Volume 13, Number 5 · September 25, 1969
Poetry of Loss
By Helen Muchnic
Poets on Street Corners
by Olga Carlisle
Random House, 429 pp., $6.95
Russia's Underground Poets
translated by Keith Bosley, translated by Dimitry Pospielovsky, translated by Janis Sapiets
Praeger, 92 pp., $4.95
The Italics Are Mine
by Nina Berberova, translated by Philippe Radly
Harcourt, Brace & World, 606 pp., $12.50
Fever and Other Poems
by Bella Akhmadulina, translated by Geoffrey Dutton, translated by Igor Mezhakoff-Koriakin
Morrow, 72 pp., $5.50
In his learned and delightful book about translation, The Lofty Art, Korney Chukovsky, speaking of an excellent Russian version of The Great Gatsby, remarks: 'One reads it, rejoicing in every line and thinking gloomily: why is it that neither in the USA, nor in England, nor in France, has a single translator been found to translate with equally concentrated devotion and equal skill our Gogol, Lermontov, Griboydev, Krylov, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Mandelshtam, Blok?' Why indeed? Perhaps because translation in the West is seldom considered an art, much less a 'lofty' art, and translations are usually made for reasons that are not literary but, as Robert Lowell has said, because they are 'news': 'Nine-tenths of the competent translations being done today in verse, to say nothing of the incompetent ones, are of no value except as news. They get the thing over for the moment and that's very valuable, but there will be much better translations later on.' When he himself undertakes this kind of work—and he is outstanding in it—Lowell wants to produce good English poems; how else shall Pasternak or Mandelshtam be served, certainly not by 'very bad, very uninspired English poetry?'
Review, 3384 words
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