Andrei Voznesensky (pronounced Vahz-nuh-SEN-skee) was one of the Soviet Union’s boldest and best known young poets of the 1950s and ’60s who moved Russian literature from a sate of fear and virtual slavery under Stalin. His works, often subtle, ironic and innovative, epitomized the strain, hope and progress of the post-Stalin decades in Russia. He rose to international stardom in the 1960s, largely due to the cultural thaw that followed Stalin’s death in 1953.
In his work “I Am Goya,” (below) one Voznesensky’s earliest and best-known poems, he expressed the fear of war he experienced in childhood. It was inspired by a volume of Goya’s etchings given to him by his father. The poem creates its impressions of war and horror through a series of images and interrelated variations on the name of the painter, which echo throughout in a series of striking sound metaphors in Russian: Goya, glaz (eyes), gore (grief), golos (voice), gorod (cities), golod (hunger), gorlo (gullet).
I am Goya
of the bare field, by the enemy’s beak gouged
till the craters of my eyes gape
I am grief
I am the tongue
of war, the embers of cities
on the snows of the year 1941
I am hunger
I am the gullet
of a woman hanged whose body like a bell
tolled over a blank square
I am Goya
O grapes of wrath!
I have hurled westward
the ashes of the uninvited guest!
and hammered stars into the unforgetting sky – like nails
I am Goya
(translated from the Russian by Stanley Kunitz)