As often as I can, I walk the poets. What I mean is, I take my phone and put on a You Tube reading or a podcast and listen as I walk near my home. Mostly in the woods, or on the ridge. I journal as I walk, writing on Evernote on my phone, using a specific practice I have adapted from the late Linda Gregg that I call ‘6 things,’ a practice that has evolved with me ever since I discovered it in 2020, a year after Gregg’s passing. Quite often, I will listen to the same recording over and over again as I walk and make notes, in a way that I know would bore friends and family senseless, were I to inflict it on them. Sometimes this bores me too. But I know, too, the extraordinary benefits of repetition and occasional boredom: going from intoxication (‘can’t get enough of ’) to despair and panic (‘the magic is waning—help!’) to tedium (‘do I really want to listen to this again?’) and—out the other side into strangeness mixed with immersion, the thing being not ‘it’ ‘you’ or even ‘me’ but ‘we,’ a kind of hybrid state, a plurality, a ramifying of self and emotion.
Elizabeth Bishop once alluded to the value of this process when she wrote to the unknown ‘Miss Pierson’ to read ‘all of’ the writers Pierson was interested in. Bishop can’t really have meant listening to those poets, because only a few recordings of recent poets then existed. But I’m pretty confident that she would have approved of my obsessive listening habits. After all, I think she used the music of Henry Purcell in much the same way, just as Louise Glück did with Don Giovanni, or Linda Gregg with John Coltrane. She just couldn’t take that music into the woods.
Perhaps, after a longish period of this kind of repetition, the words become just their music. Or their presence. Their apparent untranslatable-ness.
After a while of listening to Glück over the past year, it seemed that I only had to press play on one of her readings or interviews—she didn’t even need to be reciting a poem—and suddenly, words would come into my own mind. Poetry is a place, Michael Longley has insisted, and the mere incipit of a poet’s voice can become a portal.
This is a long preamble (note, preamble means ‘walk before!’) to a piece on Marina Tsvetaeva and Moniza Alvi, but I wanted to see more clearly where my recent experiences with these two last fit in.
I can’t even remember how I came across the recording of Moniza Alvi and her fellow-translator Veronika Krasnova talking to Sasha Dugdale. I think I searched ‘Marina Tsvetaeva Documentary’ but what prompted me to do so I no longer remember. I had read some Tsvetaeva before, in excellent translations by Elaine Feinstein and David McDuff, and had read her correspondence with Rilke and Pasternak. Yet the poetry hadn’t much touched me. It had seemed strange and very alien. Usually, though, with these things, it’s a matter of timing. I wasn’t ready for Tsvetaeva then.
But the correspondence, encountered later, began to change that. What seems almost immediately evident from those letters is that even these poetic titans are no match for Tsvetaeva. She seems to exist on another plane entirely. They don’t understand her, not fully.
Rilke seems…scared and backs away. It’s almost funny. He cannot do his Rilke thing with her. He has no strategies. It is such a strange correspondence to read: Rilke meets the angel after all—or corresponds with her—and runs away. ‘Every angel is terrifying.’ But not to Marina Tsvetaeva, who was never afraid of the angel—as in power—as in illumination or force—in herself.
So, a few months ago, I began to listen to Moniza Alvi’s translations of Marina, with Veronika reading the originals in Russian, and Sasha Dugdale providing illuminating questions and commentary on behalf of MPT. What is so apparent in Alvi’s approach is the way in which she, along with Krasnova, have really found the fire in the words.
Solitude
Aloneness: retreat
into yourself, as our ancestors
fell into their feuds.
You will seek out freedom
and discover it – in solitude.
Not a soul in sight.
There is no such peaceful garden –
so search for it inside yourself,
find coolness, shade.
Don’t think of those
who win over the populace
in the town squares.
Celebrate victory and mourn it –
in the loneliness of your heart.
Loneliness: leave me,
Life!
What really comes across in the audio version of this translation is the ecstatic plainness, and the terrible, unresolvable tension between Tsvetaeva celebrating and mourning her solitude, her life; her Delphic seeing of the suffering to come (this poem was written in the mid-thirties) and her attempt to find a provisional refuge and safety within her own gift. Defiance and rage and strength are here, and Moniza Alvi, with the help of Krasnova, seems to have stripped any externals away. Only the ferocity and luminosity of the emotion remains, and the sense in which this poem is a survival guide in a time of oppression: engaged and disengaged at the same time. This, and the other translations on this recording are like being handed a torch, a burning olive branch.
They feel like being given the Russian intact (even if, like me, you do not speak it). The Russian oozes from the English words like amber.
‘The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’ to borrow from Hopkins. Alvi’s efforts to find a way to let this late poem and others by Tsvetaeva keep their magnificent indeterminacy is a gift to us. Amber is electric.* Did you know that? I didn’t, until today. But really, I should have. It was Marina who taught me: Marina, who uses the image of ‘Baltic amber.’ Marina: electric all over again through Moniza Alvi and Veronika Krasnova.
*elektron is the ancient Greek name for amber, which can ‘bear a charge of static electricity,’ according to Wikipedia.