Surely Has Her Day

     Poetry can survive anything -- even the Russian Revolution, even death. The proof is in the works of Marina Tvestaeva.

     Born in Moscow, Tvestaeva lived an eventful life. She grew up in a posh family surrounded by culture, yet lost one of her children to a famine. She saw the Revolution up close and did not care for it. She lived in Paris, Berlin, Prague; she knew artists and spies and had love affairs aplenty, even amid much political intrigue. Tvestaeva once wrote a cycle of amorous poems that she called The Girlfriend, except for the times she called it The Mistake. (Some of us can relate.) She ended her own life in 1941 rather than be pressured into spying for the Russian secret police.  
     Librarian Yelena, Russian-born, recommends these samples of Marina Tvestaeva's verse. Yelena has also kindly recited them for us in the original tongue so that we can hear the lines as they were written. 


     My Little Poems

     (Click here for audio)

     My little poems, composed so very early,
     That I did not yet call them poetry,
     Erupting, like a rocket's flame, and swirling
     Like cloudy fountain spray,

     And rushing forth, like devils into sleepy,
     Secluded sanctums to commit misdeeds,
     My poems, that ponder youth and death so deeply,
     That no one ever reads,

     That lie on dusty shelves in hidden shops
     (Where no one ever moves them from their place),
     My poems, like precious wines someone forgot,
     Will surely have their day!


     You...


     (Click here for audio)


     You, the ones passing by not my dubious charms to admire,
     If only you knew just how much was lost
     Of the life and the internal fire.

     The occasional shadow and rustle
     Eliciting from me heroic fervor...
     And how my heart was turned into ashes
     By this uselessly spent gunpowder.

     Oh, the trains flying into the night,
     Taking away sleep at the railway station...
     However, I know that even then,
     You still would not have realized -- even
     If you knew

     Why my words are so sharp, shrouded
     Forever in the smoke of my cigarette --
     How much of the dark anguished grief
     Inside of my fair-haired head.