Voznesensky

So the very well-know Russian poet Andrey Voznesensky died yesterday. And when I say well-known I mean in his heyday he could fill stadiums. And the New York Times obit says so. 


I was fortunate enough to hear him read on one of my trips back to Odessa - a theater right off the main walking street at the center of town. The place was packed, mothers brought large bouquets of flowers and made their daughters totter up to the stage after the reading to present them to him. I'll admit I wasn't overly impressed by his performance, but I'm also coming at it from quite some remove. For me, Russian poetry has always lived on the page despite the rich Russian tradition of declaiming or singing your verses. Still, it was a pleasure and an honor to have been there.


They NYT article singles out his poem "I Am Goya" for its metaphors and its sounds. :




"The poem creates its impressions of war and horror through a series of images and interrelated variations on the name of the painter, which echo throughout in a series of striking sound metaphors in Russian: Goya, glaz (eyes), gore (grief), golos (voice), gorod (cities), golod (hunger), gorlo (gullet)."




I won't go off on another tirade about translations, suffice it to say I think Kunitz does a pretty remarkable job. 

I Am Goya

Stanley Kunitz

I am Goya!
of the bare field, by the enemy’s beak gouged till the craters of my eyes gape.
I am grief.


I am the tongue
of war, the embers of cities on the snows of the year 1941.
I am hunger.


I am the gullet
of a woman hanged whose body like a bell
         tolled over a blank square...
I am Goya!


O grapes of wrath!
I have hurled westward the ashes of the uninvited guest!
and hammered stars into the unforgetting sky – 
like nails.


I am Goya.

I've also been remiss in thanking somebody. In looking up a poem of Voznesensky's to share, I flipped through a beautiful dark red 2-volume set of Soviet poetry given to me by my Russian teacher Larissa Petrovna. 

I basically learned Russian through two things: friends and literature. (As a result, I know a lot of slang and a lot of 19th-century diction. The cursing I picked up myself.) Even when most of the friends I spoke Russian with are far away or lost to me, I still have the poems.