Tsvetaeva’s Dash: “Readers of Newspapers”
by Mecaria Baker
Despite its form and function as a punctuation mark, the poetic power of the dash is infinite. The dash is illustrative of a gap endowed with physical shape. It suggests actuality through representation, redaction, and echo. It acts as a bridge between disparate points in time and space, underscoring the range in between. A linkage across the void, the dash articulates the void itself and acts in acknowledgement of the abyss between two extremes. It takes place across and negotiates linguistic and cultural boundaries, depicted with varying lengths and frequency. This nonverbal, indeclinable sign creates an area of emptiness that defies materiality and escapes translation.
In Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Readers of Newspapers” (“Chitateli gazet,” 1934), there are twenty-five dashes per sixty-five lines of the poem (in fact, twenty-six, including the dash between the poem's dates). When translated into foreign languages, however, the dashes travel far distances from their native milieu, sometimes disappearing altogether, as if to reflect the experience of Tsvetaeva’s fellow Russian exiles in Europe in the wake of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. The exile experience informs Tsvetaeva’s poem as she contemplates and articulates relocation, misunderstanding, and the inevitable loss of self. The dashes in “Readers of Newspapers” draw a map of sorts, depicting both temporal and spatial movement, and presenting exile more clearly and palpably than any lexical item could seek to attempt. Tsvetaeva’s dash functions as a sign of reiteration and habit, repairing and even perpetuating an interrupted existence. Taking on the role of a preposition, her dash restores and reshapes space and time. It guides the reader along, mimicking the movement and the sound of the train that makes the poem’s subject matter, and extending the straight lines beyond their physical scope. In “Readers of Newspapers,” the dash is used as a relational measure, charting the threshold between two worlds apart. The dashes provide Tsvetaeva’s reader a framework, or a map, to navigate space and time within the liminal condition of exile.
The longest dash in the poem is the train itself. The readers travel along underground, while the world above remains a constant presence and point of reference. In drawing this line between the worlds under and above ground, Tsvetaeva juxtaposes two states of existence, building an axis of sorts that situates those in exile within the relational dash: riding the train. Plunged underground without a clear destination, the riders of the subterranean train find themselves on a journey through purgatory. This is underscored in the motion of the train, always coursing up and down the axis. The verb kacha – […] – / iutsia (“rocking”) in the third stanza is literally split in two. This fragmented word, split between two lines of the poem and punctuated by two dashes and a “quote” from the newspaper in between, creates an auditory experience similar to a train going down the track. In fact, this disjointed pattern is echoed in the two-syllable Russian word for the dash itself: ti-re.
This word and sign, in Tsvetaeva's poem, is used as a locative, prepositional noun, suggesting that the dash, in and of itself, acts habitually. Tsvetaeva’s persistent use of twos and their relation to the forward motion of the train is also represented in the poem's fifth stanza, where there is a dash in each line. In the first two lines of the stanza, the dash follows the word gazet (“newspapers”), while in the last two lines, it appears before the last word in each: navet (“calumny”) and otvrat (“disgust”), respectively. Here, the dash directs the reader’s vision of a newspaper as libel and horror by offering two ways of reading the stanza. The fifth stanza “rocks” back and forth visually, syntactically, and acoustically. Here, Tsvetaeva goes so far as to compare a printing press to gunpowder. But while a gun produces a single sound (shot) per bullet, the printing press is driven by patterned, consecutive clunking similar to the sound of the train.
Tsvetaeva seeks to align the train with the dash by employing the latter as a form of relative measure. The dash, in her poem, becomes a recursive image charged with its own meaning. It is used to represent a range, either spatial or temporal, or both, as if replacing the prepositions “from” and “to.” As such, it displays direction. Tsvetaeva’s underground train is in perpetual motion, dashing through the reality it seeks to capture. Thus, the very idea of distance is drawn throughout the lines of the poem by the continued presence and motion of the dash-cum-train. In “Readers of Newspapers,” such a representation of space, one may argue, is driven by the experience of exile, where time moves forward, but the distance one travels remains indeterminable.
While the dash, in general, is used to reference relative distance, the word tire is foreign to the Russian text of the poem. It is, therefore, indeclinable, suggesting continuous, unidirectional motion. It comes from the French tirer (to pull), which points to the dash’s potential for a forceful action. Nonverbal in nature, not only is the dash associated with the space between the two words it bridges or separates, but it also has the capacity to denote an action and being. Indeed, the dash often seems to replace a verb in Tsvetaeva’s poem.
