Search results for ""author marina tsvetaeva""

Marina Tsvetaeva is among the great European poets of the twentieth century. With Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, she retained her humanity and integrity through Russia's 'terrible years' of the Great Terror. Even in her long, tragic exile, her roots were in Russia and the great tradition of Russian poetry. Her voice lives in part because it remains alert to her past, and to cultures, especially French, where she spent her exile. When Elaine Feinstein first read Tsvetaeva's poems in the 1960s, they transformed her. Their intensity and honesty spoke to her directly. To her first translations, published to acclaim in 1971, she added in later years, not least the sequence 'Girlfriend', dedicated to her lover Sofia Parnok. Feinstein published Tsvetaeva's biography in 1987.

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During the Stalin years Russia had four great poets to voice the feelings of her oppressed people: Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetayeva. The first two survived the terror, but Mandelstam died in a camp and Tsvetayeva was driven to hang herself in 1941. This comprehensive selection of Tsvetayeva's poetry includes complete versions of all her major long poems and poem cycles: Poem of the End, An Attempt at a Room, Poems to Czechia and New Year Letter. It was the first English translation to use the new, definitive Russica text of her work. It also includes additional versions ascribed to F.F. Morton which first appeared in The New Yorker: these rhyming translations are actually the work of Joseph Brodsky (who lived at 44 Morton Street in New York).

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Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was one of the four great Russian poets of the 20th century, along with Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Pasternak. She also wrote outstanding prose. Endowed with 'phenomenally heightened linguistic sensitivity' (Joseph Brodsky), Tsvetaeva was primarily concerned with the nature of poetic creation and what it means to be a poet. Among the most exciting of all explorations of this theme are the essays 'Art in the Light of Conscience', her spirited defence of poetry; 'The Poet on the Critic', which earned her the enmity of many; and 'The Poet and Time', the key to understanding her work. Her richly diverse essays provide incomparable insights into poetry, the poetic process, and what it means to be a poet. This book includes, among many fascinating topics, a celebration of the poetry of Pasternak ('Downpour of Light') and reflections on the lives and works of other Russian poets, such as Mandelstam and Mayakovsky, as well as a magnificent study of Zhukovsky's translation of Goethe's 'Erlking'. Even during periods of extreme personal hardship, her work retained its sense of elated energy and humour, and Angela Livingstone's translations bring the English-speaking reader as close as possible to Tsvetaeva's inimitable voice. First published in English in 1992, "Art in the Light of Conscience" includes an introduction by the translator, textual notes and a glossary, as well as revised translations of 12 poems by Tsvetaeva on poets and poetry.

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