The Strongbox: Sasha Dugdale

This week's blog, 'Pasternak and the Place of the Poet', is by Sasha Dugdale, author of The Strongbox, which is published this month. Use the code MAYBOOKS for 20% off the collection and free UK P&P.

I've always had a deep love of Pasternak’s poems, but have hesitated to commit to translating a body of work. After all, how to translate the gauzy quality of their imagery and the bold friction of the language which creates his extraordinary sound-world into English? I can hear the originals clearly in my head, their music of repeating sounds becomes abstracted in my imagination.

Once or twice I’ve used his sonic energy, this almost abstract sound patterning, to generate new work, as it imparts a sense of exhilaration, like moving fast – or running at night when you can’t see the road beneath your feet. Pasternak, according to the composer Scriabin, had a talent for music composition, and spent years as a teenager studying music. That gift for sound composition, released among words, gives the effect of a scattering flock of white doves against a grey sky.

A good friend of mine sends me birthday greetings every year on one of a pack of Soviet literary postcards with variously handsome portraits of Pasternak, and poems on the back. One of these postcards arrived while I was writing The Strongbox, at a particularly hard time in the Spring of 2022, when it did seem as if Russia might conquer Ukraine. The poetry on the card was taken from a famous cycle of poems called ‘Waves’, written by Pasternak in the Black Sea resort of Kobuleti in Georgia in 1931, and filled with a sense of historical and personal change and a corresponding search for a poetic response. One could write at length about his situation in 1931, his escape from his own marriage to the Caucasus with the married Zinaida Neuhaus (then the wife of the famed pianist Heinrich Neuhaus, later she became Pasternak’s second wife), or about the political situation in the USSR, the genocidal famine in Ukraine and Stalin’s slowly tightening grip on politics – and yet poetry’s relationship with reality is often oblique and veiled. However, this cycle and the book it appears in, Second Birth (1932), mark a distinct new period in his poetry.

I began translating the excerpt as an idle and almost subconscious exercise, trying to keep the form, but whenever I met with a translation obstacle I would take a sideways route: dance around it rather than banging my head against it. I was, in effect, repurposing the sonic force of the lines to make my own dance around a monolith. I must emphasise that this felt like the most natural response for me: my work was nothing more than an act of sly appreciation, like thinking about Malevich whilst doodling black squares on a piece of paper; or an elaborate act of cross-dressing whilst gazing in a mirror and watching one’s face distort and reshape as something new. It also answered a need in me to create and be occupied at that time of tragedy and horror.

Pasternak addresses the lines to a female ‘you’, presumably Zinaida, and it describes a missed meeting in the opening stanzas: he could catch her up, she was still in the sanatorium, and if he did she would listen to him, her large, brave face becoming softer, younger as he spoke about this and that: the human being in extremis, the human as an overgrown ant. The poem then shifts to become the expression of a thought, one he might have shared with her if they had spoken, I suppose: if one, as a poet, is in concordance with everything that exists, then one must eventually fall into an as-yet-unheard simplicity, as into a heresy.

These lines gave me a set of quatrains which open the ‘The Dirty Fire’ section of The Strongbox. I have changed a great deal of the original meaning to fit a very different philosophy of composition, and a different poetic position:  

You are not yet gone.

They told me where you were and when you left,

I could still catch you if I hurried

not stand around wasting my breath.

I caught you up, but you’d died down—

in your place a brown patch.

I knew I’d have to pour petrol

over your tender features and strike a match.

In the dirty fire of the great poets

there are lines of such naturalness

that when you have torched the source

you too must end in wordlessness.

At odds with everything in the fall

of my life, I fell to my knees.

I was a heretic, but no longer—

I’m heartened by your simplicities.

Let me exist underground with the iris

slowly opening my pale hands.

My workings are unbearable.

My renewal what the world demands.

Pasternak often expresses anxieties about the mantel of poetic greatness in his poems. In his ‘Hamlet’ for example (another poem I have used to write my own poem about poetic composition, ‘Michael Blann’) he walks out onto the stage to find a thousand opera glasses trained on him, as in a bad dream. He asks God to spare him the fate that has been dealt to him: the fate of a famous poet-prince in a brutal state. Of course, Pasternak has every right to this gravity and sense of position; we only have to remember that Stalin rang him directly to ask about the status of Mandelstam when the latter’s fate hung in the balance, and Pasternak worried about the fatal implications of speaking wrongly (somehow fluffing his lines) on that occasion. My ‘Michael Blann’ is his opposite: a lucky carefree shepherd, who existed outside the straits of history and religion, like a twentieth-century Pan. This is no reproach to Pasternak; Blann is merely his shadow person, another version of the poet.

There’s a friction in this act of creation: the clothes, the rhyme, the thoughts, the sounds – nothing fits very precisely, everything is too big, too male, or chokingly tight like an Edwardian collar. However construction is dependent on constriction: the most poetically fertile situations often lack space and proportion, and thereby force the poet to create from within.