Books: The Yes & No of a Public Muse

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YEVTUSHENKO POEMS by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Bilingual Edition. Translated by Herbert Marshall. 191 pages. Duffon. $4.50.

The scenes recall the excitement that surrounded the incantatory recitals of Dylan Thomas. Crowds of youngsters usually scrounge for extra tickets, and in the auditoriums, rows of standees lean against the walls. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 33, Russia's principal poet, has been touring the U.S. for four weeks, with stops at New York, Buffalo and Pittsburgh, while the latest collection of his verse is in the bookstores.

Audiences watch and listen agog as the big, blond, open-shirted Siberian submits to the passion of his verse and rolls a voice like an organ through the packed halls.

The whole performance and the response are all the more remarkable in that most of his audiences under stand not one word that the poet utters, leaving for stage translators the unhappy job of making the poetry sing in English.

The Handicap. "All nightingales understand each other," wrote Yevtushenko hopefully in 1960. "Everywhere they speak the same tongue." But unhappily, intelligible dialogue between American and Russian nightingales is severely inhibited, partly in the matter of language, chiefly by the nature of Yevtushenko's nonpoetical preoccupations. The handicap is not so much that his muse is a Marxist but that she is a public creature: poetic sensibility in the West is involved in more private, perhaps more eternal matters.

"A poet is more than a poet in Russia," Yevtushenko has explained. "Here only he is destined to be a poet/ In whom civil sense ferments to passion." With deepest sympathy for Yevtushenko's position as de facto laureate of Russia, it must be objected that to be more than a poet is to be something less than a nightingale. Poetry obliged to make "civil sense" will sometimes make strange noises. In one passage, Yevtushenko remembers, "The ascetic-faced PartOrg said to me . . ." But how can a poet deal with a "PartOrg" (Party Organizer) in any language? The poet himself, alas, must become part poet and part org.

The Laureate. Remarkably, many of Yevtushenko's home-turned verses, so uncomplicated and naive, hypnotize his American intellectual audiences. Perhaps the enthusiasm for him reflects an unconscious dissatisfaction with the disappearance from modern Western poetry of simple values and popular appeal. It is not that Yevtushenko is a Communist poet, but that he is a sentimental Communist poet. Any American producing paeans to the Great Society, better dam construction or Old Glory would be sneered out of the intellectual establishment.

Yevtushenko has been applauded in the West as a free anarchic spirit against Stalinism. But sometimes, when he dreams of "Hindus in machine-gun wagons/ And Peruvians in helmets and sheepskin jerkins," or when he visualizes Marshal Budenny "galloping all over Africa,/ And I, of course, galloping right after him," the effect is quite other than intended. The image of the dynamic poetic dramaturge fades, to be replaced by that of another poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, inflamed with patriotic ardor over the breakfast table and dashing off Form! Form! Riflemen Form!—to be published in the Times, please the Queen, and possibly encourage the redcoats.