Alexandra Smith: Toward Poetics of Exile: Tsvetaeva’s Translation of Baudelaire’s Le Voyage

Milan Kundera, the most prominent Czech émigré writer, defines the condition of exile as

 

a “tight-rope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where

 

he has family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a

 

language he has known from childhood.” Joseph Conrad identifies an émigré who is a

 

divided person split between two shores, a “homo duplex.” Arguably, Marina Tsvetaeva

 

anticipates many developments in the post-war literature of exile and links exilic discourse

 

to poetic activities in general. Tsvetaeva proclaims all poets to be displaced persons,

 

alienated not only from their own country but also from their mother language. She states:

 

“Every poet is essentially an émigré, even in Russia. Émigré from the Kingdom of Heaven

 

and from the earthly paradise of nature.” Tsvetaeva’s vision of a poet who uses his

 

displacement in order to subvert the dominant discursive frameworks resonates well with

 

Julia Kristeva’s in her article “A New Type of Intellectual: the Dissident” which suggests

 

that the fundamental role of the intellectual is constantly to question existing structures and

 

meanings. In Kristeva’s view, the intellectual is a permanent dissident who moves away

 

from any fixed identities that relate to authorship, gender, and meaning and who exhorts

 

the assumption of the language of exile as his truest home, however evasive it might be.

 

Kristeva writes: “How can one avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by

 

becoming a stranger to one’s own country, language, sex and identity? Writing is

 

impossible without some kind of exile.” Yet Edward Said warns against the idealisation of

 

the past, pointing out that a fetish of exile is a practice that distances displaced persons

 

“from all connections and commitments”. At the same time, Said notes that the experience

 

of exile can serve as the polyphonic and creative vision: “For an exile, habits of life,

 

expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against memory of these

 

things in another environment. Thus both the new and old environment are vivid, actual,

 

occurring together contrapuntally. There is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension,

 

especially if the exile is conscious of other contrapuntal juxtapositions that diminish

 

orthodox judgement and elevate appreciative sympathy.” It would not be too far-fetched

 

to suggest that the last years Tsvetaeva spent in the Soviet Union are easily comparable to

 

the exilic condition described by many authors and theoreticians. It is important to bear in

 

mind that Tsvetaeva, upon arriving in her native land in 1939 after 17 years of exile, found

 

herself in an altogether new country: a country which had a political regime and discursive

 

framework that suppressed and largely destroyed the modernist discourse to which

 

Tsvetaeva belonged. Tsvetaeva’s estrangement from the Soviet reality was also reinforced

 

by the Russian-European identity that she acquired during her life in Europe.

 

I would like to view Tsvetaeva’s translation of Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage” that she

 

undertook in 1940 in Moscow at her own initiative as a vivid manifestation of the exilic

 

discourse that displays the contrapuntal juxtaposition of her present condition with the

 

expression of Tsvetaeva’s loyalty to the past. In the view of Simon Karlinsky, Tsvetaeva’s

 

work as a translator in Stalin’s Russia is linked to the political conditions that were

 

imposed upon her, since her own work was not publishable in those days. Karlinsky writes

 

thus on Tsvetaeva’s translations of French, English, German, Spanish, Georgian, Polish

 

and Yiddish poetry: “They kept her from writing any poetry of her own, but they also

 

testify to what extent her poetic ability had survived all her trials. A real gem is her

 

rendition of Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘Voyage’, a dazzling piece which not only

 

translates French into Russian but also Baudelaire into Tsvetaeva — an awesome

 

amalgam. But these translations, for all their excellence, are also a monument to the waste

 

of talent in the Stalin years, when the best Russian poets […] were prevented by the

 

regime from making their own creative contribution and were forced to put their gifts into

 

the service of other literatures.” Given the fact that Tsvetaeva’s worldview and poetic

 

persona were shaped by the Russian Symbolist culture that embraced Baudelaire’s vision
of modernity with great enthusiasm, Tsvetaeva’s desire to make Baudelaire’s poem

 

available to a Soviet readership in the 1940s might be seen as a powerful political and

 

artistic gesture that introduces a concept of estrangement from the Soviet environment and

 

Soviet cultural practices that was alien to Socialist realism. In the words of Adrian

 

Wanner, “Baudelaire’s influence, beyond its measurable dimensions in terms of texts with

 

Baudelarian features, became a powerful mythical presence in Russia, to the point that he

 

could assume, in Andrey Bely’s words, the position of a ‘patriarch’. It was in this role of

 

charismatic icon that Baudelaire was able to radiate in Russia as an inspiration to

 

modernists and anti-modernists alike.” Indeed, Tsvetaeva’s translation of “Le Voyage”

 

attempts to resurrect Baudelaire as an important source of inspiration and as a patriarch

 

whose views on modernity were fitting for Tsvetaeva’s critique of the various totalitarian

 

and imperialist tendencies that she witnessed in Europe and the Soviet Union at the end of

 

her life.

 

According to Marina Belkina’s memoirs, Tsvetaeva undertook the translation of “Le

 

Voyage” in July-December 1940. Tsvetaeva recited her rendering of Baudelaire’s poem to

 

Belkina and Tarasenkov on 12 December 1940 and revealed to them that she had produced

 

12 versions of it altogether. E.V. Snezhkova, a Russian contemporary scholar, points out

 

that Tsvetaeva’s rendering of “Le Voyage” finalises the theme of a journey that is

 

prominently featured in her works. Snezhkova also indicates that Tsvetaeva’s rendering of

 

the original title as “Plavanie” evokes the idea of death embedded in the original. In

 

Snezhkova’s opinion, the French word “voyage” appears in the idiomatic expression “faire

 

le grand voyage” which alludes to the final journey and represents death. Indeed

 

Tsvetaeva at the end of her life anticipated her death, and several of her poems written in

 

1939-1941 bear the qualities of the final closure, since they were written in the style of last

 

poems and pronouncements. It is not coincidental, for example, that twelve months prior to

 

her death — on 31 August 1940 — Marina Tsvetaeva wrote to Vera Merkur’eva as

 

follows: “I have written everything I wanted to write. Of course, I could write a few more

 

works but I could easily give it a miss.” (“Ia svoe napisala. Mogla by, konechno, eshche,

 

no svobodno mogu ne.” ) Unfortunately, Snezhkova does not address the essential

 

question, “Why did Tsvetaeva choose to translate Baudelaire’s poem in anticipation of her

 

death?”

