Translation as Creative Process: Elaine Feinstein’s Marina Tsvetaeva

This essay sheds new light on Elaine Feinstein’s Selected Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva (1971). This publication was crucial, not only in introducing Tsvetaeva to a larger Anglophone audience, but also in influencing Feinstein’s career. Its importance is the more remarkable, as Feinstein was then neither a Russian specialist nor a translator. Using archival material, the essay shows, first, how Feinstein’s versions of Tsvetaeva’s poems present a personal perspective on the Russian writer, echoing Feinstein’s poetic concerns at the turn of the 1970s and, second, how she used these drafts to test new creative possibilities that could be harnessed for her own future practice. More broadly, this is a case study of the links between literary translation and creative writing, when the poet has no previous knowledge of the source language.