Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I'm reading Elaine Feinstein's translation of the poems. Tsvetaeva's voice is intensely lyrical, passionate and bitter. It can be satirical, against the rich and the newspapers readers on the Parisian Metro, but its dominant tones are abasement--towards poets she revered--and recrimination--against unfaithful lovers. So far I prefer the shorter lyrics to the sequences. "As people listen intently" makes me smell my hearing, and and crave my remembering. As people listening intently xxx (a river's mouth to its source) that's how they smell a flower to the depths, till they lose all sense. That's how they feel their deepest xxx craving in dark air, as children lying in blue sheets peer into memory. And that's how a young boy feels when his blood begins to change. xxx When people fall in love with love they fling themselves in the abyss.

Razminovenie , or Non-meeting Though I dream all the time of union, cold air aerated by air, coursing water saturated by water, I’ll imagine never meeting you, my imaginary love. Perhaps you are in the apartment above mine, hooked up with my neighbor, cursing softly, and I wish you could read, here, the entry of your voice: fuck . Perhaps you are not so near in time and space. On a planet dried of air or water you survive by reciting poetry from memory, a line of verse— you’re exerting a force equal to the earth’s — a capsule taken, paradoxically, by spitting it out. This is not so ridiculous as some may think, for didn’t Tsvetaeva and Pasternak live like this, not on one planet, but on two hurtling asteroids. We have nothing, Marina wrote Boris, except words. A poet’s boast, carried by neither air nor water. But, oh, we can live for months by howling the medial syllable of razminovenie : no .

from Rachel Polonsky's review "A higher romance" of Catherine Ciepiela's "The Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva" Although Pasternak fantasized about travelling to Switzerland with Tsvetaeva to visit the dying Rilke, and there were intermittent urges and unrealized plans to meet over the years, actual encounters played no part in the "love" that their letters mutually proclaim. As Tsvetaeva later wrote to Pasternak, "we have nothing except words." Her shrewd sense of how meeting in person might jeopardize the communion available to them in letters (and dreams) was part of a longstanding philosophy of "non-meeting" ( razminovenie ) with other great poets, which, in its turn, contributed to what Joseph Brodsky calls her retreat into an ever-expanding "sphere of isolation". I, too, have this intuition about meeting great poets, the fear of being disillusioned, but I did not know that there was a "lon...