 

In my view, Tsvetaeva uses Baudelaire’s poem as a manifestation of her hybrid identity,

 

that could be described as modernist Russian–European identity expressed in terms of

 

exilic poetics. It is not coincidental that Karlinsky describes Tsvetaeva’s version of

 

Baudelaire’s poem as powerful fusion and awesome amalgam. Indeed, what we see in

 

Tsvetaeva’s translation is an expression of Lacanian alienation, decentredness that dwells

 

on the gap between the female writing subject and the masks of identity that she inserts

 

into the one of the most influential and canonical texts of European modernist poetry ever

 

produced by a male author. Luce Irigaray views the state of womens’ writing as fluid and

 

mimicking because it is already placed within a finalised linguistic system that already

 

incorporates the established forms of feminine and masculine identity. Irigaray says: “To

 

play with mimesis is […] for a woman, to attempt to recover the place of her exploitation

 

by discourse, without letting herself be simply reduced to it.” One can approach

 

Tsvetaeva’s desire to produce a translation of her choice as a powerful political statement,

 

since she felt displaced both within the patriarchal discourse of Stalin’s Russia and within

 

the European modernist tradition that she identified in her 1939 poems “Mart” (“March” )

 

as a culture in crisis. In one of the poems of this cycle she denounces the modern world of

 

mass conformity and madness in a bold existentialist manner: “Pora —pora — pora

 

/Tvortsu vernut’ bilet […] Na tvoi bezumnyi mir/ Otvet Odin – otkaz.” (“It’s time, it’s

 

time, it’s time to return the ticket to the Creator. […] I have only one reply to your insane

 

world: a refusal.”) Tsvetaeva’s alienation from recognisable social structures constitutes

 

the pattern of linguistic disintegration in exilic discourse that is strikingly comparable to

 

the mimetic relationship in the structures of language that exists in senile dementia. In her

 

first book Le Langage des déments (“The Language of dementia,” 1973) Irigaray describes

 

the speaking subject who suffers dementia thus: “Spoken more than speaking, enunciated

 

more than enunciating, the demented person is therefore no longer really an active subject

 

of the enunciation… He is only a possible mouthpiece for previously pronounced

 

enunciations.” Thus Irigaray suggests that woman must copy male discourse and points

 

out that the feminine can only be read in the blank spaces that are placed between the signs

 

of her mimicry. She also suggests that woman can exceed and disturb the male’s logic of

 

the Same by placing her miming in the new context and thereby providing it with political

 

efficacy. In her essay “La ‘mécanique’ des fluides” (“The ‘mechanics’ of fluids”) Irigaray

 

compares the language of masculinity to solids and the language of femininity to fluids,

 

arguing that phallocratic scientific discourse does not account for woman because her

 

language possesses a fluid identity. In Irigaray’s opinion, woman should be viewed as the

 

life-giving sea, as the source of blood, milk and other fluids that represent a positive alternative to the construction of the patriarchal identity of the Same. In Tsvetaeva’s

 

writings the fluidity of her writing subject is articulated on many occasions, especially

 

through analogy between the water element and Tsvetaeva’s first name “Marina”, which is

 

linked to the sea. The definition of fluid identity that Irigaray produces can be easily

 

applied to Tsvetaeva’s poetic persona that has so many masks and prefers to be evasive:

 

“It never ends, it is powerful and powerless through its resistance to that which can be

 

counted, it takes its pleasure and suffers through its hypersensitivity to pressure; it changes

 

— in volume or strength, for instance – according to the degree of heat, it is in its physical

 

reality determined by the friction between two infinitely neighbouring forces — a

 

dynamics of proximity and not of property.”

 

I will argue that Tsvetaeva uses an exilic discourse as an important discursive framework

 

that allows her to comment on the barbaric cultural condition of Stalin’s Russia of the

 

1930-40s. In his study of twentieth-century Russian architecture Vladimir Paperny offers a

 

useful tool that helps approach Stalin’s Russia in terms of style of thought: thus, he

 

describes many cultural developments of the 1920s as a type of culture that he calls

 

Culture One and labels the trends of the 1930-1950s as Culture Two. Paperny states that

 

the main characteristic of Culture One is a horizontal quality that reflects on the fact that

 

“the values of the periphery become more important that those of the centre” and architects

 

were left to themselves and enjoyed a sense of great freedom to generate ideas “that are

 

almost never realised.” Paperny says that Culture Two represents the transfer of values to

 

the centre that results in the fact that society becomes ossified. As Paperny puts it, “the

 

authorities start showing an interest in architecture both as practical means for securing the

 

population and as spatial expression of a new centre-based system of values.” Paperny’s

 

model can be easily extended to the Soviet literary scene of the 1930s-40s that displaced

 

such creative and independent modernist spirits as Tsvetaeva, who was far from being an

 

escapist. I will argue that Tsvetaeva understood several politically charged messages in

 

Baudelaire’s poem that brought to the fore the negative aspects of modernity. At the same

 

time, her translation work on Baudelaire’s poem enabled her to internalise the desire for

 

voyage that was absent in Soviet Russia and in her everyday life, and to experience the

 

adventures undertook by her literary predecessors, including Baudelaire. Her translation is

 

essentially modernist and therefore displays several metatextual qualities that create a

 

bridge between modernist practices in France and Russia. Milan Kundera’s

 

characterisation of modern writers aptly describes Tsvetaeva’s poetic imagination at the

 

end of her life. As Kundera puts it, “Ever since Joyce…. we have been aware of the fact

 

that the greatest adventure in our lives is the absence of adventure. Odysseus fought at

 

Troy, made his way home on a ship he himself piloted, and a mistress on every island —

 

no, such is not the life we lead. Homer’s Odyssey now takes place within man. Man has

 

internalised it. The islands, the sea, the sirens seducing us, and Ithaca calling us home —

 

they have been all reduced to voices within us.”

 

Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage” was written in 1859 and was dedicated to Max du Camp, the

 

most celebrated traveller of his time, whose 1855 collection of poetry Les Chants

 

Modernes includes a poem “Le Voyageur.” It is interesting to note that the original title of

 

Baudelaire’s poem resonates strongly with Max du Camp’s poem: it was titled “Les

 

Voyageurs”. Perhaps, the initial title more aptly describes the heroic personalities of those

 

who challenge death and overcome the horrors of life. As Richard Burton puts it, “as they

 

set sail, the travellers are inwardly afire, unafraid, wholly and willingly committed to the

 

onward journey […] and their cry ‘Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe’ is not at all the cry of

 

nihilistic defiance it is sometimes taken for, but an affirmation of life whatever it may

 

bring, a triumph for the lyricist’s passionate espousal of life over the moralist’s horrified

 

recoil from it.” According to Burton, Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage” is not a manifestation of

 

de Maistrian pessimism but rather an exorcism of it. Burton suggests that at the end of the

 

poem “the ‘nous’ of childhood hope and appetite has triumphed, despite everything, over

 

the ‘nous’ of adult apathy and despair: a lifetime’s struggle between ‘l’horreur de la vie et

 

l’extase de la vie’ has ended, provisionally, in a victory of ecstasy, for lyricism, for tragic

 

joy.” In her 1932 article “Epic and Lyric of Contemporary Russia” (“Epos i lirika

 

sovremennoi Rossii”) Tsvetaeva wrote of Boris Pasternak as great lyricist who sets out on

 

a journey to self-discovery in language conspicuously akin to Baudelaire’s poem.

 

Tsvetaeva thus describes Pasternak: “Pasternak is inexhaustible. In his hand, everything,

 

including his hand, goes from his hand into infinity — and we go with it, after it.

 

Pasternak is solely an invitation au voyage of self-discovery and world-discovery, solely a

 

point of departure: a place from which. Out unmooring. Just enough space for weighing

 

anchor. […] You read Pasternak above the line — a parallel and perpendicular reading.

 

You don’t so much read as look (think, walk) away from. Something leads you on.

 

Sometimes leads beyond. You might say that the reader himself writes Pasternak.” Thus

 

Tsvetaeva’s uses Baudelaire’s vision of a lyricist who is comparable to a courageous

 

traveller committed to the onward journey and whose passionate espousal of life triumphs
over the moralist’s recoil from it.

 

In this respect it is important to bear in mind that Tsvetaeva’s articles on Pasternak,

 

including “Epos i lirika sovremennoi Rossii” (“Epic and Lyric of Contemporary Russia”)

 

and her letters to Pasternak in which she voices her concerns about the displacement of the

 

poet-lyricist in the Soviet Union, can be viewed as an important contextual setting for her

 

translation of “Le Voyage.” The choice of this poem for translation might also have been

 

inspired by the poem’s politically charged messages. Thus, for example, Richard Burton

 

points out that Baudelaire’s dedication to du Camp is double-edged because it contains

 

political overtones inspired by Baudelaire’s condemnation of du Camp’s activities as an

 

editor of Revue de Paris and by the repressive cultural politics of the Second Empire: in

 

January 1858 the journal was closed by decree of the imperial government. Burton

 

explains: “Baudelaire was certainly setting out to cause a shudder of horror in writing and

 

publishing ‘Le Voyage,’ but his target was less du Camp personally than Second Empire

 

humanity in general of which, it is true, du Camp was an entirely typical representative.”

 

Burton suggests that in 1859 Baudelaire was preoccupied not so much with the theme of

 

life and death but with the issue of the relationship between artist and authority, and

 

especially with the question of “the place of the creative artist in a society dominated by

 

utilitarianism and the headlong pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and power.” Thus, in the first

 

part of his “Le Voyage”, Baudelaire invokes the existential reasons for those who wish to

 

abandon their native land: “Les uns, joyeux de fuir une patrie infâme; /D’autres, l’horreur

 

de leurs berceaux, et quelques-uns, /Astrologues noyés dans les yeux d’une femme, /Le

 

Circé tyrannique aux dangereux parfums.” (“Some happy to escape from an infamous

 

land;/ Others, from the horror of their cradles, and a few, / Astrologies drowning in the

 

eyes of a woman, /A tyrannical Circe with her dangerous perfumes.”) Tsvetaeva inscribes

 

into the poem autobiographical overtones that contain references to contemporary life in

 

the Soviet Union, and states that some people are inspired to leave their motherland from

 

their hatred for it; or from boredom; or from desire to take control over their lives and

 

spend the rest of it in a noble manner, surpassing the limitations that might have been

 

imposed on them: “Chto nas tolkaet v put’? Tekh – nenavist’ k otchizne, /Tekh –skuka

 

ochaga, eshche inykh — v teni/ Tsirtseinykh resnits ostavivshikh polzhizni — /Nadezhda

 

otstoiat’ ostavshiesia dni.” (“What makes us leave? Some leave because they hate their

 

motherland; some are bored by the sight of their fireplace; some have spent half of their

 

lives under the surveillance of Circe and are hoping to spend the rest of their lives they

 

way they wish.”) Tsvetaeva’s image of a tyrannical Circe that enchants and makes people

 

waste half their life is a vivid reworking of the tyrannical image that occurs in Baudelaire’s

 

poem and of the goddess powerful in magic described in Homer’s Odysseus. According to

 

Homer’s narrative, Circe has a house surrounded by wild beasts who fawn on new arrivals,

 

and she is capable of changing people: thus, for example, she turns Odysseus’s men into

 

swine. Baudelaire uses the classical framework of mythological, historical and literary

 

allusions throughout the whole collection of his book Les Fleurs du Mal, and the

 

references to Circe have a strong presence not only in “Le Voyage” but also in his poem

 

“Le Cygne” (The Swan). In the words of Burton, ‘the classical context is not […] intended

 

to endow ‘Le Voyage’ with a ‘heroic’ or ‘epic’ dimension but, by an ironic contrapuntal

 

effect […], to contrast, in particular, Odysseus’s voyage of initiation and discovery

 

through a mythologically significant universe charged with sacred density with modern

 

man’s journey towards nothingness in a ‘one-dimensional’ world that has been deserted by

 

gods and goddesses, myths and magic.”

 

Burton regards ‘Le Voyage” as anti-Odyssey narrative because it challenges the

 

teleological assumptions that constitute the mythological universe, pointing to the fact that

 

in the modern world there are “no tutelary gods or goddesses, no predestiny or

 

precognition, no supernatural interventions of any kind […], no framework of tradition,

 

belief or authority, no Eumenides other than the relentless goad of human Desire itself

 

[…]; above all no Ithaca at the beginning and end of time.” In Tsvetaeva’s rendering the

 

image of Circe alludes to the relationship between state power, or a figure of authority, and

 

the individual. This is especially felt in her reference to those who would still like to

 

defend the right of individuals to have control over their lives and maintain a sense of

 

human dignity. In other words, this seductive aspect of political power that could crush

 

and destroy individuals is highlighted in Tsvetaeva’s translation, to the effect that it

 

appears to manifest the anxiety towards modernity expressed in the works of Russian

 

modernists who drew on the symbols of modernity embedded in Pushkin’s narrative poem

 

“Mednyi vsadnik” (“The Bronze Horseman”). Pushkin’s poem suggests that those

 

individuals who resign themselves to denial of historical past and to oblivion are doomed

 

to perish. Pushkin insists in this work that it is important to know the history of one’s

 

country and of familial lineage, and identifies respect for the past with enlightenment and

 

civilisation. Such an attitude is related to the mythological consciousness that provides

 

individuals with healing experiences. As Svetlana Evdokimova points out, “Pushkin does
not condemn Eugene […] The poet demonstrates, however, that a man who places himself

 

outside the history of his family and his land is doomed to ruin.” In the light of this

 

contextual framework, Tsvetaeva’s image of Circe in her translation of “Le Voyage”

 

evokes the image of a modern tyrant, a false idol placed outside history.

 

Another important change in Tsvetaeva’s translation relates to the image of a child

 

discussed at the beginning of Baudelaire’s text. Simon Markish considers as a key image of

 

the whole text Baudelaire’s image of a child whose dreams of travel are inspired by his

 

exploration of maps and who is described in the opening lines of the poem —“Pour

 

l’enfant, amoureux de cartes et d’estampes/ L’univers est égal à son vaste appétit” (“For

 

the child, in love with maps and prints, /The universe is equal to his huge appetite.”). In

 

Markish’s opinion, it sets the whole atmosphere of desiring. In a metonymical manner

 

Baudelaire identifies a modern man with a child whose desire of new experiences and new

 

adventures knows no bounds. Burton argues that, to Baudelaire, a divided adult is just a

 

descendant of a divided child. He points out that the expression “dès l’enfance” occurs

 

several times in the collection Les Fleurs du Mal “reminding us that any notion of

 

paradise, be it situated before birth, after death or within life itself, is radically foreign to

 

Baudelaire.” Yet, it might be argued that in “Le Voyage” Baudelaire presents himself as

 

a passionate advocate of modernity that makes the world more accessible to individuals

 

through the advancement of technology. Henri Peyre observes that Baudelaire was a true

 

romantic who “was able to rediscover the poetry of the past preserved in the streets of the

 

metropolis” and was fond of a rebelliousness “which expanded and exalted the nature of

 

man and was to acquaint him with all vices, all excesses, to make him hover on the verge

 

of many an abyss and to cherish death itself in order to live more courageously.”

