Truth after Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva lived a hard life, at least as an adult. Her daughter starved; she went into exile. Amid the suffering, she wrote poems, she had affairs, and she corresponded with the likes of Rilke and Pasternak. Tsvetaeva rejected the revolution. She came from wealth, with an artistic pedigree, and was between foreign academies and Black Sea resorts before facing common life. This poem was written before she could lament her losses:
Не надо людям с людьми на земле бороться.
Смотрите: вечер, смотрите: уж скоро ночь.
О чём — поэты, любовники, полководцы?
Уж ветер стелется, уже земля в росе,
Уж скоро звёздная в небе застынет вьюга,
И под землёю скоро уснем мы все,
Кто на земле не давали уснуть друг другу.
3 октября 1915
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look – it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
What do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?
The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.
(trans. Elaine Feinstein)
Ne nado lyudyam s lyud’mi na zemle borot’sya.
Smotrite: vecher, smotrite: uzh skoro noch.
O chyom — poety, lyubovniki, polkovodtsy?
Uzh veter stelitsya, uzhe zemlya v rose,
Uzh skoro zvyozdnaya v nebe zastynet v’yuga,
I pod zemlyoyu skoro usnem my vse,
Kto na zemle ne davali usnut’ drug drugu.
3 oktyabrya 1915
No need for earthbound humans' strife with others.
Look: evening falls, and night is on its way.
What use are poets, generals, and lovers?
The wind now spreads, the earth wears dewy lace,
Soon starlit blizzards will congeal on high,
And underground we'll find our resting place -
We who denied each other's lullaby.
(trans. claude-3.5-sonnet)
In the top row, we have the original Russian and Elaine Feinstein’s translation. In the bottom row, I added a transliteration so that I can learn to read Cyrillic, as well as a rhyming translation à la claude-3.5-sonnet (an AI model). Feinstein’s seems right, but translations are indeterminate as a rule. Russian is also especially thorny for ideological and ethnic reasons.
The poem was presumably written on 16 October, 1915, although to Tsvetaeva, that was 3 October. This is because the Bolsheviks replaced the Julian calendar with our Gregorian after the revolution, calling it a switch from “Old Style” to “New Style,” and eliminating 13 days’ difference.
I view this exercise as a warm-up for reading Anna Akhmatova’s work.
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