If
anyone were to trace my footfall in the poetry library in order to
mark out my poetic “city state”, the map would
show repeated visits to the collections of Akhmatova, Brodsky,
Cavafy, Eliot, Rilke, Seferis,
Tsvetaeva and Yeats. Poetry in my native Serbian remains a secret
spot on the map. The names of my favourite Serbian poets –
Crnjanski, Lalic, Dis – mean so little to the Anglophone reader
that I hesitate even to mention them here. Theirs is the poetry I
don’t need to revisit between the covers of a book because it lives
inside my head. Instead, their lines arrive in unbidden snatches –
when I am walking, taking a shower or making lunch – like
palimpsest echoes of an earlier life.
Russian
poetry occupies a substantial quarter of this “city state”, a
home from home. Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva are its
chatelaines. If I were forced to choose one, it would probably be
Akhmatova, but I reread Tsvetaeva’s Novogodnee (“New Year’s
Greeting: An Elegy for Rilke”) at least once a year.
Rainer Maria Rilke and Marina Tsvetaeva never met. They corresponded between
May and December 1926. Rilke’s “Elegy for Marina” was written
in June 1926, to accompany his gift to her, a copy of Duino
Elegies,
one
of my favourite collections. In return, Marina’s elegy for Rilke,
written in her Parisian exile on receiving the news of his death (he
died of leukaemia on 29 December, having never told her that he was
seriously ill) is a lament, an extended ululation which never fails
to shake me to the core. It follows few poetic rules, but it defines
a metaphysics of mourning.
Tsvetaeva’s
contemplation of the meaning of life, language, loss and love is too
profound to do it justice in a blog. Joseph Brodsky only partly
succeeded in analysing Novogodnee in his glorious seventy-page
essay “Footnote to a Poem”. Such is the complexity of Tsvetaeva’s
verse that you can only ever succeed in part. Like the epiphanies
that grow out of a painful life -- and few have known as much pain as
Marina Tsvetaeva -- the poem is both staggeringly simple and
resistant to periphrasis. It is also probably untranslatable from
Russian, though its English translations are solid enough.
The
international translator who succeeded most fully, I believe, is the
novelist Danilo Kis. His Serbian rendition of Novogodnee is one
of the most beautiful poems of my mother tongue. I hear Tsvetaeva,
even when I read her in Russian, through a gravelly, cigarette smoke
stained gauze of Danilo Kis’s voice.
Kis
haunts my memories of my native Belgrade, propping up the bar of the
Writers’ Club, or arguing something in one of the editorial offices
of the many literary magazines which flourished on a shoe string in
the dog-days of socialism. He was a symbol, an encapsulation of a
writing life I had wanted to lead, a life now imbued with all the
melancholy of a “future in the past”, a future which never
happened.
I
met Brodsky once, in London, quarter of a century ago. Although our
conversation was brief, I managed to eulogise Tsvetaeva’s poem,
praise Danilo Kis’ translation most effusively, and not even refer
to his “Footnote”. I no longer remember how we arrived at the
topic. I suspect that I was no good at small talk with a poet whose
verse had meant so much to me, yet I was also too self-conscious to
flatter him. But this memory too is somehow in keeping with
Novogodnee... it embarrasses me no more.
Bio: Vesna Goldsworthy (née Bjelogrlić) is a Serbian writer and poet who lives in England. Her books include Chernobyl Strawberries, Inventing Ruritania, The Angel of Salonika (2011), a collection of her poems.[1] Her novel Gorsky was published in 2015. In 2010, she presented a BBC radio 4 programme on finding one's voice in a foreign land. She won the Crashaw Prize in 2011 and is from Belgrade. She is a Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University. Previously she worked for the BBC Serbian Service as a journalist.
Note: you can pre-order Vesna Goldsworthy's excellent new novel, Gorsky, from Amazon.com
© 2015 Vesna Goldsworthy
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