Pasternak's poetry is better than his prose. Why he is still often better known for the latter baffles me. I suggest this or any of his collected poems to the reader looking for creative, quality poetry. Pasternak certainly ranks as one of the greatest amongst the group of very talented Russian poets that emerged during the first quarter of the 20th centuary. His poems deserve just as much (if not more) recognition as his novels.

While Pasternak is known in the United States mainly for his novel "Dr. Zhivago" - or, more to the point, the film based on "Dr. Zhivago" - he was quite an accomplished poet. A better poet, I think, than he was a novelist. Although I've never read Mr. Rudman's translation - or, for that matter, any translation at all - "Sister of Mine-Life" keeps to its bosom a host of beautiful poems.

Rather than try to explain Pasternak's incredible gift for metaphor and detail, his absolute love of words - he was a decent translator of Shakespeare and others - I'll roughly approximate my favorite poem, from it's original Russian. It is untitled.

***

My friend, you ask, who ordered
That the holy idiot's speech should blaze?

***

Let us trickle words
As the garden drips amber and lemon
Absently and generous,
Gently, gently, gently.

And there's no need to explain
Why there is such ceremony
Of madder and of lemon
Scattering on leaves.

Who made pine needles rush
On a long stick, like music
Through the locks of Venetian blinds,
To the bookcase.

Who reddened the rug of mountain ash
Rippling beyond the door,
Written through with beautiful,
Quivering cursives.

You ask, who orders
That August be great
To whom nothing is small
Who lives in the finishing

Of maple leaves;
Who, since the days of the Ecclesiastes,
Hasn't left his post
And is hewing alabaster?

You ask, who orders,
That the September lips of asters and dahlias
Shall suffer?
That leaves
Should fall from stone caryatids
To the damp gravestones
Of autumn hospitals?

You ask, who orders?
--Omnipotent God of details,
Omnipotent God of love,
Of Yaigails and Yaidvigas.

I don't know, was it decided,
The riddle of the road to the afterlife,
But life, like the stillness
Of autumn -- is details.

I can't quite transmit the pine needles rushing through the Venetian blinds as boats through a sluice, but I'm sure Mr. Rudman could. Even through my approximate translation, it's possible to see what a man of detail Pasternak was. In my edition, the introduction begins: "With Pasternak, you must hurt" -- as great ideas are, the editor notes, painful.

Pasternak certainly took painful care of his words, his thoughts, his beauty. And "Sister of Mine-Life," one of his earlier collections - (the summer of 1917) - is beautiful, detailed and pained.

***

As a post script, I prefer "Sister of Mine-Life," to "My Sister-Life" because the construction "sistra maya" - rather than "maya sistra" stresses that she's my sister.

Also, because life and sister are both female in gender, "my sister" and "my life" are dually coupled in Pasternak's title. "My" could refer solely to sister, or it could be my life, as well.

I went to Columbia, with the most prominent 'great books' curriculum still in existence. 25 years later, I'm finding myself re-reading and discussing many of the titles. The Penn Greek Drama series is a handsome library of new translations that give fresh takes on the classics. It's useful to have Euripides on the shelf when you return home from the recent bravura performance by Fiona Shaw as Medea--it settled an argument too on how it 'originally' ended.

Again, a must; Mark Rudman continues to write some of the most daring poems today. The juxtaposition of prose with verse forces the reader to ask how poetry should be read--what constitutes a line of poetry? The lyrical beauty inherent in the poems included in the second installment of Rudman's anthology defies any simple answer, and makes for a compelling read.

As the book opens, an unnamed narrator has returned, after twenty years, to the small Italian village in which he grew up, alone and unloved. A foundling abandoned on the cathedral steps, the narrator was brought up, for a fee, by a destitute farmer, who treated him more like a workhorse than a person with a soul. Eventually escaping as a youth to the United States, he worked his way to California, but when an accidental fortune leaves him "rich, big, fat, and free," he returns to Gaminella, where he confronts the harsh memories of his childhood and the even harsher wartime events which traumatized the town after he left.

