I Know the Truth
I know the truth! All others – banished!
No need to fight each other up and down this planet.
Look, night comes soon, soon the sun will set.
What say you, general, lover, poet?
Now the wind sweeps low, the grass is pearled
with dew. The starry blizzard that whirled
overhead has frozen in its place. And we who never let
each other sleep above this earth, will sleep at last below it.
Я знаю правду!
Я знаю правду! Все прежние правды — прочь!
Не надо людям с людьми на земле бороться.
Смотрите: вечер, смотрите: уж скоро ночь.
О чем — поэты, любовники, полководцы?
Уж ветер стелется, уже земля в росе,
Уж скоро звездная в небе застынет вьюга,
И под землею скоро уснем мы все,
Кто на земле не давали уснуть друг другу.
* * * * *
Two Suns are Cooling
Two suns are cooling — dear God be kind! –
one is above me, one in my chest,
and I – O, these two suns – who nearly lost
(how will I forgive myself?) my mind
In the scorch of their heat … soon their rays won’t pierce me!
Not even the one that burned more fiercely.
Два солнца стынут…
Два солнца стынут — о Господи, пощади!
Одно — на небе, другое — в моей груди.
Как эти солнца — прощу ли себе сама? —
Как эти солнца сводили меня с ума!
И оба стынут — не больно от их лучей!
И то остынет первым, что горячей.
* * * * *
from “Poems for Moscow”
2
Take from my hand, this city, built here
by no human hand. Take, my beautiful brother,
my stranger, its 40 times 40 churches
and all their cooing pigeons, perched
or flying beside the spires. And, taller, take the Spassky Towers,
where the heads of the prayerful, bared and lowered,
enter through the flowered gates. And below the stars,
take the Chapel of Stars, its floors
washed clean with kisses. And when you take from their circle,
each by each, the five cathedrals,
I will take you into the Garden of Sudden Joy,
its domes resplendent and the sky
shaken by bells. And from a crimson cloud,
dropping from the Mother of God,
a cloak will clothe you. And you will rise then, wondrous, covered
with its power, and you will not repent that you loved me.
Стихи о Москве
2
Из рук моих — нерукотворный град
Прими, мой странный, мой прекрасный брат.
По церковке — всё сорок сороков,
И реющих над ними голубков;
И Спасские — с цветами — ворота,
Где шапка православного снята;
Часовню звездную — приют от зол —
Где вытертый — от поцелуев — пол;
Пятисоборный несравненный круг
Прими, мой древний, вдохновенный друг.
К Нечаянныя Радости в саду
Я гостя чужеземного сведу.
Червонные возблещут купола,
Бессонные взгремят колокола,
И на тебя с багряных облаков
Уронит Богородица покров,
И встанешь ты, исполнен дивных сил…
Ты не раскаешься, что ты меня любил.
* * * * *
Marina Tsvetaeva is considered one of the four greatest Russian poets of the 20th century, along with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak. Her poetry — often rhymed and metered, though usually translated as free verse — roils with broken faiths and broken cities. The wry, sad humor of 1915’s “I Know the Truth,” for example, reflects the absurdity of WWI — and of human folly beyond.
She was born to poorly matched parents in 1892. Tsvetaeva’s concert pianist mother wanted the talented Marina to fulfill the dreams of her own frustrated career. She died of tuberculosis when Marina was 14. (Marina and her future husband would also contract tuberculosis.) Her father founded the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.
In 1912, Tsvetaeva married Sergei Efron. He later worked for the Soviet secret police while the family lived in Paris, making Marina a pariah among the Russian expat community. After living in several European cities, she returned to Moscow in 1939. “Poem # 2” from her “Poems for Moscow” memorializes a tour conducted there for Osip Mandelstam who became a wedge in Tsvetaeva’s romance with poet Sophia Parnok. The poem “Two Suns are Cooling” was written during her charged two-year affair with Parnok. Tsvetaeva also carried on an epistolary and unconsummated affair with Pasternak.
Of Marina’s and Sergei’s three children, Irina, the middle child, starved to death at the age of two after Marina placed her two girls in an orphanage in hopes that they would be better fed during the post-Revolution famine. Later, older daughter Alya and Sergei were arrested as enemies of the people, and she would spend 8 years in prisons and labor camps. Sergei was executed in 1941 after Alya, under torture, testified against him. Marina, 46 days earlier, had hanged herself on August 31. She is buried in the Old Cemetery near the town of Yelabuga, the exact location of her grave unknown. Their son Mur died on the Eastern Front in 1944.