Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 'The City of Yes and the City of No'.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-2017)

For my generation, perhaps the best known Russian Poet. Possibly better known than the more critically acclaimed Brodsky. Whether he was best known because he was marketable in ‘The West’ or because he was the best of his contemporaries in Russia is, for those of us who rely on translations, an unanswerable question. But sometimes, dealing with poetry in translation, you can be forgiven for wondering what’s being valued.

Not in the case of this poem. Even if it were English it would still work.

One strange evening I took a group from the high school where I worked to Brisbane (Australia) to hear Yevtushenko read. He was tall, elderly, wearing a puce suit and a huge, bright yellow tie. He had just published a novel call ‘Don’t die before your death’.

He didn’t so much read this poem as dance it down the aisle.

This is taken from Twentieth Century Russian Poetry. Silver and Steel, an anthology. Selected, with an introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, edited by Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward (with Daniel Weissbort) Doubleday 1993.