PARTISAN REVIEW
293
The Spaniards and the Spanish-Americans have a splendid grave
humor and irony, and a fine sense, rather like the English sense, of
nonsense but not (in the French, the American, or the Anglo-Irish sense)
very much wit. Nicanor Parra is an exception and I think that being a
professor of mathematics may have given him the logical quickness
which lies at the essence of wit. I prefer his "poems," slow, grave, nostal–
gic evocations of a lost rural Chile of his childhood, to his "antipoems,"
but the antipoems are very witty (and funny) indeed. And there seem to
me no translation problems in this volume, since wit-logic depends on
ideas, which are international, not on the rooted local feelings of words.
Here is the first section of a very bang-on one:
There was once a monk
who had a lot of sacred
and non-sacred books.
One day unto him there appeared
a naked girl
who looked like the Virgin.
She danced naked
on the top of his desk
the crafty scoundrel
helped himself under the desk.
There was once a monk
who had a lot of sacred
and non-sacred books.
He read none of them.
Yevtushenko, as he shows in his poems and in his preface, is a man
of extraordinarily adroit charm and gaiety: the right sort of liberal in
both
Russia and Western Europe/North America, and charming enough
to persuade about eight of the best living American poets to make adap–
tations (rather than translations) of his poems, but also to provide them
with assistants who know some Russian. The authors of the adaptations
range from what one might call the Parnassian at one end, like Richard
Wilbur, to various kinds of anti-Pamassian at the other, like Updike,
Ferlinghetti, and Dickey. I think this volume conveys the liveliness and
variety which Yevtushenko's poetry must have, but it is just as well
worth buying as an anthology of contemporary American skills: from,
for instance, Wilbur,
Light died in the hall .
..
Yet, while upon the boards
Darkness arose and played the only role,
