Waxing Poetic: Lessons of English by Boris Pasternak

     Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was a Russian poet, novelist, and translator.  Pasternak is best known for Dr. Zhivago, a novel set during the last years of the House of Romanov and the earliest years of the Soviet Union.  He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.

    Pasternak's anthology, My Sister Life, is one of the most influential poetry collections ever published in the Russian language.  Pasternak spent the summer of 1917 living in the steppe country near Saratov, where he fell in love.  This passion resulted in the collection My Sister Life, which he wrote over a period of three months but was too embarrassed to publish for four years because of its novel style.  When it was finally published in 1921, it revolutionized Russian poetry.  The following poem comes from this collection.

Lessons of English

 

When Desdemona sang a ditty-
In her last hours among the living-
It wasn't love that she lamented,
And not her star-she mourned a willow.
When Desdemona started singing,
With tears near choking off her voice,
Her evil demon for her evil day
Stored up of weeping rills a choice.

And when Ophelia sang a ballad-
In her last hours among the living-
All dryness of her soul was carried
Aloft by gusts of wind, like cinders.

The day Ophelia started singing,
By bitterness of daydreams jaded,
What trophies did she clutch, when sinking?
A bunch of buttercups and daisies.

Their shoulders stripped of passion's tatters,
They took, their hearts a-quake with fear,
The Universe's chilly baptism-
To stun their loving forms with spheres.