Books: The Yes & No of a Public Muse

YEVTUSHENKO POEMS by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Bilingual Edition. Translated by Herbert Marshall. 191 pages. Duffon. $4.50.

The scenes recall the excitement that surrounded the incantatory recitals of Dylan Thomas. Crowds of youngsters usually scrounge for extra tickets, and in the auditoriums, rows of standees lean against the walls. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 33, Russia’s principal poet, has been touring the U.S. for four weeks, with stops at New York, Buffalo and Pittsburgh, while the latest collection of his verse is in the bookstores.

Audiences watch and listen agog as the big, blond, open-shirted Siberian submits to the passion of his verse and rolls a voice like an organ through the packed halls.

The whole performance and the response are all the more remarkable in that most of his audiences under stand not one word that the poet utters, leaving for stage translators the unhappy job of making the poetry sing in English.

The Handicap. “All nightingales understand each other,” wrote Yevtushenko hopefully in 1960. “Everywhere they speak the same tongue.” But unhappily, intelligible dialogue between American and Russian nightingales is severely inhibited, partly in the matter of language, chiefly by the nature of Yevtushenko’s nonpoetical preoccupations. The handicap is not so much that his muse is a Marxist but that she is a public creature: poetic sensibility in the West is involved in more private, perhaps more eternal matters.

“A poet is more than a poet in Russia,” Yevtushenko has explained. “Here only he is destined to be a poet/ In whom civil sense ferments to passion.” With deepest sympathy for Yevtushenko’s position as de facto laureate of Russia, it must be objected that to be more than a poet is to be something less than a nightingale. Poetry obliged to make “civil sense” will sometimes make strange noises. In one passage, Yevtushenko remembers, “The ascetic-faced PartOrg said to me . . .” But how can a poet deal with a “PartOrg” (Party Organizer) in any language? The poet himself, alas, must become part poet and part org.

The Laureate. Remarkably, many of Yevtushenko’s home-turned verses, so uncomplicated and naive, hypnotize his American intellectual audiences. Perhaps the enthusiasm for him reflects an unconscious dissatisfaction with the disappearance from modern Western poetry of simple values and popular appeal. It is not that Yevtushenko is a Communist poet, but that he is a sentimental Communist poet. Any American producing paeans to the Great Society, better dam construction or Old Glory would be sneered out of the intellectual establishment.

Yevtushenko has been applauded in the West as a free anarchic spirit against Stalinism. But sometimes, when he dreams of “Hindus in machine-gun wagons/ And Peruvians in helmets and sheepskin jerkins,” or when he visualizes Marshal Budenny “galloping all over Africa,/ And I, of course, galloping right after him,” the effect is quite other than intended. The image of the dynamic poetic dramaturge fades, to be replaced by that of another poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, inflamed with patriotic ardor over the breakfast table and dashing off Form! Form! Riflemen Form!—to be published in the Times, please the Queen, and possibly encourage the redcoats.

The Secret. In his public readings, Yevtushenko comes to much truer poetic life when he sings of The City of Yes and the City of No, which contrasts suffocating authoritarianism with total permissiveness:

Everything is deadly,

everyone frightened, in the city of

No.

It’s like a study furnished with

dejection.

In it every object is frowning,

withholding something,

and every portrait looks out

suspiciously . . .

But in the town of Yes—

life’s like the song of a thrush.

This town’s without walls—

just like a nest . . .

To tell the truth, the snag is it’s a bit

boring at times,

to be given so much, almost without

any effort,

in that shining multicolored city of

Yes.

Better let me be tossed around—

to the end of my days,

between the city of Yes

and the city of No!

Asked during a question period what the dualism symbolized, Yevtushenko replied, “That is our Russian national secret.”

His views on the West are variable. In Colosseum, he indulges in a prudish flight of fancy; as the poet broods on the ancient games, he also rather absurdly sees capitalist corruption symbolized amid the Roman ruins by “powdered pederasts,” “urinating whores,” and a “society lady” swooning with delight as a gigolo pulls off her nylon panties. Then again, he takes a good-humored dig at the Western preoccupation with spy movies and has a ball with a Bond take-off entitled Impressions of the Western Cinema. He envisons a future state of espionage technology when even roses are bugged and he evokes a worldwide convention of secret agents meeting under the banner: “If you don’t spy, you don’t eat.” Then,

Spying on the secrets of beautiful

women,

the Chinese agent—

gaunt Li Van—

spiking himself on the springs,

crawls bravely inside a divan.

And, suffering there,

instead of “Mama” . . .

he sadly whispers:

“Mao . . . Mao . . .”

Yet even here, Yevtushenko finally

turns solemn. He ends:

A spy will always be a spy

Christ will always be Christ.

The Dream. For those who miss the fun and electricity of Yevtushenko’s performances, the new collection of his poems will have to suffice. It will be something of a disappointment. Yevtushenko is badly served by his translator, Herbert Marshall, professor of communications at Southern Illinois University. The book abounds with atrocities and dud rhymes—”trees-industries,” “linger-lingo,” “see-literacy” —that are enough to destroy any kind of communication.

But something of what must be Yevtushenko’s great quality in his native tongue comes through in at least one poem in the Marshall translation, his uncompleted “epic” composition, Brat-sky GES (Bratsk State Hydroelectric Power Station). There is special pleasure in these episodes where the original metrical scheme does not call for rhymes above and beyond the call of the English language, and where

Yevtushenko either forgets politics or goes beyond it. Thus:

A world I dreamed—without the infirm and the fat without dollars, rubles or pesetas, with no frontiers, no phony

governments’ fiat, no rockets or rackets no ink-stinking papers. I dreamed a world where all seemed first-created outspreading bird cherries in the

dewfall with blackbirds and nightingales crowded. Where no untalented exist—just geniuses all. Where love has no impediments or desecration . . .

This is a dream—and a poem—that all can not only understand but share.