In “Readers of Newspapers,” the function of the dash is both syntagmatic and paradigmatic, much like the poem itself. The dash, thus, challenges conventional signification in any specific language, as it bridges heterogeneous fragments of reality and channels interaction across cultures, time, and geographies. Tsvetaeva’s poem, centered around the dash as an iconic sign, hints at the possibility of a nonverbal, universal language beyond the categories of time and space. As a cross-out, the dash highlights only the threshold. As a graphic representation of liminality, the dash, thus, enables Tsvetaeva to communicate what cannot be translated or merely articulated.
Her readers of newspapers are faceless and featureless, buried alive underground. These train riders are stripped of individuality, entangled in a web of skeletal dashes that articulate nothing but their mechanical, perpetual motion through the purgatory, or else through exile. While the dashes in Tsvetaeva’s text represent the repetitive pattern of a train in motion syntactically and phonetically, the dashes on the pages of the newspaper may point to the act of editing – of a newspaper column, of life itself.
And yet, the allegorical meanings of the dash are in a constant dialogue (or in a conflict) with its conventional syntactical and grammatical function. While the dash in Tsvetaeva’s poem maps exile, it seems to be replacing – with its straight and soundless line – the verb “to be.” This is why the dashes are drawn throughout the poem, defining the readers of “rotten words,” so to speak, in absentia. As the train carries them down the line, their gradual withdrawal further into the netherworld is akin to the editing process, or censorship. In the final stanza, along those lines, the dash likens the faceless editor of a newspaper to the biblical void: “– pustee mesta – net! –” (“There is no emptier space!”). The three dashes in the original become both a marker of nonbeing and, at the same time, a realized version of absence, a map of the abyss.
The dash is a line, not a space nor a letter. Although it makes no sound, it has form and holds space, underlying its own ephemeral nature. The dash is a punctuation mark that articulates liminal reality and serves as one of the most effective representations of the experience of exile. Conventional language often fails to communicate this reality, but the dash expresses exile as a “pulsation” between life and nonbeing, material existence and apparition, the loss of or withdrawal from time and space and one's presence in both. In short, the dash reconciles each binary. In “Readers of Newspapers,” with its portrayal of the faceless passengers on the subway in Paris as they keep dashing on, the dash communicates exile as an experience where lines are continuously drawn. For Tsvetaeva, the state of exile is ever transitory, always in motion. It is a continued reiteration of actuality. The dash makes this liminal reality palpable, much like standing in the doorway between two rooms.
In Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Readers of Newspapers” (“Chitateli gazet,” 1934), there are twenty-five dashes per sixty-five lines of the poem (in fact, twenty-six, including the dash between the poem's dates). When translated into foreign languages, however, the dashes travel far distances from their native milieu, sometimes disappearing altogether, as if to reflect the experience of Tsvetaeva’s fellow Russian exiles in Europe in the wake of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. The exile experience informs Tsvetaeva’s poem as she contemplates and articulates relocation, misunderstanding, and the inevitable loss of self. The dashes in “Readers of Newspapers” draw a map of sorts, depicting both temporal and spatial movement, and presenting exile more clearly and palpably than any lexical item could seek to attempt. Tsvetaeva’s dash functions as a sign of reiteration and habit, repairing and even perpetuating an interrupted existence. Taking on the role of a preposition, her dash restores and reshapes space and time. It guides the reader along, mimicking the movement and the sound of the train that makes the poem’s subject matter, and extending the straight lines beyond their physical scope. In “Readers of Newspapers,” the dash is used as a relational measure, charting the threshold between two worlds apart. The dashes provide Tsvetaeva’s reader a framework, or a map, to navigate space and time within the liminal condition of exile.
The longest dash in the poem is the train itself. The readers travel along underground, while the world above remains a constant presence and point of reference. In drawing this line between the worlds under and above ground, Tsvetaeva juxtaposes two states of existence, building an axis of sorts that situates those in exile within the relational dash: riding the train. Plunged underground without a clear destination, the riders of the subterranean train find themselves on a journey through purgatory. This is underscored in the motion of the train, always coursing up and down the axis. The verb kacha – […] – / iutsia (“rocking”) in the third stanza is literally split in two. This fragmented word, split between two lines of the poem and punctuated by two dashes and a “quote” from the newspaper in between, creates an auditory experience similar to a train going down the track. In fact, this disjointed pattern is echoed in the two-syllable Russian word for the dash itself: ti-re.
