thing, is all I want .... The farther from me-the farther into me. I do not live in myself, but outside myself. I do not live in my lips, and he who kisses me misses me. liB This seems to contradict her definition of love as an active, real force, but the contradiction is illusory. The "love" that Tsvetayeva spoke of existed in the world of the spirit, in the world where the unattainable, the impossible was real. For Tsvetayeva it was a given that the touching of words was as real as the touching of hands.

The "elements," i.e., a spiritualized Nature, for Tsvetay­eva were synonymous with soul. ''Nothing touches me but Nature, i.e., the soul; and the soul, i.e., Nature,1I she wrote to her friend Teskova on December 12, 1927. In her work the intensity of thought, speeding upon the wings of emotion, proves the fearlessness of her confrontation with (and the expression 00 the e1ements, her irrevocable refusal to don the "armor," i.e., to appear before a reader (and the elements) arrayed in the psychological defenses of feminine lyrics­melodiousness and languor, both variations of the poetic posturing that uses feeling (Le., what poetry is said to reveal) as a psychological defense (Le., conceals the self, in life or art). This paradox of self-revelation/ self-concealment is most conspicuous in the assortment of liposes" that lyric poetry as a genre has at its disposal: e.g., a pouring forth of feeling can assume the mincing posture of more tradi tional feminine love lyrics. It is clear that the force of Tsvetayeva's emotions can­not be confined by conventional strictures. Yet even her

x Introduction

dramatic and hyperbolic speech cannot fully express the power of her feelings: '~he limitlessness of my words is but a weak shadow of the limitlessness of my feelings."9

For Tsvetayeva, creating is like giving herself over to a fever: '~here is no way to approach art: it takes hold of you." "Being creative means being obsessed." Yet Tsvetayeva de­veloped a unique poetic form. Certainly its mastery required not only psychological courage and inspiration, but also the iron discipline of a craftsman. In her essay, II Art in the Light of Conscience," she defines genius as lithe highest degree of susceptibility to inspiration" and "control over the inspira­tion." "Creative will is patience," she says elsewhere.

Her style abounds in peculiarities, some virtually un­translatable. The dynamism of her speech is unprecedented, yet her lines speed forward almost without the help of verbs, generally perceived as carriers of motion, action. Seething with energy, her lines nearly burst at the seams, and her dashes are those very seams that, strained to the utmost, hold together the contents of her lines. Borrowing from Tsve­tayeva her habit of speaking metaphorically, we may say that, having discarded wheels (Le., verbs), which guaranteed her swift movement, but also weighed her down, her verse soared.

An experienced master of sophisticated poetic form, Tsvetayeva sees form as only the means, never the aim, of poetry. II As though words gave birth to words, rhymes to rhymes, poems to poems!" she argued with formalists. She considered Boris Pasternak the best modern Russian poet because his contribution was "not a new form but a new essence, and consequently, a new form." For Tsvetayeva, it is the essence that counts in poetry and the essence that dictates new poetic form, not the other way around. As Orlov pointed out in his introduction to the 1965 Soviet edition of her work, for Tsvetayeva the essence of poetry lies in its ability to ren­der, through words, the structure of a poet's soul. It is the

Introduction xi

"structure of the soul" that must be different; innovative form will follow.

She saw mere estheticism as an unpardonable sin against true life and true art. True life means a complete surrender to the elements. True art comes as a result of this psychological openness to experience; it is the voice of the elements speak­ing through the poet. Tsvetayeva had the most profound hatred for verbal decorators, i.e., makers of literature she ironically referred to as belle-Iettres. Her concern was with life, not literature. "Everyone has a place under the sky-a traitor, a rapist, a murderer-but not an esthete! He does not count! He is expelled from the elements, he is a zero!"lO

If Tsvetayeva's psychological courage is defined as the ability to surrender one's self wholly to another-a person, a poem, the elements in each (a testimony to her generosity of spirit), then the transmutation of her own element into that other (which, in turn, becomes hers) is the essence of Tsvet­ayeva's poetry. Her words are emotional, almost physical gestures that heighten the intensity of her appeals to the world, the Romantic past, God, a lover, a child-who is (and is not) herself. As she wrote in her letter to Rilke on August 26, 1926, she demands of poetry "the truth of this moment."

