From the left flap: The poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva is the fruit of passion. So is the present book of side-by-side verse translations. Our aim was to preserve not simply the rhyme, or rhythm, or music, or meaning, or special effects, but all of the above to the extent dictated by our love and pride for the originals. This love, and the sense of grandeur of the phenomenon we are barely touching are what we hope to confer upon the reader. Sample from the book. Marina Tsvetaeva, Nostalgia (Toska po rodine, 1934) Nostalgia, homesickness! Oh, what a long-denunciated longing! It matters absolutely not where I would absolutely lonely be, passing by which street-name sign I'd roll back home my shopping barrows - A home, yet clueless it is mine, as if a hospital or barracks. It makes no difference, whose grins amid, to bristle like a captive beast, nor from which fraternal rings to be expelled - into effective self-insulation - where belong. I, a Kamchatkan floe-less bear, - where not to (try to) get along, where to abase myself - don't care! The mother-tongue, its luring pitch, too, to my hearing, risks no dangers. It couldn't matter less in which to be misunderstood by strangers (books' readership, or gossip's ears, consumers of newspaper pages ...) They're in the nineteen-something years, and I'm yet in unnumbered ages! To me, impressionable like a log in a forgotten forest, all means the same, all looks alike, and maybe most alike, and foremost the same - and sane - remains the past. All dates, all tags I used to bear, have been stripped off of me at last: A mortal given birth - somewhere. So thoroughly my native soil abandoned me, that - search the ground and far and wide across my soul! - a single birthmark won't be found! Each home feels void, each temple vain, all ties are burnt, all ashes buried. But if a bush is on my way, especially a rowan-berry ...