...
Show More
Pasternak's greatest muse and mistress was nature. And when poetry abandoned him for nearly a decade, it was to nature he turned in Peredelkino, and it was nature that replenished him. Maybe I don't really love—I pray
when lovers kiss. The mollusc,
not for an hour, not for eternity,
floats by in joyful light. This book, one of his first (written in 1917, published in 1922), is arguably about human passion, but nature already transpires through it at every turn. It is the steppe that judges, the August leaves dream, the storm is like a priest, the cherry trees bark, one grows as numb as the sweltering sky and rakes up the residue of years like pinecones, even the hours skip past like stones. My sister—life today floods over
and bursts on everyone ub spring rain However, this is an ungrateful book to read in translation. It is difficult to see what all the fuss is about, why it was so important for Russian poets and critics when it came out, why Mandelshtam said it fortified one's breathing and was "a cure for tuberculosis", why it made Tsvetaeva say he was a poet "at the moment bigger than any other" (See "Downpour of Light" in Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry) and fall in love with him. But oh well, the unconsolable incommunicability of Russian poetical mastery is nothing we are not used to with Pushkin sensei. We have come to expect that the true essence of great Russian poetry may be lost in translation, yet we still strive to understand and appreciate it, knowing that there is a depth and beauty that lies just beyond our reach.
when lovers kiss. The mollusc,
not for an hour, not for eternity,
floats by in joyful light. This book, one of his first (written in 1917, published in 1922), is arguably about human passion, but nature already transpires through it at every turn. It is the steppe that judges, the August leaves dream, the storm is like a priest, the cherry trees bark, one grows as numb as the sweltering sky and rakes up the residue of years like pinecones, even the hours skip past like stones. My sister—life today floods over
and bursts on everyone ub spring rain However, this is an ungrateful book to read in translation. It is difficult to see what all the fuss is about, why it was so important for Russian poets and critics when it came out, why Mandelshtam said it fortified one's breathing and was "a cure for tuberculosis", why it made Tsvetaeva say he was a poet "at the moment bigger than any other" (See "Downpour of Light" in Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry) and fall in love with him. But oh well, the unconsolable incommunicability of Russian poetical mastery is nothing we are not used to with Pushkin sensei. We have come to expect that the true essence of great Russian poetry may be lost in translation, yet we still strive to understand and appreciate it, knowing that there is a depth and beauty that lies just beyond our reach.
