Who sleeps at night? No one is sleeping.
In the cradle a child is screaming.
An old man sits over his death, and anyone
young enough talks to his love, breathes
into her lips, looks into her eyes.

from 'Insomnia'

When, more than a quarter of a century ago, Elaine Feinstein first published her translations of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), they broke new ground. She had developed mimetic forms to suggest the pace and movement of Tsvetaeva's complex structures, and the great Russian poet's passion and immediacy burst into a new kind of English verse.


Tsvetaeva is among the great European poets of the Twentieth Century. With Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, she was, as Akhmatova wrote at the end of her life, one of 'the four of us': poets who kept their humanity and integrity through Russia's 'terrible years'. Even in her long and tragic exile, she never lost her roots in Russia or in the great tradition of Russian poetry. Her vibrant voice is fully alive in her time in part because it remains alive to her past, and to the cultures - especially French - in which she spent her exile.


Through Elaine Feinstein's versions, which, Charles Tomlinson said, 'reproduce that jagged, breathless self-wearing tone' of the poems, another generation of English-speaking writers and readers will discover her voice. Poets, particularly women, take courage from her obstinate determination to honour and obey the demands of what Pasternak called her 'golden, incomparable genius' against the dark current of her life. Elaine Feinstein adds to this selection new translations and an updated introduction.

'Marina Tsvetaeva was the first of the modern Russian poets whose greatness really came clear to me, thanks to these translations. Feinstein has performed the first, indispensable task of a great translator: she has captured a voice.' Alan Williamson, Threepenny Review