My Sister-Life [Hardcover]

Product Details

• Hardcover: 150 pages
• Publisher: Ardis Publishers
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0685004880
• ISBN-13: 978-0685004883
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,536,688 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sister of Mine: Poetry of Detail

, September 5, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: My Sister-Life (Paperback)

While Pasternak is known in the United States mainly for his novel "Dr. Zhivago" - or, more to the point, the film based on "Dr. Zhivago" - he was quite an accomplished poet. A better poet, I think, than he was a novelist. Although I've never read Mr. Rudman's translation - or, for that matter, any translation at all - "Sister of Mine-Life" keeps to its bosom a host of beautiful poems.

Rather than try to explain Pasternak's incredible gift for metaphor and detail, his absolute love of words - he was a decent translator of Shakespeare and others - I'll roughly approximate my favorite poem, from it's original Russian. It is untitled.

***

My friend, you ask, who ordered

That the holy idiot's speech should blaze?

***

Let us trickle words

As the garden drips amber and lemon

Absently and generous,

Gently, gently, gently.

And there's no need to explain

Why there is such ceremony

Of madder and of lemon

Scattering on leaves.

Who made pine needles rush

On a long stick, like music

Through the locks of Venetian blinds,

To the bookcase.

Who reddened the rug of mountain ash

Rippling beyond the door,

Written through with beautiful,

Quivering cursives.

You ask, who orders

That August be great

To whom nothing is small

Who lives in the finishing

Of maple leaves;

Who, since the days of the Ecclesiastes,

Hasn't left his post

And is hewing alabaster?

You ask, who orders,

That the September lips of asters and dahlias

Shall suffer?

That leaves

Should fall from stone caryatids

To the damp gravestones

Of autumn hospitals?

You ask, who orders?

--Omnipotent God of details,

Omnipotent God of love,

Of Yaigails and Yaidvigas.

I don't know, was it decided,

The riddle of the road to the afterlife,

But life, like the stillness

Of autumn -- is details.

I can't quite transmit the pine needles rushing through the Venetian blinds as boats through a sluice, but I'm sure Mr. Rudman could. Even through my approximate translation, it's possible to see what a man of detail Pasternak was. In my edition, the introduction begins: "With Pasternak, you must hurt" -- as great ideas are, the editor notes, painful.

Pasternak certainly took painful care of his words, his thoughts, his beauty. And "Sister of Mine-Life," one of his earlier collections - (the summer of 1917) - is beautiful, detailed and pained.

***

As a post script, I prefer "Sister of Mine-Life," to "My Sister-Life" because the construction "sistra maya" - rather than "maya sistra" stresses that she's my sister.

Also, because life and sister are both female in gender, "my sister" and "my life" are dually coupled in Pasternak's title. "My" could refer solely to sister, or it could be my life, as well.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful poetry of material things, April 15, 2007

By 

Martin H. Dickinson "Walker in the woods, dis... (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Sister - Life (European Poetry Classics) (Paperback)

Some of our strongest poets are those who energize the material things and concrete sensations of daily life in special ways. Objects set apart by poetic imagination and power become sacred and establish a bond between the reader as perceiver and the thing perceived. By extension the bond opens the reader to an entire universe of ensouled matter--a new way of looking at the world.

Such is the poetry of Boris Pasternak in this 1917 book written at the height of The Great War and on the eve of the October Revolution. Pasternak's spirited materialism predates William Carlos Williams's concept "No ideas but in things."

Pasternak sets many of these poems in concretely described locations where his magical materialism can go to work. In "The Flies of the Moochkap Teahouse,"

The spirit sweats--the horizon's

tobacco-tinged--like thought

Windmills image a fishing village

Boats and weathered nets.

This poet's world view of ensouled materiality provides a unique perspective on the new century just beginning. Each reader must decide for him or herself just how prescient or prophetic Pasternak's "The Definition of Soul" was to become.

It falls like a ripe pear into the storm

with a single clinging leaf

How faithful--it quits its branch--

reckless--it chokes in the heat.

We learn much about Pasternak from his later novel and the film (Dr. Zhivago) it spawned--but we don't experience his power as a poet. He was possibly the the most poetically powerful of figures in what is known as the Silver Age of Russian Literature, including Marina Tsvetaeva Selected Poems (Tsvetaeva, Marina) (Twentieth-Century Classics), Osip Mandelstam Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (New York Review Books Classics), Anna Akhmatova Anna Akhmatova (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets), and Nikolai Gumilyov The Pillar of Fire, among the most talented and brilliant poets of the twentieth century. They bore the brunt of the Soviet regime's ideological attacks and physical repression.

Here is poetic brilliance and talent of the first rank--the power of poetry of material things on display.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Right up there with Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, and Pushkin, May 20, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: My Sister - Life (European Poetry Classics) (Paperback)

Pasternak's poetry is better than his prose. Why he is still often better known for the latter baffles me. I suggest this or any of his collected poems to the reader looking for creative, quality poetry. Pasternak certainly ranks as one of the greatest amongst the group of very talented Russian poets that emerged during the first quarter of the 20th centuary. His poems deserve just as much (if not more) recognition as his novels.