“I Am Goya” (“Я – Гойя!”), composed in 1957, first appeared in Andrei Voznesensky’s debut collection, Mozaika (Mosaics), which was published in Vladimir, USSR, in 1960, when the poet was 27 years old. It is reputedly “one of the poet’s favorites, and he always recites it at his public readings” (Blake and Hayward 111). Many readers familiar with the original version in Russian particularly appreciate its verse form and sound qualities, especially its use of alliteration and assonance.
The poem’s inspiration has its origin in the poet’s childhood. In the middle of World War II, the poet’s father took a leave of absence from his post in Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg) to visit his family, ensconced for their safety in the mountain town of Kurgan, near the Soviet republic of Khazakhstan, to which Andrei and his mother had moved from Vladimir. Andrei was only a child, probably not yet 10 years old, when the momentous visit occurred. His father had packed very lightly and had brought with him only some food and a slim volume of the etchings of the famous Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya, most likely Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War, 1863). The book fascinated the child with its dark vision of the horrors of war and its depiction of inhumanity and atrocity.
The poem is not a description of Goya’s work as such, but an instance of identification with its signifying power. The poem’s imagery—like Goya’s—relates to the violence and injustice of warfare and emphasizes war’s effects on both victims and perpetrators. The poem begins with the words “I am Goya!” followed by an image of the speaker, a blinded victim on a barren field, his eyes gouged out by the enemy. The speaker next becomes an emblem of despair, saying, “I am grief” (“Я – Горе.”) and calls himself the voice of war and the charred remains, the filth of Soviet cities in the snows of 1941. Next the speaker says, “I am hunger”—adding, “I am the throat of a hanged woman naked clanging like a bell over the empty square.” (“Я – горло / Повешенной бабы, чье тело, как колокол, / било над площадью голой…”)
Twice more the speaker exclaims, “I am Goya!” and between those exclamations boasts, “I have flung back the ashes of uninvited guests from the west and driven stars into the commemorative sky, like nails.”
As commentators have pointed out, in Russian the words for Goya, grief, throat, voice, hunger, and naked alliterate on their initial syllable (gó-) so that the guttural opening sound of all of these words—followed by an accented throaty o and sometimes a velar l as well—emphasizes (by constricting the throat) a strong sensation of choking or sobbing.
Inspired by Goya, this poem—in many ways the consummate elegiac expression of the desolation, anguish, and wretchedness of war—has in turn inspired other artists, including the English composer Nigel Osborne, who wrote, produced, and recorded a symphonic piece, also titled I Am Goya, conducted by Richard Hickox and featuring the baritone Stephen Varcoe (1977).
Bibliography
Blake, Patricia, and Max Hayward, eds. Introduction to Andrei Voznesensky’s Antiworlds. New York: Basic Books, 1966.
Voznesensky, Andrei. Antiworlds. New York: Basic Books, 1966.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Russian Formalism
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