Yet when the poet is translating-is she not making love to the poem? She caresses, penetrates. “Reading poetry in translation is like kissing through a veil,” Chaim Nachman Bialik, the Hebrew poet who lived (like Kaminsky) in Odessa reported. How haunting, that in his “Afterword” Kaminsky writes “as a girl, she dreamed of being adopted by the devil in Moscow streets, of being the devil’s little orphan.” She traveled and lived in Europe, was fluent in several languages, and translated poetry, including her own (into French.) Once across the border, in new garb, the orphan remembers or conceals the old town, and appears new-born and different.” How paradoxical (if not disturbing): giving birth to an orphan.
“Translation”, Willis Barnstone says, in An ABC of Poetry Translation, “is an art between tongues, and the child born of the art lives forever between home and alien city. She died at age 48, by suicide, having endured profound suffering and loss having filled mountains of notebooks with poetry, prose and plays. Marina Tsvetaeva was born in 1892 in Moscow. Her relationship to poetry is as light is to air. Jean Valentine is a poet traveling between unseen worlds and this planet. Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa (former Soviet Union, in the Ukraine), learning English at the age of 16 when his family immigrated to the United States. Dark Elderberry Branch is a collaboration between two living poets and one who is dead but fully present.
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