While Pasternak is known in the United States mainly for his novel "Dr. Zhivago" - or, more to the point, the film based on "Dr. Zhivago" - he was quite an accomplished poet. A better poet, I think, than he was a novelist. Although I've never read Mr. Rudman's translation - or, for that matter, any translation at all - "Sister of Mine-Life" keeps to its bosom a host of beautiful poems.
Rather than try to explain Pasternak's incredible gift for metaphor and detail, his absolute love of words - he was a decent translator of Shakespeare and others - I'll roughly approximate my favorite poem, from it's original Russian. It is untitled.
***
My friend, you ask, who ordered
That the holy idiot's speech should blaze?
***
Let us trickle words
As the garden drips amber and lemon
Absently and generous,
Gently, gently, gently.
And there's no need to explain
Why there is such ceremony
Of madder and of lemon
Scattering on leaves.
Who made pine needles rush
On a long stick, like music
Through the locks of Venetian blinds,
To the bookcase.
Who reddened the rug of mountain ash
Rippling beyond the door,
Written through with beautiful,
Quivering cursives.
You ask, who orders
That August be great
To whom nothing is small
Who lives in the finishing
Of maple leaves;
Who, since the days of the Ecclesiastes,
Hasn't left his post
And is hewing alabaster?
You ask, who orders,
That the September lips of asters and dahlias
Shall suffer?
That leaves
Should fall from stone caryatids
To the damp gravestones
Of autumn hospitals?
You ask, who orders?
--Omnipotent God of details,
Omnipotent God of love,
Of Yaigails and Yaidvigas.
I don't know, was it decided,
The riddle of the road to the afterlife,
But life, like the stillness
Of autumn -- is details.
I can't quite transmit the pine needles rushing through the Venetian blinds as boats through a sluice, but I'm sure Mr. Rudman could. Even through my approximate translation, it's possible to see what a man of detail Pasternak was. In my edition, the introduction begins: "With Pasternak, you must hurt" -- as great ideas are, the editor notes, painful.
Pasternak certainly took painful care of his words, his thoughts, his beauty. And "Sister of Mine-Life," one of his earlier collections - (the summer of 1917) - is beautiful, detailed and pained.
***
As a post script, I prefer "Sister of Mine-Life," to "My Sister-Life" because the construction "sistra maya" - rather than "maya sistra" stresses that she's my sister.
Also, because life and sister are both female in gender, "my sister" and "my life" are dually coupled in Pasternak's title. "My" could refer solely to sister, or it could be my life, as well.
