Word: poet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Translation is the customs office of poetry. Nothing is more difficult to smuggle into another language and culture than a unique poetic gift. The latest poet of distinction to be hampered, though not stopped, at the literary customs barrier is Nobel Prizewinner Boris Pasternak...
...born Eugene Kayden, professor emeritus of economics at the University of the South, more than a glint of Pasternak's poetic genius filters through; whole stanzas blaze with life and passion. But, since Pasternak frequently relies on a fusion of images and sounds, perhaps only an inspired fellow poet could devise sensuously idiomatic English equivalents. In Translator Kayden's rhymes, Pasternak's lyric song is sometimes reduced to schoolboy singsong...
...itself, including Pasternak's writing of his poem. This corresponds to his belief that "the world's best creations describe their own birth.'' The birth of the poem, Pasternak seems to be saying, is like the birth of a world, day emerging from night. The poet encompasses the world and suffers to express it ("Blood froze in the huge Colossus") while the common run of humanity sleeps under the snows. Such is Pasternak's own creative shorthand that -as with any major poet-the possibilities of symbolic interpretation are almost limitless, without ever offering complete...
...poet of so personal a vision was almost certain to be apolitical, but Pasternak was never so swathed in poetic contemplation as not to recognize the hell around him. If his images for it are oblique, they are nonetheless powerful...
...incredible line, "The city has a thousand elbows" and goes on to picture men pacing "like armor" with each one carrying a building on his back. The carelessness in this poem is evident to a greater or lesser degree in all of the others. They read as though the poet had chosen his theme, the depiction of a certain impotence, a certain deficiency in communication, and attacked it again and again, rapidly, realizing each time that his attempt has been unsuccessful but not caring to return and to correct, moving on immediately for the next abortive try. He puts together...