Marina Tsvetaeva

Tr. Belinda Cooke

i am late for my appointment…

I am late for my appointment.
Though I brought spring with me
I arrive grey-haired.
You placed great significance on it.

Ophelia’s taste for bitter roots did not falter.
She will be my guide as I walk for years,
through mountains and city squares
through souls and arms.

It’s hard to live out one’s time on earth —
a desperate place of blood, its drops
our only shelter, while Ophelia’s face
lies by the stream in bitter grasses.

She, who grasped at passion, only to
eat dirt like a plant on stone!
I loved you passionately.
I buried myself in the sky.

it’s too early…

It’s too early to die.
It’s too early not to burn.
Tenderness. The wretched whip
of underworld meetings.

However intensely you try,
you cannot hold on to the sky.
O, for that kind of love
but it’s too early not to suffer.

It’s jealousy that keeps us alive.
Blood is determined to flow
into the earth. Doesn’t the widow
have the right to fall on her sword?

It’s jealousy that keeps us alive.
The sacred sacrifice of the heart.
Grass likes to be mown down
by the relentless cut of the scythe.

The secret thirst of grasses.
Each blade wishes to be broken.
Having reduced myself to rags,
these wounds are still mine.

And while I still put in the stitches
myself, I will continue.
It’s too early for the ice
of the lands of the underworld.

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) is considered one of the greatest twentieth century Russian poets. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution and the Moscow famine that followed. She left Russia in 1922 living in increasing poverty in Berlin, Prague and Paris, before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and her daughter Ariadna were arrested on espionage charges in 1941. Efron was executed and Alya imprisoned. Desperately isolated in the new Soviet regime and severely depressed, she committed suicide to be survived only by her son, who died in a penal battalion shortly after. This selection includes poems shortly before that departure.

Belinda Cooke is a widely published poet, translator and reviewer. This consists of seven collections, including translations from both Russian and Kazakh. Best known for her translations of Marina Tsvetaeva, she has recently written a prose memoir of her mother’s life: From the Back of Beyond to Westland Row: a Mayo Woman’s Story (The High Window Press, 2022). Her latest collection, The Days of the Shorthanded Shovelists, is due out shortly from Salmon Poetry.

Belinda wrote the following about her translations:

I think I learnt the most  about translation when studying Robert Lowell’s  versions of Mandelstam for my PhD.  He relied on what he called the ‘naturalness of prose diction’ as his starting point before structuring the poem’s form. This helped ensure that the poem sounded natural and authentic to an English reader. Added to this I like to draw on often plain diction a lot because this, as well as avoiding the text reading as a translation, also allows for more complex meaning. Think of Shakespeare’s ‘To be or not to be’. It’s very plainness allows for far more subtlety than, say. ‘To exist or not to exist.’