Volume 26, Number 13 · August 16, 1979
Voznesensky's Case
By Clive James
Nostalgia for the Present
by Andrei Voznesensky, by Vera Dunham, edited by Max Hayward
Doubleday, 268 pp., $4.95 (paper)
The Making and Unmaking of a Soviet Writer
by Anatoly Gladilin, translated by David Lapeza
Ardis, 166 pp., $3.50 (paper)
Twelve years ago Antiworlds and the Fifth Ace, a bilingual volume to which several distinguished poets contributed translations under the editorship of Max Hayward and Patricia Blake, left nobody in doubt of Andrei Voznesensky's invigorating talent. This new volume, in whose editing the admirable Mr. Hayward, who recently died, again had a hand, provides further evidence of Voznesensky's high gifts. He is blessed with such a way of putting things that he can vault the language barrier as if it were a low fence. In a poem called 'Winter at the Track' he talks of a frozen bird hanging in the air like an ornament, and a dead horse on its back with its soul sticking up out of its mouth like a cork-screw from a penknife. All he means is that the temperature is forty-five below zero centigrade, but somehow the simplest statement comes out like a burst of colored lights. Going overboard about Voznesensky seems, at first reading, the only decent thing to do.
Review, 3798 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |