Three by Tsvetaeva

Author: Marina Tsvetaeva

Publisher: NYRB (2024)

Three by Tsvetaeva collects three dazzling and devastating reckonings with love and the end of love by a poet celebrated for the unequaled verbal inventiveness and emotional intensity of her work. “Backstreets,” translated into English for the first time, is a retelling of a Russian fairy tale that offers a witches’ brew of temptation, bodily transformation, marriage, and murder.

“Poem of the Mountain” and “Poem of the End,” perhaps the most celebrated of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetic sequences, explore the shifting dynamics of a love affair. The voices of the lovers, the voice of the narrator, and the voice of poetry combine and recombine, circle each other and split, engaging the reader in a constantly shifting spectrum of emotion, from unbridled passion to rawest grief, and discovering at last a strange triumph in loss. Andrew Davis’s translations of Tsvetaeva bring out the wild brilliance of an incomparable artist.