POETRY
155
devourer of his sons. Here is the last stanza, first in the original, then in
Christopher Middleton's version :
Nachts kommt Saturn
und halt seine Hand auf.
Mit meiner Asche
putzt seine Ziihne Saturn.
In seinen Rachen
werden wir steigen.
At night Saturn comes
and holds out his hand.
With my ashes, he
cleans his teeth, Saturn.
We shall climb
into his jaws.
The horror is to be felt as everyday, habitual, emphasized obliquely by
an
accepting flatness. Mr. Middleton sees this, but does he convey it?
Suppose instead, distorting English idiom just a little, one simply gave
a point-for-point
map
of the original:
Nights comes Saturn
and holds his hand out.
With my ashes
cleans his teeth Saturn.
Into his jaws
we shall climb.
Voznesensky is utterly different from Brecht and Grass, so far as
one can judge from Mr. Marshall's translations: fluent, light, gay, some–
thing of a virtuoso in fanciful surprises and daring juxtapositions, frivol–
ous at times, almost rococo. His commitment is against solemnity and
pomposity in Russia, against official anti-Americanism (he loves America
even at, especially at, its most gimmicky and glittery) and for a tradition
of dandyism, of insouciance, even of romantic individualism: Gaugin
for inrtance is one of his cultural heroes. A most odd bird to come
out of modern Russia, and how encouraging that he should come! But
swift, light and difficult formal intricacy is, unfortunately, the one
quality in verse that is almost untranslatable-the "play" element,
depending so much on the genius of the poet's native tongue. Mr.
Marshall has a jolly good try. But such a passage as this, lively as it is,
makes Voznesensky sound
N ew Y orkerish,
a kind of male Phyllis
McGinley, where one feels sure that his gaiety and elegance in his
own tongue is in quality more comparable to that, say, of Richard
Wilbur or Marianne Moore, or perhaps Auden in his comic-baroque vein:
