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"No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim."
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), Russian poet, novelist, translator. Doctor Zhivago, ch. 12, sct. 7 (1957). |
"As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy.... Translation is very much like copying paintings."
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), Russian poet, novelist, translator. Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (1963).
"The only interesting sort of translating is that of classics," Pasternak believed. |
"It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose."
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), Russian poet, novelist, translator. Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (1963). |
"That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it."
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), Russian poet, novelist, translator. Ivan Ivanovich, in Doctor Zhivago, ch. 1, sct. 5 (1957). |
"Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common round, has crumbled into dust and been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself."
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), Russian poet, novelist, translator. Lara, in Doctor Zhivago, ch. 13, sct. 13 (1957). |
"What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels."
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), Russian poet, novelist, translator. Nikolay Nikolayevich, in Doctor Zhivago, ch. 1, sect. 5 (1957). |
"What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves."
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), Russian poet, novelist, translator. Nikolay Nikolayevich, in Doctor Zhivago, ch. 1, sect. 5 (1957). |
"Snow, snow over the whole land
across all boundaries.
The candle burned on the table,
the candle burned."
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), Russian poet, novelist, translator. "Winter Night," st. 1, Doctor Zhivago: the Poems (1958), trans. by Richard McKane (1985). |
"I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them."
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), Russian poet, novelist, translator. Zhivago, in Doctor Zhivago, ch. 13, sct. 12 (1957). |
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Boris Pasternak
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