This word and sign, in Tsvetaeva's poem, is used as a locative, prepositional noun, suggesting that the dash, in and of itself, acts habitually. Tsvetaeva’s persistent use of twos and their relation to the forward motion of the train is also represented in the poem's fifth stanza, where there is a dash in each line. In the first two lines of the stanza, the dash follows the word gazet (“newspapers”), while in the last two lines, it appears before the last word in each: navet (“calumny”) and otvrat (“disgust”), respectively. Here, the dash directs the reader’s vision of a newspaper as libel and horror by offering two ways of reading the stanza. The fifth stanza “rocks” back and forth visually, syntactically, and acoustically. Here, Tsvetaeva goes so far as to compare a printing press to gunpowder. But while a gun produces a single sound (shot) per bullet, the printing press is driven by patterned, consecutive clunking similar to the sound of the train.
Tsvetaeva seeks to align the train with the dash by employing the latter as a form of relative measure. The dash, in her poem, becomes a recursive image charged with its own meaning. It is used to represent a range, either spatial or temporal, or both, as if replacing the prepositions “from” and “to.” As such, it displays direction. Tsvetaeva’s underground train is in perpetual motion, dashing through the reality it seeks to capture. Thus, the very idea of distance is drawn throughout the lines of the poem by the continued presence and motion of the dash-cum-train. In “Readers of Newspapers,” such a representation of space, one may argue, is driven by the experience of exile, where time moves forward, but the distance one travels remains indeterminable.
While the dash, in general, is used to reference relative distance, the word tire is foreign to the Russian text of the poem. It is, therefore, indeclinable, suggesting continuous, unidirectional motion. It comes from the French tirer (to pull), which points to the dash’s potential for a forceful action. Nonverbal in nature, not only is the dash associated with the space between the two words it bridges or separates, but it also has the capacity to denote an action and being. Indeed, the dash often seems to replace a verb in Tsvetaeva’s poem.
In “Readers of Newspapers,” the function of the dash is both syntagmatic and paradigmatic, much like the poem itself. The dash, thus, challenges conventional signification in any specific language, as it bridges heterogeneous fragments of reality and channels interaction across cultures, time, and geographies. Tsvetaeva’s poem, centered around the dash as an iconic sign, hints at the possibility of a nonverbal, universal language beyond the categories of time and space. As a cross-out, the dash highlights only the threshold. As a graphic representation of liminality, the dash, thus, enables Tsvetaeva to communicate what cannot be translated or merely articulated.
Her readers of newspapers are faceless and featureless, buried alive underground. These train riders are stripped of individuality, entangled in a web of skeletal dashes that articulate nothing but their mechanical, perpetual motion through the purgatory, or else through exile. While the dashes in Tsvetaeva’s text represent the repetitive pattern of a train in motion syntactically and phonetically, the dashes on the pages of the newspaper may point to the act of editing – of a newspaper column, of life itself.
And yet, the allegorical meanings of the dash are in a constant dialogue (or in a conflict) with its conventional syntactical and grammatical function. While the dash in Tsvetaeva’s poem maps exile, it seems to be replacing – with its straight and soundless line – the verb “to be.” This is why the dashes are drawn throughout the poem, defining the readers of “rotten words,” so to speak, in absentia. As the train carries them down the line, their gradual withdrawal further into the netherworld is akin to the editing process, or censorship. In the final stanza, along those lines, the dash likens the faceless editor of a newspaper to the biblical void: “– pustee mesta – net! –” (“There is no emptier space!”). The three dashes in the original become both a marker of nonbeing and, at the same time, a realized version of absence, a map of the abyss.
The dash is a line, not a space nor a letter. Although it makes no sound, it has form and holds space, underlying its own ephemeral nature. The dash is a punctuation mark that articulates liminal reality and serves as one of the most effective representations of the experience of exile. Conventional language often fails to communicate this reality, but the dash expresses exile as a “pulsation” between life and nonbeing, material existence and apparition, the loss of or withdrawal from time and space and one's presence in both. In short, the dash reconciles each binary. In “Readers of Newspapers,” with its portrayal of the faceless passengers on the subway in Paris as they keep dashing on, the dash communicates exile as an experience where lines are continuously drawn. For Tsvetaeva, the state of exile is ever transitory, always in motion. It is a continued reiteration of actuality. The dash makes this liminal reality palpable, much like standing in the doorway between two rooms.