Selected Poems

by Boris Pasternak, Jon Stallworthy (Translator), Peter France (Translator)

Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) lived through his country's savage wars and radical traumas trying to welcome the new order. Trotsky wrote, `Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that is what broke him.' Pasternak said, `He is as free as the wind.'

Genres: Poetry, Russia, Classics, Russian Literature, Fiction, 20th Century, Literature

164 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in Moscow to talented artists: his father a painter and illustrator of Tolstoy's works, his mother a well-known concert pianist. Though his parents were both Jewish, they became Christianized, first as Russian Orthodox and later as Tolstoyan Christians. Pasternak's education began in a German Gymnasium in Moscow and was continued at the University of Moscow. Under the influence of the composer Scriabin, Pasternak took up the study of musical composition for six years from 1904 to 1910. By 1912 he had renounced music as his calling in life and went to the University of Marburg, Germany, to study philosophy. After four months there and a trip to Italy, he returned to Russia and decided to dedicate himself to literature.

Pasternak's first books of verse went unnoticed. With My Sister Life, 1922, and Themes and Variations, 1923, the latter marked by an extreme, though sober style, Pasternak first gained a place as a leading poet among his Russian contemporaries. In 1924 he published Sublime Malady, which portrayed the 1905 revolt as he saw it, and The Childhood of Luvers, a lyrical and psychological depiction of a young girl on the threshold of womanhood. A collection of four short stories was published the following year under the title Aerial Ways. In 1927 Pasternak again returned to the revolution of 1905 as a subject for two long works: "Lieutenant Schmidt", a poem expressing threnodic sorrow for the fate of the Lieutenant, the leader of the mutiny at Sevastopol, and "The Year 1905", a powerful but diffuse poem which concentrates on the events related to the revolution of 1905. Pasternak's reticent autobiography, Safe Conduct, appeared in 1931, and was followed the next year by a collection of lyrics, Second Birth, 1932. In 1935 he published translations of some Georgian poets and subsequently translated the major dramas of Shakespeare, several of the works of Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, and Ben Jonson, and poems by Petöfi, Verlaine, Swinburne, Shelley, and others. In Early Trains, a collection of poems written since 1936, was published in 1943 and enlarged and reissued in 1945 as Wide Spaces of the Earth. In 1957 Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak's only novel - except for the earlier "novel in verse", Spektorsky (1926) - first appeared in an Italian translation and has been acclaimed by some critics as a successful attempt at combining lyrical-descriptive and epic-dramatic styles.

Pasternak lived in Peredelkino, near Moscow, until his death in 1960.

Reviews

[Julie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

About 10 years ago, my washing machine started making this high-pitched sound whenever I ran it. I called a company, in the hopes of repairing the machine, and a tall, older Russian repairman showed up at my house.

He was the anti-hero of this story, a man who reeked of cigarettes and who callously pronounced my machine as “Dead!” in the first three minutes of his arrival.

As he was explaining the irrevocable problem to me (Men Explain Things to Me) and I glazed over from soul-crushing boredom, I suddenly became excited, realizing I had a real life Russian in my midst and I could finally talk about one of my favorite writers, Boris Pasternak, to someone who was in the know.

I gushed at him, like a schoolgirl, “I love Boris Pasternak!!” Blink, blink, blink.



He looked up at me, bored, from his boring clipboard of dead washing machine statistics, and shouted in my face, “BAH! Boris Pasternak is CRAP! He is GARBAGE!”

I was stunned. What a bastard!

I stammered back, “Boris Pasternak is crap? You might as well say Tolstoy is crap.”

He didn't miss a beat, shouted, “BAH! Tolstoy is CRAP! He is GARBAGE!”

That's when I started to laugh. There's a part of me that appreciates an equal opportunity hater.

I was like, “Oh, I get it. You hate everyone.”

He grumbled something under his breath (all Americans are crap) and was like, "You need a new washer. One that isn't crap."

As he pulled out of the driveway, I raised my fist like Ludwig Bemelmans's Madeline and shouted (in my mind only), “Boris Pasternak isn't crap! YOU'RE crap!”

Y'all, don't ever talk smack about Boris Pasternak.