 

Certainly, the idea of living courageously is reinforced in Tsvetaeva’s rendering of the

 

poem, since she translates the first line thus: “dlia otroka, v nochi gliadiashcego estampy”

 

(“for a young man who looks at prints in the night”). The image of a young man

 

archaically called “otrok” is associated in Tsvetaeva’s own works with the image of a man

 

capable of cherishing death and of living life in an intensified way in anticipation of his

 

demise or from recognition of his predestiny as martyr. Thus, for example, in Tsvetaeva’s

 

cycle “Otrok” (“Youth,” 1921) we come across a youth related to and modelled upon

 

Israel’s King David, a musician traditionally held to be the author of the Psalms. Once

 

again Tsvetaeva inscribes into this poem her favourite juxtaposition of Jews and poets

 

through their displacement from the society they live in. Undoubtedly, Tsvetaeva’s

 

metaphor that brings together displaced Jews and poets derives from the seventh part of

 

Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage”,which states: “Le Temps! Il est, hélas! des coureurs sans répit, /

 

Comme le Juif errant et comme les apôtres,/ A qui rien ne suffit, ni wagon ni

 

vauseau,/Pour fuir ce rétiare infâme […].” (“Time! There are, alas, continual runners,

 

/Like the wandering Jew and like the apostles, /To whom nothing suffices, neither train nor

 

ship, /in order to flee the infamous retiary […].”). It appears that Tsvetaeva’s image of

 

poets who constantly experience an exilic condition, and who are continual runners, is

 

borrowed directly from Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage”. In fact, in her early career Tsvetaeva

 

was very much influenced by translators and poets, including Ellis (Kobylinskii L.L.) and

 

Maximilian Voloshin, who actively promoted Baudelaire in Russia as a cult figure and an

 

important source of inspiration. Tsvetaeva dedicated to Ellis her poem “Charodei” (“The

 

Enchanter”) and referred to him “as the translator of Baudelaire, one of the most

 

passionate early Symbolists, a chaotic person and disorganised poet but a man of genius.”

 

Ellis cultivated the philosophical dandyism of a modern artist that Baudelaire’s poetry

 

epitomises at its best, and Ellis’s plea for aristocratic elitism and contempt for the

 

profanum vulgus was developed further in Tsvetaeva’s poetry and essays.

 

It is not surprising therefore to see that in her 1923 cycle of poems “Poet” Tsvetaeva

 

compares poets to comets, lepers, superfluous members of society, rebels and those who

 

critically evaluate the philosophical and moral foundations of societal life. Olga Hasty

 

observes in her analysis of the concluding poem of the cycle “Poet”: “The surface of the

 

text focuses on the marginality of the poet and his isolation from the mundane world which

 

are encoded in a series of images that range from the soaring comet to the abject leper.” In

 

fact, the opposition between the poetic vision of the world and the mundane world that

 

views poets inadequately and displaces them receives a critical evaluation from Tsvetaeva

 

who launches her attacks on the Age of Reason as an important source from which

 

modernity was to evolve. The sailors in Tsvetaeva’s rendering of “Le Voyage” are

 

portrayed as true poets. Their minds bear all the signs of poetic vision incompatible with

 

triviality, pragmatism and commercialisation. Thus, for example, Baudelaire’s description

 

of the sailors is inscribed into the text as their self-representation:

 

Un matin nous partons, le cerveau plein de flamme,

 

Le coeur gros de rancune et de désirs amers,

 

Et nous allons, suivant le rhythme de la lame,
Berçant notre infini sur le fini des mers […]

 

(One morning we leave, our minds full of fire,

 

Our hearts heavy with anger and bitter desire,

 

And we go, following the rhythm of the wave,

 

Rocking our infinity on the finiteness of the sea […]. )

 

In Tsvetaeva’s translation the whole moment of departure creates the atmosphere of the

 

unbearable superhuman longing for an adventure and for the spaces that match poetic

 

imagination:

 

V odin nenastny den’, v toske nechelovech’ei,

 

Ne vynosia tiagot, pod skrezhet iakorei,

 

My vskhodim na korabl’ — i proiskhodit vstrecha

 

Bezmernosti mechty s predel’nost’iu morei.

 

(One stormy day, possessed by superhuman longing,

 

Not prepared to carry our burden any longer, under the noises of anchors,

 

We board the ship and the meeting takes place between

 

Our boundless dream with the bounds of the seas. )

 

It is clear from Tsvetaeva’s translation that she draws here on the image of superhuman

 

suffering that also appears in her French translation of Pushkin’s poems “Besy” (“Devils”)

 

undertaken in 1937. Pushkin’s image of the supernatural is transformed in Tsvetaeva’s

 

translation into the sound of the evils of modernity that lead to the fragmented self of the

 

individual and bring madness into the contemporary world:

 

Survolant la blanche plaine

 

Geignent, hurlent les malins,

 

De leurs plaintes surhumaines

 

Déchirant mon coeur humain.

 

Simon Markish thinks that Tsvetaeva’s presentation of superhuman longing and of the

 

desire to rebel against the unbearable burden of the mundane life contradicts the spirit and

 

symbolic language of Baudelaire’s poem. Yet it seems important to bear in mind that

 

Tsvetaeva’s understanding of the rebellious spirit embedded in “Le Voyage” captures the

 

spirit of Baudelaire’s poem, in that in many ways she skilfully re-defines, in accordance

 

with Ellis’s aesthetic vision which promoted lyric thinking at the expense of epic thinking,

 

and accommodates Ellis’s rejection of the material reality in the name of an abstract and

 

unattainable beauty. Ellis’s words on the tragic being of the creative spirit are fully

 

applicable to Tsvetaeva. “The ideal image,” maintains Ellis, “is always inevitable hostile

 

to the primary, external reality that once brought it forth. From this comes the tragic

 

wavering of the creative spirit between the two poles of being.”

 

It is obvious that Tsvetaeva did not choose a literal translation of the original text but

 

approached it creatively, trying to preserve the essence and main thrust of Baudelaire’s

 

poem and at the same time took it as a challenge and impulse to renovate outdated poetic

 

system that was recycled in the 1930s Soviet Union. Among the most important

 

achievements listed by Wanner as typically Baudelarian are such features as “dynamic

 

evocation of modern urban life”, “emphasis on poetic craftsmanship and form”, and ”an

 

elaborate rhetoric of unusual metaphors leading to a paradoxical notion of the sublime that

 

undercuts the traditional dichotomy of high and low style.” Therefore Tsvetaeva’s image

 

of the superhuman longing, her usage of archaic words (for example “otrok”, “vetrilo”,

 

“istye plovtsy”) mixed with everyday speech, vivid metaphors and allegorical descriptions

 

(such as “glotateli shirot”, “plemia begunov”, “chernil’naia voda”, “opii morei”, to name

 

just a few) certainly challenge Soviet official poetry of the late 1930-early 1940s that

 

suppressed expression of poetic individuality and boundless imagination. Thus, a most

 

daring re-making of Baudelaire’s imagery appears in Tsvetaeva’s rendering of the seventh

 

part of the poem, whose fourth stanza reads:

 

Lorsque enfin il mettra le pied sur norte énchine,

 

Nous pourrons éspérer et cruer: En avant!

