Marina Cvetaeva and Twelve Poems by Federico Garcia Lorca

Abstract

This paper analyzes twelve poems by Federico García Lorca that Marina Cvetaeva received from the Russian Hispanist F. Kel’in and translated in 1941. Out of them, five poems were translated into Russian, five into French (these texts were identified and republished only in 2020), and two poems remained untranslated. In this paper, we analyse Cvetaeva’s translation process as a reception of texts and compare poetic images from García Lorca’s original poems with Marina Cvetaeva’s images in translations and her work. It is a well-known fact that Cvetaeva wrote to Kel’in saying she liked Lorca and that the poems were well chosen for her. This statement became the starting point of the work. We demonstrate the typological proximity and similarities of imagery between García Lorca’s poems and Cvetaeva’s work and trace possible echoes of Cvetaeva’s poetry in translations from the Spanish poet. In searching for translation solutions, Cvetaeva activates her vocabulary, as well as metrical, rhetorical, and compositional techniques, and introduces allusions to the works of other Russian authors into the texts.

Keywords

• 20th Russian poetry
• Russian Literature