Second Nature: Poems by Boris Pasternak

"English goes into Russian like butter. Russian goes into English like mud." This is a twenty year effort by Andrey Navrosov to bring over what he could. Best intro to Pasternak I have found other than O'Connor's academic study of My Sister, Life. I am not a Russian speaker. So much of Russian literature is an entirely different animal in their English renderings. As Nabokov points out, Dostoevsky is actually funny and sardonic in the original.

As the previous reviewer said, you get a feel without necessarily understanding. Some of these poems use a very surreal hard to grasp imagery. There is a lot of vocabulary well out of the range of even those with a large vocabulary. Navrozov translates beautifully however since there is a majesty at times in these paradoxical and hard to grasp images formed of complex associations, that Pasternak seems to paint so effortlessly, but requires much effort to understand on the intellectual level. However it may be that Pasternak reaches us most lucidly in his poetry and lyricism , allowing us to absorb the meaning by a slow process of osmosis, in the manner one might appreciate a painting, returning to it with renewed interest.O Duncan of grey guesses! - fate.Oh host of legions in his omens!O god, my Lord, what hast though madeon our sale to the commons!or:thus summer evenings can dispersethe rain in just one dream, inspire!Whose light their irides may curse:thus quarrels with the sun transpire.thus they begin to live in verse.His work feels spiritual, and is moving. Well worth persisting with, since despite the complexity, there is an intricacy and beauty of design at work.

very good