An Editor’s Selection in the Stephen Mitchell Translation Series

When, once again, fire flares from Moscow’s Red Square and other countries—this time Ukraine—are bombed, mutilated, erased, what can Russia’s greatest 20th-century poet tell us? What can we learn about our own days of uncertainty, fear, anger, and fright? “People don’t need to fight people on earth,” Tsvetaeva proclaimed over a century ago. “What are poets, lovers, generals—about?” she asks, insists, then reminds: “soon we will all fall asleep under the earth, / who on earth never let each other sleep.” Open this book, reader, and learn that wisdom is passion, and Tsvetaeva’s is endless, a painful search for honesty, the one that breaks barriers and survives the test of time. And then close the book for a moment, look around at 21st-century USA and see how history keeps doing its terrible thing: the turmoil is upon us, and ours is the “hour of orphans.” And then open the book again to this ceaseless, passionate voice—in Margaree Little’s clear, musical translations—as it rings and reminds us that while the world is once again stolen from us by powers that be, “as long as there’s spit in our mouths—the whole country is armed!” —Ilya Kaminsky

This collection is a revelation. At the Edge: Selected Political Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva restores to English a long-overlooked dimension of one of the 20th century’s most complex poetic voices. With fierce clarity and precision, Margaree Little’s translations bring us a Tsvetaeva who is not merely a lyricist but an uncompromising witness to the cataclysms of her time—revolution, war, famine, exile, and the rise of fascism. These poems don’t just reflect history; they confront it, denounce its brutality, and expose the militarism, cowardice, betrayal, and moral failure of democracies that made possible events like the Munich Agreement and Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. “There is an hour for those words,” Tsvetaeva wrote—and that hour is now. This volume speaks with urgency to our own historical moment. I can’t think of a more timely book; it should be required reading for anyone interested in the ethical possibilities of poetry. —Julia Nemirovskaya

Margaree Little’s book is, above all, an honorable act of resistance to the conventional portrayal of Marina Tsvetaeva as a "romantic poetess" and to the broader tendency to banalize and diminish the complexity of her political and human stance. Little’s translations seek to preserve the tonal and textural variety of the selected poems: from the early yet distinctly Tsvetaevan works of the World War I and Civil War period, through the central, densely layered and brilliantly crafted poems of the "landless brotherhood" era, which evoke themes explored by Hannah Arendt, to the late, open, urgent, and despairing Poems to Czechoslovakia, whose painful relevance is so tragically deepened today. —Irina Mashinski

As a reader without knowledge of Russian, I speak to the fierce, vital power of Margaree Little’s English translations of the political poems of Marina Tsvetaeva and to their urgent timeliness—across cultures and years they burn anew with outraged empathy as a world is brutally dismembered, as what was sacred is sold for scrap, when “your neighbor—is strangely different … and the huge black trees / stagger in powerless anger.” And with what searing, acidic contempt Tsvetaeva greets appeasement: “To your mad world, / there is one answer: refusal.” —Eleanor Wilner

Read two poems from At the Edge: “God” and “[Night. —Nor’easter. —Roar of soldiers. —Roar of waves.]”