It is for this reason that many readers and critics continue to prefer the simple prose renderings of the Zhivago poems, published in Max Hayward and Manya Harari's original translation of Doctor Zhivago, to other more elaborate attempts at 'poetic' translation. The problem arising is similar to that facing translators of Pushkin, or Akhmatova among the moderns, or which, in the musical world, confronts interpreters of Mozart: the fluency, purity and simplicity of style seem to present so few technical problems, that a banality and blankness of expression can easily result, unwittingly reducing Pasternak to the level of John Betjeman or worse. There has been no shortage of translators - the above-named have been joined by such as Michael Harari, Donald Davie and Bernard Guilbert Guerney, and the present offerings are a further addition to this body of translated verse. Surprisingly, however, Pasternak's poetry of the 1930s, and of the World War 2 and postwar period (including the poems of Doctor Zhivago) has remained tantalizingly resistant to the efforts of English translators. On the face of it, such writing ought to be more congenial to translation, offering the chance of closer equivalence in English and a clearer impression of the, in many cases, magnificent originals. In his later verse, Pasternak consciously cultivated a more transparent poetic idiom, striving towards Pushkinian ideals, and pursuing a new and 'unheard-of' simplicity'. Nevertheless, successful versions have been produced at various times by translators such as George Reavey, Robert Lowell, Lydia Pasternak Slater, Eugene Kayden, Peter France and John Stallworthy, who have given us English poetic renderings that in varying degrees balance the elements of 'verbal music', rhythm, rhyme structure, and metaphor in Pasternak's early lyrics. At first sight it might seem that it is the complex earlier verse, based on a multitude of wordplays, that loses most in translation to other languages. Pasternak's poetic style of various periods remains one of the most challenging to translate. Academic Electronic Journal in Slavic Studiesīoris Pasternak The Poems of Doctor Zhivago.

The poems of doctor zhivago