Two Novellas (Elizabeth Smart, Boris Pasternak) #NovNov

Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

The narrator has fallen in love with the poet on the basis of his poems. She invites the poet and his wife to Monterey, California, where she's living, to meet him. She's just as enthralled by the poet in person as she was when she only knew him through his poetry. But can she do this to his wife?

Oh, yes she can.

The narrator is Elizabeth Smart and the poet is George Barker; his wife is Jessica Barker, and the events more or less follow actual events. So, auto-fiction, avant la lettre?

Yes, but. The prose definitely makes this. You see the Psalms there in the title: is that Grand Central Station or the rivers of Babylon? The Song of Solomon is all over the book. So are the Latin and Greek classics, slyly grandiose: "Jupiter has been with Leda, and now nothing can avert the Trojan Wars."

There's also interesting things happening with metaphors from the natural world. The main events take place in the late 30s, but Smart is writing the book during World War II in England. Comparisons to natural features from North America--the Mississippi, Niagara Falls--are inundating, but positive as a rule; those of Europe--the pools in Epping Forest, e.g.--smaller, withdrawn. All mostly involve water, or its absence: the Mojave Desert makes a metaphorical appearance.

But the occasional funny pinprick from outside the bubble lets us see another side. A policeman (and yes, the police do get involved): "'What a cad,' he said, 'And the girl's a religious maniac.'" Why, now you mention it, quite possibly yes... "Are all Americans chaste? All, by law." "Like Macbeth, I keep remembering that I am their host."

The book was first published in England in 1945. Smart came from a well-to-do Ottawa family, and her mother, appalled Elizabeth was publishing her shame (as she saw it) bought up as many copies of the book as she could get her hands on. It was also the end of the war, so, between those things, not much happened with the book at the time. But when it was reissued in the 60s, its reputation took off. Smart continued her bohemian life, bearing four children to Barker, but never marrying him. (Barker continued his caddishness.) She wrote other works (which I haven't read) but this is considered her masterpiece. She died in 1986.

Weird and wonderful. "Girls in love, be harlots, it hurts less."

112p. including an introduction by Brigid Brophy.

Boris Pasternak's The Last Summer

Serezha has just finished his exams, and takes a job as tutor to the eleven-year-old Harry Fresteln. The Fresteln estate is in the Ural Mountains, well away from Moscow or Saint Petersburg. Serezha finds his duties light, writes and gallivants at night.

Mrs. Anna Tjornskold is the widow of a Danish pastor who died young. Suddenly near destitution she takes a job as paid companion to Mrs. Fresteln, but once she's stuck in the remote Ural Mountain region, she discovers her role is more maid than companion. She feels denigrated and trapped and unhappy.

There's a frame set in 1916, but the main events take place in the summer of 1914, the last summer before everything goes to pieces.

Then Serezha proposes to Anna.

It's a promising enough premise for a story, but I can't recommend it, at least in this form. (Penguin, 1960, reprinted many times.) There's an introduction by Pasternak's younger sister Lydia, interesting, though it doesn't tell you what you want or need to know. 

But the main problem is the translation. I guess I'll credit the translator (George Reavey) with trying to reproduce things he found in the original, but it just doesn't read well in English. There's undigested bits of Russian: izvoschik (a cabman, it seems), mahorka (a coarse tobacco), calatch (still not perfectly sure about this one. Kolach? Maybe.) I don't know how you would have sorted those before the Internet. There's awkward bits of English: 'a tent of tremblingly-moist, sultry-laurel birch trees.' And extravagant words, even if they are English. Canicularly? Know that one? Canicular: having to do with the dog days of summer. -ly, adverb. In retrospect, you can probably see the can- of canine in it, but it's certainly a long ways from Basic English. Is the Russian word in Pasternak equally obscure?

Anyway, it needs notes or a new translation or likely both. I don't know if those things exist.

92p, including Lydia Pasternak Slater's introduction.

Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago came out in November of 1957 first in an Italian translation even before a Russian edition came out in France at the very end of 1957. The story of its publication is as full of twists and turns as the novel Doctor Zhivago is itself. Sergio D'Angelo, an Italian communist bookseller, offered to act as a scout for the publisher Feltrinelli on a trip to Moscow, learned of the possible publication of Pasternak's novel during the post-Stalin thaw, and met with Pasternak, who authorized an Italian edition, telling him, "You, sir, are hereby invited to my execution."

An Italian reader for Feltrinelli said, "Not to publish a novel like this would constitute a crime against culture."

Correspondence about the edition followed. Feltrinelli and Pasternak set up a code that if letters were written in a language other than French they were to be ignored. At one point a bank note was cut in half and needed to be matched by two parties to guarantee authenticity. Pasternak was forced to pretend to plead with Feltrinelli not to publish.

The Russian edition in 1957 was quietly killed; it didn't come out in Russia until the fall of the communist state. But the first printing of the Italian edition was 12000 copies and sold out almost immediately; further printings occurred at two week intervals. Doctor Zhivago won Pasternak the Nobel prize, or would have, had he been allowed to claim it; after his death it was given to his heirs. [Details on the publication history drawn from Feltrinelli, Carlo Feltrinelli's biography of his father Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, English translation, 2001.]

The novel was first translated into English and came out in 1958; that edition was translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari. It was retranslated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, appearing in 2010. It's this second edition I've just read, though I've also read the earlier translation, even taught it once in a Reading and Comprehension course in Cal-Berkeley's Comp Lit program. I'd say, those poor students, who had to suffer through me, but since none of them read it, I don't feel that bad...

The story is pretty well known: Doctor Yuri Zhivago falls in love with Larissa (Lara) Antipova, though each of them are married to someone else. They're separated and rejoined several times by the tides of World War I, the October Revolution, and the Russian Civil War. You can if you choose now whistle or hum Lara's Theme.

With all that was going on, it would be reasonable to assume the original translation into English was rushed, and 40+ years on, it could stand redoing. Pevear and Volokhonsky are well known and, I think, generally successful translators from Russian. Like everyone else in the universe, I became aware of them when Oprah picked their translation of Anna Karenina for her book club. I read that and their War and Peace, some of their Chekhov. I really felt like I got a new appreciation of Dostoevsky when I reread his major novels in their translation. But I have to say I'm less convinced by this one.

I have no Russian, and I have to assume they're often trying to reproduce something that feels ungainly in the Russian, but it makes it harder going in English. Here's an example of what I mean, from the section named either Conclusion or The Ending, part 5. From Hayward and Harari:

"...the porter's lodge was always warm and dry, and the water did not freeze."

From Pevear and Volokhonsky:

"...only in the porter's lodge was it warm and did the water not freeze."

That's a particularly egregious example, but not an uncommon one.  I think Hayward and Harari, rushed though they may have been, didn't do so bad. 

Poetry translation is hard, but neither volume does especially well with the poems. Neither translation attempts the original rhymes.

Anyway, a great novel. An adequate translation, but maybe no better than what was there before.