- Person
- Boris Pasternak
- Lived
- 1890–1960
- Field
- Poetry and fiction
- From
- Russian
The story
As the Stalinist terror deepened in the 1930s, Boris Pasternak found it increasingly difficult to publish his own poetry. After a doctrine of socialist realism was imposed on writers in 1932, he refused to write what the state demanded and for years wrote little poetry of his own. He turned instead to translation, which allowed him to earn a living for his family and to keep working with language at the highest level.
His translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, finished by 1938, was a turning point. After finishing it he found he could write poetry again. During the Second World War he translated Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello and Henry IV, and he went on to translate Macbeth and King Lear.
He aimed not for word-for-word accuracy but for living Russian theatre, verse that actors could speak and audiences could feel. He rejected the fashionable translation methods of his day as artificial and soulless, and described working through Shakespeare section by section, day after day, until the translator seems to relive the circumstances of the author and share some of his secrets. Critics accused him of pasternakising Shakespeare, but readers and actors loved the results.
Shakespeare was the centre of a much larger body of translation that sustained Pasternak through the Stalin years, alongside Goethe's Faust, Schiller, Calderón, Petőfi and the poets of Georgia. His friend Osip Mandelstam teased him that his collected works would one day hold twelve volumes of translations and only one of his own. Translation was also the income his enemies could take away: after the Nobel Prize scandal of 1958, publication of his translations stopped and he was left struggling to support his family.
A British newspaper once wrote that if Shakespeare had written in Russian, he would have written as Pasternak translated him. Pasternak responded sadly that his silence was not courageous; he was silent because he was not printed.
Because of their colloquial, modern dialogue, Pasternak's Shakespeare translations remain deeply popular with Russian audiences. For many Russian readers and theatregoers, his words are the Shakespeare they know, and his versions continue to be staged, studied and quoted.
Why it matters
Pasternak's translations brought Shakespeare vividly to life for generations of Russian-speaking readers, actors and audiences.
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.
More about Boris Pasternak
- Pasternak sent Doctor Zhivago into the worldRejected at home, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was published in Italy in 1957, and its English edition spent 26 weeks at the top of the New York Times list.
- Pasternak's My Sister, Life transformed Russian poetryBoris Pasternak wrote My Sister, Life in the revolutionary summer of 1917; published in 1922, it changed the course of Russian poetry.
- Boris Pasternak translated Goethe's Faust and Georgian poetsBoris Pasternak's translations ranged from Goethe's Faust and Schiller to the poets of Georgia, bringing world literature to Russian readers.
- Doctor Zhivago has been taught in Russian schools since 2003Once banned in the Soviet Union, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago has been part of the Russian school curriculum since 2003.
- Boris Pasternak refused to endorse Stalin's death sentencesIn 1937, at the height of Stalin's Great Purge, Boris Pasternak refused to sign a Writers' Union statement supporting death sentences for Red Army commanders.
- Boris Pasternak interceded for the arrested Osip MandelstamWhen his fellow poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested in 1934 for a poem mocking Stalin, Boris Pasternak appealed to Nikolai Bukharin to intervene on his behalf.
- Boris Pasternak served as a fire warden and read to soldiersDuring the Second World War, Boris Pasternak served as a fire warden in Moscow and in 1943 travelled to the front to read his poetry to soldiers.
Sources
- Boris Pasternak Wikipedia
- Boris Pasternak Academy of American Poets (Poets.org)
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