Life is composed of details - some lines from Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak is likely made the most distant in translation than any of the great cohort of Russian poets I have been reading.  But he works with imagery as well as a purely poetic language, and translators can make their desperate attempts at the imagery if nothing else.

It may be that our knowledge
At the graveside fails.
But life, like autumn stillness,
Is composed of details.  (from “Let words drop, as resin,” 1917)

Please note the rhyme.  Jon Stallworthy and Peter France, in the Penguin Selected Poems (1983) succeed in creating poems that sound like poems that might have been published in poetry magazines circa 1983.  What else they do, I don’t know.  They provide a helpful introduction.  This book is another of those that, apparatus and blank pages aside, ends up with all of ninety pages of poems.  But maybe that’s about right.

from About These Poems

On pavements I shall trample them
With broken glass and sun in turn.
In winter I shall open them
For the peeling ceiling to learn.

The garret will start to declaim
With a bow to the window-frame.
Calamities, eccentricities
Will leapfrog to the cornices.

I don’t want to say that the translators are trampling Pasternak’s poems, but those rhymes, I dunno.  Regardless, I can see what the poet is doing.  Near the end of the poem he turns into Ebenezer Scrooge: “I shall shout to the kids: Hey, you, / What century is it out there?”  A reasonable question in 1917.  What is a poet going to do in the new world that has suddenly appeared outside his room?

As with Anna Akhmatova, the selection of poems become a biography.  Early exuberance (“Verses sob from the pen,” 1912, p. 47) and mastery (“And, Poetry, tonight I’ll squeeze you out / To make the thirsty paper flower,” 1916, p. 55); a revolution that gradually displaces him; a series of tragedies for other poets; a career as a translator, especially Shakespeare; Doctor Zhivago; the Nobel Prize:

Like a beast in a pen, I’m cut off
From my friends, freedom, the sun,
But the hunters are gaining ground.
I’ve nowhere else to run.  (from “Nobel Prize,” 1959, 154)

“Nobel Prize” is among the bleakest poems I have ever read.  “Of what crime do I stand / Condemned?”

And aside from the biography, imagery:

At twilight the swifts have no way
Of stemming the cool blue cascade.  (“Swifts,” 1916, 55)

Love in a foreign city:

Like any rep Romeo hugging his tragedy,
I reeled through the city rehearsing you.  (“Marburg,” 1916, 57)

Then summer took leave of the platform
And waiting room.  Raising his cap,
The storm at night for souvenir
Took snap after dazzling snap.  (“Storm, Instantaneous Forever”, 1917, 72)

Lots of poetry in these poems, still.

The poems from Doctor Zhivago, the ones that make up the last chapter of the novel, are included in Selected Poems.  They are mysteries to me, a deliberate turn to a plainer language that likely resists translation.  A note to the poem “Hamlet” tells me that as of the writing of this book, 1983, a particularly frozen period of Soviet history, “this poem [and a list of others] has never been published in the Soviet union, but thousands of people know it by heart and it was spoken at the poet’s funeral” (159).

No translator will capture that.

this unknown land in the company of terrible peasants - Chekhov crosses the steppe

You cannot go over the road past the fence
Without trampling the universe.  (Boris Pasternak, “Steppe,” 1917, tr. Jon Stallworthy and Peter France)

Or at least seeing the universe, which is a possible summary of Anton Chekhov’s 1888 novella The Steppe.  Yegorushka, “a boy of nine with a sunburnt face, wet with tears,” is crossing the steppe with his uncle and an elderly priest.

It is a one-way trip for Yegorushka, thus the tears.  The men, including the priest, are selling wool, but the boy is going to a new school, far from home.  In the middle of the story, the uncle, for obscure reasons, hands the boy over to the wool-carters, who are traveling in the same direction, allowing Chekhov to mix the boy with characters of a different social class and some different incidents.

Not that there is much in the way of drama in The Steppe.  Yegorushka sees, feels, thinks.  He comes down with a fever near the end, but recovers.  When his uncle and the priest leave him at the end of the story (“something whispered in his heart that he would never see the old man again”) the boy

felt that with these people all that he had known till then had vanished from him for ever.  He sank helplessly on to the little bench, and with bitter tears greeted the new unknown life that was beginning for him now….

What would that life be like?  (302, ellipses Garnett’s)

The implication is that the events of the trip across the steppe are somehow significant, not symbolic but rather part of a web of associations or memories with either the boy’s past life or new life.  Or they are just a series of experiences, which I experience along with Yegorushka.

The travelers go past a prison, and memories stir.  Then a cemetery:

… white crosses and tombstones, nestling among green cherry-tree and looking in the distance like patches of white, peeped out gaily from behind the wall.  Yegorushka remembered that when the cherries were in blossom those white patches melted with the flowers into a sea of white; and that when the cherries were ripe the white tombstones were dotted with splashes like bloodstains.  (163)

Yegorushka’s grandmother is buried there.  He is still in familiar territory – old experiences, old memories.  But he is in a heightened, receptive emotional state.  Everything potentially means something, the distant windmill that is for hours the only interruption of the prairie, the marmots and birds, the storm, the peasants working or traveling, many of whom have their own little stories inset into the larger story, stories that could be independent Chekhov stories if the point of view were swiveled away from the boy.  But this way, these stories become Yegorushka’s stories.  Or not.  Maybe he forgets them.  Who knows?

And these men and the shadows round the camp fire, and the dark bales and the far-away lightning, which was flashing every minute in the distance – all struck him now as terrible and unfriendly.  He was overcome with terror and asked himself in despair why and how he had come into this unknown land in the company of terrible peasants? (270)

I’m not sure I have given a hint about what kind of masterpiece The Steppe is.  Tomorrow, a different approach.  Just ignore this post.

I read and quoted the Constance Garnett version found in The Bishop & Other Stories.