Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

eflection when it appears in the water, and is disturbed by the water, by the life of the
water, by its fluid night; interrupted, canceled, and again admitted, and then deeper in the
element, as if already familiar with this mirror world and, after each waning, back again
and more deeply immersed! (You great star!)
Do you know of the young Tycho Brahe's- trip home, made at a time when he wasn't
really allowed to practice astronomy yet, but was on vacation at an uncle's estate ... and
there it turned out that he already knew the sky so exactly, so much by heart (pense: il
savait Ie del par coeur.) that a simple turning-up of his eye, more resting than searching,
bestowed upon him the new star, in the constellation of the Lyre: his first discovery in
starry nature. (And is it not, or am I mistaken, this very star, Alpha in Lyre, "visible de
toute la Provence et des terres méditierranées,' which now seems destined to be named
after the poet Mistral) Would that not be enough, by the way, to make us feel close to this
era - that this is possible again, the poet flung beneath the stars: Tu dlias a ta fille un
jour, en t'anetant a Maillane: void "Mistral," comme il est beau ce soir.' [You'll tell your
daughter one day as you stop at Maillane: look, there is "Mistral," how beautiful it is
tonight!] At last a "fame" beyond being on a street sign!)
But you, Marina, I did not find by my free-ranging eye; Boris placed the telescope in
front of my sky for me.... First, spaces rushed past my up-gazing eye and then, suddenly,
you stood there in the middle of the field, pure and strong, where the rays of your first
letter gathered you up for me.
The most recent of your letters has now been with me since July 9: how often I meant
to write! But my life is so curiously heavy in me that I often cannot stir it from its place;
gravity seems to be forming a new relationship to it - not since childhood have I been in
such an immovable state of soul; but back then, the world was under the pull of gravity
and would press on one who himself was like a wing wrenched off somewhere, from which
feather upon little feather escaped into limbo; now I myself am that mass, and the world
is like a sleep all around me, and summer is so curiously absent-minded, as though it was
not thinking of its own affairs....
As you see, I am again away from Muzot: to see, here at Ragaz, my oldest friends and
the only ones whom I considered still linked to me from Austrian times (how much longer
for their age overtakes me by a great span...). And with them came, unexpectedly, a
Russian woman friend of theirs; a Russian - think how this struck home with me! Now
they are all gone, but I'm staying on a little for the sake of the beautiful aquamarine-clear
medicinal springs. And you
Rainer
Tsvetaeva to Rilke
[PTR p.250-253]
St.-Gilles-sur-Vie
August 2, 1926
Rainer, I received your letter on my name day, July 17/30, for I have a patron saint, if
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