Concentrated reading of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry began for me in the very first years of the Literature Department’s existence at Essex University, through my acquaintance there with the poet Elaine Feinstein for whom I made literal versions of numerous Tsvetaeva poems, to be recreated by her as English poems. I became fascinated by Tsvetaeva’s strong originality, in both verse and prose, and especially by her powerful attention to language: her liking for the etymological, the epigrammatic, the paradoxical, and for a richly filled laconicism. Joseph Brodsky says that she was ‘fenced off from her contemporaries by a wall composed of discarded superfluity…’
My research has profited from encouragement by the Tsvetaeva-scholar Irma Kudrova, as well as from many months of translation-discussion with my publisher Antony Wood.