From the Zhivago Cycle

The cycle of twenty-five poems by Yury Zhivago forms the final chapter of Pasternak's novel, and as the distillation of much of the hero's religious, amorous, and other experience, it is a climactic point in the whole work. The cycle also contains some of Pasternak's finest-ever lyrics, and thus, paradoxically, it partially frustrates the tenor of the author's recent assurances and belief that the prose novel was the genre most adequate to the modern age, superseding the poetic lyric. Opinions about the success of Pasternak as novelist, and of his welding of prose and verse, continue to differ, but on the strength of its several poetic gems the success of the Zhivago cycle is rarely disputed. For privileged cognoscenti who know the Russian text, it is thus disappointing to find the poetic climax of Doctor Zhivago so feebly reflected in the English translation, where the poems appear rendered in plain prose and, if read at all, are often perceived as a sort of optional appendix rather than an integral part of the work. The fault is hardly that of translators Manya Harari and Max Hayward. (Their predicament exemplified a situation often repeated in the 1960s and 1970s, when the rush to publish translations of an outstanding Russian original-sometimes from samizdat-resulted in English versions of a quality inversely proportional to that of the original.) Under pressure to produce an English translation as soon as possible after release of Feltrinelli's Italian edition of Doctor Zhivago, Harari and Hayward achieved, under the circumstances, a very serviceable rendering of the prose narrative. But they stopped short of attempting a verse translation of the Zhivago poems. In later English editions, one of Lydia Pasternak Slater's renderings of "A Fairy-Tale" was sometimes appended-intended maybe to give English and American readers some flavor of the Russian. (An unsuccessful attempt, partly, for "A FairyTale" was one of the weaker and untypical items in the cycle, and it gained nothing from Ivinskaya's claim that its depiction of the maiden rescued by St. George was an allegory of her own and Pasternak's story.) There have been subsequent attempts to translate some or all of the Zhivago poems into English verse, with varying degrees of success. The four items printed below are selected from my own translation of the whole cycle. It was begun a few years ago in order to produce poetic versions as epigraphs for various chapters in my recently published study of Pasternak.I Various items such as "Hamlet," "Winter Night," and "August" appear in that volume, and the remaining poems were translated under the fresh impetus of studying the composition story of Doctor Zhivago. I offer these translations without claiming them as the most inspired or best possible renderings of Pasternak's verse. (After several unwarranted claims by earlier translators of Pasternak, I am wary of putting my head upon the block!) However, I believe that