Boris Pasternak translated Goethe's Faust and Georgian poets

Person: Boris Pasternak
Lived: 1890–1960
Field: Poetry and fiction
From: Russian

The story

Translation was not only a refuge for Boris Pasternak but one of his great achievements. As a young man he had studied philosophy at Marburg in Germany under Hermann Cohen, and he read widely in European languages. In the years around the revolution, before My Sister, Life was published in 1922, he translated plays by Heinrich von Kleist and Ben Jonson and poems by Goethe, Hans Sachs and the German Expressionists.

In the 1930s, as Stalin's demands on writers tightened and he found it harder to publish his own work, translation became his main occupation and his livelihood. He formed close friendships with poets in Georgia, among them Titsian Tabidze and Paolo Iashvili, and worked especially hard on Georgian poetry, including Tabidze's verse and the classic poet Nikoloz Baratashvili. His translations introduced Georgian verse to a wide Russian readership, and the Caucasus also inspired some of the finest poems in his own collection The Second Birth (1932). Tabidze was executed and Iashvili took his own life in the Great Purge of 1937, losses Pasternak felt deeply.

His range kept widening. Beyond Shakespeare, he translated the Hungarian national poet Sándor Petőfi, Rilke, Verlaine, the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, Schiller, the Spanish dramatist Calderón and the Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki. His version of Goethe's Faust, published in 1952, was attacked by Novy Mir in 1950 for keeping the play's supernatural elements as Goethe wrote them but his contract to translate the second part was not cancelled. He argued that translation demanded the insight of a fellow writer rather than a merely literal approach.

Translation kept him close to the classics during years when his own voice was unwelcome in print. Even during the campaign against him after Doctor Zhivago, he continued translating Calderón and Słowacki. His friend Osip Mandelstam once warned him that his collected works would contain twelve volumes of translations and one of his own.

Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderón and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences, and his Georgian translations helped build lasting literary ties between the two cultures.

Why it matters

Pasternak's translations widened the horizons of Soviet readers, giving them access to European classics and to the poetry of Georgia.

About Boris Pasternak

Russian poet and author of Doctor Zhivago, smuggled to the West in 1957, who was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature and forced by the Soviet state to decline it.

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Boris Pasternak

1890–1960 · Poetry and fiction

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