Tag: Doctor Zhivago

Bookish Nostalgia & Wishful Desires

Readers are among the most nostalgic people in the world. And re-readers are even more nostalgic: they seek to capture the meaning and mood of the first reading.

Nostalgia often doubles as a word for sentimentality. But that is not quite its meaning. It comes from the Greek word nostos, which means “homecoming” or “return,” and from the word nostew, “to go home” or “return home.“ The  English definition, too, centers on home: “a wishful desire to return in thought or in fact to one’s home, homeland, or family friends.”  Another common meaning:  “a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.”

The Betsy-Tacy books

Nostalgic readers stand out at bookstores. They not only wish to return to and reread their favorite books, but they seek multiple editions, or the original edition in which they read it.  In 2011 HarperCollins reissued four paperback omnibus editions of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series, with forewords by Judy Blume, Anna Quindlen, Meg Cabot, and Laura Lippman. I swooped upon them, not because I intended to read them, but out of nostalgia.  My best friend and I loved this series about best friends Betsy and Tacy, who live in Deep Valley, Minnesota (actually Mankato, MN), in the early 20th century. (We had Betsy-Tacy revivals.) And when I mentioned these books to a student, he dashed out to the bookstore to buy them for his wife, because she, too, is a fan.  Nostalgia and word-of-mouth are great sellers of Betsy-Tacy.

And then there is Zola’s Germinal, one of my favorite novels.  Can you have too many copies?  Well, you probably can, because it is a very dark book.  I briefly had three editions:  a Penguin translation by Roger Pearson, an Oxford by Peter Collier, and an old illustrated Heritage Press copy translated by Havelock Ellis.  Of the three, Roger Pearson’s  translation for Penguin was my favorite and the most readable, though all are good in different ways. Oxford has reissued new translations of Zola over the last 20 years, many of which had not been in print in English for a long, long time.

Many readers are nostalgic for Angela Thirkell’s distinctive 1930s and ‘40s humor. There is an Angela Thirkell Society and an Angela Thirkell listserv group. But much as I enjoy Angela Thirkell’s nonsensical Barsetshire series, I have not been impressed by the covers of the newish Virago editions. Why? The cover of The Headmistress looks more Jane Eyre-ish than Pomfret Towers-ish.  Cover art isn’t everything, but I am satisfied with 1990s used copies of Carroll & Graf paperbacks, which are sturdy, have bigger print, and pretty good cover art. Still, kudos to Virago, because a friend looked for Thirkell’s Pomfret Towers in vain for years! And now there’s a Virago.

Did you struggle over the Doctor Zhivago question?  It is one of my favorite novels, but in a way it is two books: the two English translations of Pasternak’s masterpiece are so different. I prefer Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky‘s lyrical translation (2010) to the spare first translation by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (1958). But there was quite an uproar over the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation by those who preferred the Haywar-Harari. Out of nostalgia, I hang on to both, and also because who knows?  Maybe I’ll want to return to them, out of nostalgia.

When the public library weeded Gladys Taber’s hilarious novel, Mrs. Daffodil, I was likely to have a conniption fit.  It is funny and endearing, and the writer heroine raises recalcitrant chickens. But the cheapest edition I can find online is $100.  I would have happily donated that to the library for a copy, but it seems a rip-off online.

The heroine, Mrs. Daffodil, lives in the country and writes for a living, just like Gladys Taber. In addition to her syndicated column, “Butternut Wisdom,”  she writes short stories about young love:  readers are not interested in stories about older people like herself, she has learned.   As a prolific writer, she supports herself, her married daughter and graduate student husband, and presumably her housemate, Kay, a widowed college friend who agreed to share Mrs. Daffodil’s country house after her husband died.  When, when will I be able to read this book again? Maybe Persephone could publish it…

Who isn’t nostalgic about books? My rediscovery of James Wilcox’s Tula Springs series has recaptured one of the happiest times of my life. Books bring out the nostalgia in all of us! So rock on!

Notes on an Unputdownable Book: “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak

This month I decided to reread the Nobel Prize-winner Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, surely one of the most breathtaking Russian novels of the twentieth century. Such a gorgeous book! I was enraptured by the lyrical language, the romance between soulmates Yuri and Lara, the detailed descriptions of family life in Moscow and small towns, and the tragic descriptions of war and the splintering of revolutionary politics.

I have a long history with Doctor Zhivago. David Lean’s gorgeous film, starring Julie Christie and Omar Sharif, was my introduction. I am still haunted by “the ice palace” scene, where Yuri Zhivago (Sharif) and Lara (Christie) take refuge in a deserted house at Varykino, which is filled with snow and stalactites and stalagmites (actually frozen beeswax). And–don’t ask!–of course I had a “Lara’s theme” music box.

But it was years before I got around to the the novel. Somehow the cover of the Signet movie-tie-in put me off. I finally read this tattered paperback in the ’90s, during a blizzard. Honestly, I was not that impressed.

I didn’t really fall in love with Zhivago until I read the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky in 2010. Some critics praised it, others reviled it. I remember an indignant essay in The Guardian by Pasternak’s niece, Ann Pasternak Slater, who felt they had ruined the book. The Pevear-Volokhonsky backlash seems more extensive in the UK, but they do get people’s backs up. Janet Malcolm hated their Anna Karenina.

The Soviet-banned Doctor Zhivago was first published in Italy in 1957. The Italian edition was translated into English by Manya Harari and Max Hayward in haste after Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in 1958.  

The translations are very different. Here’s Yuri’s observation of a foul day in autumn (Pevear-Volokhonsky).

“The rain poured down most disconsolately, not intensifying and not letting up, despite the fury of the wind, which seemed aggravated by the imperturbability of the water being dashed on the earth. Gusts of wind tore at the shoots of the wild grape vine that twined around one of the terraces.  The wind seemed to want to tear up the whole plant, raised it into the air, shook it about, and threw it down disdainfully like a tattered rug.”

Here is the same passage in the Harari-Hayward translation:

“The rain poured with a dreary steadiness, neither hurrying nor slowing down for all the fury of the wind, which seemed enraged by the indifference of the water and shook the creeper on one of the houses as if meaning to tear it up by the room, swinging it up into the air, and dropping it in disgust like a torn rag.”

I love this book so much!

By the way, there is a new translation by Boris Pasternak’s nephew, Nicolas Pasternak Slater, commissioned by Folio Society ($125). It looks lovely at the website.