My Sister - Life (European Poetry Classics)

From Book News, Inc.
A classic of 20th-century Russian poetry, well served in this translation by Mark Rudman (with Bohdan Boychuk), which was originally published by Ardis in 1983. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Book Description
One of the great books of twentieth-century poetry.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian

From the Back Cover
In Russian poetry, Boris Pasternak's My Sister¾Life 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 Sister¾Life 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. Paskternak'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, Damp universal waster Groans tore from their posts, 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 Sister¾Life as a collection of magnificent exercises in breathing...a cure for tuberculosis." This English version, which includes "The Highest Sickness," is a heady gust that matches the intensity and power of the Russian.

About the Author
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) won the Nobel prize in literature in 1958. He is best known in the West for his novel Doctor Zhivago. Mark Rudman was born in New York City where he now lives with his wife and son. He is an Adjunct Professor at NYU. His books include Rider, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for 1994; Realm of Unknowing: Meditations on Art, Suicide, and Other Transformations, and The Couple (2001). Rudman also received the Max Hayward Award from the Translation Center at Columbia University for My Sister¾Life. Bohdan Boychuk is a prominent Ukrainian poet who critiqued and guided Rudman's version of Pasternak.


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