HOLLO, Anselm (translator and editor). Red Cats. San Francisco: City Lights Books. 1962.
Small 4to. Red and White card wrappers with title lettering in white on front wrapper; pp. [2], 5-64; slightly toned on front and rear wrapper with vague shelf-wear stains to rear; spine slighty rubbed and toned; offsetting of upper cover to title; signs of offsettng to rear end paper; otherwise very good.
First edition of Hollo's translations of poetry by Soviet poets Andrei Voznesensky, Yevgeni Yevtushenko and Semyon Kirsanov.
Anselm Hollo, a young Finnish translator, wrote to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Book Shop, when he was merely twenty five. Here began a frenetic correspondance, with Hollo even translating Ginsberg's "Kaddish" into German, an experience he described as, “of a kind to give you the shakes sometimes, the sheer intensity and difficulty of it”. Keen to create an anthology of international dissidents, Hollo struck upon the Russian and Soviet avant-garde as his subject matter; specifically "The Thaw" in Soviet Arts, a movement which coincided politically with fighting for freedom from censorship in arts and media from the 1950's. This volume includes poems by three Soviet poets of the so-called Soviet "Thaw"; Voznesensky, Yevtushenko and Kirsanov.
As one of Andrei Voznesensky's later poems 'Dogalypse' ironically proclaims of the organic art of poetry and it's relationship to translation;
"They understood without translation—
for the nature of poetry
is not in the grammar but in the gut.
They understood without translation,
No English-Russian dictionary—
only the language of sky and field
and the place where music
hasn’t lied. They understood by breathing deeply".
-so this mini anthology of three exciting voices translates from the gut.
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