Beginning on a High C: Marina Tsvetaeva in 1914.
Too few Americans know the oeuvre of Muscovite poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) – partly, I think it’s because of the translations. How can one translate her? Where other poems end, hers begin. And her poems typically begin “at the far right – i.e., highest – end of the octave, on high C.”
Those are the words of her admirer, poet Joseph Brodsky, who wrote, “Tsvetaeva is a poet of extremes only in the sense that for her an ‘extreme’ is not so much the end of the known world as the beginning of the unknowable one.”
He continues: “Tsvetaeva is an extremely candid poet, quite possibly the most candid in the history of Russian poetry. She makes no secret of anything, least of all of her aesthetic and philosophical credos, which are scattered about her verse and prose with the frequency of a first person singular pronoun.”
So here are a few of those aphorisms, which have been gathered from her diaries and notebooks from about 1917 to 1922, over at the Paris Review:
I should be drinking you from a mug, but I’m drinking you in drops, which make me cough.
You don’t want people to know that you love a certain person? Then say: “I adore him!” But some people know what this means.
Kinship by blood is coarse and strong, kinship by choice—is fine. And what is fine can tear.
Betrayal already points to love. You can’t betray an acquaintance.
And this one is especially intriguing:
The heart: it is a musical, rather than a physical organ.
There! What a naughty thing I’ve been! I’ve used up six of the ten “aesthetic and philosophical credos” on this post. Find the rest over at the Paris Review here.
Tags: "joseph brodsky", Marina Tsvetaeva