Marina Tsvetaeva's poem “Longing for the motherland, long ago…” and its three English translations

The article dwells upon a comparative analysis of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem “Longing for the Motherland” and its three English translations performed by Elaine Feinstein, David McDuff, and Christopher Whyte. The novelty of the approach is based on pinpointing the transformations performed by the translators, exploring their reasons and describing their influence on the main idea of the original. The comparative analyses of the original and its three versions have shown that all the three translators are trying to be as close to the original as possible but in each version Tsevetaeva’s poem is seriously transformed. The transformations concern all those aspects which constitute the specific nature of the original text: national and individual concepts, syntax, phonosemantics, metre, rhythm, punctuation, intonation. The concepts “longing for the motherland” and “motherland” appeared to be especially difficult for translation. The recoding of these concepts to the language of the target culture utterly changed the main idea of the poem in the versions by Whyte and Feinstein. The original is based on an attempt of the persona of the poem to persuade herself that she, in spite of her Russian nature, does not feel any nostalgia. In Feinstain’s version, the persona’s emotions are “translated” into the language of the British culture: the longing for coming back to the place, where you were born, where your kin come from, where the people you belong to live, give way to homesickness. Whyte highlights in the persona the universal character of her feelings, showing the tragic restlessness of an emigrant deprived of her home and her hearth. In the version by MacDuff, which converted Tsvetaeva’s idea most closely, the very fact of recoding “тоска по родине” (longing for the Motherland) into another language deprives it of all the emotions so special about the Russian nostalgia.