Poetry Bookclub 3

With Ekphrasis I think especially of something like Dante Rossetti's poem to the Mona Lisa... a poem about a painting... a work of art about a work of art... or in response to a work of art. Shelley's Ozymandias, which I mentioned in connection with this poem... is a poem about a sculpture... but I would venture it is more intentionally symbolic (although Shelley may certainly have been inspired by engravings of Egyptian ruins... or even the fragments of the colossal sculpture of Constantine. I'm not certain that this poem... even if in response to a real orchard or Russian estate in ruin... is quite an example of Ekphrasis... but I can see some of the similar emotive response to an existing place... perhaps a place once seen as being of great culture and civilization... now grown ill.

I think we need a sense of authority on the text - the two versions seem to read completely differently - can we agree on one, or perhaps figure out somehow which is more literal, or something? Slippers and Galoshes are two different terms - slippers evokes a cottage where it is raining, where as Galoshes evokes that statue of Chekhov in Siberia.

Another translation I found on-line suggests that Rudman's version may be closer to the original:

Deep silence. Not even a leaf is astir.
No gleam of light to be seen.
Only choking sobs and the splash of slippers
And sighs and tears between.

http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/30441-Bor...Weeping-Garden

Well, slippers and galoshes are not really that far apart. I slip on galoshes on my nice shoes to avoid them getting muddy. Galoshes are a kind of slippers, slippers for outside and over shoes.

Certainly every translation suggests footsteps on wet ground. Another's? Or the poet's own?:confused:

I think it says he's alone, no?

It never really specifes a "he" or a "who" it is rather vauge as to who the pressence is within the poem.

Quote:

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But all is quiet. Not a leaf stirs.
Nothing anywhere to be seen,
Except the gulps and splashing galoshes
And sighs and tears in between.

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Virgil

In fact it doesn't even make sense. If Pasternak wishes for an image associating with the war, why not boots out right. One translator translated it as galoshes and one slippers, so obviously the actual Russian is not boots, but something less.

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I don't know if it is the war he is trying to invoke in his symbol - I think more a perspective of the land, in terms of the rainy, stormy, lonesome landscape. We get all sorts of nightmarish scenes in Russian symbolism to suggest such a thing was contemporary thought at the time, and I think, if we go with Galoshes, they are meant to fit with the rain, and weeping imagery, as if one is splashing through the tear-soaked streets.

Still though, without someone who speaks Russian or a direct translation, the ambiguous poem seems even more ambiguous.

I think we're ready for another poem - someone please pick one.

I've been reading the entire volume again and have a few in mind... but my mind is somewhat mush right now. I have observations tomorrow... yet I'm sitting up due to the possibility of a snow day. I've spent too long debating the merits of Shakespeare... who certainly does not need my support. I'll post something tomorrow:nod::wave:.

Well, I definitely have snow. I've enjoyed quite a few myself. Ok, you go next StLukes.

The Mirror

Steam from a cup of cocoa floods the mirror,
the sheer curtains stretch and yawn.
Down the straight path, past storms and chaos,
the mirror runs towards the swings.

There pines toss, impregnating the air
with resin, and the garden
scatters its eyeglasses in the grass
where shadows read a book.

Toward the gate, toward dusk in the steppes,
toward the heavy odor of drugged air,
hot quartz shimmers and flows over the road
laced with snails and branches.

The huge garden wrestles in the room, in the mirror,
but doesn't break the glass -
as though its collodion flowed above the dresser
to the noise of tree bark.

The mirrored tide glazes the world
with sweatless ice, knocking
bitterness into knots, smell into lilacs,
reigning through mesmerism.

The weird world walks in its sleep,
and only the wind can bind
what breaks into life, breaks in a prism,
and gladly plays in tears.

You can't blast the soul with saltpeter
or dig for it, like treasure.
The huge garden wrestles in the room, in the mirror
but doesn't break the glass...

excerpt from My Sister-Life
tr. Mark Rudman and Bohdan Boychuk

entire text of the poem can be seen here:
http://www.markrudman.com/books_sister.html

Reading this and a number of other poems from the volume I come to doubt even more the suggestion that the first poem we discussed was an intentional expression of loss related to the Revolution. It seems that Pasternak had recently suffered from a love affair that ended and the loss of his poems may have much more to do with that. Rudman notes that "... most of the poems are located in very specific places- the train station, the Moochkap teahouse (the Orchard?)- objects and nature enact the drama. In a manner I think of a painter such as Van Gogh... or Bonnard... both Post-Impressionists working contemporaneously with the Symbolist poets/writers... often speak enact dramas through the most innocuous details: a chair, pair of shoes, fruit in a bowl sitting on a dresser and reflected in the mirror. I am fascinated by how this poem begins... as our attention is drawn to the very surface of the mirror steamed over... and then we rush back... back... through the surface into the reflected world: the curtains blowing in he wind, and out beyond... into the garden (the same as the Weeping Orchard?). Like that earlier discussed poem, every inanimate detail is animated: the pine trees toss and impregnate the air, the garden scatters eyeglasses, and the shadows read a book... and further... further... out to the road beyond the gate... and then suddenly we are back in the room and the entire garden wrestles... is but a reflection... in the mirror. In many ways the shifting perspectives reminds me of the use of montage in the then nascent art form of film.

This one is certinatly more surreal then the other two we have discussed, and while some of the imagery here I do not fully grasp the meaning of and I might have to read this one over a few more times, there is something about it that does feel more personal.

I did find the the contradiction and contrast of the glass of the mirror never breaking, considering the usual fragile nature of mirrors, this one remains intact no matter the turmoils that is suffers through.

The opening stanzas strike me as almost cinematic. The camera zooms in on a mirror... the surface of which is partially clouded with steam from a hot cup of cocoa. The camera then zooms closer... further into the mirror... into the world reflected... through the curtains blowing in the wind and down the straight path through the wild and overgrown garden and toward the swings where the pine trees sway and a shadow creeps across the ground toward an abandoned book and a pair of reading glasses... and back even further... through the gate and out into the road strewn over with twigs and leaves and snails... And then a sudden cut in the film... and we are now viewing the mirror from inside the room and the garden is reflected in the mirror so that it seems as if the outside is inside... and the garden sways in the wind... as if it were wrestling in the mirror.

As I stated above... I find myself thinking of the paintings of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard... where the distinctions between exterior and interior are blurred... where one is often uncertain of what one is seeing directly... or in refection:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3094/...1788fcca_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3110/...1cef9e0a_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3398/...78bf3c13_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3475/...1a1488f0_o.jpg

I found the joruney the the mirror took to be quite interesting. Upon reading this poem again, you moved from the room, out down the path into the garden, and it seemed to be expanding more and more, or getting gradually farther away. It made me think of those paintings, that will have the same painting wihtin the paitning, constantly repeating itself unitll it is too small to distinqush anymore.

I did not quite understand

Quote:

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The huge garden wrestles in the room, in the mirror

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as these repeats two or three times in the poem.