- Paperback: 112 pages
- Publisher: Imprint unknown (Jun 11 1989)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0727504479
- ISBN-13: 978-0727504470
- Shipping Weight: 503 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
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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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Pasternak's poetry murdered,
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.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Right up there with Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, and Pushkin,
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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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) 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
,
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.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful poetry of material things,
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,
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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