In cold, realistic, and unemotional prose, the author alternates bleak memories of the boy who was always an outsider with his observations about his later life in the U.S. and his growing awareness of the atrocities that happened in Gaminella during the war. As the speaker reconnects with the characters from his past, particularly Nuto, a friend and musician, he notes the sameness of their days, their lack of hope, and the emptiness at the heart of their lives. The speaker has always believed that "a town means not being alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the soil, there is something of yourself, that even when you're not there it stays and waits for you," a belief which acquires enormous irony as the town's collusion in events during and after the war become clear and as bodies mysteriously surface.

In language which is both understated and rigidly controlled, Pavese creates a world as bleak and cold as the moon, a world of secrets, a world in which there seem to be no dreams. His detached, almost off-handed presentation of horrors sets them in high relief and heightens their impact. Only when Pavese describes the attraction of the speaker to his employer's two daughters do we get a feeling that there's a heart beating within him, yet he remembers his "place," something which makes the daughters' fates doubly affecting and ironic for the reader. The moon and the bonfires, men and the land, nature and spirit, and ultimately life and death all combine here in a story about a small town, and, Pavese points out, "one needs a town, if only for the pleasure of leaving it." Mary Whipple

i came across the book because i was reading some material on jean-luc godard, from which i learnt that godard read pavese's work, so i got the book from the library... i really don't know how to say anything about the book, but it certainly is one of the few books that really touched me... the protagonist's nostalgic sadness on reflecting his childhood and its innocent charm, the solitude of (impossible) love were depicted as they were natural, natural but not natural enough for him to be at ease. the style is bare but this bareness proved to be great merit, it's like hou hsiao hsien's film

Mark Rudman's poetry is very distant. Whenever I read his poems I feel like he's keeping something very important from me, like the point.

I'm going to have to contest that as large as this book is, it seems a little moronic to try and sum it up in a one-sentence review, somewhat wittily titled. That is why I didn't find what was on this page, review-wise, "helpful." Mark Rudman's book is exploratory, an array of forms, and of the voices heard in them. You get the feeling you've never heard ideas before in a poem, then you realize you've never heard ideas expressed like this in a poem. As much as is implicit in Hart Crane is found here in dialogue, as much as Robert Lowell chisels, Mark Rudman pieces together. "Venice is a mystery beyond any solution," is only one of the epigrams you can pull out of "Provoked..." if you just pass through it, and admire for being succinct, yet broad enough to suggest the intuitive grasp behind the rest of the book's inquisitions. Altogether I wouldn't give "Provoked" five stars because it suggests, as great works should, some feeling...that there's more.

One should do himself/herself a favor and read PROVOKED IN VENICE, the third installment of Mark Rudman's exceptional and audacious trilogy. One finds deft lyrical poems distinguished not only as fine parts collected in the whole of a book, but also for their thematic progression that affords an extremely rewarding read. This is a book rich in allusion and cultural reference, but is ultimately marked by the elementary capacity to learn through experience. An extremely capable book that deserves reading after reading...a shame it didn't win the Pulitzer last year.

The first chapter of this book "Mosaic on Walking" is great for people who live in NYC. After that, don't bother. Rudman meanders through various subjects with a voice that not only alienates the reader with pretentious language and a snobbish attitude but manages to take up 200+ pages and yet not say anything of significance. Robert Pinsky is better.

A stellar book by a stellar mind. Mandatory reading for anyone who thinks...Be sure to read the Duncan and Rilke essays. A triumph.

One might wonder why I read so many of Mark Rudman's books if I continuously dislike what I find. I have no clue, perhaps I'm fooling myself into thinking that someday he might get a hold of some talent, after all he keeps getting his stuff published. Alas, this small book lets me down as did all the others. Nothing new, nothing truly evocative, nothing that captures my heart. Considering the subject matter, it's amazing it didn't move me at all.

I do not recommend this book at all.

I don't know why the reader below keeps reading Mark Rudman either, or writing about him. Comments like his are wasted on somebody as unique. "The Killers" is an indictment of the entire Colombine tragedy/circus - instead of just assailing the trademark 'inhumanity' of the killers, it asks: why do people continue hiding in suburbs? why is the shock to such an event so ritualized? and does anybody that bothers to shout "this will never happen again, not here!" have any real say in the matter whatsoever? i.e. Questions only a poet could ask.