Book description
When Elaine Feinstein first read the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva in
Russian in the 1960s, the encounter transformed her. 'What drew me to
her initially,' she writes, 'was the intensity of her emotions, and
the honesty with which she exposed them.' Her translations, first
published to great acclaim in 1971, introduced Tsvetaeva to English
readers. It was the start of Feinstein's continuing engagement with a
poet who has been an enduring, challenging inspiration to her, and
whose life she has written. To this enlarged edition Elaine Feinstein
adds five major pieces. 'Girlfriend', a sequence of lyrics, was
written for Tsvetaeva's lover Sofia Parnok. In 'New Year's Greetings'
she responded to the death of Rainer Maria Rilke. 'On a Red Horse' is
a dramatic fairytale of power and cruelty. 'Wires', of which two
lyrics were included in the earlier edition, now appears in full; and
a previously omitted lyric from 'Poem of the End' has been translated.
With a new introduction, notes and bibliography of works in English,
Bride of Ice brings Tsvetaeva to a new generation of readers.
'Like numerous English readers, I owe my discovery of Tsvetaeva to
the multi-talented poet and writer, Elaine Feinstein... Feinstein's
translations prove that a poem can be re-born in its adoptive language.'
- Carol Rumens Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892. Her father
was a professor of art history at the University of Moscow and her
mother, who died of TB when Tsvetaeva was fourteen, a gifted pianist.
Tsvetaeva's first poems, Evening Album, were self-published in 1910. In
1912 Tsvetaeva married Sergei Efron, with whom she had two daughters,
Alya and Irina. During the Civil War Efron fought in the White Army
while Tsvetaeva and the children endured the Moscow famine. Irina died
of starvation in 1920. In 1922 the Civil War ended with Bolshevik
victory and Tsvetaeva joined Efron in exile in Prague. It was here that
she wrote some of her greatest poetry. In 1924 Tsvetaeva's son Georgy
was born. The family moved to Paris in 1925. Tsvetaeva became isolated
from the Russian literary emigres and, increasingly, from Efron and
Alya, whose allegiances moved towards Communism. Both returned to Russia
in 1937, Alya freely and Efron to avoid arrest for his involvement in
the murder of a defector. Tsvetaeva followed him to Russia with Georgy
in 1939, unaware of Stalin's Terror. Alya was arrested and sentenced to
fifteen years in prison. Efron was shot in 1941. In the same year,
following the German invasion, Tsvetaeva and Georgy left Moscow for
Yelabuga in the Tartar Republic. Tsvetaeva hanged herself there on 31
August 1941. Elaine Feinstein was educated at Newnham College,
Cambridge. She has worked as a university lecturer, a subeditor, and a
freelance journalist. Since 1980, when she was made a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature, she has lived as a full-time writer. In
1990, she received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and was given an
Honorary D. Litt from the University of Leicester. Her versions of the
poems of Marina Tsvetaeva - for which she received three translation
awards from the Arts Council - were first published in 1971. She has
written fourteen novels, many radio plays, television dramas, and five
biographies, including the critically acclaimed A Captive Lion: the Life
of Marina Tsvetaeva (1987) and Pushkin (1998). Ted Hughes: The Life of a
Poet (2001), was shortlisted for the biennial Marsh Biography Prize. Her
biography of Anna Akhmatova, Anna of all the Russias was published in
2005. Elaine Feinstein has travelled extensively, not only to read her
work at festivals across the world, but to be Writer in Residence for
the British Council, first in Singapore, and then in Tromso, Norway. She
was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Bellagio in 1998. Her poems have
been widely anthologised. Her Collected Poems and Translations (2002)
was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She has served as a
judge for the Gregory Awards, the Independent Foreign Fiction Award, the
Costa Poetry Prize and the Rossica Award for Literature translated from
Russian, and in 1995 was chairman of the judges for the T. S. Eliot
Prize. In 2010 her debut novel The Circle was longlisted for The Lost
Man Booker Prize, a one-off award honouring books published in 1970 that
were not eligible for consideration for the Booker Prize.
