Cover not available
Article published In:
Translation and the cultural Cold War
Edited by Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam and Giles Scott-Smith
[Translation and Interpreting Studies 15:3] 2020
► pp. 380–398

Cold War literary modernists in a dialogue under oppression

Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky in Anglo-American translations during and after the “Thaw”

ORCID logo | Kalashnikov Izhevsk State Technical University
The article deals with selected aspects of the cultural appropriation of post-Stalinist Soviet poetry by Anglo-American poets and translators. The article focuses on Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky, two eminent representatives of Russian lyric poetry of the “Thaw.” English translations of Yevtushenko’s and Voznesensky’s poems are discussed in relation to Cold War issues and imagery, such as the themes of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the rediscovery of America. The article demonstrates that the Soviet-Russian authors and their Anglo-American translators appealed to their governments and audiences over the moral and aesthetic barriers imposed by the Cold War. The opportunity for independent, liberal, romantic, or leftist English-speaking authors to collaborate with the post-Stalinist Russian poets of the Thaw was made possible by the latters’ willingness to break the cultural isolation of the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death.
Keywords: Cold War, the Thaw, modernism, Soviet poetry, Anglo-American translations
Article outline
  • Modernism and the Cold War
  • Soviet poets of the Thaw and Anglo-American Cold War intellectuals
  • Yevgeny Yevtushenko: A popular people’s poet in modernist reflections
  • Andrei Voznesensky: Translating visual parabolas
  • Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 16 September 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.20075.ero
References (37)
References
Baer, Brian James. 2016. Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature. London: Bloomsbury Press.Google Scholar
. 2010. “Literary translation and the construction of a Soviet Intelligentsia.” In Translation, Resistance, Activism, edited by Maria Tymoczko, 149–167. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Barnhisel, Greg. 2015. Cold War Modernists. Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Brunner, Edward. 2001. Cold War Poetry. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Caute, David. 2003. “Foreword.” In The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945–1960, ed. by Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam, ix–x. London: Frank Cass Publishers.Google Scholar
Emig, Rainer. 2001. “‘All the others translate’: W.H. Auden’s poetic dislocations of self, nation, and culture.” In Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness, ed. by Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown, 167–204. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Friedberg, Maurice. 1977. A Decade of Euphoria. Western Literature in Post-Stalin Russia, 1954–1964. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
. 1997. Literary Translation in Russia: a Cultural History. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fürst, Juliane. 2010. Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Genter, Robert. 2010. Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hixson, Walter L. 1996. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961. New York: St. Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Hughes, Ted. 1983. “Modern poetry in translation.” In Modern Poetry in Translation: 1983. An Annual Survey, ed. by Daniel Weissbort with an introduction by Ted Hughes, 9–13. New York: MPT/Persea.Google Scholar
Lee, A. Robert. 2004. “Pocket books to global beat: Andrei Voznesensky, Kazuko Shiraishi, Michael Horovitz.” Orbis Litterarum 591: 218–237. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leighton, Lauren G. 1991. Two Worlds, One Art: Literary Translation in Russia and America. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Mariani, Paul L. 1981. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.Google Scholar
McConachie, Bruce. 2003. American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.Google Scholar
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Accessed 11 April 2020. [URL]
Nadel, Alan. 1995. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham: Duke University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Richmond, Yale. 2004. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain. University Park: Penn State University Press.Google Scholar
Saunders, Frances Stonor. 1999. Who Paid the Piper: CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta Books.Google Scholar
Scott-Smith, Giles and Hans Krabbendam, eds. 2003. The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945–1960. London: Frank Cass Publishers.Google Scholar
Scott-Smith, Giles. 2012. Western Anti-Communism and the Interdoc Network: Cold War Internationale. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shaw, Tony. 2007. Hollywood’s Cold War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, William Jay. 1989. “Finding the proper equivalent: Translating the poetry of Andrei Voznesensky.” In Translating Poetry: The Double Labyrinth, ed. by Daniel Weissbort, 201–220. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tsipursky, Gleb. 2016. Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Voznesensky, Andrei. 1967. Antiworlds and the Fifth Ace, ed. by Patricia Blake and Max Hayward. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday.Google Scholar
. 1972. Dogalypse: San Francisco Poetry Reading. San Francisco: City Lights Books.Google Scholar
. 1978. Nostalgia for the Present, ed. by Vera Dunham and Max Hayward. New York: Doubleday and Co.Google Scholar
Whitfield, Stephen. 1991. The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Wilford, Hugh. 2013. The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Witt, Susanna. 2017a. “Institutionalized intermediates: Conceptualizing Soviet practices of indirect translation.” Translation Studies 10(2): 1–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017b. “‘Sovetskaia shkola perevoda’ – k probleme istorii kontsepta” [‘The Soviet school of translation’ – to the history of the concept]. In Perevodcheskie strategii i gosudarstvennyi kontrol’/Translation Strategies and State Control, ed. by Lea Pild, 36–51. Tartu: Tartu University Press.Google Scholar
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny. 1962. Selected Poems. Translated with an introduction by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
. 1966. Poems. Introduction by Y. Yevtushenko. Authorized Translation by Herbert Marshall. Bilingual Edition. Oxford: Pergamon Press.Google Scholar
. 1991. The Collected Poems. 1952–1990, ed. by Albert C. Todd with the author and James Ragan. New York: Henry Holt and Co.Google Scholar
Yurchak, Alexei. 2006. Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Zhuk, Sergei. 2018. Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists. London: I.B. Tauris. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Ekaterina, Kornakova, Ekaterina Tutova, Irina Grekhanova, Lyubov A' Safaralieva & Maria A Nekrylova
2023. Investigation on author’s concept in the Russian National Corpus. Revista de Gestão e Secretariado (Management and Administrative Professional Review) 14:10 ► pp. 19091 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.