differences (one tsvetaeva, two translators)
Elaine Feinstein’s translation: Bent with worry Bent with worry, God paused, to smile. And look, there were many holy angels with bodies of the radiance he had given them, some with enormous wings and...
Monthly Archive: May 2004
not writing, with words
lost lost lost my voice lost lone along these rainy highways blown out the window by the raucous crow caw radio lost I saw a tom turkey brown bronze bearded breast wandering in the...
the ultimate stair
What to tell you about the book? The ultimate stair. My bed turned to a cloud. Darling, I know everything already–from me to you–but it is still too early for a lot of things....
of the spangled mind
Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind, child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you do not break with hard pains, O lady, my heart Sappho, as translated by Anne Carson, in If Not,...
letters
Pasternak saved these two sheets of light-blue notepaper all his life. After his death, in the summer of 1960, they were found in an envelope marked “Most Precious,” which he carried in a leather...
word weather, a change in
I wished to go outside to see what one poet’s thinking of another poet had done to the air and the sky. Pasternak to Tsvetayeva, Letters: Summer 1926, p 80 A wild leap from...