 

De même qu’autrefois nous partions pour la Chine,

 

Les yeux fixés au large au large et les cheveux au vent,

 

Nous nous embarquerons sur la mer des Ténèbres […]

 

(“When at last he puts his foot on our neck,

 

We can hope and shout: Forward!

 

At once we left for China,

 

Our eyes fixed seaward and our hair in the wind,
We shall embark on the sea of darkness […].”)

 

Tsvetaeva replaces Baudelaire’s reference to China as a destinations travellers would like

 

to visit with the more exotic image of Peru. Given that this change appears in the stanza

 

referring to a tyrant who tortures his victims (in Baudelaire’s poem there is a depiction of a

 

tyrant who puts his foot on the neck of sailors who act as lyric personae of the poem), it

 

seems that Tsvetaeva could not avoid the temptation to use here a powerful subtext that

 

portrays in a dystopian manner a paradise crushed by tyranny and censorship. Thus, the

 

image of Peru is an intentional allusion to Maiakovsky’s 1915 satirical poem “Gimn sud’e”

 

(“Hymn to Judge”) that features Peru as a country conspicuously similar to Stalin’s Russia.

 

The lines of Tsvetaeva’s version state: “Kak na zare vekov my otplyvali v Peru,/Avroroi

 

litsa privetstvuia voskhod” (“As at the onset of new epochs we started our journey to Peru/

 

Greeting with Aurora’s face the sunrise”). The political implication of this passage may be

 

fully appreciated only in conjunction with Maiakovsky’s poem “Gimn sud’e” that

 

describes a journey of slaves who are forced to sail to Peru by their owners. Maiakovsky

 

demonstrates convincingly how easily any utopian place, or paradise, could be turned into

 

a totalitarian society divided into oppressor and oppressed. Maiakovsky’s poem might be

 

read as a prophecy of things to come, since the various forms of oppression he describes

 

include absurd laws, unnecessary prohibitions, official hatred for spontaneous expressions

 

of life, desire of those in power to tame natural chaos, and censorship. In such a paradise

 

everything is controlled by judges who forbid poetry that does not conform to their ideal:

 

V bednom Peru stikhi moi dazhe

 

v zaprete pod strakhom pytok.

 

Sud’ia skazal: “Te, chto v prodazhe

 

tozhe spirtnoi napitok.”

 

(In poor Peru even my poems

 

are forbidden to the extent that those who wish to read them will be tortured;

 

The judge said, “Those books that are on sale,

 

Should be regarded as a spirit, too.” )

 

Maiakovsky’s poem ends with a powerful gesture: the poet calls upon readers to join him

 

in his protest against any manifestations of a totalitarian discourse, pointing out that

 

everyone would be better off without censors and oppressors: “Sud’i meshaiut i ptitse, i

 

tantsu, / i mne, i vam, i Peru.” (“Judges make life very difficult for birds, dances, you, me

 

and Peru.”)

 

The imagery and symbolism of the above-discussed stanza, which relates to various

 

manifestations of sunrise, suggest that in her translation of Baudelaire’s poem Tsvetaeva

 

inscribes a few political overtones and parodies Soviet propaganda discourse. Tsvetaeva

 

mimics the bad aesthetic taste of Soviet newspeak and creates a conglomeration of images

 

that have the same connotations related to sunrise: “voskhod,” “zaria,” and Aurora. The

 

image of sunrise was actively used in the Soviet propaganda, denoting utopian ideological

 

aspirations and new beginnings. The images of Aurora in Tsvetaeva’s rendering of

 

Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage” might be seen as a semi-veiled allusion to the navy boat

 

“Aurora” canonised in the Soviet Union as a ship whose guns fired the symbolic shot

 

marking the start of the October 1917 revolution. Tsvetaeva borrows all these image from

 

the official newspeak and strips them of their political connotations by presenting them to

 

Soviet readers anew. This device of estrangement was already anticipated in Baudelaire’s

 

works because his idea of the sublime is based on the presentation of old objects and

 

established associations as novelty. According to Baudelaire, the essence of the sublime

 

relies on a depiction of “something of wrong order, something unexpected, something that

 

dazzles, something that surprises.” The concept of new experience, known in French

 

symbolism as “sensation du neuf” (the sensation of the new), prefigures developments in

 

Russian Formalism of the 1920s that relate to the exploration of such concepts in literature

 

as estrangement and montage.

 

John Middleton Murry, one of the most established English modernist critics, outlines a

 

very significant aspect of Baudelaire’s outlook in modernist terms: “A single thread runs

 

through the work of Stendhal, Mérimée, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky; in spite

 

of their outward dissimilarity and the great differences between their powers, these men are

 

united by a common philosophical element which takes bodily shape in their conceptions

 

of the hero. They are all intellectual romantics, in rebellion against life, and they imagine

 

for themselves a hero in whom their defiance should be manifested.” Undoubtedly

 

Tsvetaeva’s translation of “Le Voyage” highlights heroic features of travellers described in

 

Baudelaire’s poems, and fashions them in the clothes of intellectual romantics who seek

 

heroic death and display enormous courage in their desire to face dangerous experiences.

 

Such images occur in Tsvetaeva’s own poetry and in her 1936 essay “Nezdeshnii vecher”

 

(“Otherworldly Evening”) which portrays Tsvetaeva and her fellow poets in Petrograd in
1916, on the eve of the 1917 revolution, as rebels and romantics prepared to die for their

 

art. Tsvetaeva elaborates Baudelaire’s opposition between Life and Death and inscribes

 

them in more intensified manner into her own text. Thus, for example, it is difficult not to

 

notice that Tsvetaeva’s reference to death in the first part of the poem contradicts

 

Baudelaire’s intention to present death as a final destination available to adventure-seeking

 

travellers. Thus the fifth stanza of the first part of “Le Voyage” reads:

 

Mais les vrais voyageurs sont ceux–là seuls qui partent

 

Pour partir; coeurs légers, semblables aux ballons,

 

De leur fatalité jamais ils ne s’écartent,

 

Et, sans savoir pourquoi, disent toujours: Allons!

 

(But the real travelers are those only who leave

 

In order to leave; light hearts, similar to balloons,

 

They are never separated from their fate,

 

And, without knowing why, always say: let us go on!)

