Boris Pasternak's Last Poems

...To say, as Sir Maurice does, that in Pasternak's late poetry "the movement of the verse is much more regular" certainly requires some very important reservations...

...The chronological subtitle of the book is slightly inaccurate in that it contains no poems written after January 1959, and no evidence that any of them were written before 1946...

...Interestingly, now that Pasternak has been rehabilitated in the Soviet Union, Russian readers seem to be showing a preference for his later poetry...

...George Katkov...

...Zhivago...

...The book is divided into three parts: 1) the 25 poems from Dr...

...Zhivago...

...Whatever similarities there might have been between the two poets in those early days, they were clearly not of language...

...Yet Katkov seems to have been a bit too parsimonious with his notes...

...others see in it a decline of poetic power, freshness and originality, feeling that none of it comes up to the wonderful poems in My Sister Life and Themes and Variations...

...A great number of poems are left uncommented upon, and while in some of them the absence of commentary may be understandable, there are others—for instance, "Grass and Stones," "Night," "The Nobel Prize" and "Wide World"— which deserve to have certain points clarified for the non-Russian reader...

...While no Zhivago poems are included, 35 of the 44 postZhivago poems are (some of them were quite new to the Soviet reader), the few omissions quite obviously dictated by ideological reasons...

...As for George Katkov's notes, they are, in his own words, designed to clarify "for the reader not familiar with Pasternak's literary work as a whole the connection between the individual poems and the principal trends underlying his other works, especially his prose writings...

...2) the 33 poems which made up When the Skies Clear, originally published in Paris in 1959, with one poem added...

...The "two or three slim volumes" obviously refer to On Early Trains (1943) and The Earth's Expanse (1945): The first also contained poems of high quality...

...Aside from inaccuracies, Sir Maurice makes some highly debatable claims...

...The Soviet volume of his selected poems published in late 1961, for instance, contains relatively few poems from his early books, whereas The Second Birth and the wartime books are very fully represented...

...author, "Soviet Russian Literature: 1917-1950" This handsome bilingual edition of Boris Pasternak's late poems— all of them translated earlier—contains all the verse known to have been written during the last 15 years of the poet's life...

...As for the poems attributed to Yuri Zhivago, of which Kamen says that certain of them "can probably be dated by their reference to events in Pasternak's own life"—he makes no attempt to do so, however—it is now known that they were all written between 1946-52...

...Some people view it as the peak of his poetic achievement...

...The additional lines, which greatly enhance the value of the poem, were first made known in the three-volume edition of Pasternak's Collected Works in Russian published by the University of Michigan in 1961 and edited by Boris Filippov and myself...

...His notes are often illuminating, especially in relating the poems (and not merely those of Yuri Zhivago) to the themes of the Dr...

...As Pasternak's translator, Kamen has brought to a near impossible task great sympathy and understanding...

...What about the poems themselves and the quality of the translations...

...Reviewed By GLEB STRUVE Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, University of California...

...and 3) the 10 poems written in 1958-59...

...Speaking of the poet's years of more or less enforced silence, for example, he maintains that in the last 30 years of his life Pasternak "published almost no original poetry," and that "apart from two or three slim volumes, not of the highest quality, issued during the War, his publication output was limited to his noble translations of Shakespeare and Goethe.' A double error is at work here: The Second Birth, a book which contained some first-rate poetry, was published in 1932 and reissued in 1934...

...Both opinions are erroneous, though the former is closer to the truth...

...In my opinion, those difficulties were not only gigantic but insurmountable, and Kamen is to be congratulated on his gallant attempt to grapple with them...

...Recourse to the Michigan edition would also have made it possible to date more precisely 18 of the poems in When the Skies Clear, for which the editor, Henry Kamen, claims accurate dates are hard to find...

...There are several imprécisions in Sir Maurice's short introduction...

...Pasternak's poetic output between 1946-59 is somewhat uneven, but much of it—most of the Zhivago poems, and many of those that followed—belongs to his greatest poetry...

...Actually, these poems were all marked by Pasternak, when he was preparing a selected volume of his poetry for publication, as written in the summer of 1957...

...In the preamble to his notes, Katkov describes the translator as "sensitive and courageous" and speaks of "the gigantic difficulties he must have encountered in his task...

...Many of his renderings of the poems are superior to any previous translations, and he has taken greater care than his predecessors to be faithful to Pasternak's original form, though not always with success...

...Opinions are greatly divided about the quality of Pasternak's later poetry...

...Kamen's translations are preceded by his own short explanatory note and a foreword by Sir Maurice Bowra...

...Questionable, too, is his statement that, in his early days, Pasternak learned a great deal about language from Mayakovsky...

...These are followed by textual notes compiled by Dr...

...the second was really a reprint with some new wartime poems added...

...that is, 28 and 26 years before Pasternak's death...

...Notes also would have been helpful in relating these poems to Pasternaks other works as well as to his life...

...Within certain limits, Katkov admirably achieves this task...

...Chiefly, these concern Pasternak's verse and language...

...Regrettably, In the Interlude fails to include the eight new lines which the poet added as an afterthought, in March 1959, to his well-known poem, "The Nobel Prize...