Jianing Zhao
on translating Marina Tsvetaeva
I used to believe that poetry is what’s lost during translations. Now that I’m carrying out a translation myself, I’m thinking about how to minimize the loss, what to lose, and what to gain in turn. I tried to stick to Tsvetaeva’s original syntax as much as possible although it’s often all over the place, a result of both the flexibility of Russian sentence structures and Tsvetaeva’s personal style. I supplied my own interpretations at places of ambiguity. For example, in the second stanza, Tsvetaeva didn’t specify whose eyes are “at my own” (literally) or “gazing into my own,” so I added “— your eyes” in the end of the third line, to keep the stylistic consistency with the first line (as Tsvetaeva did) and simultaneously distinguish it: while both stars and eyes “rose and dimmed,” I proposed that there is a difference between the vast vagueness of the stars and the specificity of the eyes that are the narrator’s concern. Another example is last two lines of the third stanza: literally translated, it would be “had a wedding in church — oh tenderness! — on the singer’s own chest.” Instead of resorting to the clumsy word “married,” I chose words that I thought captured the essence of the scene depicted while evoking the idea of a church wedding. I eventually settled on “charm,” “crown,” and “rest,” keeping in mind also the flow and rhythm of the stanza. Although Tsvetaeva didn’t employ a rhyme scheme, since this stanza is about a hymn, I decided to use some end rhyme and alliteration to render a sense of melody — one that’s a bit arbitrary and non-systematic (especially with the abruptness of the intrusion “oh tenderness!”), corresponding to the tonality of the hymn drifting through the dark night. I also framed the ending to resemble the ending of the first stanza, except that it turns from a declarative sentence to a question, which corresponds to the evolution of the narrator’s emotions throughout the poem — from trying to find a rational explanation for the unusual tenderness she feels towards him, to the realization of her complete infatuation despite all doubts and criticisms. The ending, therefore, is an exclamation masked by a question.
about the author
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (Марина Ивановна Цветаева) was a Russian poet, born in Moscow, whose work is considered among the greatest in twentieth-century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Her daughter died of the famine that followed the revolution, her husband was executed on espionage charges, and she committed suicide in 1941. Many of her poems (such as a famous one starting with “I’ve cut open my veins…”) handle rather heavy topics with daring linguistic experimentation, establishing her as a striking chronicler of her times and of the human condition in tragic circumstances. In this poem, however, we see another side of Tsvetaeva: she had a brief love affair with Osip Mandelstam, also a famous poet, when her husband was in the White Army. This poem was written in 1916 and dedicated to Mandelstam: here we can see her passion, her interest in temporality, and her emerging style of circular structure and unusual syntax.
about the translator
Jianing Zhao is a sophomore at Princeton University majoring in comparative literature and minoring in archaeology, theater, and gender and sexuality studies. Based on her unrequited love for Soviet rock music, poetry (especially by Mayakovsky), and plays (especially those by Schwartz), she believes she was born in the wrong time and place. One of her favorite places in the world is a Soviet non-conformist art gallery hidden in the depth of an alley in St. Petersburg.