 

In some ways, Baudelaire’s poem lends itself to interpretation as an artist’s journey for a

 

meaning and a new language that could express inexpressible modes of the fluid

 

subjectivity of modern man. As Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane aptly sum up,

 

“Modernism is less a style than a search for a style in a highly individualistic sense; and

 

indeed the style of one work is no guarantee for the next” because any modernist is

 

perpetually engaged “in a profound and ceaseless journey through the means and integrity

 

of art.” Baudelaire’s modern man is usually presented as a flâneur and dandy whose

 

artistic taste makes him contemptuous of the vulgar world of commercialisation and

 

vulgarity that torments on his sensitive soul. John Murry describes Baudelaire’s ideal of

 

beauty as a symbolic landscape that has intoxicating sense of the monotony of metal,

 

marble and water and states that “Baudelaire makes solid everything he can” and “his very

 

ideal of Beauty is an absolute immobility”. It is possible to detect in Tsvetaeva’s version a

 

strong desire to escape any static manifestations of the sublime. Thus, for example, in the

 

third stanza in fourth part Baudelaire talks about the richest cities and wildest landscapes

 

that failed to attract the travellers described in his poem: “Les plus riches cités, les plus

 

grands paysages.” Tsvetaeva’s translations evokes the grand architectural and industrial

 

projects that mark the style of Stalin’s culture defined by Paperny as Culture Two:

 

“Stronneishie mosty, slavneishie stroien’ia” (“the most elegant bridges and the most

 

glorious buildings”) that are not comparable with the image of an ideal city that exists in

 

the imagination of Tsvetaeva’s traveller-poets.

 

At the same time Murry points out that Baudelaire’s image of immobile Beauty is

 

conspicuously akin to the inscrutable Dandy because, in Baudelaire’s vision of the

 

universe, steel is opposed to steel. As Murry puts it, “The oppressor and the oppressed are

 

equally ruthless, equally immobile, equally conscious, and equally beautiful [...] To this

 

Moloch of existence the poet sacrifices himself in an ecstasy concealed beneath the mask

 

of bronze.” Tsvetaeva’s rendering of the last two stanzas of the first part of “Le Voyage”

 

reinforces the opposition between steel and steel, to use Murry’s definition. It appears that

 

this opposition is a new motif of her version of the poem. She names death as a destructive

 

and powerful force that poet-travellers are eager to challenge. Thus her version describes

 

courageous adventurers as heroes who are prepared to overcome total destruction:

 

[…] Chto kazduiu zariu spravliaiut novosel’e

 

I dazhe v smertnyi chas eshche tverdiat: — vpered! […]

 

Tak krai zhelanen im, kotoromu nazvan’ia

 

Dosele ne nashla eshche liudskaia rech.’

 

(“Who give a house-warming party every morning,

 

And who shout even in the moment of mortal danger, ‘Move on!’

 

They desire a land but the human speech

 

Has not named it yet.”)

 

Although Tsvetaeva’s translation is just as vague on naming the unidentified destination of

 

the journey undertaken by travellers, it does contain autobiographical overtones that relate

 

to Tsvetaeva’s experiences of the majestic lands and ancient Greek myths of her visits to

 

the Crimea, where she explored together with Maximilian Voloshin cultural landmarks that

 

might be interpreted as palimpsests.

 

Thus, for example, in her translation of “Le Voyage” Tsvetaeva uses such adjectives and

 

expressions as “profil’ mysa” (“ the cape’s profile”) and “bazal’tovyi utes” (“ basaltic

 

rock”). In Baudelaire’s poem in part two the sailors report on their imaginary landscapes

 

that they see each time they approach an island in terms of their utopian vision as if they

 

hope to find their own Eldorado, a paradise on earth:
Chaque îlot signalé par l’homme de vigie

 

Est un Eldorado promis le Destin;

 

L’Imagination qui dresse son orgie

 

Ne trouve qu’un récif aux clartés du matin.

 

(Each island pointed out by the watchman

 

Is an Eldorado promised by destiny;

 

The Imagination which calls up its orgy

 

Finds only a sandbar in the morning light.)

 

Tsvetaeva’s translation leaves out any established utopian connotations associated with

 

social engineering that Eldorado epitomises. This might be done with a view to avoid any

 

political connotations related to a radiant communist future that the image of Eldorado

 

might evoke in the minds of Soviet readers. Yet it seems most likely that Tsvetaeva wants

 

to endow this passage with more abstract images of beautiful and majestic landscapes. At

 

the same time she inscribes into this passage a nostalgic longing for a paradise for her

 

forever lost. This paradise is related to Tsvetaeva’s exploration of the Crimea with

 

Voloshin in 1911, warmly portrayed in her 1933 autobiographical essay “Zhivoe o

 

zhivom” (“Living Word about a Living Man”). In this essay Tsvetaeva refers to one

 

particular a cave that she identifies with the entrance to Hades and with her Orphic

 

journeys: she symbolically undertakes such a journey with Voloshin. In this passage that

 

relates to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice Tsvetaeva evokes both Voloshin and Ellis,

 

adding thereby some Baudelarian touch to her text. This is especially evident in her

 

definition of Voloshin as “French modernist in Russian poetry”. It is also interesting that

 

both Tsvetaeva and Voloshin are portrayed in this essay as sailors who take a boat to a

 

basaltic cliff that features a symbolic entrance to Hades which she describes as ‘bazl’tovye

 

steny vkhoda” (”the basaltic walls of the entrance”). The profile of the cave that appears

 

in Tsvetaeva’s translation of “Le Voyage” is also absent in the original. In the fourth part

 

of Tsvetaeva’s version of the poem we come across the lines that mention the cliff as part

 

of treasures brought back by travellers from their journeys to distant destinations: “Dlia

 

vas my privezli s morei/ Vot etot fas dvortsa, vot etot profil’ mysa, — Vsem vam, kotorym

 

veshch’ — chem dal’she — tem milei…” (“We brought back for from the seas /this front

 

of the palace, this profile of a cliff, / we brought them to those of you who like the objects

 

more if they are further removed from you”). In “Le Voyage” in part four Baudelaire

 

writes, in more straightforward and less specific manner, about the souvenirs which the

 

sailors brought back: “Cueilli quelques croquis pour votre album vorace,/Frères qui

 

trouvez beau tout ce qui vient de loin!” (“Picked a few sketches for your voracious album,

 

/Brothers who find beautiful everything that comes from far off!”). In part three Tsvetaeva

 

refers to treasures associated with memories that were not seen by Nereus, the archetypal

 

Old Man of the Sea (“sokrovischa, kakikh ne vidyval Nerei”). This image is absent in

 

Baudelaire’s poem. Yet it seems important to Tsvetaeva’s imagery and symbolism in her

 

rendering of the poem because Nereus had the power to change himself into all sorts of

 

animals and beings and was considered a benevolent and beneficent god for sailors. Once

 

again, this image evokes Tsvetaeva’s definition of Voloshin as “The Old Man of the Sea,

 

Nereus.” In her cycle of poems dedicated to Voloshin —“Ici Haut” (”Height”) —

 

Tsvetaeva also labels Voloshin as a leader of souls, as opposed to a political leader who

 

guides masses, and suggests naming the cliff where Voloshin is buried as Voloshin’s Hill.

 

The profile of the cliff has a strong resemblance to Voloshin’s profile and it is not

 

coincidental that Tsvetaeva identifies this landmark with Voloshin. The Voloshin subtexts

 

in Tsvetaeva’s translation of “Le Voyage” point to the fact that Tsvetaeva invites her

 

readers to consider a spiritual quest and undertake a nostalgic journey into the past. In this

 

respect, her rendering of “Le Voyage” exemplifies well the above-discussed internalised

 

adventures to majestic and mythical locations that Kundera labels as voices within us.

