The Pied Piper of Marina Tsvetaeva: Genesis, Reception and Translations of Poems with Commentary

Russian poet Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) is one of the world's most prominent authors of the early 20th century. The Pied Piper (Ratcatcher) is the magnum opus of her work. The aim of my thesis was to literally translate the poem and provide a detailed commentary on the poem. Translation is designed for the future Slavonic Studies, but also for the wider public. The translation is a kind of proposal and could be used as the default text for a possible poetic translation of the poem into Czech. The intention of the commentary is to point out the relationships of the Tsvetaeva's Pied Piper and possible sources of inspiration of the texts of other authors or her own original works. The commentary also explains the concepts specific to the creation of Tsvetaeva and her characteristic individual poetic methods. The commentary, however, provide, nearly no interpretation. It is used only as a supplementary comment on individual parts in order to enable better understanding of the original text and the translation. The first chapters deal with the history of the poem, its genesis, and reception by critics and writers. Followed by technical notes to the translated text, where a reader would find an explanation of the peculiarities of the original text, including syntactic difficulties, which are the clues..