Shearsman 61

Marina Tsvetaeva

Three Poems
translated by Belinda Cooke


You who don't come near me,
but avoid my dubious charms,
if only you knew how much fire,
how much life is squandered for nothing,

and how much passion
there is in the chance shadow or sound,
how my heart reduced to ashes,
wasted powder all for nothing.

Oh trains flying in the night
carrying a dream at the station...
But, I know, even if you could have,
you would not have recognised then

why my speech is bitter
in the endless smoke of my cigarette —
how much dark and stormy longing
is in my light-haired head.

 

****

 

For my poems, written so early,
that I didn't know I was a poet,
erratic as water from a fountain,
like sparks from a rocket.

Like little devils broken loose
into the sleep and incense of a sanctuary,
for my poems of youth and death,
— my unread poems! —

Collecting dust at the back of shops
(where no one's going to buy them!),
my poems mature like vintage wine—
I know their time will come.

 

****

Oh gypsy passion of
You've only just met—and you break it off!
I put my head in my hands
and think, gazing into the night:

Digging into our letters
no one has really grasped
the nature of our treachery—
the fact we are faithful only to ourselves.

Translations copyright © Belinda Cooke, 2004.

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was one of the greatest Russian poets of the first half of the 20th Century. Although she lived in exile for many years, she returned to the USSR in 1939, only to commit suicide two years later.

Belinda Cooke works as a schoolteacher in the North of Scotland. Her PhD thesis concerned Mandelstam and Robert Lowell, and she has translated several Russian poets, including the little-known 1920s émigré Boris Poplavsky. Her translations have appeared in various magazines and anthologies including Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, Acumen and Poetry Salzburg.