Life & Wisdom Quote by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

A poet’s compliment that lands like a backhand. Yevtushenko’s line flatters “beauty” and “faithfulness” while staging them as mutually exclusive, then smuggles in an old, sexist metaphor to make the dilemma feel natural. The provocation works because translation really does live in a double bind: cling to the source and you risk stiffness, foreignness, dead air; chase the target language’s music and you risk drifting from what was said, and why. He compresses that into a neat epigram, the kind poets love because it’s rhythmic, binary, and cruelly memorable.

The subtext is a defense of creative betrayal. Calling a “beautiful” translation “unfaithful” elevates the translator from clerk to artist, legitimizing deviation as the price of making a poem live. It’s also a warning: the closer you get to another writer’s voice, the more your own voice disappears; the more you make it sing in your language, the more it becomes yours. His certainty (“most certainly”) is part performance, part polemic - an attempt to settle an argument by force of aphorism.

Context sharpens the edge. Yevtushenko came up in a Soviet literary culture where words had stakes and where poets were translated, exported, and interpreted as public symbols. For someone whose fame depended on crossing borders, the quip is self-protective: if your work reads differently abroad, blame the necessary treachery of translation. Today the gendered analogy reads dated, but the underlying point still needles: fidelity is not a meter you can simply maximize; it’s a choice about which truths you’re willing to lose.