[Chris O'Carroll]

His obit made the front page of the New York Times, but I hadn't glanced below the fold before I sat down at last weekend's Carmine St. Metrics reading. Somebody else on the open mike read a poem in his memory, and that's how I learned that Yevgeny Yevtushenko had died.

Even his ardent admirers will admit that he was capable of cheesy, shallow propaganda verse. ("My Party Card" would be my exhibit A, and there are plenty of others.) But even his angriest detractors can't deny that "Babi Yar" ranks among the masterpieces of modern Russian literature. And "Weddings" is a brilliant, painful treatment of love, death, and art in wartime, ending with this fierce, exhausted artist's manifesto: "I frightened/don't feel like dancing, but you can't not dance."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/w...poet.html?_r=0

[John Isbell]

Is "My Party Card" the one that boasts of how cool the narrator is because he's got a party card and people from elsewhere haven't? My wife was born in the Soviet Union (not Russia) and has quoted that particular poem to me. I have no Yevtushenko in my library, and I'm not a great fan of Akhmatova, but I like Mandelstam's Stalin Epigram:

"Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can't hear our words.

But whenever there's a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meouws, a third snivels.
he pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one for the forehead, temple, eye.

he rolls all the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home."

Mandelstam of course did not outlive Stalin.

Cheers,
John

PS My wife tells me the poem I'm thinking of is by Mayakovsky.

[Michael Juster]

Try Akhmatova again--maybe with a different translator.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Mike,

Do you have a recommendation for translator? I know so many poets who love her, but I'm like John here in that I haven't been moved as much as I feel like I ought to have been.

[John Isbell]

My Akhmatova has the Russian facing, translated by Stanley Kunitz. I see I've written on the flyleaf "Gets brilliant around 1939"; it's been a while since I looked, but nothing lingered in the mind for me. Here is one I find powerful:

"At dawn they came and took you away.
You were my dead: I walked behind.
In the dark room children cried,
the holy candle gasped for air.
Your lips were chill from the ikon's kiss,
sweat bloomed on your brow - those deathly flowers!
Like the wives of Peter's troopers in Red Square
I'll stand and howl under the Kremlin towers."

The Russian starts "uvodili tebya".

Cheers,
John

[Gail White]

I remember Yevtushenko from decades ago. I always remembered his saying (either in a poem or an interview) "A fox born in a cage loves the cage."

[Roger Slater]

Yevtushenko was also noteworthy as the poet who drew huge crowds to hear him read. I believe he sometimes filled stadiums with tens of thousands of people. At most readings I've been to, everyone is thrilled if fifty people show up.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Neither Mandelstam nor Anna of all the Russians have found their translator in English yet, in my opinion. And the looser versions ring truer so far, again, just one opinion. But this is about another time here. Yevteshenko is not the same generation as the Acmeists. different world is some ways.

Not my favorite translation but a friend used to quote this and the opening to Babi Yar to me...often.


Half Measures
by Yevteshenko


Half measures

can kill

when,

chafing at the bit in terror,

we twitch our ears,

all lathered in foam,

on the brink of precipices,

because we can't jump halfway across.

Blind is the one

who only half sees

the chasm

Don't half recoil

lost in broad daylight,

half rebel,

half suppressor

of the half insurrection

you gave birth to!

With every half-effective

half measure

half the people

remain half pleased.

The half sated

are half hungry

The half free

are half enslaved.

We are half afraid,

halfway on a rampage . . .

A bit of this,

yet also half of that

party-line

weak-willed "Robin Hood"

who half goes

to a half execution.

Opposition has lost

its resolution

By swashbuckling jabs

with a flimsy sword

you cannot be half

a guard for the cardinal

and half

a king's musketeer.

Can there be

with honor

a half motherland

and a half conscience?

Half freedom

is perilous,

and saving the motherland halfway

will fail