NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT by Andrei Voznesensky Edited by Vera Dunham and Max Hayward Doubleday; 268 pages; $10 hardcover, $4.95 paperback
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations spans some 5,000 years, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead (circa 3500 B.C.) to the verse of Andrei Voznesensky (born 1933). The book ends are astonishingly apposite. The King Tut exhibition demonstrates that ancient art has modern resonance. Nostalgia for the Present proves that Russia's contemporary poet tells ageless parables.
Voznesensky's tenth book reinforces his reputation as a major lyricist and enhances his role as the last of the international troubadours, a public man as recognizable on American campuses as he is on his own soil. Literary and political celebrities throng these pages: Poets Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Wilbur are among the many translators; Senator Edward Kennedy and Playwright Arthur Miller contribute moving forewords. Several poems recall encounters with Robert Lowell. Robert Kennedy, Boris Pasternak and Marc Chagall. By all customary standards Voznesensky should be thoroughly corrupted by recognition and applause. Instead, his work has retained its pure, almost elemental force.
Nearly every poem glistens with irony: the man who is regularly censured at home is not one to go gentle into that good night. Muffled by Soviet bureaucracy, he seethes:
I'm . . . 35th for a place in Vagankovo Cemetery . . . 16th at the optician's . . . 110th for an abortion (not pregnant now, but ready when my time comes).
In "Technology" he admits:
With all due respect to samovars, in the very middle of this provincial hole, I long for plumbing and freedom of thought.
Throughout, Voznesensky's work is transfigured by metaphors. A man clothes himself in a suit, a car, a garage, a nation, a planet, a cosmos—and then realizes that he has forgotten his watch. Timeless, he has lost his place in history. A girl's black bell-bottomed trousers "flare out as shadow would flare out/ If the source of light/ Were centered in her belly." The poet moves in his leather jacket, "a cow's hide stuffed with soul." In "War" he compresses the century's anguish to four barbed-wire lines:
With the open eyes of their dead fathers Toward other worlds they gaze ahead— Children who, wide-eyed, become Periscopes of the buried dead.
Nostalgia presents a single poetic vision and a choir of translators. They are not of equal worth. Robert Bly makes Voznesensky sound like Robert Bly, all curt stanzas and quick vignettes. Ginsberg jettisons the author's rhymes for some ungainly free verse. The best work is the least obtrusive: working with Voznesensky's supple and difficult lines, Max Hayward, Vera Dunham and William Jay Smith have given the Russian, both man and language, a new voice.
At its most eloquent, that voice echoes the lurching prophecies of Yeats:
A man in the dark, drunkenly seeking his matchbox, cries: "Mary is pregnant again, and again the world is not ready! . . . "
Or the hellish stanzas of Brecht:
You and I, George, let us drink together, in our eyes the wildfires of centuries glow. Each sister is raped by her own brother, and nobody knows whose brother is who.