Mayakovsky, Vladimir; George Reavey (tr.); Max Hayward (tr.); Patricia Blake (intro);
The bedbug [a play] and selected poetry
Meridian Books / World Publishing Co 1960/1984 (Paperback 318 pages)
ISBN 9780253311306 / 0253311306
topics: | drama | poetry | russia
[Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky] (1893--1930) is no doubt one of the most influential (and controversial) of modern Russian poets. His fierce defence of the Soviet system alienated him to many Russians (particularly the large and influential emigre community), and his lifestyle of utter excess fringing on megalomania does little to endear him. However, many of his poems, such as Conversation with a tax collector about poetry retain an undeniable power. Mayakovsky is also a pioneer in creative writing pedagogy, and often conducted "How to write verse" lectures, using his own poems as exemplars. The introductory biography by Patricia Blake is full of Mayakovsky's exotic quirks, including an episode where he disrupted an official dinner and prevented a minister and an ambassador from speaking (by yelling outrageously), and reduced a visiting Finn dignitary to epileptic paroxysms of "too much... too much... "
Also describes a series of cruel acts against lovers, including a 17-year girl who commits suicide three years after estrangement - and then Mayakovsky incorporates her suicide into a plot. In another episode, noted dissolute neo-romantic poet, Sergei Esenin committed suicide in 1925, by slashing his wrists and writing a farewell poem in his own blood; a day later he finally hanged himself. Two lines from the poem: in this life to die is nothing new and, in truth, to live is not much newer. Mayakovsky's "most famous act of cruelty" was in response to these lines, in the poem To Sergei Esenin, where he counters: In this life it is not hard to die, to mold life is more difficult A year later, in a lecture titled "How to make verse", he used To Sergei Esenin as an example, and elaborated on his purpose behind writing it: to deliberately paralyze the action of Esenin's last lines... the wroking class needs strength in order to continue the revolution which demands... that we glorify life and the joy that is to be found along that most difficult of roads -- the road towards communism." (from _How to make verse_, 1926 [At the time, Mayakovsky was a noted "communist poet", posited the Lef conception of poetry (to work in accordance with "social demand"), here the poetry of self-expression has no place. ] [as a matter of interest, the farewell note by Esenin goes: Goodbye, dear friend, goodbye My love, you are in my heart. It was preordained we should part And be reunited by and by. Goodbye: no handshake to endure. Let's have no sadness furrowed brow. In this life to die is nothing new and, in truth, to live, is not much newer. [Dec 1925]
Citizen tax collector!
Forgive my botheing you ...
Thank you ...
don't worry ...
I'll stand ...
My business
is
of a delicate nature:
about the plate
of the poet
in the workers' ranks.
Along with
owners
of stores and property
I'm made subject
to taxes and penalties.
You demand
I pay
five hundered for the half year
and twenty-five
for failing to send in my returns.
Now
my work
is like
any other work.
Look here --
how much I've lost,
what
expenses
I have in my production
and how much I spend
on materials.
You know,
of course, about "rhyme."
Suppose
a line
ends with the word
"day,"
and then,
repeating the syllables
in the third line
we insert
something like
"tarara-boom-de-day."
In your idiom
rhyme
is a bill of exchange
to be honoured in the third line! ---
that's the rule.
And so you hunt
for the small change of suffixes and flections
in the depleted cashbox
of conjugations
and declensions.
You start shoving
a word
into the line,
but it's a tight fit --
you press it and it breaks.
Citizen tax collector,
honestly,
the poet
spends a fortune on words
In our idiom
rhyme is a keg.
A keg of dynamite.
The line
is a fuse.
The line burns to the end
and explodes
and the town
is blown sky-high ??
in a strophe.
Where can you find,
and at what price,
rhymes
that take aim and kill on the spot?
Suppose
only half a dozen
unheard-of rhymes
were left,
in, say, Venezuela.
And so
I'm drawn
to North and South.
I rush around
entangled in advances and loans.
Citizen!
Consider my traveling expenses.
-- all of it! --
is a journey to the unknown.
Poetry
is like mining radium.
For every gram
you work a year.
For the sake of a single word
you waste
a thousand tons
of verbal ore.
But now
incendiary
the burning of these words
compared
with the smoldering
of the raw material.
These words
will move
millions of hearts
for thousands of years.
Of course,
there are many kinds of poets.