If I had known that this is what happens,
When I first stood up and read;
That poetry is murderous,
Will strangle you and leave you dead. . .

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Has all the greatest hits - "Ballada," "Sorrento Photographs," "In Petrovsky Park" - in translations I cannot evaluate, as well as lovely pieces from his repudiated first collections. I love the dainty, balletic melancholy of this one:

Precious ladies long ago,
Richardson-reading company;
I visited your ancient home,
glanced from the lofty balcony

at far-off meadowlands and woods,
and sweetly came to the realization:
all your world has disappeared
and gone all its fascination.

Gardens with no flowers now,
a harpsichord that no one plays;
no more the old men's endless sighs
for darling Empress Catherine's days.

I did not run my fingers down
the books that stood in serried rows,
and yet their mouldy graveyard smell
I found congenial to my nose.

I thought how fifty years have left
this place deserted, void and glum.
O may my life be troubled now
entirely by the things to come!

I walk in bliss through flowerbeds
of broken urns, and glorify
thy flight, O Saturn, over us
along the empty starry sky.

Untitled - I would call it "Sarabande for a Salonnière."

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

At night, when I can't get to sleep
Revelation leaps up from the sofa
To fit the whole world in a page,
To accommodate all in a stanza;

This verse deserves ten stars. Pasternak reaches those elements of my brain which long to be religious, it enriches the dimension of my soul which remains capacious and rife with wonder. The chronology appeared well informed by Pasternak's autobiographical exercises which I read last year. There's an artful exuberance and a whirling despair. The homages to both Mayakovsky and Blok were stellar. Both touched me. The cold eye of science blushes as a foggy mysticism winks. It is the nature of things. Is the number of rooks perched on a hedge significant? What could such portend?

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without obstetrician, in darkness, unconscious,
The towering Urals, hands clawing the night,
Yelled out in travail and fainting away,
Blinded by agony, gave birth to light.

- - -

My sister, Life, is today overflowing
And smashing herself in spring rain on our coats,
But people with monocles are not amused
And bite, quite politely, like snakes in the oats.

- - -

How good it was then to go out into quietness!
The steppe's boundless seascape flows to the sky.
The feather grass sighs, ants rustle in it,
And the keening mosquito floats by.

- - -

Beer raving, cascading off
The moustache of precipice, headland, cliff,
Spit, shoal, and knot. The blazing and roar
Of the deep, drenched with moonlight
As from a washtub. Sucking gale and fume
And thunder. Light, as day. All lit by foam.
You can't tear you eyes from that sight.
Surf pounding the sphinx spares no candles
And fresh ones it promptly rekindles.
A cliff and gale. A cliff and cloak and hat.
The sphinx's lips inhale the salty breath
Of fogs. The sand all round is smeared
With medusan kisses of death.

- - -

No one will be in the house
But twilight. Just the same
Winter day in the gap
The gathered curtains frame.

Only swiftly beating wings
Of white flakes as they fall.
Only roofs and snow, and but
For roofs and snow — no one at all.

- - -

I am dead, but you are living.
And the wind, moaning and grieving,
Rocks the house and the forest,
Not one pine after another
But further than the furthest
Horizon all together,
Like boat-hulls and bowsprits
In an unruffled anchorage,
Rocked out of aimless rage,
But with a sad heart seeking
Words for your cradle-song.

[Ehsan'Shokraie' · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I ve heard about old age,what an omnious forebidings!
That no wave will lift again to the stars ..
The waters will speak no more..no god in the woods
no heart within the pools,no life in meadowlands."



"Where dusk is empty like a broken tale,
Abondened by stars,motionless
expressionless,unfathomable
a thousand clamouring eyes are in confusion"


"For in the silence of your passing
there s reproach left unexpressed.."

[Angelina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my first literary encounter with Pasternak and I'm glad that I finally read something by him. I can't say I really enjoyed his poetry (and I partially blame the English translation although I understand that translating Russian poetry is no easy feat). Still, there were poems, especially among the later ones, that I liked a lot. I also learned a bit about his life, which helped me understand his works better. I was particularly intrigued by the fact that he wanted to become a pianist in his youth but later abandoned this dream deciding he lacked the necessary talent. He was also a prominent translator (for long periods of time this was his only source of income, according to his son). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 for his novel Doctor Zhivago, which made him a pariah in the Soviet Union despite the fact he was world famous. In fact, he barely avoided an arrest and deportation and died less than two years later.

