Skip to product information
1 of 1

Three by Tsvetaeva

Three by Tsvetaeva

by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated from the Russian by Andrew Davis

Regular price $16.00
Regular price Sale price $16.00
Format

Three by Tsvetaeva collects three dazzling and devastating reckonings with love and the end of love by a poet celebrated for the unequaled verbal inventiveness and emotional intensity of her work. “Backstreets,” translated into English for the first time, is a retelling of a Russian fairy tale that offers a witches’ brew of temptation, bodily transformation, marriage, and murder.

“Poem of the Mountain” and “Poem of the End,” perhaps the most celebrated of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetic sequences, explore the shifting dynamics of a love affair. The voices of the lovers, the voice of the narrator, and the voice of poetry combine and recombine, circle each other and split, engaging the reader in a constantly shifting spectrum of emotion, from unbridled passion to rawest grief, and discovering at last a strange triumph in loss. Andrew Davis’s translations of Tsvetaeva bring out the wild brilliance of an incomparable artist.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Poets
ISBN: 9781681378329
Pages: 96
Publication Date:

Praise

Tsvetaeva is a poet of extremes only in the sense that for her an ‘extreme’ is not so much the end of the known world as the beginning of the unknowable one.
—Joseph Brodsky

These translations convey Tsvetaeva’s passion and intellectual verve. At times, as when reading the original, I feel I am witnessing some mysterious process of language itself being created anew.
—Robert Chandler

Cryptic, carnal works by an uncompromising Russian poet
— Bryan Karetyk The TLS

View full details
  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 
  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 
  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it