A Russian Poet [1]

I found this book of translations from the modern Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky to some extent a disappointment. The trouble was that unconsciously I kept comparing him to Yevtushenko, the only Russian poet I had read before with a translator good enough to let me get inside the work. Compared to Yevtushenko, Voznesensky is like a man on a jet-propelled travelling circus float in the same race with a farmer riding on a wooden sledge.

I had not realised before why I had come to love Yevtushenko’s work: it was because at some level the work was deeply old-fashioned, smelling of fresh dairy butter and old women in their aprons and old men in their shirtsleeves, even when the ostensible theme was the sorrows of the proletariat or just plain love trouble. This may mean no more than to say that Yevtushenko has a heart. He would probably believe in man whether or not Lenin had told him to; and as belief in God is all but indispensable for a good death, so belief in man is the fundamental tenet of good writing, however hard it may be to hang on to it.

It is comforting in a sense to find that Voznesensky can so easily write poems that are indistinguishable from those of the more brittle American literary expressionists:

There’s one gazelle for a hundred wild goats, For
a hundred tin whistles – but a single flute. To
bloom in the garden – the time hasn’t come.
There are hundreds of lilacs.
I love but one!
Nocturnal clusters many-petalled drone.
Like an electroplated microphone.
Oh, that tree’s a devil!
Everyone has migraine.
Like a hundred salutes stands the lilac spray . . .

Noticing some awkward rhymes, I have a suspicion that Voznesensky may have suffered at the hands of his translator; but that can hardly be the main difficulty. His idiom is visual, electric, well adapted for the expression of the painful emotional reflexes of the Computer Age. There are a few poems that page 290 awkwardly praise the Revolution, as American poems of the same calibre perhaps more awkwardly praise a vague but strident togetherness. One could say that Voznesensky has a fragmented heart, not because he was born in a Marxist society, but because he is one of us. And one can hardly complain. But I had hoped for something more than this – the voice of Mother Russia flowing somewhere like a river underneath the lines – singing for her children and sighing for her dead – the undefeatable voice that rises miraculously from time to time at the heart of Yevtushenko’s work. There is hardly a whisper of it in Voznesensky. But those who want the Russians to be just like us should feel entirely at home with him.

1967 (427)