Article

Name: Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna de Noailles: The Possibilities of Dialogue

Authors: N. O. Laskina

Education Centre «Otkrytaya kafedra»

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna de Noailles, French literature, literary translation

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