NINA ZIVANCEVIC
[1957-]

Zivancevic was born in Belgrade. She is a literary critic, journalist, and translator as well as a poet. She lived for several years in New York, where she wrote in English, and now resides in Paris. New Rivers Press published a book of her poems, More or Less Urgent, in 1980. The poems in this anthology come from her books The Spirit of Renaissance (1989) and At the End of the Century (2006).
Charles Simic: The Horse Has Six Legs, an anthology of Serbian Poetry

Ah, now our time has come, Marina.
You visit me at night while I sit alone
with a glass of wine in hand
-you who do not need a key-
for you the most secret door of my room
is always open:
abandoned by our mothers,
we both loved children and poetry,
and hated Paris and poverty,
wearing the one and only dirty dress,
we kept clear oflandlords and cops.
We both had blue eyes, many lovers,
and the incapacity to live with anyone.
Ah, I almost forgot: our fathers, too,
had similar jobs-they occupied themselves
with museums and art ...
Still, I got angry yesterday
when someone called me Marina ...
I'm neither important nor odd enough
to send daily reports to Beria ...
How furious I was that you hanged yourself!
What courage, what a double cross, what a lie,
what a betrayal of poetry ...
Marina, I'm a child as you can see,
about you and life I really know nothing.


O, great great Western wind,
lift me up and take me back
to people and places I loved,
save me from this neoclassical order
and its stupidities,
take me as far as you can from Gard du Nord
from which they took
200,000 Jews to camps,
so that not a single one came back,
carry me away from Europe
poisoned with wars and plagues,
as far as possible from the United States
where people die in hunger and ignorance,
take me back to Serinda where to breathe is more important
than sublime thought and moving about,
take me to the make-believe land of poetry
and keen spirit
where women don't speak of equality
and where men dance the tango all day
and all night,
lift me high, wind
and make me forget
this terrible ever-present reality,
since, if the spring has indeed come
why am I trotting
so far behind it?



Tam giác tình thần thánh?
Thứ tình yêu chỉ gồm có chiêm ngưỡng và kính trọng, thứ amour platonique mà anh nói đó cũng làm Hương sợ.

It is the most beautiful law of our species that that which is not admired is forgotten.
[Luật đẹp nhất của con người là, đàn bà thì là đẹp, và đẹp, thì là để chiêm ngưỡng, và chẳng hề bị lãng quên].
Alain
Đó là luật đẹp nhất của giống người, là, cái gì không được chiêm ngưỡng, thì bèn vứt vô sọt rác.

seven bells toll in the seven bell towers.
All forty times forty churches, all seven hills
of bells, everyone of them counted, like pillows.

I was born in the ringing of bells
on the saint's day of John the Theologian.
Over the wattle fence, our gingerbread house-
dropped its crumbs for Saint John the Theologian.

I loved it first: the first ringing-
the nuns sweeping to mass in the warmth of sleep-
the crack of the fire catching in the stove-
seven bells, seven bell towers.

Come with me, people of Moscow,
you crazy, looting, flagellant mob!
And priest-place on my tongue
all of Moscow, the city of bells!

Marina Tsvetaeva
Bẩy đồi – như bẩy chuông
Bẩy chuông ngân trong bẩy tháp chuông
Tất cả bốn mươi lần bốn mươi nhà thờ, tất cả bẩy đồi
Chuông, mọi cái, đếm, như những cái gối

Tôi sinh ra trong tiếng chuông ngân
Vào ngày thánh John nhà Thần Luận
Trên hàng cọc, căn nhà bánh gừng của chúng tôi
Nhả những miểng vụn cho Thánh John nhà Thần Luận

Tôi yêu nó, thoạt đầu: tiếng chuông thứ nhất
Những nữ tu cuộn vào lễ thánh trong cái ấm áp của giấc ngủ
Tiếng lửa lách tách trong lò
Bẩy chuông bẩy tháp chuông

Đến với tôi, cư dân Moscow
Đám khùng điên ăn cướp ăn trộm du thử du thực đáng đánh đòn!
Và tu sĩ -  để trên lưỡi tôi
Tất cả Moscow, thành phố của những cái chuông.

Admiring her, the poet Balmont once said, "You demand from poetry what only music can give."
Was she a 'difficult' poet? Perhaps. But first we must clarify what 'difficult' meant for that country and that time. To clarify this, one turns to Pushkin, the father of the Russian poetic tradition:

One of our poets used to say proudly, "Though some of my verses may be obscure they are never prosaic."
There are two kinds of obscurity; one arises from a lack of feelings and thoughts, which have been replaced by words; the other from an abundance of feelings and thoughts, and the inadequacy of words to express them.
Bạt

Ngưỡng mộ nhà thơ, thi sĩ Balmond có lần phán, “Bà đòi thơ ca, cái chỉ âm nhạc có thể cho.”
Bà là nhà thơ "khó khăn ". Có lẽ. Nhưng trước hết chúng ta phải làm sáng tỏ "khó" nghĩa là gì, với xứ sở đó, thời kỳ đó. Và để làm sáng tỏ, người ta phải viện tới Pushkin, người cha của truyền thống thơ Nga.

Một trong những nhà thơ của chúng thường hãnh diện phán, “Mặc dù một vài câu thơ của tôi có thể tối tăm, chúng không bao giờ là văn xuôi”.
Có hai thứ tối tăm, một dấy lên từ cái sự thiếu cảm nghĩ, tư tưởng, và được thay thế bằng từ ngữ; một, từ sự thừa mứa cảm nghĩ và tư tưởng, và thiếu từ để diễn tả chúng.

