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Of the twenty-five poems that make up the final part of Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago, twenty-one are included here. The other four ('A Winter Night', 'The Star of the Nativity', and the two poems entitled 'Magdalene') will appear with some early chapters of the novel in the summer issue of The Hudson Review. Our translation of the entire novel will be published by Harvill and Pantheon later this year. Some of the poems of Yuri Zhivago are linked to specific moments in the novel; others belong only to its general artistic make-up. Pasternak shared the 'promptings of inner restraint' that Zhivago felt as he wrote, 'which did not allow him to reveal personal experiences and unfictitious happenings too openly.' In translating the poems, we have been guided by the meaning of the words, and have welcomed poetry when it has offered itself. We have sacrificed rhyme, which Pasternak most often used quite regularly and with great originality, but which in the many rhymed English versions of his poems, to borrow a phrase from a fellow translator, makes him sound like bad Tennyson. We have tried, on the other hand, to keep the rhythm of the poems, especially when it is as important as in 'Wedding,' which Pasternak composed in the popular song form known as the chastushka. And above all we have been attentive to the tone and inner movement of the originals. Several of the poems mention nightingales, and specifically the contrast between the 'homely little bird' and the 'ecstasy and turmoil' awakened by its singing. For Pasternak that unlikely combination was the essence of poetry.
1 Hamlet
The hum dies down. I step out on the stage.
Leaning against a doorpost,
I try to catch the echoes in the distance
Of what my age is bringing.
The night's darkness focuses on me
Thousands of opera glasses.
Abba Father, if only it can be,
Let this cup pass me by.
I love the stubbornness of your intent
And agree to play this role.
But now a different drama's going on -
Spare me, then, this once.
But the order of the acts has been thought out,
The end is inevitable.
I'm alone, all drowns in Pharisaism.
Life is no stroll through a field.