“The poems Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine have chosen to translate, by Marina Tsvetaeva , are magnetic blessings of experience, blessings even of suffering, though also of simpler causes of joy, someone’s body, a ray of light, a book. Kaminsky says he and Jean Valentine have very different temperaments from hers, but they show here what they show, differently, in their own poems, that they are themselves so very good at blessing experience, finding its indomitable life. This is radiant work. They chose the right poet to fall in love with, and her poems responded”

“Of the legendary four great Russian poets of her generation (others are Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Pasternak) at the beginning of the twentieth century, Marina Tsvetaeva has always seemed to me the most mysterious. Of course they were all mysterious — what great poet, indeed what individual person is not? — but I have turned from reading translations (I read no Russian) of her poems and writings, and from writings about her and her tormented story — and from reading them gratefully with a feeling that, vivid and searing though they may have been, she had been in them like a ghost in a cloud, and was gone again.

This new selection from her poems and prose, a ‘homage’ to her by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine brought me a closer and more intimate sense of her and of her voice and presence than I had before. Besides, if we had not had Ilya Kaminsky’s own radiant first book, Dancing in Odessa, and the singular, unfolding, over several decades of Jean Valentine’s haunting poetry, this brief representation of Tsvetaeva’s life, fate, and the poetry that is inseparable from them, would have made their talents and their stature unmistakable. This Dark Elderberry Branch is magic.”

“Delicious English translations. Kaminsky and Valentine convey the lyric intensity of Tsvetaeva’s love poems particularly well: ‘A kiss on the lips – is a drink of water./I kiss your lips.’ ”

“Kaminsky has been working overtime, it seems, to bring the freshness and visceral power of Russian into English. With Jean Valentine he has brought out a book of fragments and poems of Marina Tsvetaeva. They do not refer to their project as a translation but a ‘reading’ of Tsvetaeva. Valentine and Kaminsky explore the assonant sounds of the bells: ‘Seven hills — like seven bells / seven bells toll in the seven bell towers / all forty times forty churches, all seven hills / of bells, every one of them counted, like pillows.’ Later they describe the ‘nuns sweeping to mass in the warmth of sleep’ and call the riotous citizens of Moscow a ‘crazy, looting, flagellant mob.’ The repeating vowels and the liquid sounds of the ‘L’ resonate through the lines to call to mind the ever-present bells. Sound and energy meet here in these powerful sonic shards.”

“This is a gorgeous, gorgeous work by two brilliant poets. It evokes the depth, range and truest voice of this Russian master.”

“Everything from the mercurial selection to the compassionate afterword demonstrate their deep engagement with Tsvetaeva’s work. The book’s rapturous attention is infectious and fitting. Tsvetaeva’s poems, often addressed to specific people, convey a state of intoxication. The translators seem, likewise, to write with the silver bell of Tsvetaeva’s voice in their mouths, and the journal entries give them a huge amount of traction in conveying the intensity and vulnerability of that voice in such a brief selection…The reading that Kaminsky and Valentine convey shows a particular interest in her thinking about poetry and writing. In this, their homage is also a study: two poets turning around the definition of lyric poetry, looking at the shadows and light a third poet casts on it.”