---

A few years after her mother's death, Marina Tsvetaeva, still a young schoolgirl, published her first book. Critics praised the book's uncommon "intimacy of tone" and its structure, called it a lyric diary, a daybook, a sequence;" they praised the "bravery" of this "intimacy." There was also criticism. Brusov, the venerable older poet, encouraged her poems' "sense of intimacy" but noted that this lyric intimacy was, sometimes-of ten-too much.
But there cannot be "too much" of lyric because lyric itself is "too much." Tsvetaeva: "A lyric poem is a created and instantly destroyed world. How many poems are in the book-that many explosions, fires, eruptions: EMPTY spaces. The lyric poem-is a catastrophe. It barely began-and already ended.?"

Vài năm sau, khi bà mẹ mất, còn là 1 nữ sinh, Marina Tsvetaeva đã cho xb cuốn sách đầu tay. Phê bình gia khen, giọng riêng tư chẳng giống ai, đây là 1 thứ nhật ký vãi lệ, sự can đảm của cái riêng tư thầm kín.
Bruso, một nhà thơ đáng kính, già, khuyến khích thơ của cô bé, ở "cảm quan tâm tư thầm kín riêng tư" của nó, và ghi nhận, hình như hơi bị quá riêng tư, thầm kín, đôi lúc.

Nhưng làm gì có “quá” vãi lệ, bởi vì vãi lệ, chính nó, là đã “quá quá” rồi.
Tsvetaeva phán:

Một bài thơ vãi lệ là một thế giới, được sáng tạo và liền lập tức, bị huỷ diệt. Có bao nhiêu bài thơ trong 1 cuốn sách – là bấy nhiêu nổ tung, lửa cháy, phún thạch: những không gian TRỐNG RỖNG. Thơ trữ tình là 1 thảm họa. Nó chưa kịp bắt đầu, thì đã ngỏm củ tỏi rồi.

Đúng là cú đâm trúng tử huyệt thơ Mít. Chúng, thi sĩ Mít, chỉ làm được thứ thơ này, để tán gái, và thơ ngồi bên ly cà phê nhớ bạn hiền, để tán bạn, sự thực, để tán chính chúng!

Ta có thể ăn ngủ với bàn tay bẩn, nhưng, làm thơ, không.

"The magnitude of love, exile, loss, desperation and faith is met with a fortitude most of us will never have to muster; a vulnerability most would never expose. We can thank the stolen paper, quills, red ink; the bells of Moscow, piles of bills and bread from a stranger for a glimpse into the lines and life of Marina Tsvetaeva in a tender 'reading' by poets Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine, a collaboration exquisitely suited to deliver these earthly traces." -C. D. WRIGHT

"For a non-Russian reader, Tsvetaeva's poetry has always been a house with neither doors nor windows. This is the first time when the translators do not claim to inhabit this house, but choose to stand outside-most importantly outside of themselves, as when in ecstasy, in love with Tsvetaeva's genius. With these brilliantly introduced and delivered poems, Kaminsky and Valentine offer no less than the first real welcome of Marina Tsvetaeva into English. To turn to Tsvetaeva's own words ('I can eat-with dirty hands, sleep-with dirty hands, write with dirty hands I cannot'), these two American poets wrote this Russian book with sparkling clean hands." -VALZHYNA MORT

"As Brodsky once wrote ofTsvetaeva, '[her 1 voice had the sound of something unfamiliar and frightening to the Russian ear: the unacceptability of the world.' Ilya Kaminsky's and Jean Valentine's homage is a work of true translatus, carrying-across that voice, that sound, 'by hand-across the river,' into an English of commensurate intensity, ferocity, and beauty. Dark Elderberry Branch is magnificent: absolutely essential reading for anyone who loves Tsvetaeva." -SUJI KWOCK KIM

"The poems Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine have chosen to translate, by Marina Tsvetaeva, are blessings of experience, blessings even of suffering, though also of simpler causes of joy, someone's body, a ray of light, a book. Kaminsky says he and Jean Valentine have very different temperaments from hers, but they show here what they show, differently, in their own poetry, that they are themselves, each of them, so very good at blessing experience, finding its indomitable life. This is radiant work. They chose the right poet to fall in love with, and her poems responded." -DAVID FERRY

As a child, Marina Tsvetaeva had "a frenzied wish to become lost" in the city of Moscow. As a girl, she dreamed of being adopted by the devil in Moscow streets, of being the devil's little orphan. But Russian poetry began in St. Petersburg-the new capital was founded in the early eighteenth century. Moscow was the old capital, devoid of literature. No literature existed in Russia before St. Petersburg's cosmopolitan streets.
    But St. Petersburg was also, for two hundred years, the least free city in Russia. It was dominated by the secret police, watched by the Tsar, and full of soldiers and civil servants-the city of loneliness Dostoevsky and Gogol shared with us.
    Moscow was for a long time the seat of the old Russia that considered

A kiss on the forehead-erases misery.
I kiss your forehead.

A kiss on the eyes-lifts sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.

A kiss on the lips-is a drink of water.
I kiss your lips.

A kiss on the forehead-erases memory.

Hôn 1 phát lên trán - xóa sạch khốn cùng
Gấu bèn hôn trán em

Hôn 1 phát lên mắt - nhấc đi cơn mất ngủ
Gấu bèn hôn mắt em

Hôn 1 phát lên môi - chiêu ngụm nước
Gấu bèn hôn môi em

Hôn 1 phát lên trán - xóa sạch hồi ức