Pasternak Samples

To follow up on a previous post related to George Reavey's translations, here a few favorite snippets of Pasternak's poetry.

The dawn, a venomed, famished viper,
Crawled into holes,
And jungles held moist air of requiem
And finer incense.

O silence--you're the best
Of all I've ever heard.

How soporific it is to live!
To kiss--what utter insomnia.

Who knows if the riddle's answered
Of what's beyond the grave;
But life--like autumn silence--
Is always deep in detail.

There's no nostalgia in the world
That snow will not completely cure.

Were I a man--and not a mere collection here
Of lips and temples, eyes, hands, shoulders, fingers, cheeks!--
Then I'd let rip in crackling verse, in strident lines,
In the boisterous strength and freshness of nostalgia:
I'd have succumbed to them, and led them to the assault;
I would have stormed your citadel, my staggering shame!

Like--Time. For suicide she finds no cause,
And thinks it slow--a tortoise at best.

For in these days the very air reeks of death.
An open window is an open vein.

We were people. But now we are epochs.

An avalanche of diary sheets cast yearly into the fire?

What if the universe wear a mask?

We gave so much to Christmas trees!
If only we could get some back.

These days were like a diary.
One read them at a guess.
At any page.

I was not born to look three times
In different ways into men's eyes.
Far more ambiguous than song,
The dull, blunt word of "enemy."

I'm now oblivious to the day
When, in the deep Pacific depths.
Of gaping Japanese abyss,
A telegram could tell the class
(What an erudite sea-diver!)
Of workers from the class of Octopi.

My life is no faint-figured draft--
It's something solid teeth will crack on.

So, for a time become immortal,
We're numbered in the face of pines:
From epidemics, plagues, all ills
And death, we're now for once immune.

Creation is as subtly deceptive
As a story with a happy ending.

Passion of Pasternak

Pasternak's longevity as a Soviet poet is remarkable. Few gifted writers or poets of the first order of talent survived the age of Stalin, who knew Pasternak well enough to call him from time to time. Pasternak, famous in America for his romantic novel Dr. Zhivago, was a brilliant poet, worthy of the Nobel Prize nomination he declined out of deference (or fear) of the Soviet government and literary establishment.

Soviet Roulette hasn't yet hired a poetry editor, so I'll have to do the work of analyzing George Reavey's translations of The Poetry of Boris Pasternak. In brief, I'll call this poetry inventive, intelligent, and exceedingly obtuse. (Reavey adds the adjective, optimistic, here too). At times, Pasternak seems to have bowed to political and social pressures in produce poetry that transparently served the interests of the the Soviet state. Although his political poems (on 1905, Stalin, and World War II) are limpid, they somehow seem uninspired and far less profound than his lyrical treatment of natural themes. But when Pasternak addresses a natural topic, he's in his element: confident, impersonal, reverent, and expressive.

While it's usually very difficult to discern the author's meaning with any certitude, line by line Pasternak is almost always rewarding. The phrasing is complex, rich, and relentlessly unexpected. To me, Pasternak's poetry resembles Virginia Woolf's prose, which, at the level of the sentence, is sometimes so beautiful and complex that it overpowers the meaning of the paragraph in which it finds itself. In fact, the comparison need not end there. In both cases, the sound of the words--the alliteration, the rhyme, the cadence--is at least as important as its communicative purpose. This isn't a criticism: perhaps poetry is supposed to work this way; perhaps a poem ought to resemble a riddle more than an an article or treatise.