Bride of Ice: Selected Poems

When Elaine Feinstein first read the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva in Russian in the 1960s, the encounter transformed her. ‘What drew me to her initially,’ she writes, ‘was the intensity of her emotions, and the honesty with which she exposed them.’ Her translations, first published to great acclaim in 1971, introduced Tsvetaeva to English readers. It was the start of Feinstein’s continuing engagement with a poet who became an abiding, challenging inspiration to her, and whose biography - A Captive Lion - she published in 1987.

To this enlarged edition Elaine Feinstein added five major pieces. ‘Girlfriend’, a sequence of lyrics, was written for Tsvetaeva’s lover Sofia Parnok. In ‘New Year’s Greetings’ she responded to the death of Rainer Maria Rilke. ‘On a Red Horse’ is a dramatic fairytale of power and cruelty. ‘Wires’, of which two lyrics were included in the earlier edition, now appears in full; and a previously omitted lyric from ‘Poem of the End’ has been translated. With a revised introduction, notes and bibliography of works in English, Bride of Ice delivers Tsvetaeva to a new generation of readers.