Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago Chapter 17, Poems by Yuri Zhivago Paperback – April 3, 2017

All books on Boris Pasternak are worth reading.

Phenomenal achievement. These translations are congenial to the originals – I state that with full authority. I think that During the Holy Week is one of the greatest successes. Amazingly, the author has even found a way of translating The Christmas Star, the best Russian poem of the 20th century, having preserved its magic in its entirety. I was also particularly impressed with Encounter with Love: “but who are we, from where, if all those years galore left nothing but hot air but we are here no more?” deserves a rightful place in the English language classical literature and equals the original in every way possible. The translator has even managed to add internal rhymes, which has produced a perfectly magical ending. He has created a miracle and Pasternak’s Miracle is proof that the poet’s unique style has been retained in all its beauty and complexity.Reviewed by Dmitry Bykov, Russian writer, poet, journalist and a biographer of Boris Pasternak, Bulat Okudzhava and Maxim Gorky.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I read these translations with pleasure - some of them running in tandem with my mother's parallel translation reverberating to yours as I read. And I loved your choice of poems, and many moments in them, when you swung comfortably into Pasternak's beat.I can see that you are driven by exactly the same set of values as she was, the replication of the form of the original poems being paramount. The modernity of Pasternak lay in his language and imagery, and his remarkable use of assonance, within these tight forms. And you do get that across, as well as conveying the vital and unexpected imagery, tied together in the onward march of the rhythmic form.  The endings of several of the translations you've sent me are very strong (as in the originals) - particularly the lovely image of the centuries moving downstream like barges, in 'The Garden of Gethsemane'.Reviewed by Ann Pasternak Slater, a literary scholar and translator who was formerly a Fellow and Tutor at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is a niece of Boris Pasternak.