From Mantis 2
 

by Boris Pasternak

The Wind

Judson Rosengrant

I am done, but you will live on.
And the wind, restively wailing,
Rocks the forest and the dacha;
Not each pine tree separately,
But all the trees together
With all the endless reach of land
Rocks them like the hulls of vessels
Upon a harbor's masted calm.
And this it does not from boldness,
Nor from an aimless rage or fury,
But in longing to find the words
To sing a cradlesong for you.


From the Russian.

 

Here is a version of "The Wind" (Veter) from Pasternak's celebrated Zhivago series. I have tried to render it responsibly, but I am always less confident with verse than I am with prose, where the original and its translation both proceed from an isolable argument or narrative, a complex of psychological or social or other meaning to which one may refer one's judgments about coherency of structure and accuracy of representation. Locate that meaning and render it scrupulously, and an appropriate diction and syntax will emerge to give it clear shape and resonant, self-consistent detail, and a distinctive intonation and cognitive rhythm. In Pasternak's deceptively simple little poem, however, the rocking meter, cascading assonance, and insistently repeated rhymes (there are only three, one masculine and two feminine) seem to express on a pre-cognitive, sensuous level, the level of pure sound and pure cadence, the endless natural cycle of death and rebirth evoked in the poem's imagery - an uncanny union of concrete form and abstract theme that is irreproducible in translation, and not least be­cause it is impossible to say which dimension, the somatic or the conceptual, actually takes precedence in the original.

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