One has to admit that this is a deliberate strategy: faithfulness to the Russian at all costs, even when it implies faithlessness to the English. These are the ordinary idiom of everyday Russian. The simplest Russian phrases, translated literally, sound awkward, and their meaning is unclear: "What's with me?" "I am deeply guilty before him". The new translation teems with artificial, un-English constructions. However, sticking too closely to the Russian original often takes the translators to the other extreme. The first sentence of the old translation could be anyone's: "On they went, singing 'Eternal Memory', and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing." The tone, impersonal and rhythmical, heightening everyday detail, is recognisably Pasternak's. Here is the opening: "They walked and walked and sang 'Memory Eternal', and whenever they stopped, the singing seemed to be carried on by their feet, the horses, the gusts of wind". Sometimes, especially where the effect depends on the rhythm of the sentence, it works well. What is important is an acknowledgement of the unique features of the novel's structure and style, which combine to create the poet's vision of the Russian Revolution and its consequences. In the end, it's not what one calls it that matters. He argues that "to embody the 'living moving reality'", it "had necessarily to be an experimental novel".įor some reason, Pevear refuses to call it modernist, although both Pasternak's words and Pevear's own description of "a feeling of chaos, random movement, chance encounters, sudden disruptions" could very well apply to a modernist author – Virginia Woolf, for example. Pevear uses this quote to stress his point that Doctor Zhivago is "a highly unusual book". In his introduction to this new translation of Doctor Zhivago, Richard Pevear quotes from a letter written by Boris Pasternak in English: "living, moving reality in such a rendering must have a touch of spontaneous subjectivity, even of arbitrariness, wavering, tarrying, doubting, joining and disjoining elements".
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