Praise to the Rich
And after this, having established first,
that between you and me—are miles!
That I count myself among the ragged,
that my place in the world is honest:
under the wheels of excess:
at the table of freaks, cripples, humpbacks:
after this, from a bell tower,
I declare: I love the rich!
For their root, rotten and shaky
from a cradle-raising wound,
for the confused habit that they have
of reaching in and out of their pockets;
for how the quietest request of their lips
is obeyed as though it were shouted,
for the fact that they won’t be let into Paradise
and that their eyes don’t look.
For their secrets—always with the courier!
For their passions—with the deliveryman!
For the nights imposed on them,
(and they kiss and drink violently!)
And for how, in their accounts, in their boredom,
in their gilding, their yawning, their cotton,
I, here, insolent—they will not buy,
I confirm: I love the rich!
And yet, in spite of being shaven,
and well-fed, and fed again (I blink, and it’s gone!)
for some reason—their sudden bruising,
for some reason—that doggy look,
doubting . . .
—might they not at the core
be zeros? Might not the weights play pranks?
And for the fact, that among all rejections,
there’s no such—orphan-hood in the world!
There is also such a bad fable:
about camels climbing through needles.
. . . For their gaze, amazed at death,
apologetic for disease,
as they are for bankruptcy . . . “I would have lent, I would be glad—
yes” . . .
For how, silent, from clamped lips:
“I counted carats, I—I was one of you” . . .
I swear: I love the rich!
September 30, 1922
***
And God be with you!
Be—sheep!
Go in flocks, flocks
without dreams, without thoughts of your own
after Hitler or Stalin
Display on your sprawled bodies
star or Swastika hooks.
June 23, 1934
***
There is an hour for those words.
Through muffled sound
the highest rights
tap life.
Maybe—in a shoulder,
braced by a forehead.
Maybe—in a ray of light
invisible by day.
In a futile trail
of ashes—a wave on a sheet.
Tribute to one’s fear,
and to one’s ashes.
Hour—of hot self-righteousness,
and of the quietest requests.
Hour of landless brotherhoods.
Hour of world orphans.
June 11, 1922
To Moscow
<1>
Inheritance—to the orphanage!
I will not.
Great, your corpulence:
I renounce.
As I look at my neighbors in the distance—
I renounce.
As I trample down your cobblestones—
I renounce.
====
As in the seventeenth year,
righteous in white,
I stood smirking
under fire.
As in the eighteenth year,
—With what?— a trace of rust,
I looked for all the sons
on the outposts.
Here—some of the bayonets—
I will not!—
For your short memory,
I renounce.
Dorogomilovo, Rogozhskaya,
the rest . . .
widely you have made
your liturgy known.
And the rank and file, side by side
on the main square
in rag-shreds,
consoled, with laurels . . .
Sweep together, blizzard, sawdust,
the snow is pure.
Bow, heads, to the graves
of the rebellious.
(Also, the righteous were,
were—not some foreign value!)
These falsehoods, red wounds
to the righteous . . .
====
The old, the former, to the dump!
Now, hello!
And in the blood, on the recent dead—
dance and caviar.
It is for those, for all those brothers
—I will not!—
Forgive me, Iberian Mother!
I renounce.
January 12, 1922
<2>
More than a woman
at the hour of a meeting!
Laurel-hewn,
red rags,
slashed blood—
snow.
Here they are, close steel cohort,
pinned to the Kremlin wall,
sleeping
in a row.
Laurel—instead of stone
and the Kremlin—rail.
You don’t need
God’s banner.
Honor—
how?
They weren’t honored, “With the Saints.”
They didn’t rest with the Saints.
Laurel.
Snow.
As over the Sacred Heart
the body—keeps guard.
I gnaw my own hands—for even
here,
snow.
Anger.—“Come inside! This, over their own?!”
For this first criminal connection
the hour
beats.
From the tower—which one?—I stand, and think.
That on such an earth,
I step,
I have grown.
I won’t come away! (“Cut off the hands!”)
More than a woman
at the hour of parting
the hour
beats.
Under another rebel’s laurel
my secret passion.
My anger is obvious—
enemy,
sleep!
January 13, 1922
Four Poems
Marina Tsvetaeva
translated from the Russian by Margaree Little
These translations are part of a larger project to bring Marina Tsvetaeva’s politically-oriented poems into English. Although a crucial part of her sensibility and her life’s work, Tsvetaeva’s political poems have largely been neglected by translators, who have emphasized, instead, poems she wrote about her personal and romantic relationships; this emphasis suggests a gendered reading of the poet as an extreme personality rather than as a poet responding to the extremity of her time. Tsvetaeva was deeply attuned to the political circumstances in which she lived (many of her poems draw on specific political events), and she wrote extensively and incisively about them. The poems included here are from 1922, the year Tsvetaeva left Moscow, and from 1934, during the time that she lived in Paris.
Other translators have written about the challenges of translating Tsvetaeva; in their recent Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine suggest that, given the difficulty of the original, an impressionistic “reading” of the poems was preferable to attempting a full translation. It is true that Tsvetaeva’s compression, syntactical elision, and sharp tonal turns present challenges to the translator—but these elements are also what make the poems most alive. Some of Tsvetaeva’s political poems do present distinct challenges, since many are located in and refer to specific historical circumstances and include references that may be unfamiliar to a contemporary reader. At the same time, the gravity, tone, and perception of the poems make them as acute and applicable now as they were during her time, particularly in our current political moment. I have stayed as true to the specificity of the originals as possible, including notes where I felt there might be gaps.
Other translators have written about the challenges of translating Tsvetaeva; in their recent Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine suggest that, given the difficulty of the original, an impressionistic “reading” of the poems was preferable to attempting a full translation. It is true that Tsvetaeva’s compression, syntactical elision, and sharp tonal turns present challenges to the translator—but these elements are also what make the poems most alive. Some of Tsvetaeva’s political poems do present distinct challenges, since many are located in and refer to specific historical circumstances and include references that may be unfamiliar to a contemporary reader. At the same time, the gravity, tone, and perception of the poems make them as acute and applicable now as they were during her time, particularly in our current political moment. I have stayed as true to the specificity of the originals as possible, including notes where I felt there might be gaps.
Marina Tsvetaeva was one of the foremost Russian poets of the twentieth century. Born in 1892 to a family of wealth, she lived most of her life in poverty and exile following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow Famine. Tsvetaeva left the Soviet Union in 1922, living in Berlin and what was then Czechoslovakia before moving to Paris in 1925. In 1939 she returned to the Soviet Union, where she died in 1941. Despite isolation, political disaster, and personal tragedy, Tsvetaeva wrote extensively throughout her lifetime, including short lyrics, long narrative poems, plays in verse, and literary criticism.
Margaree Little is the author of Rest, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2018. She is the recipient of a 2013 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a 2016 Bread Loaf Bakeless Fellowship at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, New England Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere, and her criticism appears in American Poetry Review and Kenyon Review Online. She is the 2016–2018 Kenyon Review Fellow in Poetry.
