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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

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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 with link | Kalashnikov Izhevsk State Technical University
Published online: 16 September 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.20075.ero
Abstract
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.
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
References (37)
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