Marina Tsvetayeva: Selected Poems - Couverture souple

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0140421661 ISBN 13 : 9780140421668

Editeur : Penguin Books Ltd, 1974

A propos du livre

Biographie de l'auteur

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892, the daughter of a pianist and a museum curator. After enjoying a relatively secure and comfortable childhood, she published her first poems in 1910 and in 1911 married fellow poet Sergei Efron. They had two daughters before the Russian revolution broke out, and it was at that time she began to experience the turmoil and brutality of early twentieth-century Russia. During the years of famine that ensued, she was forced to place her daughters in a State orphanage, where one of them died of malnutrition. Tsvetaeva later followed her husband to Czechoslovakia, where they lived in exile until Efron’s return to Russia in 1937. Efron subsequently was arrested and died in a labor camp. Tsvetaeva returned to Russia with their son in 1939 but was driven to despair by the difficulty of finding food for the both of them, and, in 1941, she hanged herself. Along with Pasternak, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva stands as one of the four great Russian poets of this century and is one of the most important woman writers in the Western canon.

Elaine Feinstein is a prizewinning poet and novelist and the author of highly praised biographies of Alexander Pushkin, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Ted Hughes. She lives in London.

Revue de presse

Tsvetayeva is one of the great poets of the century and David McDuff's translations are very good. This is all the more remarkable because, like the poems they translate, they rhyme. There are overlaps with Elaine Feinstein's excellent but unrhyming translations of the same poet, but not too many. McDuff conveys Tsvetyeva's commitment to poetry's musical force, Feinstein substitutes a beautifully nuanced syntax for music; Tsvetayeva shines and appals in both. --Martin Dodsworth, Guardian

It must be said right away that those who want to have an inkling of what Tsvetayeva is actually like, and that includes her form, her rhyme, and the tone of that accompanies form and rhyme, will have to go to McDuff. His diligence with metre and rhyme is remarkably successful, and is the only proper tribute to the poet's linguistic virtuosity. Readers may find that Feinstein comes across more fluently, but that fluency is not Tsvetaevan. McDuff has caught her abruptness, her veering and tacking, and has tried to show something of the curious modern music this produces - "modern" not through free verse but by dint of straining traditional patterns to breaking point. --Cencrastus

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date d'édition: 1974
• ISBN 10: 0140421661
• ISBN 13: 9780140421668
• Reliure: Broché
• Langue: anglais
• Nombre de pages: 144
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible