Other Shepherds: Poems with Translations from Marina Tsvetaeva

Review by Art Beck

I: The Rhyme of History

 

Other Shepherds is an unusual sequence that alternates translated Marina Tsvetaeva poems with poems by the translator. It appears as part of the Poets and Traitors Press series which “seeks to showcase authors who travel between writing and translation” and “views translation as forming part of a continuum with the creative writer’s work.” The series, which began in 2013, arose from the New York New School’s translation workshop readings which incorporated a similar format.

This volume doesn’t appear to be a spontaneous, “in real time” exercise.  Nina Kossman has published two previous well received Tsvetaeva volumes that included some of these translations. And Kossman says her poems weren’t intentionally written in response to the individual Tsvetaeva lyrics they’re paired with. So the pairings present an after the fact editorial meditation that perhaps allows Kossman to revisit and further contextualize both her translations and her own poetry.

The effect is of a vibrant conversation between a translator and her translatee. A courageous and impertinent duet, because of course Tsvetaeva is an iconic Russian poet. This is also the case with other Poets and Traitors books which feature the original poems of translators of major poets alongside their translations. I can’t speak to the other volumes but It doesn’t come off as unduly brash here, rather a respectful ancestral dialogue between Kossman and a shadowed but glowing figure who might represent a cultural grandmother or great aunt. (Both were born in Moscow. Tsvetaeva in 1892, Kossman in the late twentieth century.)

Kossman’s introduction notes she emigrated from the Soviet Union with her family in the ’70s on the cusp of her teens. While immersing herself in the English language and American life, she simultaneously embarked on an internal path of writing poetry in Russian. And eventually writing and publishing bilingually while continuing to make her home in the United States.

Tsvetaeva, notably, spent the better part of her writing life self-exiled from Russia. In the 1920s and ’30s, she and her young family lived in often uncertain circumstances in various European cities. including Berlin, Prague and Paris.  Her husband was originally a White officer but eventually seems to have been persuaded to become a clandestine Soviet agent in the Russian emigre community.

With WWII imminent and with few other options, Tsvetaeva returned to the Soviet Union in 1939 to join her husband who had preceded her. The result was tragedy. Her husband, Sergei Efron was ultimately arrested on political charges and executed. Her daughter was also charged and sentenced to prison.  It’s hard to imagine her own standing with the authorities as anything better than shaky, and her economic circumstances were dire.  In 1941, Tsvetaeva committed suicide. In Boris Pasternak’s metaphorical description. “Not knowing how to protect herself from that horror, she hurriedly hid herself in death, putting her head into a noose as under a pillow.”

Kossman recalls being drawn to Tsvetaeva’s poetry in her teens with a sense of “nostalgia and alienation.” Her introduction notes a not dissimilar level of unease rearising in the dystopic politics and plague shock of 2020.  Kossman is under no sentimental illusion that her successfully assimilated American circumstances bear any similarity to Tsvetaeva’s uprooted migrant life. But for the reader (and to borrow a Mark Twain simile ) it’s the “rhyme” of her 2020-angst with the last century’s various dystopias that marks the best of these translatee/ translator pairings.

II:   A Notable Omission

 

To look at one example: Kossman includes only a short segment from (her previously published translation of) Tsvetaeva’s long, 1924  “Poem of the End.”  But it provides a nuanced sample of how their paired dialogue flows. Tsvetaeva’s father was the son of a Russian Orthodox priest and while she professed no particular religion she was a familial Christian. However in this passage, Tsvetaeva uses an extended metaphor of Russian anti-Semitism to convey her alienation.

Wouldn’t it be a hundred times better

to become the Wandering Jew?

For anyone not scum,

Life is a pogrom.

Life loves only converts,

Judases of all faiths!

Go to a leper colony! To hell!

Anywhere, but not into life,

It spares only traitors,

Sheep for the butcher!

My birth certificate

I trample underfoot!

I trample it! Vengeance:

David’s shield avenged. Into the crush of bodies.

Isn’t it thrilling that the yid

Did not want to live?

Rather than alienation, Kossman’s single stanza, whispering lower cased, paired poem seems reverently rooted in her own familial context: As part of the diaspora of Soviet Jews allowed to leave in the 1970s. And in a sense of spiritual inclusiveness with the fate of so many 20th century Eastern European Jews.

silver hair yellow stars

gold teeth children’s shoes

this church of memory

hides the temple of all beginnings

we shall walk to our graves

remembering them

But those familiar with Tsvetaeva’s Poem of the End will notice the four stanzas above immediately precede a notable often quoted culminating stanza. It’s a mark of how artful these pairings are that Kossman omitted this stanza from her Tsvetaeva excerpt. Alas, I don’t have Kossman’s translation at hand but Mary Jane White’s translation reads:

Ghetto of God’s chosen! A divide

And a ditch. Ex-pect no mercy!

In this most Christian of worlds

All poets – are Jews

Elaine Feinstein’s is similar:

Ghetto of the chosen. Beyond this

ditch. No Mercy

In this most Christian of worlds

all poets are Jews.

In effect, Kossman substitutes a quiet personal Kaddish for her poetic forebear’s bitter exclamation. It both internalizes and restates the unspoken stanza. A yin to Tsvetaeva’s yang, welcoming her like an adoptive cultural grandmother into her family. Both the translation and the paired poem are imbued with pain. But like a secular hymn, the pairing introduces a redemptive harmonic underpinning that shares and eases the grief.

III. An Enigmatic Mirror

 

Not all the poems and pairings are this weighty. Tsvetaeva’s (six-stanza) “Orpheus” begins:

So they drifted: the lyre and the head,

Downstream, toward the endless stretch.

And the lyre sighed: “I will miss…”

And the lips completed: “the world…”

and ends:

…Where are these hallowed remains?

Answer to this, salt water!

Has a bare-headed Lesbos girl

Perhaps caught them in her net.

Kossman’s (17 line) “Orpheus” responds:

He sings his way up to being,

quietly with unhurried breath,

as though words were a blossoming staircase

leading to a perfect sky…

…Where now are the moonlit woods

that stood up dark and strict

in the soft, thick mist of his longing,

now that he has constructed his perfect staircase

and burst through his silent sky?

But apart from the musical duet simile, the thought of “scrying” or divination with mirrors also occurs. Of finding reflections of oneself in an ancestral mirror. Shakespeare provides a handy quote:

Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime

As does Willis Barnstone when in his Restored New Testament he translates the “through a glass darkly” of the King James version of Corinthians Alpha as “an enigmatic mirror.”

As does this short pairing near the end of the sequence. The first poem is Tsvetaeva in 1918. The second, Nina Kossman. Hers seems not so much either a conversation, or a poem that reaches a similar conclusion. Rather a century later poem that draws its sap from the same roots as its predecessor.

I am. You shall be. Between us- a chasm.

I drink. You thirst. All talk is futile.

Ten years – a hundred thousand years

Part us. God does not build bridges.

Be – this is my commandment. Let me pass

And not disturb your growth with my breathing.

I am. You shall be. In ten years’ time

You’ll say: I am – I will say: I was.

M.T. (1918)

 

The one who is set apart

who hasn’t been born yet

whose birth is a ship

unmoored

unanchored

unmarked

waiting to sail in an open sea

death awaits in the shallows

death awaits in the deeps

death surrounds the unborn

as the sea swallows the ship.

N.K.

 

Given the inherent task difficulties of the series format and as with any long sequence, some segments work better than others. But the entirety does work for me. And pairings like the above help make it all cohere. These are serious translations and earnest responses.

Other Shepherds: Poems with Translations from Marina Tsvetaeva
Nina Kossman
Poets and Traitors Press
ISBN: 978-0-9990737-4-2