Authors

Discussion

Poets and translators associated with the Beat movement, and the American literary counterculture more broadly, were the first to translate and champion the Soviet Russian poet Andrei Voznesenskii in the English-speaking West. My paper investigates how and why Voznesenskii came to be styled as the nearest thing to a Soviet Beat. I focus on the formative years of the initial contact, from 1961 to 1964. The London-based, Finnish-born poet Anselm Hollo was the principal mediator who brought this "Beat Voznesenskii" to British and American readers. Two collections will be discussed: Red Cats (1962) from City Lights’ "Pocket Poet Series", an eccentric book that included Voznesenskii, Evgenii Evtushenko, and Semen Kirsanov, as well as the single-author Selected Poems of Andrei Voznesensky, published in 1964 by Grove Press. Close readings of poems combined with an examination of archival material reveal a convoluted translation process involving multiple interlinear translations. Miscommunications and calculated omissions abound in the correspondence between the translator (Hollo) and the publishers (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Fred Jordan). This Voznesenskii material should be of considerable interest to specialists in poetry and translation studies as well as cultural historians working on the Cold War. Hollo’s attempt to fashion Voznesenskii as a Beat writer, while largely unfulfilled from a strictly literary-textual perspective, nevertheless helped to initiate decades of fertile interlingual and cross-cultural contacts between the Soviet Russian poet and America’s literary counterculture.