Bride of Ice

Selected Poems

Marina Tsvetaeva author Elaine Feinstein translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd

Published:26th Jan '23

Should be back in stock very soon

Bride of Ice cover

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 Tsvetaeva's lover the poet Sofia Parnok. Feinstein published Tsvetaeva's biography in 1987.

'Tsvetaeva's simple, clean language follows the track of the nerves. There is nothing hit or miss, nothing for effect, nothing false. Reading her poems one feels cleansed and sharpened.' - Ted Hughes;'Marina Tsvetaeva was the first of the modern Russian poets whose greatness really came clear to me, thanks to these translations. Feinstein has performed the first, indispensable task of a great translator: she has captured a voice.' - Alan Williamson, Threepenny Review

ISBN: 9781800172272

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

186 pages

2nd New edition