Is [Yevgeny Yevtushenko], as Anthony Burgess remarked recently …, "easy to do, but hardly worth doing" …? Reading George Reavey's fairly substantial collection of Yevtushenko translations [The Poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko] … together with the poet's own fat volume Idut belye snegi (a full retrospective of the best poems from earlier books, plus some recent work), one would be forced to a rather different view. He is only "easy to do" in the sense that the obvious interest of his subject-matter can be made to sponsor loose, publicistic translations which make no attempt to reproduce his often very pointed rhymes and sound-effects. And that he is "hardly worth doing" is surely a hasty judgment, hinging again on a negative reaction to his "civic" concerns, but forgetting the not inconsiderable bulk of deeply felt lyrical and meditative poems…. Yevtushenko seems entitled to some defence, if only because in his best personal poems...