The Reception of Marina Tsvetaeva in Britain

The Anglo-Russian Research Network is delighted to announce a talk by Professor Marina Tsvetkova (Higher School of Economics, Nizhnii Novgorod) on the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva in English.

Every writer, when translated into other languages, acquires new “faces” that resemble them no more than portraits resemble their model. Since Marina Tsvetaeva was introduced to the British literary scene by D.S. Sviatopolk-Mirskii in his Anthology of Russian Poetry (1924), she has acquired multiple “faces” in translations by Donald McDuff, Elaine Feinstein, Christopher White, and others. This reading group will conduct an interactive analysis, led by Professor Tsvetkova. It will consider Tsvetaeva’s poem “An Attempt at Jealousy” (Popytka revnosti) and its translation by Elaine Feinstein, to identify the transformations that happened to the Russian poem when translated into the English amd to pin-point one of the “faces” Tsvetaeva has received in Britain.

Professor Marina Tsvetkova is Professor of Literature at the Higher School of Economics (Nizhnii Novgorod). Her area of expertise encompasses different facets of Russian-British cultural interactions: the reception of Russian poetry and prose in Britain, and vice versa; translation of Russian literature into English; cross-cultural “inter-semiotic translation”, such as in film and comic book adaptation of literary classics. Marina Tsvetkova has taught as a visiting professor and given guest lectures in France, Brazil, Italy, USA, and Poland.

This event will be held on Zoom. We will circulate the Russian text of ‘An Attempt at Jealousy’, alongside Feinstein’s English translation, ahead of the talk.