What is Writing but Translating – Marina Tsvetaeva and The Poem of the Mountain
What is Writing but Translating – Marina Tsvetaeva and The Poem of the Mountain

Summary/Abstract: “What is writing poetry but translating?” Tsvetaeva asked in a 1926 letter to Rilke. Is not it always a question of translating “from a native tongue to a foreign one”? This native tongue lives so deeply and unspeakably within that it can never be worded as such but only as an impulse in the words I actually can say – words in Russian or German, in French or, in my case as a translator, in an American idiom. So Russian receives the impulse of Tsvetaeva’s native tongue, what in 1940, not long before her death, she called “my difficulty in writing poems and maybe for others – in understanding them”: “with words… to translate a moan”. So English receives an impulse from Russian that translates what exceeds semiosis. Perhaps there is an inherent erotics involved, like the passage between tongues of two lovers, the impulse felt by one of the other, the translation of this impulse of yours in me.

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