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My Sister-Life
 
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My Sister-Life [Paperback]

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (Author), Mark Rudman (Author, Translator), Bohdan Boichuk (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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From the Back Cover

In Russian poetry, Boris Pasternak's My Sister¾Life is the equivalent of The Waste Land, Spring and All, and Harmonium. But it is also accessible to the general reader, and belongs on a slender shelf of great love poems. Written in the summer of 1917, the cycle of poems in My Sister¾Life concentrates on personal journeys and loves, but is permeated by the tension and promise of the impending October revolution. Pasternak is an uncompromisingly complex poetic stylist, and his meticulous attention to structure, etymology, and the phonetic qualities of words makes his poetry a formidable challenge for the translator. Mark Rudman renders Pasternak's poetic masterpiece with verve and intelligence.

Paskternak's poems, writes Rudman in his introduction, evoke "the constant movement and change that occurs from moment to moment and in hitherto unseen connection between disparate things." His unencumbered and startling perceptions of the world are dense, rich, and surreal: In the orphaned, sleepless, Damp universal waster Groans tore from their posts, The whirlwind dug in, abated. A SULTRY NIGHT Osip Mandelstam wrote, "To read the poems of Pasternak is to get one's throat clear, to fortify one's, breathing....I see Pasternak's My Sister¾Life as a collection of magnificent exercises in breathing...a cure for tuberculosis." This English version, which includes "The Highest Sickness," is a heady gust that matches the intensity and power of the Russian. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) won the Nobel prize in literature in 1958. He is best known in the West for his novel Doctor Zhivago. Mark Rudman was born in New York City where he now lives with his wife and son. He is an Adjunct Professor at NYU. His books include Rider, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for 1994; Realm of Unknowing: Meditations on Art, Suicide, and Other Transformations, and The Couple (2001). Rudman also received the Max Hayward Award from the Translation Center at Columbia University for My Sister¾Life. Bohdan Boychuk is a prominent Ukrainian poet who critiqued and guided Rudman's version of Pasternak. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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1.0 out of 5 stars Pasternak's poetry murdered, April 9 2010
By 
This review is from: My Sister-Life (Paperback)
Pasternak is a great poet, but this translation murdered his poetry completely. The translations have neither rhyme nor rhythm nor do they make any sense. It reads like some nonsense poetry, or a "tale, told by an idiot, signifying nothing". The originals are highly poetic, with their own delicate rhythm, perfect metre and good rhymes. None of this survived in this so-called translation. To pass THIS for a translation is a blatant fraud. An American reader will probably shrug and pass by Pasternak's books next time, and this will be a crying shame.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Right up there with Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, and Pushkin, May 20 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: My Sister, Life (Paperback)
Pasternak's poetry is better than his prose. Why he is still often better known for the latter baffles me. I suggest this or any of his collected poems to the reader looking for creative, quality poetry. Pasternak certainly ranks as one of the greatest amongst the group of very talented Russian poets that emerged during the first quarter of the 20th centuary. His poems deserve just as much (if not more) recognition as his novels.
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Amazon.com: 5.0 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Sister of Mine: Poetry of Detail

, Sep 5 1996

By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: My Sister-Life (Paperback)
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.


5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful poetry of material things, April 15 2007
By Martin H. Dickinson "Walker in the woods, dis... - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: My Sister, Life (Paperback)
Some of our strongest poets are those who energize the material things and concrete sensations of daily life in special ways. Objects set apart by poetic imagination and power become sacred and establish a bond between the reader as perceiver and the thing perceived. By extension the bond opens the reader to an entire universe of ensouled matter--a new way of looking at the world.

Such is the poetry of Boris Pasternak in this 1917 book written at the height of The Great War and on the eve of the October Revolution. Pasternak's spirited materialism predates William Carlos Williams's concept "No ideas but in things."

Pasternak sets many of these poems in concretely described locations where his magical materialism can go to work. In "The Flies of the Moochkap Teahouse,"

The spirit sweats--the horizon's
tobacco-tinged--like thought
Windmills image a fishing village
Boats and weathered nets.

This poet's world view of ensouled materiality provides a unique perspective on the new century just beginning. Each reader must decide for him or herself just how prescient or prophetic Pasternak's "The Definition of Soul" was to become.

It falls like a ripe pear into the storm
with a single clinging leaf
How faithful--it quits its branch--
reckless--it chokes in the heat.

We learn much about Pasternak from his later novel and the film (Dr. Zhivago) it spawned--but we don't experience his power as a poet. He was possibly the the most poetically powerful of figures in what is known as the Silver Age of Russian Literature, including Marina Tsvetaeva Selected Poems (Tsvetaeva, Marina) (Twentieth-Century Classics), Osip Mandelstam Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (New York Review Books Classics), Anna Akhmatova Anna Akhmatova (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets), and Nikolai Gumilyov The Pillar of Fire, among the most talented and brilliant poets of the twentieth century. They bore the brunt of the Soviet regime's ideological attacks and physical repression.

Here is poetic brilliance and talent of the first rank--the power of poetry of material things on display.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Right up there with Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, and Pushkin, May 20 2002
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: My Sister, Life (Paperback)
Pasternak's poetry is better than his prose. Why he is still often better known for the latter baffles me. I suggest this or any of his collected poems to the reader looking for creative, quality poetry. Pasternak certainly ranks as one of the greatest amongst the group of very talented Russian poets that emerged during the first quarter of the 20th centuary. His poems deserve just as much (if not more) recognition as his novels.
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