PASTERNAK'S OTHELLO
SHAKESPEARE, William, and Boris Leonidovich PASTERNAK, translator.
Otello, venetsianskii mavr. Perevod s angliiskogo Borisa Pasternaka [Othello, the Moor of Venice. Translated from the English by Boris Pasternak].
Moscow, Ogiz, 1945.
8vo, pp. 139, [1]; browning throughout, as usual; original printed wrappers, slightly creased; faint pencil annotations in Swedish to first 20 or so pages.
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Otello, venetsianskii mavr. Perevod s angliiskogo Borisa Pasternaka [Othello, the Moor of Venice. Translated from the English by Boris Pasternak].
First edition of Pasternak’s translation. ‘Pasternak was attached to Shakespeare for all his creative life. In his best early verse collection My Sister Life (pub. 1922), the poem “English Lessons” featured Desdemona and Ophelia “letting their passions slip from their shoulders like old rags” and entering into the “reservoir of the universe” …’ (Stříbrný, Shakespeare and Eastern Europe (2000), p. 98).
Pasternak claimed that he translated Othello ‘against my will; I never liked it’, but like his other Shakespeare translations, produced in the 1940s when he was unable to publish his own verse, it can be seen as ‘an oblique comment on Soviet public life’ (Barnes) – Othello was ‘a man of history and a Christian’, Iago (like Stalin) was ‘unconverted, prehistoric, and bestial’.
Tarasenkov, p. 296.
