Sunday, March 18, 2012

Tsvetaeva Poem Markup


Just as I am deciding on how I want to present the text used in Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire", I find myself looking for a source list to David McDuff's Tsvetaeva translations: I find none.

One of the poems must have resisted his efforts.  Translators write a forewords and such to advise readers of the challenges they faced.

A web page of translated poems in markup should offer some options (the McDuff book is in a second edition but still lacks 2 pages of sources to offset 25 pages of introduction.)

One option would be to indicate the "shape" of the original.  Consider this instance from McDuff:

“The demon in me’s not dead,”

as a translation of ( phonetic stress added by me )


Жив, а не у́мер
Де́мон во мне!


I am relying on the following Russian-language Wikisource page: Tsvetaeva 1925, which gives the poem entitled by McDuff as "The Demon in Me" as  «Жив, а не умер…»,  but without stress (UNICODE combining characters are inserted AFTER the stressed vowel in my excerpted lines above.)

If, in fact, her two lines were reduced to his one, there is no indication.  One simple way to achieve this is with a Shape in the Curl language.