Book review: Tsvetayeva's "autobiography"

[Paul B. Gallagher]

 From Thursday's /New York Times/:

March 31, 2005
COMPOSING THE WORK AN ILL-FATED POET NEVER BEGAN
================================================
By Alan Riding

PARIS, March 30 -- Marina Tsvetayeva is often ranked alongside Boris
Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova among Russia's greatest 20th-century poets.
Yet if she is not better known in the West, it is partly because the
tragedy of her life did not end with her death. For decades after her
suicide, on Aug. 31, 1941, much of her writing was lost, banned or
locked away. It took the collapse of the Soviet Union for her complete
works to be published in Russian.

Now, in a new book published here, Tzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian-born
French philosopher and literary critic, believes he has found a way of
introducing Tsvetayeva to a larger public outside Russia. In "Vivre Dans
le Feu: Confessions" (Éditions Robert Laffont), or "Living in Fire:
Confessions," Mr. Todorov has organized extracts from nine volumes of
her letters, notes and diaries into what he calls the autobiography she
never wrote.

"When I first read the material in Russian, I thought it was amazing,
but also a bit difficult to follow," Mr. Todorov said in an interview,
"because when you take all this writing, it's not a finished work. So I
decided to carry out a labor of love, to compose a book that Marina had
already written so that anyone could read the confessions of one of the
great writers of the past century."

The volume has an additional appeal. While Tsvetayeva gained some
literary renown, first in Russia, then among Russian exiles, her poetry
has always been considered difficult to translate. Indeed, it was the
publication of her 1926 correspondence with Pasternak and Rainer Maria
Rilke that finally won her broad recognition in the West in the 1980's.
Now, with "Living in Fire" -- her metaphor for the sacrificial ritual of
writing -- still more of her prose has become available outside Russia
though not in English.

...

Read the rest at <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/31/books/31mari.html>.
The /NY Times/ website requires free registration and cookies.

--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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