Tsvetayeva's powerful language is notoriously difficult to translate precisely because "the rhythms that inhabited her soul," as Pasternak put it, were so Russian, so close to the folk­lore, and yet so daringly her own. In translating these poems, my goal was to reproduce Tsvetayeva's intense voice, to carry through into English the energy of the original poem. Tsvet­ayeva's intensity, which in Russian perfectly agrees with her pattern of rhyme and rhythm, is bound to be lost in any trans­lation in which rhyme and rhythm become the primary con­cern. Nonetheless, there are in this collection a few metrically translated poems; it seemed to me that those particular poems

xii Introduction

were amenable to, and indeed would benefit from, just this sort of treatment. In all the rest, I tried to create readable English poems rather than attempt the next-to-impossible task of maintaining her original schemes of rhyme and meter. Regrettably, there were wonderful poems that I had to omit because they seemed not to lend themselves to translation at all. In the end, I do not claim success for my venture; that is for the reader to decide. My only hope is that at least some of Tsvetayeva's greatness of spirit and art, some of her special intensity shines through.

I would like to thank my friend Wayne Pernu for the numerous suggestions he provided while I was working on the final versions of these poems.

Nina Kossman

Notes

lMark Slonim, Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems, 1917-1967 (Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 265.

2Simon Karlinsky, Marina Tsvetayeva. The Woman, Her World, and Her Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 236.

3From Robin Kimbal's Foreword to the Demesne of the Swans (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980), p. 26.

4Mark Slonim (1967), p. 265. SA line from Tsvetayeva's 1923 poem (the cycle "Poet," #3). 'V. Orlov's Preface to Marina Tsvetayeva, Izbrannye Proizvedenia (Moscow-Lenin­

grad: Sovyetskii Pisatel, 1965), p. 37. This and subsequent quotations are from Tsvetayeva's archives (draft notebooks, drafts of letters, etc.), cited by V. Orlov.

7Karlinsky (1966), p. 58. 'Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters. Summer 1926

(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), pp. 177, 179, 202. 9Orlov, p. 38. l00rlov, p. 39.

Contents"

v Translator's Introduction 1 You, rushing past on your streets 2 The war, the war 3 The leaves have fallen upon your gravestone 4 The fatal volume 5 Two suns are cooling 6 After a sleepless night 7 Sweetly-sweetly 8 Black as an iris 9 To kiss one's brow

10 I came in 11 The New Year's Eve 12 I am not an impostor 13 Here, darling, take these rags 14 Words are inscribed hi the black sky 15 I am. You shall be. 16 I will tell you about the great hoax 17 Spurned by my lover 18 Dying, I will not say 19 I am paper to your pen 20 Your soul is close to mine 21 Poems grow like stars 22 Bring to me all that's of no use to others 23 The sun is one, but marches through all lands 24 Two trees 25 God, I live! 26 I am happy to live impeccably and simply 27 My way does not lie by your house 28 To you, who bid farewell to love 29 There is a whole tribe of them pining after me 30 Nailed to the Pillon) ... : I 31 Nailed to the pillory ... : II

*Titles in boldface are those of Tsvetayeva; lightface titles are based on the first lines of the poems.

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32 You wanted this 33 Neither stanzas, nor stars will save me 34 Earthly Name 35 Roland's Horn 36 Soul unacquainted with limits 37 Shaggy star 38 How they flare up 39 Slowly, with a careful thin hand 40 1 know that mortal loveliness 41 In the garden 42 Pride and Timidity 43 Praise to Aphrodite: I 44 Parise to Aphrodite: II 45 Praise to Aphrodite: III 46 Praise to Aphrodite: IV 47 From the mind's dreams 48 With such force has her hand grasped 49 TheMuse 50 Orpheus 51 Atdawn 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 61 63 65 66 67 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

There's an hour for those words So, in the destitute daily toil Find yourself trusting women Remember the law When, Lord You will have your proof The Sibyl Sibyl-to the Newborn But even the joy of mornings From Trees: VI

VII VIII IX

These are ashes of treasures The gold of my hair God: I God: III Do not call out to her Ophelia-In Defense of the Queen It's no black magic The hour when the kings on high

Contents

Contents

77 The hour when my dear brother 78 As patiently as sto1les are chiseled 79 With the others 80 Window 81 Sister 82 The hour of bared riverheads 83 To Steal By ... 84 The Dialog of Hamlet with His Conscience 85 The Crevasse 86 The Curtain 88 Sahara 90 From The Hour of the Soul

1: In the inmost hour of the soul and the night 91 2: In the inmost hour of the soul 92 Beyond Sight 93 Minute 94 From this mountain 95 The Ravine 96 I love you, but the torment is still alive 97 You who loved me with the falsehood 98 There are rhymes in this world 99 It is not fated

100 The Island 101 Under the Shawl 102 Thus~nly Helen looks past the Trojan 103 The Baptism 105 Squeezed with the hollows 106 A soldier, into a t7'ench 108 My veins slashed open

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