| My Sister--Life Translated Edition Contributor(s): Pasternak, Boris (Author), Rudman, Mark (Translator), Boychuk, Bohdan (Translator) |
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ISBN: 0810119099 ISBN-13: 9780810119093 Publisher: Northwestern University Press OUR PRICE: $15.26 Product Type: Paperback Published: October 2001 Annotation: In Russian poetry, Boris Pasternak's My Sister -- Life 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 Sister -- Life 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. Pasternak'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, Dam universal waster 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 Sister -- Life as a collection of magnificent exercises in breathing...a cure for tuberculosis. "The English version, which includes "The Highest Sickness", is a heady gust that matches the intensity and power of the Russian. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Poetry | European - General |
| Dewey: 891.714 |
| LCCN: 2001034544 |
| Series: European Poetry Classics (Paperback) |
| Physical Information: 0.43" H x 5.18" W x 7.8" (0.36 lbs) 116 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Eastern Europe |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Boris Pasternak, the Nobel laureate and author of Doctor Zhivago, composed one of the world's great love poems in My Sister--Life. Written in the summer of 1917, the cycle of poems focuses on personal journeys and loves but is permeated by the tension and promise of the impending October Revolution. 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 Sister--Life as a collection of magnificent exercises in breathing . . . a cure for tuberculosis." This English translation, rendered with verve and intelligence by Mark Rudman, is a heady gust that matches the intensity and power of the original Russian text. |