Margaree Little, a poet and translator pursuing a master’s degree in Russian, has been named as a finalist for the 2026 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
Little’s translation, At the Edge: Selected Political Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, was published in November by Green Linden Press, highlighting an overlooked side of one of Russian’s best-known 20th century poets.
“I came to her poems first in English translation, and the poems which have been translated into English are mainly her love poems,” Little said. “She had a very tumultuous, complicated personal life and those poems have been emphasized in English. I started to read her work that way, but there would be small excerpts of a poem here or there that were more political, so I began to be curious about that. Looking at the original work, she wrote a lot in this vein, but her poems that speak to these huge historical events she was living through had largely been neglected.”
When she first began reading Tsvetaeva, Little didn’t know the Russian language at all. Later, she started teaching English at the University of Arizona and enrolled in undergraduate classes to begin learning. Last fall, she enrolled in the master’s degree program to gain advanced Russian proficiency.
“The poems made me want to learn the language,” Little said. “As with any poet, the language of Tsvetaeva’s poems is distinctly her own. The way she uses the language is very compressed. It’s not conversational.”
Born in 1892 to a wealthy family, Tsvetaeva lived most of her life in poverty and exile, following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow Famine. She wrote about the personal as well as the political, extensively, until her death in 1941.
At the Edge focuses on Tsvetaeva’s experiences living through turbulent history, including the poetic sequence that Little first worked to translate in 2016, written in response to the Munich Agreement and the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. The parallels between Tsvetaeva’s experiences in the first half of the 20th century and world events today make the poems powerful, Little said.
“They’re specific to the events they’re talking about, but at the same time, they have a resonance where many of them feel as though they could be written today,” she said. “Many people have pointed out the historical parallels between those events and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the failure of the Western democracies to prevent this full-scale invasion. There are parallels to what we’re seeing now in the United States, with the rise of fascism and nationalism, and I think for many people, values that we may have assumed we shared as a society, seeing these values torn apart.”
Little is interested in continuing to translate Tsvetaeva’s poetry, as well as the work of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, contemporaries who also wrote about living through the revolution and the rise of Stalinism and whose work was censored or disappeared in their lifetimes. And Little’s goal isn’t just to focus on work that hasn’t been translated to English, but to revisit poems for more accurate translations.
“When I was looking these poems up word by word and trying to understand the etymology, the grammatical structures, the cultural references, it became evident to me that her work has been mistranslated and misrepresented,” Little said. “People have taken significant liberties with poems and actually changed them in English, often with certain ideas the translators may have had of the poet, the stereotype of a doomed hysterical woman. Many people just accept these translations as Tsvetaeva, but they’re not that close to the original poems. So, I also felt an ethical imperative to translate the poems as closely as possible to the originals.”
In particular, At the Edge represents a side of Tsvetaeva’s work that’s similar to Little’s own poetry. Her book REST (Four Way Books, 2018), winner of the 2018 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2019 Audre Lorde Award, emerged from work she was doing in the borderlands of Southern Arizona, working with No More Deaths to provide direct aid to migrants in the desert.
“I was with a group of volunteers who found the remains of someone who died in the desert and has never been identified. My book emerged out of that experience and is a series of poems thinking about who this man was and what it means to care for or respect another human life when there’s so much we don’t know,” she said. “There are themes that connect my own poetry with the translation work I’m interested in, themes of violence or erasure, but also a sense of survival and resistance and memory.”
Little said she feels fortunate that the University of Arizona provides her with an opportunity to explore those important themes in different ways. In addition to coursework and pursuing translation, she co-teaches Intermediate Russian, which provides a different perspective on the language.
“The Russian and Slavic Studies Department is wonderful and has been so supportive of my path with learning the language, and why I ended up deciding to pursue the graduate program. I’m happy to have the book come out at a time I’m able to be a part of the department,” she said. “The College of Humanities has also been wonderful, and it feels like an intellectual home for my work.”
As far as the PEN award, which will be presented at the Literary Awards Ceremony on March 31 in New York, Little said being in a group of finalists whose work presents translations from Spanish, Arabic and Chinese is a gratifying endorsement of the art of translation itself.
“It’s wonderful that PEN has this award to recognize translation,” she said. “Sometimes in the U.S. we are in a little bit of a bubble as far as reading literature from other parts of the world and other traditions. All of the books on the list are remarkable and important. It’s wonderful to have access to that kind of work from all over the world and different periods of time.”