Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Russian and Irish

Russian and Irish

The translator of these last poems by Boris Pasternak tells us that the poet’s intended Russian title for the collection was a phrase of two words, meaning roughly, ‘When the weather is going to clear up.’ The fact that we know the weather did not clear up for Pasternak gives an edge to our inquiry into his work. One realises before one is half-way through the book, with an old frustration renewed, the severe limits of all verse translation. Michael Harari has no doubt done a thoroughly workmanlike job. At times the page leaps to life –

Abrupt horizons menace
The unhealed twilight, bruised
And bleeding like the scar-crossed
Legs of the Reaper.
The sky has many gashes,
Gale-warnings of disaster.
The marshes smell of rust,
Water and iron.

And one suspects bitterly that the Russian on each alternate page is loaded with such significant images that have been damaged in transit across the English frontier. There is another obstacle. Pasternak happened to be a major novelist and a minor poet. These small, glass-like pastoral slides shown on thepage 459 magic-lantern, so carefully non-human except in relation to the tragic eye of the lantern-man, can irritate a reader who remembers Dr Zhivago. They are good as perfectly crystallised candies are good. But one begins to miss the language of passion.

Padraic Colum would not agree with the character in one of Yeats’s love poems who speaks of Ireland as ‘a land of plaster saints’ or with the bare violent wit of Brendan Behan. Unfortunately Colum writes as if Ireland were always holy; he lacks the needle of satire to thread his beads together, and they spread and roll on the floor. The best thing in the book is a bare non- Irish poem on the Stations of the Cross.

1961 (250)