Art & Creativity Quote by Boris Pasternak

Pasternak is politely throwing a brick through the window of “faithful” translation. Modern writing, he suggests, can be technically portable yet aesthetically unprofitable: you can move the words across languages without moving the weather system that made them alive. That’s the sting in “although it might be easy.” The difficulty isn’t lexical; it’s tonal, cultural, rhythmic. Modern prose leans hard on voice, on the particular grain of a language, on the social acoustics of idiom and irony. Strip that away and you’re left with a clean, competent object that may no longer have the original’s electricity.

The painting analogy sharpens the provocation. Copying a painting can reproduce composition and color, even fool an untrained eye, but it can’t reproduce the fact of the brushstroke as an event: the decisions, hesitations, and pressures that announce a living hand at a specific moment. Translation, in Pasternak’s view, risks becoming a museum exercise: accurate, educational, dead. He’s not denying that translation is necessary; he’s questioning the kind of prestige we attach to it when it deals with contemporary art still rooted in its native air.

The context matters. Pasternak wrote under Soviet conditions where literature was policed, where foreign works arrived filtered through ideology, and where his own writing would be contested at home and consumed abroad. In that climate, “translation” isn’t just craft. It’s mediation, distortion, survival. His warning reads like a defense of artistic sovereignty: modern writing doesn’t merely mean something; it performs its meaning in the original tongue. Copy the image, lose the act.