adam piette
versions of Marina Tsetayeva, Edwin Morgan’s translations of Voznesensky and
Yevtushenko(notably ‘Stalin’s Heirs’), Ian Milner’s versions of Miroslav Holub.
Translation, for Silkin, was an act of listening, to gauge ‘what the sensuous powers
and moral entrapments feel like’ in other cultures, in order to help us in the UK ‘not
to preserve but freely to practise our own [culture]’.^21 But in terms of Cold War
engagements, the reading of translations from the USSR is an act of humbling proxy
witness, supplementing the loss of innocence brought on by the cumulative shock
of the Holocaust: ‘The experience of concentration camps, and totalitarianism, has
been diffused throughout consciousness and we have lost what little innocence we
might have possessed.’^22
For Silkin, the best English poets are those who have allowed the terror of that
knowledge to diffuse throughout the textures of their poetry in English, poets
like Geoffrey Hill—for his imaginary staging of totalitarian holocaust in England
(re-creating Towton in the ‘Funeral Music’ sequence)—or Roy Fisher, whose still
images of ordinary objects like chairs are ‘frightening, not because of what they
are (seen as), but for what they have been made to do’^23 in the terror camps of
totalitarian countries:
Here are the schoolroom chairs on which
the ministers, in the playground,
Sat to be shot.^24Such acts of translation brought the horrors of Cold War totalitarianism abroad
back home on to British soil, in a nightmarish and uncanny deictics of the here and
now.
More acutely, the example of dissident writers also quite simply affirmed the
power of poetry in ways the West had forgotten. As George Reavey wrote in his
introduction to his fine translations of Yevtushenko:
There is something about the poet and his poetic utterance that has a terrifying effect on
some Russians, and especially on the Authorities, be they Tsarist or Soviet. It is as though
poetry were an irrational force which must be bridled and subjugated and even destroyed.
If the critics cannot do it, then the police must try.^25
Translation and imitation of Russian dissident poetry gave poets in the West a
surrogate sense of that irrational force, not only as though preserved within the
Russianized English of the poems, but also as though half-relishing the bridling
subjugation of those brutal ‘authorities’ in an ‘age of rockets’.^26
Michael Hamburger, German-Jewishemigr ́ e poet writing in English, saw trans- ́
lation as a means of forcing British culture to feel more deeply the hard necessities
(^21) Silkin, ‘Introduction’, 20. (^22) Ibid. 37. (^23) Ibid. 36.
(^24) Roy Fisher, ‘Seven Attempted Moves’, in Silkin (ed.),Poetry of the Committed Individual, 70.
(^25) George Reavey, ‘Yevtushenko: Man and Poet’, inThe Poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko,ed.and
trans. George Reavey (London: Calder & Boyars, 1969), p. vii.
(^26) Yevgeny Yevtushenko, ‘Rockets and Carts’, ibid. 89.