Poetry is difficult to recreate in another language, as distinct from literal translation.
But here Sergei Roy captures the urgency and tumbling succession of images of Boris Pasternak's original, written in 1917. The poem comes from a little book given to me in Moscow by Pasternak's son Evgeny.
DEFINITION OF POETRY
It's a whistle blown ripe in a trice,
It's the cracking of ice in a gale,
It's a night that turns green leaves to ice,
It's a duel of two nightingales.
It is sweet-peas run gloriously wild,
It's the world's twinkling tears in the pod,
It is Figaro like hot hail hurled
From the flutes on the wet flower bed.
It is all that the night hopes to find
On the bottom of deep bathing pools,
It's the star carried to the fish-pond
In your hands, wet and trembling and cool.
This close air is as flat as the boards
In the pond. The sky's flat on its face.
It would be fun if these stars guffawed –
But the universe is a dull place.
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