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Rating: 
Summary: Terrible Translations
Review: Finestein's translations are so awful, it is no wonder that few English speakers want to know who Tsvetaeva is. She loses the rhythm, rhyme, literary devices, and everything for which Tsvetaeva's poetry is so loved. The duality of meanings and word play is also completely lost. Try Angela Livingstone's translations - they are excellent.
Rating: 
Summary: Poems by a reliable witness
Review: Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892, published her first poems at 18, and was married with two children when the Russian Revolution began. She endured numerous hardships -- one of her children died of malnutrition -- and a period of exile. She returned to Russia in 1939, but was so beset by her circumstances that she committed suicide in 1941. These passionate and autobiographical poems are deep and important. I don't know Russian, so cannot comment on the translation. From them one learns about Tsvetaeva the artist: her subjects are love and transformation, nature, poetry, love, and her complicated, exasperating country -- and, later, the bleakness which enveloped her. Poetry was serious business in Russia, and this poet was one of the greats.
Rating:
Summary: Art in life
Review: Read this book! and read about her life. She witnessed so much darkness and her words open up these experiences, lay them bare. I really wonder what her writing would have been if she had lived a different life, one without so much tragedy. She also recognized, as did Virginia Woolfe, that it is difficult for women to write amidst the responsibilities of everyday life -- "I have no time to think . . . I have only ever been myself in notebooks . . . for all my life I have been leading a child by the hand." Her work stays with you long after the book closes.
Rating:
Summary: Art in life
Review: Read this book! and read about her life. She witnessed so much darkness and her words open up these experiences, lay them bare. I really wonder what her writing would have been if she had lived a different life, one without so much tragedy. She also recognized, as did Virginia Woolfe, that it is difficult for women to write amidst the responsibilities of everyday life -- "I have no time to think . . . I have only ever been myself in notebooks . . . for all my life I have been leading a child by the hand." Her work stays with you long after the book closes.
Rating:
Summary: Reigning love
Review: Tsvetaeva's life was filled with tragedy (she lived through and in Revolutionary Russia (her husband fought for the White Army) and in Czechoslovakia during the German occupation) her heart shouted for a personal love the message which rings echoing through her words as she has deep philosophical understanding and awareness of her world which she rides over like gravel in fodder for her clinging to the personal loves of her heart which reigned supreme. She spat her poverty and desperation with pride at the shallow, whoever they might be, and challenged the dignity of heaven. She was a powerful poet who believed in living each moment for what it was and holding love at an undisputable high. Some of my favorite quotes from segments of the book... Because even more than God
himself I love his angels.
From: Bent with Worry He is the one that mixes
Up the cards
And confuses arithmetic and weight
Demands answers from the school bench
Who altogether refutes Kant
From: The Poet We entered one another's eyes
As if they were oases All poets are Jews Everything that I love changes from an external thing into an inward one, from the moment of my love, it stops being external (from the Introduction). I can't attest to the authenticity of the translations, as I know little Russian, Reviews seem mixed; but Feinstein, for me, makes some engrossing connections of words that must ring true to some extent.
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