A retired American diplomat living in Paris, John Bovey returned to his native land last fall. His return aroused the reflections expressed in his eloquent essay, as Mr. Bovey explained in a recent letter: ""Boats Against the Current" is an abbreviated version of a longer work in which I have tried to convey what it is to rediscover one's own country after an absence of three decades, broken only by home leave from the Foreign Service, by one long assignment in a more coherent if not a happier Washington from 1954 to 1960, and by brief trips after retirement. Being an uprooted Mid-westerner like Fitzgerald, provincial and squeamish like the narrator of The Great Gatsby, I have always admired the splendid passage at the end of the book in which the author describes the lost America of his youth. During my last trip, I was struck by the indifference, in high places and in great cities, to the original ideals of America, so beautifully consecrated still in Cambridge, in Concord, and in Charlottesville and less archaic, I found, than the prevailing cynicism might lead one to believe. Naturally I thought constantly— but without any pretensions to his mastery—of Henry James and the infernal intelligence at work behind the imagery of The American Scene, which remains so startlingly relevant in 1978."

To most Americans, Boris Pasternak is best known as the author of Doctor Zhivago.His place in posterity, however, is more likely to be among the world's great poets. The eight poems by Pasternak, appearing here for the first time in English, are taken from his work, My Sister, Life, written in 1917 and published in 1922.The work established Pasternak's major role as an early Modernist poet. The translation of these poems is the result of a collaboration that has taken place over the past four years between the American poet Mark Rudman and Ukrainian poet and trans