War Ballad (alternatively titled Ballad of 1941) was first published in Andrey Voznesensky’s debut collection, Mozaika (Mozaics) (Vladimir 1960), along with I Am Goya. In that book the poem was “dedicated to the partisans of Kerch, a peninsula in the Crimea, where a group of partisans hid underground in old stone quarries during World War II” (Antiworlds 115).

The poem’s original and important seventh stanza was omitted from the version published in Parabola (Moscow 1960) and from the translation published in the Norton World Poetry Anthology edited by Katharine Washburn and John S. Major (1997). Stanley Moss did both that translation and the one included in Antiworlds (which restores the seventh stanza), but the two versions differ slightly in other ways as well.

The poem’s first of seven quatrains begins with an image of a piano having “crawled underground. Hauled / in for firewood” and “waiting for the axe” (Antiworlds 51). In the second stanza the legless piano is likened to a lizard lying “on its belly” in the mine shaft where the partisans are holed up. One of the partisans “goes down” to reach the keys with his frozen seven remaining fingers and begins to play, and the speaker feels he is witnessing “the great Northern lights” and that all “the reflections of flaming chandeliers” and the “white columns and grand tiers” of concert halls are nothing but “a great lie,” for “the steel of the piano howls” in him, and he identifies with it.

At this point the two translations depart radically from each other and from the original. In the Norton, the poem ends with an epiphany the speaker experiences in identifying with the piano’s reply to the pianist’s touch: “I’ll be a song for Russia. I’ll be / an étude, warmth and bread for everybody” (969). In the Antiworlds version the poem ends with “And for my crowning crescendo / I wait for the lick of the axe” (51).

The original poem, the one dedicated to the partisans who were freezing in the mineshaft, ends with:

“Я отражаю штолен сажу. / Фигуры. Голод. Блеск костра. / И как коронного пассажа, / Я жду удара топора!”

(I reflect the gallery’s soot. / Figures. Hunger. Luster of bonfire. / And as a crowning touch, / I await the impact of the axe!)

Although Voznesensky was careful originally to title the poem Ballad of the Year ’41 (“Баллада 41го Года”), the poet’s symbolic identification in 1960 with the doomed concert grand, reduced to firewood by the exigencies of continuing war and beleaguered communalism, is clearest in the Russian-language original.

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: Literature, Russian Literature, War Literature

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