Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna de Noailles: The Possibilities of Dialogue

The article presents itself a reconstruction of the creative dialogue
between Marina Tsvetaeva and the French poet and novelist Anna de Noailles. We believe that Noailles provoked Tsvetaeva’s interest not only as a highly successful
female author or an object of cult for the early 20th century aesthetes, but
as a writer open to experiments with genres and literary conventions. It is also
important to define the poetic qualities that drew Tsvetaeva’s attention to the
novel «La nouvelle espérance». Apart from the obvious interest in the French
literary tradition, there are reasons to put Tsvetaeva in the same context as
Proust, Cocteau, Valéry and other admirers of Noailles, among the leaders of the
modernist culture in formation. The close reading of the novel reveals that the
plot structure’s ambivalence allows to read the text both as a typical of the
French «roman d'adultère» linear telling of love stories leading to disappointment,
and as a parable on the eternal recurrence putting in the centre the heroine’s
self-reflection. The paper proposes an interpretation of the Tsvetaeva’s
translating strategy based on the analysis of some of the deformations which
seem particularly meaningful in view of the generally precise and careful translator’s
work. In some cases Tsvetaeva notable extends the distance between
readers and the novel’s world and the characters’ discourse. When leaving without
translation family terms and poetic verses, she sometimes makes the text
seem more exotic for a Russian reader. However the most impactful changes
concern grammar; slight grammatical shifts change the rhythm of the Noailles’
prose and enhance moments of introspection in the episodes where the author
was more inclined to keep the narrative distance. Tsvetaeva in her translation
invents ways of translating Noailles into a language more similar to the poetic
language of the modernist novel: the translated text makes more explicit either
moments of revealing the artificial, literary origins of the characters and situations
or the crucial role of the central consciousness. When later, in 1920s,
Tsvetaeva makes Noailles part of her mythology, naming her as one of the
«friends» and writing her a letter which was evidently not designed for any answer,
the Russian poet works with a completely interiorized image not just of
Noailles character but of Noailles the author. It is possible that Tsvetaeva’s used
her translator’s experience not only for a deeper understanding of the French
novel style, but as a stage of her myth-making process.