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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

A Russian Poet [2]

A Russian Poet [2]

Sir: I envy Natasha Templeton her evident command of the Russian language. My own knowledge is restricted to a bundle of words known to us all – such as troika, sputnik, vodka, samovar, kulak. I must of course cede her general point, since I have no chance of reading Voznesensky in the original; nor indeed have I any intention of learning Russian, being oldish now and a man with a poor verbal memory. And I can only think in exculpation – ‘Well, the chances are that nearly all the Russian poets can’t read much English.’ But the problem still remains with us. How are we to judge foreign writers from bad translations? Voznesensky in the translation I page 301 read was both forced and trivial. Naturally enough I thought the forcedness was the fault of the translator and the triviality Voznesensky’s own defect. Apparently both faults belonged to the translator. Yevtushenko, on the other hand, has had the benefit of a magnificent translator in the Jesuit poet Peter Levi. Still, granting the main issue, I cannot allow Natasha Templeton to have it both ways and attribute what virtues I have found in Yevtushenko to his inspired translator.

She points out that Voznesensky is a disciple of Boris Pasternak. Now, much as I admire Pasternak’s moral character, I have always found his pastorals singularly dull reading. I can even understand the irritability of some of the revolutionary writers with his methods for, however many birch twigs are scattered on the snow in his poems, his view does seem basically that of a middle-class aesthete, an honest one admittedly, but with no actual ideas for or against the Revolution. Poetry may be hard to nut out in translation. But I can hardly have missed the bus in reading Doctor Zhivago which amazes me by the degree in which an ordinary sexual triangle has absorbed the author, while all around him the sky and earth were in commotion and set on fire. I don’t think he ever really came to grips with the Revolution at all. Well, may he rest in peace! But if Voznesensky is like him, I may not be entirely wrong after all.

As for Yevtushenko – well, I’m not sure that ‘the general anaesthetic of Socialist Realism’ has done only harm (that it has done some harm I would certainly grant) – for when I recently read Yevtushenko’s long sequence on the Bratsk hydroelectric station (and I’m pretty sure it was a second-rate translation) it held me riveted all night. We have the same social dreariness here that the Communists have in other forms – but have we the inspirational force that could inspire a great social poem on the Mangakino dam? As for Yevtushenko crushing ‘the throat of his song’, every poet does this when he shifts from lyrical work to social writing – and every poet has to make the shift if he wants to go on writing well in the non-romantic climate of middle age. Let’s give up the idea that committed Communists are bound to be bad writers. I held it once; but learnt my mistake when I read Yevtushenko.

1967 (430)