pointing to east and west of the Cold War, specifically a form of core solidarity with East European suffering
undercensorship, as transformed by the ‘absolute poetry and absolute politics’
of European Symbolism.^27 A similar forcing characterized the efforts ofModern
Poetry in Translation, founded by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes in 1966. The
coded meanings of translation can be gauged from Hughes’s description of the little
magazine’s editorial policy: ‘we saw our editorship as something like an airport
for incoming translations, an agency for discovering new foreign poets and new
translators, who then might pass inland to more permanent residence in published
books.’^28 To be both an airport and an agency is to rival, at a psychic level, the state
from which the incoming missile-missives depart. The first issue ofModern Poetry
in Translationwas largely devoted to Eastern Europe (Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav
Holub, and Vasko Popa), and the kinds of experience Hughes was interested
in—violent, psychosexual-political, shamanic-somatic—come equipped with a
special Cold War lustre in the translation work.^29
Recalling his sense of solidarity with mid-European poets in 1989, the year the
Wall fell, Hughes makes this clear:
Circumstantial proof that man is a political animal, a state numeral, as if it needed to be
proved, has been weighed out in dead bodies by the million. The attempt these poets have
made to record man’s awareness of what is being done to him, by his own institutions and
by history, and to record along with the suffering their inner creative transcendence of it,
has brought their poetry down to such precisions, discriminations and humilities that it is a
new thing.^30
Such circumstantial proof locks Hughes’s own poems into the same Cold War
frames, revealing their obsession with the hardware of lethal technology as a new
figure for the killer instincts within unconscious species drives: the pike as nuclear
submarine (‘submarine delicacy and horror.|A hundred feet long in their world’^31 );
thrushes like strike aircraft (‘attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,|More coiled steel
(^27) Michael Hamburger,The Truth of Poetry:Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), 81. 28
Hughes, quoted onModern Poetry in Translationwebsite through King’s College, London:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/mpt/issu.html
(^29) Other poetry translation projects which sustained Cold War-inflected links with dissident poets in
the Eastern bloc includeDelos, with translations of Mandelstam and Pasternak, and Oxford University
Press’s list: e.g. Oxford University Press published Pasternak’sIn the Interlude: Poems, 1945–1960,
trans. Henry Kamen in parallel text (1962), and Andrei Voznesenky’sAntiworlds,trans.Audenet al.,
ed. Patricia Blake and Max Hayward (1967). 30
Ted Hughes, ‘Vasko Popa’, inWinter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell (London:
Faber, 1994), 220–1.
(^31) Hughes, ‘Pike’, inCollected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber, 2003), 85. The first nuclear
submarine was the USSNautilus, authorized by Congress in July 1951, built, at the Electric Boat
Shipyard in Groton, Conn., between 1952 and 1954, launched on 21 Jan., commissioned as first nuclear
powered vessel 30 Sept., 1954. ‘Pike’ was published by the Gehenna Press in 1959, and then inLupercal,
Mar. 1960. The submarine was in the news in 1959 following a series of fires, leaks, and flooding
incidents, which prompted fear of nuclear sabotage. Seehttp://navysite.de/ssn/ssn571.htm