 

Therefore, to a great extent, Tsvetaeva’s translation of Baudelaire undertaken at the end of

 

her life might be seen as a manifestation of an exilic discourse related to internalised

 

experiences of displacement. In contradiction to Baudelaire’s poem, Tsvetaeva makes the

 

otherworldly overtones as part of her contrapuntal narrative that highlights the borders

 

between French and Russian traditions, between the present and the past, and between the

 

different visions of the sublime.

 

Such a strategy of viewing death and life as part of the same force or natural law testifies

 

to the fact that in the end of her life Tsvetaeva was influenced by such poets as Fedor

 

Tiutchev, Mira Lokhvitskaia, and Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, to name just a few, who

 

developed a positive attitude to death. They viewed death as a state of being that removes

 

all contradictions, almost in a religious sense, by taking the individual back to a natural

 

state of pre-existence, to the creative life force. This organic view of modernity prompts

 

Tsvetaeva to identify her new identity with the fluid state of being: she inscribes herself
into Baudelaire’s text as a displaced individual, an exile-in-making, estranged from

 

reality, searching for another meaning and another style. Tsvetaeva’s modification of

 

Baudelaire’s poem indicates that she vehemently opposed herself to any static

 

manifestations of the sublime, whether expressed in terms of the grand marble and metal

 

constructions portrayed by Baudelaire, or in terms of the epic style conveyed in Stalin’s

 

architecture and in Soviet literature of the 1930-40s. Tsvetaeva’s desire for death is

 

conveyed in erotic terms in the style of the Russian Symbolist poetry that mixed Eros and

 

Tantas as interconnected deities. The essence of this poetic tradition is well captured in

 

Mirra Lokhvitskaia’s lines that see death as a symbol of the sublime: “Ia umeret’ khochu

 

vesnoi, […] Ia smert’ svoiu blagoslavliu —/I nazovu ee prekrasnoi.” (“I wish to die in

 

spring. I will bless my death and call it magnificent.”). The concluding part of Tsvetaeva’s

 

translation of “Le Voyage” represents a most faithful attempt to follow the original, but at

 

the same time it inscribes some autobiographical overtones. Thus, if Baudelaire conveys

 

the words of travellers who appeal to death to poison them in order to provide them with

 

comfort (“Verse-nous ton poison pour qu’il nous réconforte!” ), Tsvetaeva identifies the

 

speakers as deceived travellers (“obmanutym plovtsam raskroi svoi glubiny”). This

 

reference to deceit might be seen as a semi-veiled reference to Tsveteva’s own experience,

 

because her husband and her daughter were lured to the Soviet Union, and she had no

 

choice but to follow them. At the same time, the poem speaks on behalf of those modernist

 

authors who supported the revolutionary cause in Russia and were deceived by a

 

government who displaced any expressions of originality and individuality that sustain

 

imaginary and creative journeys into the unknown or sustain a free flow of creative force

 

so vital for the poetics of the avant-garde that brings to the fore the cult of the living word,

 

abandoning thereby the differences between life and art.

 

Thus it can be argued that Tsvetaeva, being estranged from Soviet reality and language,

 

undertook translation of Baudelaire’s poem in search for a new style that could help her

 

mark her own estrangement and achieve a sense of novelty, or hybridity. In his article “The

 

Art of Translation” (1941) Nabokov identifies three types of translators: “the scholar who

 

is eager to make the world appreciate the works of an obscure genius as much as he does

 

himself; the well meaning hack; and the professional writer relaxing in the company of a

 

foreign confrère”. In Nabokov’s view, a translator must have as much talent, or at least the

 

same kind of talent, as the author he chooses to translate. Nabokov’s characterisation of

 

them as ideal playmates corresponds well to Tsvetaeva’s attitude to Baudelaire, whose

 

poem provided her with an important creative impulse. Nabokov’s words that translator

 

“must possess the gift of mimicry and be able to act, as it were, the real author’s part by

 

impersonating his tricks of demeanour and speech, his ways and his mind, with the utmost

 

degree of verisimilitude” can be fully applied to Tsvetaeva, whose desire to perform an

 

exilic speech led her to translate Baudelaire’s poem in such a way that it engages readers

 

to participate actively in such an act of performance. Simon Markish detects in

 

Tsvetaeva’s translation of “Le Voyage” her strong usage of rhetorical gestures and direct

 

engagement with readers-listeners (“chitatel’-slushatel’”). Such a distinct orientation

 

towards performing Baudelaire’s text might be partly explained by the fact that Tsvetaeva

 

did not expect it to be published and was happy to recite her translation to her friends, who

 

saw it as part of the samizdat culture in the Soviet Union oriented towards oral

 

performance of texts. At the same time, the exilic condition that Kristeva links to a type of

 

writer as intellectual critic also requires an act of performance that could instigate a

 

political response to it.

 

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, translated by Michael Henry Heim, New York: Harper and

 

Row, 1984, p.75.

 

Conrad, Joseph. A Personal Record: The Works of Joseph Conrad, London: Dent Uniform Edition, 1946,p.121.

 

Tsvetaeva, Marina. “The Poet and Time,”Art in the Light of Conscience, translated by Angela Livingstone,

 

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992, pp.87-103, p.93.

 

Kristeva, Julia. “A New Type of Intellectual: the Dissident”, translated by Seán Hand in Toril Moi, editor. The

 

Kristeva Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986,p.298. (originally published as “Un nouveau type

 

d’intellectuel: le dissident,” in Tel quell, No.74, Winter 1977,pp.3-8.)

 

Said, Edward. “The Mind of Winter: Reflection on Life in Exile,” Harper’s, September 1984, p.54.

 

Ibid., p.55.

 

Karlinsky, Simon. Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World,and Her Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University

 

Press, 1985, p.232.

 

Wanner, Adrian. Baudelaire in Russia, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996, p.196.

 

Belkina’s recollections of this recital were published for the first time in Voprosy literatury, No.6, 1986, pp.197-

 

198; and reproduced in: Tsvetaeva, Marina. Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, compiled by Anna saakiants, volume 1,

 

Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1988,pp.689-691.

 

Snezhkova, E.V. “Marina Tsvetaeva - perevodchik s frantsuzskogo i na frantsuzskii (Sharl’ Bodler “Le voyage”, A.S.Pushkin “Besy”),” in I.Iu. Beliakova, editor. Marina Tsvetaeva: Epokha-kul’tura-Sud’ba: Desitaia

 

tsvetaevskaia mezhdunarodnaia nauchno-tematicheskaia konferentsiia (9-11 oktiabria 2002 goda): Sbornik

 

dokladov, Moscow: Dom Mariny Tsvetaevoi, 2003, pp.261-269, p.264.

 

Ibid.,pp.264-265.

 

Tsvetaeva, Marina. Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, volume 2, ‘Khudozhestvennaia literatura”: Moscow, 1988, p.543.

 

Irigaray, Luce. “Pouvoir du discours,” p.74. Quoted in: Jacobus, Mary. “The question of language,” Critical

 

Inquiry, vol.8, no.2, Winter 1981,p.210.

 

Tsvetaeva, vol.2, op.cit., p. 327. (All translations from the Russian texts are mine.— A.S.)

