Purifiers of the Language

...It cannot be translated...

...Yet this process, Eliot reminded us, is a continuous one: "The spoken language goes on changing and the poetic idiom goes out of date...

...Finer, perhaps: "cold shoulders" in Russian suggests the schoolgirl dressed for a party, and neither the larder nor the snub, as in English...

...He takes up lodging with Matryona in her tumbledown cottage, with her goat and her gammy-legged cat, with the mice and the cockroaches...

...but it is also fine Voznesensky...

...Those who read official Soviet publications soon become aware of the destructive force of the official lie on what was once the most beautiful of all European tongues-the false enthusiasm, the hypocrisy, the dishonest political use of words ('peace," "freedom" and the like), the boasting and the leering optimism...

...Miss Blake observes that "there is no genuine writer in Russia today who is not dedicated to establishing the sovereignty of language over the tyranny of cant...

...As for the poet, it is always part of his task to refashion the poetic idiom of his generation...

...I should like to put in a plea for a full anthology of Voznesensky's lyrics, because he seems to me the most important purifier of the poetic idiom now at work in Russia...

...The poet must remake the poetic idiom, and bring it back at the same time to that of spoken speech...

...The process began, of course, with Pasternak: In this sense, at least, all the authors represented in Halfway to the Moon are his disciples...

...More than that, they seem to me to get as near to a translation of the originals as one could hope: They are accurate, both in meaning and in rhythm...

...Unlike the much better known Yevtushenko, who remains essentially a "pop poet," Voznesensky is a craftsman...

...Cold shoulders in a pitch-dark vestibule...

...As T. S. Eliot told us, in this way Dryden carried out a revolution in poetry in the form of a return to common speech...

...But how far can the literary agon of these young Soviet writers have any meaning for us who perforce can only read their works in translation...

...the Soviet party authorities, in their attitude toward writers, have made quite sure of that...

...they introduce no extraneous words or phrases to pad out the verse forms...

...Viewed from Khrushchev's some-what limited artistic standards, however, Nekrasov committed the unpardonable sin of describing things as he saw them, both good and bad, whether they were Russian, Italian or American...

...The narrator had come upon her by accident, after 10 years of absence from life (in a concentration camp, one assumes, or war, or both...

...Yet the plain fact stares at one from this book, in which Auden's translations (and it is to be regretted that there are only two) are superlative refashionings of the originals...

...It is an exceptionally difficult piece of writing...

...The story of Matryona's life and death among ordinary men and women, with their mixture of good and bad qualities, their selfishness and their kindliness, their greed and their generosity, is told not only with charity and understanding but with an economy that heightens the artistry in every line...

...It is the story of a very simple saint-there is no other term to describe her, though the author does not use it...

...Nekrasov's account of his trip to Italy and the United States reads well enough in English, if it lacks some of the slangy raciness of the original...

...The masterpiece of this collection, though, is the long story of "Matryona's Home," by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...

...To all of this Patricia Blake has supplied a sensitive, sympathetic, lively and illuminating introduction...

...She didn't struggle and strain to buy things and then care for them more than life itself...

...Can poetry be translated at all...

...and, above all, they reproduce as nearly as one can reproduce in another language the mood of the original-its humor, its allusions, its degree of cynicism, pathos or high seriousness-in a word, its flavor...

...There is little drama or pathos in Solzhenitsyn's account...

...We had all lived side by side with her and never understood that she was that righteous one without whom, as the proverb says, no village can stand...

...Matryona's life and persona unfold through her lodger's eyes, but it is only after her death that the essential truth about this poor waif dawns upon him: "It was only then, after these disapproving comments from her sister-in-law, that a true likeness of Matryona formed itself before my eyes...

...Here is a sample of Voznesensky in his "metaphysical" vein, so admirably reversified by Auden: There was once a girl who lived in my neighborhood...

...If you enjoy nothing else in this book, it is well worth the price to discover "Matryona's Home...

