Marina Tsvetaeva is among the great European poets of the twentieth century. With Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, she retained her humanity and integrity through Russia's 'terrible years' of the Great Terror. Even in her long, tragic exile, her roots were in Russia and the great tradition of Russian poetry. Her voice lives in part because it remains alert to her past, and to cultures, especially French, where she spent her exile. When Elaine Feinstein first read Tsvetaeva's poems in the 1960s, they transformed her. Their intensity and honesty spoke to her directly. To her first translations, published to acclaim in 1971, she added in later years, not least the sequence 'Girlfriend', dedicated to her lover Sofia Parnok. Feinstein published Tsvetaeva's biography in 1987.

Elaine Feinstein was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has worked as a university lecturer, a subeditor, and a freelance journalist. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1980. In 1990, she received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry. Her versions of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva – for which she received three translation awards from the Arts Council – were first published in 1971. Elaine Feinstein's Collected Poems and Translations (2002) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She died in September 2019. Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1891 and had established her reputation as a poet by the age of eighteen. She had a troubled life, in exile for many years: the only continuity was poetry and her loyalty to individual poets. Returning to Russia in 1939, her family was quickly torn apart by Stalin’ s purges: they were suspected of working against the Soviet government. When war came she was evacuated to Yelabuga, where she hanged herself in 1941.