 

Irigaray, Luce. Le Langage des démentes, Paris:Mouton, 1973, p. 351.

 

Irigaray, Luce. “La ‘mécanique’ des fluids,” in: Marks, Elaine and Courtivron, Isabelle de, editors. New French

 

Feminisms,translated by Reeder, Claudia, Brighton: Harvester, 1980, pp.109-110; quoted in: Toril, Moi.

 

Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London, New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 142.

 

Paperny, Vladimir. Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two, translated by John Hill and Roann Barris,

 

Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2002, p.xxiv.

 

Ibid.

 

Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim,

 

Penguin Books: London, 1983, p.90.

 

This fact is discussed in Richard Burton’s book on Baudelaire: Burton, Richard D.E. Baudelaire in 1859: A Study

 

in the Sources of Poetic Creativity, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988, p.65.

 

Ibid., p.89.

 

Ibid.

 

Tsvetaeva, Marina. “Epic and Lyric of Contemporary Russia: Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak,” Art in

 

the Light of Conscience, op.cit., pp.104-129, p.119.

 

Burton, op.cit., p.66.

 

Ibid.,p.67.

 

A Bantam Dual-Language Book: Flowers of Evil and Other Works by Charles Baudelaire, edited by Wallace

 

Fowlie, with translations, a critical introduction, and notes by the editor, Bantam Books: New York, 1964, p. 94-

 

95.

 

Tsvetaeva, Marina. “Plavan’e,” Sochineniia, vol.1, op.cit., pp.608-612, p.608.

 

Burton, op.cit., pp.72-73.

 

Ibid., p.73.

 

Evdokimova, Svetlana. Pushkin’s Historical Imagination, Yale University Press: New Haven and London,1999,

 

p.231.

 

Burton.,op.cit.,p.68.

 

Peyre, Henri. “Baudelaire, Romantic and Classical,” in Peyre, Henri, editor. Baudelaire: A Collection of Critical

 

Essays, Prentice-Hall, Inc.: Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962, pp.19-29, pp.24-25.

 

See, for example, the concluding lines of this cycle: ‘I vlachat, vlachat etot vzolh Saulov/ Palestinskie otroki s

 

krov’iu chernoi,” (“And the Palestine youths with the black blood /Carry, carry in themselves this sigh of Saul”. –

 

Tsvetaeva, vol.1 ,op.cit., p.165.)

 

A Bantam Dual-Language Book: Flowers of Evil and Other Works by Charles Baudelaire, op.cit.,pp.100-101.

 

Shhweitzer, Viktoria. Tsvetaeva, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and H.T, Willets, The Noonday

 

Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1992, p.54.

 

Hasty, Olga Peters. “Marina Tsvetaeva’s Cycle Poety,” in Schweitzer, Viktoria et al, editors. Marina Tsvetaeva;

 

One Hundred Years, Berkeley Slavic Specialties: Oakland, California, 1994, pp.131-146, p.142.

 

A Bantam Dual-Language Book: Flowers of Evil and Other Works by Charles Baudelaire, op.cit., pp.94-95.

 

Tsvetaeva, vol.2, op.cit., p.608.

 

Translation is mine. — A.S.

 

The translation of Pushkin’s poem into French is reproduced in: Ivanov, V.V. “O Tsvetaevskikh perevodakh

 

pesni iz ‘Pira vo vremia chumy’ i ‘Besov’ Pushkina,” Masterstvo perevoda 1966, Sovetskii pistael’”: Moscow,

 

1968, pp.389-412, p.405.

 

Markish, op.cit., p. 432.

 

Ellis (Kobylinskii, L.L.), Russkie simvolisty: Konstantin Bal’mont, Valerii Briusov, Andrei Belyi, Moscow:

 

Musaget, 1910, p.171.

 

Wanner,op.cit.,p.20.

 

A Bantam Dual-Language Book: Flowers of Evil and Other Works by Charles Baudelaire, op.cit.,pp.102-103.

 

Maiakovsky, Vladimir. “Gimn sud’e,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v trinadsati tomakh, vol.1:1912-1917 ,

 

Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1955, pp.76-77, p.77.

 

Translation is mine. — A.S.

 

Ibid.,p.77.

 

Quoted from: Khansen-Leve, A. Russkii simvolizm: sistema poeticheskikh motivov: rannii simvolizm, St

 

Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1999, p.73.

 

See more on this subject in: Tiedemann-Bartels, Versuch über das artistiche Gedicht, baudelaire, Mallarmé, George, München, 1971, p.16. Quoted in: Hansen-Leve,op.cit., p.73.

 

Murry, John Middleton. “Baudelaire,” Baudelaire: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Henri Peyre,

 

Prentice –Hall,Inc.: Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962, pp.94-109, p.96.

 

A Bantam Dual-Language Book: Flowers of Evil and Other Works by Charles Baudelaire, op.cit., pp.94-95.

 

Bradbury, Malcolm and McFarlane, James. “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” in Bradbury, Malcolm and

 

McFarlane, James, editors. Modernism: 1890-1930, Penguin Books, London, 1976, pp. 19-26, p. 29.

 

Murry, op.cit.,p. 99.

 

A Bantam Dual-Language Book: Flowers of Evil and Other Works by Charles Baudelaire, op.cit., p.98.

 

Tsvetaeva, op.cit.,p.610.

 

Ibid.,p.100.

 

Tsvetaeva, op.cit., p.608.

 

A Bantam Dual-Language Book: Flowers of Evil and Other Works by Charles Baudelaire, op.cit., pp.96-97.

 

On the significance of the Orphic myth in Tsvetaeva’s works see Olga Peters Hasty’s highly illuminating study:

 

Hasty, Olga Peters. Marina Tsvetaeva’s Orphic Jouneys in the Worlds of the Word, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern

 

University Press, 1996.

 

Tsvetaeva, Marina. “Zhivoe o zhivom,” Proza, Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989, pp.193-263, p.234.

 

Ibid.

 

Tsvetaeva, vol.1,op.cit.,p.610.

 

A Bantam Dual-Language Book: Flowers of Evil and Other Works by Charles Baudelaire, op.cit., pp.98-99.

 

Tsvetaeva, vol.1, p.609.

 

Grimal, Pierre. The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, translated by A.R. Maxwell-Hyslop, Blackwell

 

Reference:Oxford, 1986, p.308

 

Tsvetaeva, “Zhivoe ozhivom,” op.cit.,p.263.

 

Tsvetaeva, Marina. “Ici—Haut,” Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, Leningrad: Sovetskii piastel. Leningradskoe otdelenie,

 

1990, pp.427-431,p.430.

 

Lokhvitskaia,Mirra. “Stikhotvoreniia”, in Poety 1880-1890 gg., Leningrad : Biblioteka poeta. Sovetskii pistael’,

 

1972, pp.601-633, p.610.

 

A Bantam Dual-Language Book: Flowers of Evil and Other Works by Charles Baudelaire, op.cit.,p.102.

 

Nabokov, Vladimir. “The Art of Translation,” in Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Russian Literature, Picador,

 

London, 1983, pp. 319-321, p. 319.

 

Ibid.

 

Markish, op.cit., p.434.