Imagery in Translation

PROSE UNIT 8:

TRANSLATING B. L. PASTERNAK INTO ENGLISH

Introductory Notes

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was primarily famous as a poet and translator; his translator's notes on Shakespeare showed his worth as an independent poetic personality with his own posi­tion and view on literature, poetry and art of translation.

He began his artistic career as a musician and philosopher of the "spiritual universe," which he understood as a kind of an "answer to the phenomenon of death." The fundamental assump­tions of his aesthetic model were born and developed under the influences of the people whom he himself used to call his "prede­cessors": Alexander Blok, Alexander Skryabin, Rainer Maria Rilke and Marcel Proust. Strange though it might seem, he com­pared art and poetry to algebra, as in both it is important to be precise so that to operate symbolic values as if they were real. By Pasternak, the world of the spiritual universe is the only place where the spirit and soul of man can exist and where they can overcome fear of death.

Based on these principles, his poetry is highly metaphori­cal; he was one of the first poets in Russia to replace poetic dic­tion by metaphor, assessing the spiritual universe in symbols, which made his works not quite easy to read. He "perceived the world in colours and lines, in scents and sounds rather than in words and concepts. Resultant interpenetrability of images, wo­ven into a quaint pattern of the components that makes one feel in the field of strong spiritual magnetism of his poetic worlds where eternal ideas of good and evil are transformed into almost palpa­ble images.

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Практикум по художественному переводу

Such a vision of the world not only became a visiting cardof his poetry but also marked his prose with unique intonation that made Doctor Zhivago an outstanding piece of a novel. Some say, it is difficult to read, some say, its characters and events are not well formed; some seek epic quality in it, for the theme is epic in itself, and when that not found, become disappointed. Yet the novel is a strange beast, and it lives on and makes its readers puzzled and strangely sympathetic. The life and death of doctor Yury Zhivago has become a dramatic embodiment of the joy of life before the face of death; and this joy is not the "Feast during the Plague," for its purity and intensive power make it so natural that readers cannot but sympathise, suffer and enjoy life together with Doctor Zhivago whatever the agony of the material world.

In one of his letters, Pasternak described his novel as a living being: «Доктор на сто голов выше меня и моего времени (the letter was written 10 June, 1958). Я не понимаю, как это меня угораздило. Но этого больше не будет. Такие вещи не повторяются.»

The translators of Doctor Zhivago into English (Max Hay-ward and Manya Harari, 1958) wrote about the book: "Paster­nak's prose has astonishing power, subtlety and range. While al­ways remaining simple and colloquial, it is exceptionally rich and poetic. Indeed, he makes use of sound and word association in the manner of a poet of genius. His language has a vitality which must be rare in the literature of any country and is perhaps unique in that of Russia." Obviously, the translators did not know much about Russian literature to say that, but what is worth in this evidence is their characteristics of the language. When defin­ing it as "simple and colloquial," they sometimes fail to read be­yond it, into the culture and mood of those times; thus, the lan­guage of translation becomes too neutral and superficial to re­construct the source "subtext." For example, "the woman of pow­er" in the passage below is presented in Russian as if wrapped.in formal titles, which makes her look curiously artificial: «женщина

за столом», «представительница райсовета», «председа- _ _