WINTER APPROACHES

Winter approaches. And once again
The secret retreat of some bear
Will vanish under impassible mud
To a tearful child's despair.

Little huts will awaken in lakes
Reflecting their smoke like a path.
Encircled by autumn's cold slush,
Life-lovers will meet by the heath.

Inhabitants of the stern North,
Whose roof is the open air,
'In this sign conquer' is written
On each inaccessible lair.

I love you, provincial retreats,
Off the map, off the road, past the farm.
The more thumbed and grubby the book,
The greater for me its charm.

Slow lines of lumbering carts,
You spell out an alphabet leading
From meadow to meadow. Your pages
Were always my favourite reading.

And suddenly here it is written
Again, in the first snow – the spidery
Cursive italic of sleigh runners -
A page like a piece of embroidery.

A silvery-hazel October.
Pewter shine since the frosts began.
Autumnal twilight of Chekov,
Tchaikovsky and Levitan.
(1943)

[Mihalachi Mihai · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Grădina își tot cerne cărăbușii,
Ca-n somn cenușa, din fărașe grele,
Atârnă floarea cerurilor, toată,
La înălțimea lumânării mele

Ca la credința nouă, neștiută,
Mă convertesc la noaptea asta-ncinsă,
În care-un plop dărăpănat, cu cornul
Pe lună-nscrie o eclipsă."

[Jazzy Lemon · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's Pasternak. That says it all.

[Illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pasternak often writes about nature in itself and in relation to us. He stresses we’re part of it and even suggests we’re at one with it.

[William West]

The impulse behind Pasternak's poetry often seemed to me to be an inversion of that of his contemporary and pen-pall Marina Tsvetaeva. Whereas for Tsvetaeva art was a negation, or a replacement of subjective reality, for Pasternak art was that which preserves subjectivity and makes emotion into something lasting.

In terms of his subject matter, Pasternak seemed more directly indebted to Alexander Blok than the other celebrated poets of his generation, although they all fed off of Blok to some degree or another. His Russian landscapes are as alive as Blok's, but are far more benevolent and, for me at least, less interesting.

The most interesting aspect of this anthology, for me, was probably the ways in which it became apparent that Pasternak tried to adapt his style to the regime of Stalinist socialist-realism. I think he did so quite brilliantly, the language becoming vastly more accessible, even at times cruder, without compromising his poetic vision.

[Aino · Rating 4 out of 5]

palaan tähän varmasti vielä myöhemmin, en lue lyriikkaa samalla lailla ku proosaa… tykkäsin, runojen kanssa vaan harmittaa erityisesti että voin lukee vain käännöksen
ja siis 4,5 ehkä? mut vaikee arvioida esim. kääntäjien työtä ku ei tiiä yhtään miltä alkuperäset runot kuulostaa

[Maya · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It may be that our knowledge
At the graveside fails,
But life, like autumn stillness,
Is composed of details."

Another from my Nonno's poetry collection :')

[John Fenerov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a wonderful book. Filled with poems that the protagonist wrote in his work as a poet while the Revolution descends. There's a passage my old prof used to call "the transfiguration of the ordinary" where he watches his love, Lara, ironing. Enjoyed this essay very much. Pevear and Volokhonsky aim to help today’s readers “read the novel in a new way, to see more clearly the universality of the image that Pasternak held up against the deadly fiction of his time.”

[Martina Bahat · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Buka presta. na podij sam stao.
I prislonjen na dovratak čekam,
Iz odjeka ne bih li saznao
Što će zbiti se za moga vijeka.
No raspored određen je, jasan,
Svršetak se mijenjati ne može,
U toj farizejštini ja sam sam.
Život živjet nije lako, Bože!"