...One has only to think of the enormous influence which the on the whole mediocre translations of Chekhov have exercised on English (and Irish) short-story writers to realize that a foreign prose-writer can be brought much closer to us than a poet...

...There are no such irrelevancies about "Matryona," and its appearance in English may make us more alive to the fact that Solzhenitsyn invites comparison with Chekhov or Maupassant...

...The pure idiom suited both to poetry and to prose must be rescued for use and cleansed of its corrupting husk...

...He ought, of course, to have painted the bourgeois world in the traditional manner as wholly bad, wholly decadent, wholly corrupt and, indeed, so repulsive as to produce in the Soviet traveler nothing but a heightened appreciation of his own life...

...Reviewed by LEONARD SCHAPIRO Professor of Russian Government and Politics, London School of Economics It is, I suppose, inevitable that our main interest in Soviet literature should usually tend to be political...

...She was misunderstood and abandoned even by her husband...

...She was a ridiculous creature who stupidly worked for others without pay...

...Nor our whole land...

...But I took off with a bang...

...That is fine Auden...

...Prose is another matter when it comes to translation...

...None of the other translators who have tried their hands at the other poems seem to achieve Auden's fidelity to the originals...

...W. H. Auden has recently categorically denied it can...

...it moves us precisely because of its ordinariness: The human spirit of Matryona shines in its eternal meaning precisely because of the temporal triviality of her life...

...Nor any city...

...Rigid, erect as a radio antennarod Sending its call-sign out through the freezing Dark of the universe, how you rang out to me An undoubtable signal...

...The translation by H. T. Willetts is superb...

...Indeed, the term "saint" is so overloaded with old-regime associations that to have used it would have made the story into a period piece...

...There are nine poems by Voznesensky in this anthology, but unfortunately only one in the Auden-Hayward version...

...The book contains 18 poems, five long stories and the famous account of his travels which got Victor Nekrasov into such trouble with Khrushchev...

...We went to one school, took exams simultaneously...

...She had lost six children, but not her sociable ways...

...Although very different in style, merit and even tradition, all the writers represented have one aim in common: to purify language, to eliminate the effects of Party cant and the encrustations of propaganda usage...

...This author is famous for his concentration camp story, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, But the English reader was perhaps prevented from sensing the full greatness of that novel-partly because of the (totally irrelevant) political sensationalism that attended its publication, and partly because of the limitations of the available translations...

...Readers may find it difficult to understand why this seemingly harmless and amusing travelogue should have so alarmed Khrushchev that he seriously suggested Nekrasov's ouster from the Party for it...

...All in all, this is a book which restores one's faith in the ability of the great Russian literary tradition to survive the onslaughts of Communist philistinism...

...The task which he seems to have set himself, within the general undertaking of purification and renovation of the poetic idiom, is to call in the language of the scientist and the philosopher to help create a language for the poet of this generation...

...Forgive me tor this idiotic parabola...

...Once language has been degraded in this manner it must be purified and forged anew if it is to serve the honest writer as the medium of his art...

...It is all the more refreshing, therefore, to discover that despite the political implications the material in this excellent anthology (most of it originally published in Encounter) can be enjoyed as literature for its own sake...

...This question is particularly relevant to the poems...

...They are first of all poems in their own right...

...She is killed at a level crossing, trying to help some men with a tractor...

...Solzhenitsyn's skill in portraying a saint by circumlocution is an example of the rediscovery of language in which the young Soviet writer is engaged...

...It is much to be hoped that this fascinating collaboration of linguist and poet will continue and will yield more fruit...

...Auden's achievement is all the more remarkable because, so far as I know, he knows no Russian, and has had to rely on Max Hayward's renowned linguistic talents to supply him with the meaning, as it were, of the poems...

...It is not for me to argue about poetry with Auden...

...And the prose translations in this book seem on the whole excellently done...

...Something of the kind was attempted by the l7th-century metaphysical poets...

...Poetry," he said, "is of all arts the most parochial...

...She made no effort to get things round her...