necessity an act of interpretation, and by its
nature Cvetaeva’s verse tends to defy any single
interpretation. Naydan’s solution is to supply
ten pages of annotation, indicating other possi-
ble translations, and clarifying some of the many
mythological, literary and Biblical allusions.
This combination of translation, Russian
text, and notes is ingeniously calculated to
draw the bilingual reader into a dialogue with
poet and translator. Inevitably there are places
where another reader of Cvetaeva will remain
unsatisfied; one early example is the translation
‘‘a hand/Rustling over silk’’ (9) for Cvetaeva’s
phrase ‘‘wejia/Pagapaczba}xa~ pyia’’ (8),
where the sense of the hand spreading or casting
aside the silks (and the contrast with the lips
smoothing the silks in the following two lines)
is lost, and with it much of the erotic charge of
the stanza.
At times, the English translation over-exag-
gerates the difficulty of the Russian diction:
Naydan’s neologism ‘‘exerted freneticality’’ (7)
renders the standard Russian of ‘‘bqpydlo—
cydopoflocqh’’ (6) (Nfecob, CXobap{
pyccioso~gzia, 10th ed., M., 1973, 715). By
contrast, his invented words ‘‘transorally’’ and
‘‘transvisually’’ (161), if not entirely successful,
are certainly motivated by Cvetaeva’s neolo-
gisms ‘‘gaycqlo’’ and ‘‘gacjaglo’’ (160). One
might also quibble with some of his decisions
about word order, stanza structure, and enjamb-
ment, but on the whole the shape of Cvetaeva’s
verse is changed remarkably little.
One stated goal of the translation is to make
Cvetaeva accessible to non-Russian speakers
(xii). Here the translator may have misjudged
his audience. His refusal to overinterpret the
verse, as some earlier translators have done,
honors what he calls Cvetaeva’s ‘‘telegraphic
terseness’’ (xii), but it results at times in trans-
lations so bare that they may be quite misleading
to the reader with no knowledge of Russian. ‘‘—
Sky!—like the sea I color myself into you,’’ a
word-for-word translation of ‘‘—Heao!—
kopekbqea~oipawhba}c{’’ (228–229), may
convey less than ‘‘withthe sea I color myself [to
look]likeyou’’; admittedly, this loses the exact
parallelism with the following stanza. A more
informative translation of ‘‘lacolipecqhj’’
might be ‘‘blessed for the night’’ or even ‘‘put to
bed’’ rather than ‘‘baptized the earth into a
dream’’ (66–67). An exotic word like ‘‘yataghan’’
(211) surely merits a note of explanation. Some
phrases appear to be simply mistaken, like the
translation of ‘‘npocqobojoczekoh’’ as ‘‘My
straight-haired ones’’ (42–43); oddly enough,
‘‘bareheaded’’ does occur in the translation of
‘‘Hdpabcqby—!Hecqpeja...’’ (17). In ‘‘An
Attempt at Jealousy,’’ Cvetaeva’s faithless lover
is told, ‘‘You don’t have yourself to blame’’ and
her hyperbolic 100,000th woman is scaled back
to a mere ‘‘one-thousandth.’’
The problem of reconciling the different
gender systems in Russian and English, exempli-
fied in this last phrase, could be solved with a
reference in the notes. Often Naydan’s transla-
tion elides the gender of the Russian. For exam-
ple, the four words ‘‘Heqoq.—Swjo./Swja.’’ (8)
play on all three genders, but Naydan offers only
‘‘Wrong one. Gone./I left.’’ (9). Similarly, a nota-
ble shift occurs when the phrase ‘‘Kafda~hg
lac—Chla—/Hov{}...’’ (174) is rendered (by
a male translator) simply, ‘‘Each of us is Sinai’’
(175). A refreshingly frank discussion of Cvetae-
va’s affair with Parnok is included in the after-
word. It seems odd, then, that Sappho’s
sexuality is misrepresented in Note 101 (241);
Sumerkin at least notes that this heterosexual
Sappho is the stuff of legends (Cvetaeva,
Cmuxombopelu~uno|k{i, t. 3, NY: Russica,
1983, 456). In this case, as in a number of others,
the reader is left wishing for more detailed
commentary.
In many instances, Naydan finds economi-
cal, highly expressive solutions for nearly insolu-
ble translation problems: the chime of ‘‘alive,’’ ‘‘a
lie’’ for ‘‘zhivu’’, ‘‘lzhivo’’ (220–221) and the
laconic ‘‘God/Is gratis’’ for ‘‘Besplaten/Bog’’
(174–175) are among the rewards of reading this
collection.
The Afterword is somewhat uneven. The
first section begins with an error of fact, minor
but misleading: Naydan repeats the common
misconception that ‘‘Varvara Ilovaisky died pre-
maturely of tuberculosis in 1890’’ (245) when
Cvetaeva’s own account in ‘‘House at Old
Pimen’’ refers to a blood clot in early postpartum
(npoga, M., 1989, 131).
It seems that perhaps Naydan was not well
served by his editors at Ardis. Misprints such as,
‘‘In a letter to Vera Bunina dated March 20,
1928, Cvetaeva announced that the book would
soon appear [...]. Two months later on March
23 [...]’’ (261), and typographic errors like those
in the verse at the bottom of 271 (struchkoi andAnAttemptatJealousy