About this ebook
Marina Tsvetaeva needs no introduction—a poetic genius, she is one of the most gifted and original poets in the Russian literary canon. All the verse genres Tsvetaeva employed, including lyric poems, poetic cycles, and long narrative poems, are represented here, in Vega’s Fugitive, translated by award-winning translator and Tsvetaeva scholar Alyssa Dinega Gillespie. Tsvetaeva’s poems, some never-before translated, appear in potent English versions that are both highly faithful to the originals and lyrical in their own right. As a result, Tsvetaeva’s verse—with its driving rhythms, striking sound plays, and searing insights—is reborn in a new language and new constellations of meaning. These poems dive fearlessly into themes of place, time, and distance; the female body; the poet’s fate; desire and longing; grief, loss, and immortality. Vega’s Fugitive makes Tsvetaeva’s masterful work not just accessible, but unforgettable for English-language readers around the world.
About the author
MARINA TSVETAEVA (1892–1941) was a Russian poet who lived through the turbulent years of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. Despite exile and hardship, she wrote poems, verse plays, and prose pieces; she is considered one of the most brilliant Russian poets of the twentieth century. Her early poetry collection Milestones was published in 2002 by Northwestern University Press in a translation by Robin Kemball.
ALYSSA DINEGA GILLESPIE is the author and editor of numerous scholarly books and articles on East European literature and a prize-winning translator of Russian and Ukrainian poetry and fiction, as well as a poet herself. This is her first book-length collection of translated verse.