So many of them
use legerdemain!
And,
like conjurers,
pull lines from their mouths --
their own --
and other people's.
Not to speak
of the lyrical castrates?!
They're only too glad
to shove in
a borrowed line.
This is
just one more case
of robbery and embezzlement
among the frauds rampant in the country.
These
verses and odes
bawled out
today
amidst applause,
will go down
in history
as the overhead expenses
of what
two or three of us
have achieved.
As the saying goes,
you eat forty pounds
of table salt,
and smoke
a hundred cigarettes
in order
to dredge up
one precious word
from artesian
human depths.
So at once
my tax
shrinks.
Strike out
one wheeling zero
from the balance due!
For a hundred cigaretts --
a ruble ninety;
for table salt --
a ruble sixty.
Your form
has a mass of questions:
"Have you traveled on business
or not?"
But suppose
I have
ridden to death
a hundred Pegasi
in the last
15 years?
And here you have --
imagine my feelings! --
something
about servants
and assets.
But what if I am
simultaneously
a leader
and a servant
of the people?
The working class
speaks
through my mouth,
and we,
proletarians,
are drivers of the pen.
As the years go by,
you wear out
the machine of the soul.
And people say:
"A back number,
he's written out,
he's through!"
There's less and less love,
and less and less daring,
and time
is a battering ram
against my head.
Then there's amortization,
the deadliest of all;
amortization
of the heart and soul.
And when
the sun
like a fattened hog
rises
on a future
without beggars and cripples,
I shall
already
be a putrefied corpse
under a fence,
together
with a dozen
of my colleagues.
Draw up
my
posthumous balance!
I hereby declare --
and I'm telling no lies:
Among
today's
swindlers and dealers,
I alone
shall be sunk
in hopeless debt.
Our duty is
to blare
like brass-throated horns
in the fogs of bourgeois vulgarity
and seething storms.
A poet
is always
indebted to the universe,
paying,
alas,
interest
and fines.
I am
indebted
to the lights of the Broadway,
to you,
to the skies of Bagdadi, [Mayakovsky's birthplace]
to the Red Army,
to the cherry trees of Japn --
to everything
about which
I have not yet written.
But, after all,
who needs
all this stuff?
Is its aim to rhyme
and rage in rhythm?
No, a poet's word
is your resurrection
and your immortality,
citizen and official.
Centuries hence,
take a line of verse
from its paper frame
and bring back time!
And this day
with its tax collectors,
its aura of miracles
and its stench of ink,
will dawn again.
Convinced dweller in the present day,
go
to the N.K.P.S.(*5),
take a ticket to immortality
and, reckoning
the effect
of my verse,
stagger my earnings
over three hundred years!
But the poet is strong
not only because,
remembering you,
the people of the future
will hiccup.
No!
Nowadays too
the poet's rhyme
is a caress
and a slogan,
a bayonet
and a knout!
Citizen tax collector,
I'll cross out
all the zeros
after the five
and pay the rest.
I demand
as my right
an inch of ground
among
the poorest
workers and peasants.
And if
you think
that all i have to do
is to profit
by other people's words,
then,
comrades,
here's my pen.
Take
a crack at it
yourselves!
(1926)
online here (japanese forum)
[...]
[his last poem, may be considered his suicide note]
Past one o'clock. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I'm in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And as they say, the incident is closed.
Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
to balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.
[Notes from the back]
[After Mayakovsky's suicide on April 14, 1930, this poem was found,
untitled, among several pages of scribbled lines in his notebook. It
is presumed to be either a continuation of At the top of my voice or
part of the projected lyrical introduction to that poem. M used the
middle quatrain ("And as they say... hurts." as an epilogue in his
suicide note, except he changed the line, "Now you and I are quits" to
"Now life and I are quits".
In the suicide note he also included a further wordplay- he altered the
sentence "incident is closed" ischerpan, to read isperchen -
suggesting "the incident is too highly peppered", hence spoiled. ]
Mayakovsky (1893-1930) is one of the most important post-Revolution poets of Russia, and one of the major international figures of 20th-century avant-garde poetics. This selected edition draws from his entire career, ranging from his early love lyric "The Cloud in Trousers," through "Conversation with a tax Collector About Poetry," to "Bedbug," his late dramatic work exploding with his disillusionment with the Soviet State. Russian originals face the English translations.