[g026r · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am reminded, while reading this, of Ann Pasternak Slater's comments on Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations of her uncle's poems that accompany Doctor Zhivago:

"There are many bad translations of Pasternak's poems," she said, and described those as "no worse than the rest." Similar words that could be used just as easily to describe this mid-century — containing nothing later than 1938's The Second Birth — collection of verse, translated by J. M. Cohen.

The resultant translations are, by the translator's admission, attempts at literal renditions of the original Russian. These versions' imagery feels uninspired and grey, the rhythms dead; a crib sheet to determine the meaning, but with no clues to point the reader towards the appeals of the original.

As Slater would say: "Not inaccurate, and lacking everything."

[Hamish · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with the other reviewer, the Rudman translation (of My Sister-Life, which is godlike and you should go read right now) is a lot better. Stallworthy and France do a rhymed/metered translation here. When I put them side by side with the non-rhymed/metered Rudman translations and the also non-rhymed/metered translations of the Dr Zhivago poems in my edition of that novel, what they seemed to lose in meaning was much greater than what they gained in rhyme and rhythm. Still, I was really glad to get to read poems here that aren't contained in those other volumes, though Pasternak fell off a bit after My Sister-Life (though came back a bit at the end).

[Becca H · Rating 4 out of 5]

He is probably even more incredible in Russian

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

My introduction to Boris Pasternak came when I read "The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers" in an anthology of Russian novellas. That was several years ago. Then, roaming the stacks in the Chapel Hill Public Library, I came across "Selected Poems."

The forward by his son Yevgeny Pasternak invites the English reader to love Boris Pasternak through the work of translators Jon Stallworthy and Peter France. After reading the forward, I felt, "OK, it's alright for me to appreciate Pasternak even though I don't read Russian.

The introduction by Stallworthy and France is a brief biography of Pasternak, leading me to want to read more about this great author and thinker who grew up in Soviet Russia but was never bound by the constricting character of communism. Reading their English renditions of his brilliant poetry has me now thirsting for more of Pasternak. If I weren't neck-deep in several other books, I would begin "Dr. Zhivago" tonight.

As it is, I am deeply moved by the poems of Pasternak I have read. I still struggle with poetry as a genre (and probably always will), but Pasternak makes the struggle worth the effort.

[Natasha Galkina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Не уверена, что это именно тот сборник, который я прочла. Долго смотрела на фотографию поэта на обложке.
Прочитала биографию поэта во введении. Из биографии было приятно узнать, что первыми его роман Доктор Живаго напечатали в итальянском издательстве.
Что касается самой поэзии из сборника, чувствуется влияние переводческой деятельности, интерес к поэзии других народностей, т.к. метафора очень сильная, в этом плане восточная. От первого стиха в сборнике даже пошли мурашки, потому что стих неожиданно живой как сценарий фильма, но от лица предметов и явлений. Потом я привыкла и уже не совсем внимательно читала, но в целом осталась заинтересована. Хочется прочесть Доктор Живаго теперь, вообще наверное проза у поэтов это как поэзия в квадрате.

[Essie-Marie F. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful poems. His imagery is simple, yet powerful. I definitely flailed over this book.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Something about the selections, combined with the minimal footnotes and largely biographical introduction, left me underwhelmed.

[Fred · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent.

[Anekdotisch Probleem · Rating 4 out of 5]

7.7/10

[Samira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sublime. 🥰

[Elizabeth]

I'm not sure I am qualified to rate this.

[Neil Gussman]

Beautiful poetry spanning a long life that began in beauty and ended in tragedy.

[Jim Agustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remains one of those books that begs to be read again. The first time I read it was nearly 20 years ago, as a fresh graduate from university with little knowledge of Russian literature. These poems rarely feel like translations. The introduction gives an exceptional account of Paternak's dramatic life, making clear connections with his major works.

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really struggled with these poems. I had to read lines over and over because they didn’t make sense to me, and I didn’t understand the imagery at all. I was hoping to find some of the soul-mate tenderness of Doctor Zhivago, but I didn’t find any in here. I have the 1958 edition, translated by Cohen, who uses a literal translation method; maybe it’s a translation thing.

[Abbi Dion]

and this too i gave away, flushed with attention

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had trouble getting into these. Might be a translation thing, which I've had happen with other Russian poets.