Books: Pasternak the Poet

POEMS (194 pp.)—Boris Pasternak, translated by Eugene M. Kayden—University of Michigan ($3.95).

Translation is the customs office of poetry. Nothing is more difficult to smuggle into another language and culture than a unique poetic gift. The latest poet of distinction to be hampered, though not stopped, at the literary customs barrier is Nobel Prizewinner Boris Pasternak.

In this faithfully wrought translation by Russian-born Eugene Kayden, professor emeritus of economics at the University of the South, more than a glint of Pasternak’s poetic genius filters through; whole stanzas blaze with life and passion. But, since Pasternak frequently relies on a fusion of images and sounds, perhaps only an inspired fellow poet could devise sensuously idiomatic English equivalents. In Translator Kayden’s rhymes, Pasternak’s lyric song is sometimes reduced to schoolboy singsong.

Whatever its shortcomings, Poems is a significant literary event. Culled mainly from seven slim volumes of his verse produced between 1916 and 1945, this is the first comprehensive collection of Pasternak’s poetry ever to appear in English.

Primacy of the Image. The volume suggests why critics rank him with such movers and shapers of modern verse as Rilke, Valéry, Eliot and Yeats. There is a family resemblance linking Pasternak to these Western poets, but it is that of a distant cousin, not a brother. An occasional image carries the haunting echo of kinship. For example, one poem of Pasternak’s begins:

I’ve come from the street, 0 Spring!

There poplars stand

Amazed, horizons tremble, houses fear they may fall!

There the air is blue like the bundle of linen

A patient takes home, on leaving the hospital.

The last two lines inevitably recall T. S.

Eliot’s memorable “when the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherised upon a table.” But such instances of point-to-point similarity are rare. A Westerner can perhaps best understand Boris Pasternak’s revolutionary impact on Russian verse within the historic Russian context.

The Creative Act. Pasternak was influenced by an esthetic movement in Russian poetry that rebelled against the didactic, social-protest verse of the late 19th century. He was briefly drawn to the “Futurists.” with their sprung rhythms and staccato, telegraphic style. But in many ways he also harks back to the English romantics. With them—Blake, Shelley, Keats—Pasternak sees nature as the handwriting on God’s wall, or at least as the outward sign of an unseen and perhaps mystical order of things. And with the romantics, Boris Pasternak shares the belief that the creative imagination is itself divine, sharing in God’s own creativity. A famed and difficult poem of Pasternak’s, called The Racing Stars, illuminates both style and substance and also reveals that rigid economy of means that sometimes masks Pasternak’s difficult meanings:

The racing stars. Headlands washed in wash of seas.

The salt spray blinded. And tears grew dry.

Night filled the bedrooms. The racing thoughts.

The Sphinx in stillness watched the Sahara sky.

The candles flared. It seemed the blood froze

In the huge Colossus. Lips smiled inside

The swelling blue smile of the wilderness.

Night faded with the ebbing of the tide.

A breeze from far Morocco stirred the sea.

The simoom blew. Arkhangelsk snored in snows.

The candles flared. The first draft of The Prophet

Lay dry. And morning on the Ganges rose.

Pasternak’s subject here is Pushkin’s composition of a poem called The Prophet. A further subject is the creative act itself, including Pasternak’s writing of his poem. This corresponds to his belief that “the world’s best creations describe their own birth.” The birth of the poem, Pasternak seems to be saying, is like the birth of a world, day emerging from night. The poet encompasses the world and suffers to express it (“Blood froze in the huge Colossus”) while the common run of humanity sleeps under the snows. Such is Pasternak’s own creative shorthand that —as with any major poet—the possibilities of symbolic interpretation are almost limitless, without ever offering complete certainty as to the “real” meaning. But an electric current of excitement runs through the poem, in which the meaning is sensed before it is understood.

Message of a Spirit. Much of Pasternak is less complicated. He is often drawn to the simple joys of daily existence:

We should have punched the crazy snow

And, deafened by our noise and play,

Unstopped the mouldy window frames

Like bottled wine, and hailed the day.

As Doctor Zhivago has already shown, the sense of life in Pasternak is heightened by the flashing vigor of his imagery; sometimes he welds disparate images to startle the reader into a rebirth of wonder. At the first patter of a summer drizzle, “dust swallowed up the pills of raindrops.” In an offshore storm, “skies crouch lower/ Flying downward/ Steep/ Sea slopes/ And finger the deep/ With wings of clamorous gulls.”

A poet of so personal a vision was almost certain to be apolitical, but Pasternak was never so swathed in poetic contemplation as not to recognize the hell around him. If his images for it are oblique, they are nonetheless powerful:

In our time the air’s defiled with death:

To open a window is like opening a vein.

In the face of terror and degradation, Pasternak sees history as “the passing storm,” the title of his latest poem, sent to Translator Kayden in manuscript. In it he voices anew his enduring scorn for the “New Man in the wagon of his Plan,” and his hope for humanity’s future:

No swift upheaval swelling of itself

Can make the way for our new age to be;

Our hope—the message of a spirit kindled

By truth revealed and magnanimity.