A reading of Yevtushenko's Babi Yar in Russian and then in English (my translation)

This is poem, about what was until that point the largest single massacre of the Holocaust, is extremely famous, in no small part because of how infamous it made Yevtushenko in the Soviet Union. Accordingly, it has been translated a great deal. There are a number of Hebrew translations including fine versions by Ze'ev Geisel, Shlomo Even-Shoshan and Arie Aharoni. I've been able to find three different Yiddish versions, as well as four German ones, including one by Paul Celan. The poet Julius Balbin won a prize for his Esperanto translation. There are also at least a dozen English versions that I have been able to find. For me personally, the most moving translation of all is the Yiddish version by Zyame Telesin, though it omits the second to last stanza.

This video includes my reading of the Russian text, followed by my English verse-translation.

The original poem is written in rhymed stanzas of iambic pentameter, but you wouldn't know it from most of the translations in English. Most of the translators of the poem into Yiddish, Hebrew, and German, have seen fit to reproduce something of its formal properties. Even Balbin's Esperanto version is compelled to pay some mind to form. But all but one of the English versions I have seen illustrate one of the most irritating flaws of 20th century English-speaking literary elites, and that is the tendency to treat rhyme much like TV-viewers treat commercial breaks: if they're there, tune them out; if not, it's one less distraction. What makes this flaw so damaging is that so many critics have mistaken it for a point of pride.

So I translated the poem in a formally conscious way.