Marina Tsvetaeva with her dog in Savoy, France (1930) / Image courtesy of the Poetry Foundation
Lately, it seems that Marina Tsvetaeva pops up everywhere I
look. After last year’s inaugural prize for a translation of a poem by Nikolai Gumilev,
the organizers of the Compass Award have announced that they’re now seeking translations
of Tsvetaeva. Her work is famously difficult to translate, so whoever wins will
certainly have earned the $300 in prize money. (That may not sound like much,
but hey, we all know that literary translation isn’t the most lucrative field.)
On their page, the Compass organizers speculate why Tsvetaeva’s poems rarely
come across well in translation: “Their poetic tension is just too high, and
their force fields are overwhelmingly complex.” Anyone who has read her in
Russian knows exactly what the Compass folks mean: nobody writes such
intricately formal poems as Tsvetaeva.
Just when I had the Compass Award on my mind, the annual
translation issue of Poetry magazine
arrived, replete with a portfolio of Tsvetaeva’s work. The eight poems in the
portfolio, along with accompanying prose excerpts, were translated by Jean
Valentine and Ilya Kaminsky, who says that Tsvetaeva offers a particular
challenge to translators because of her “over-abundance of lyricism.” The
solution that he and Valentine came up with was to avoid imitating the form of
her poems altogether. Kaminsky explains that the two of them do not even claim
to have “translated” Tsvetaeva’s poetry, but have rather composed a kind of
commentary on it—mere “fragments, notes in the margin.” Still, some of their
translations (or whatever they are) come off pretty well.
