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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781910392164 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Enitharmon Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2016 |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Sales rank: | 846,862 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Volodya
Selected Poems
By Vladimir Mayakovsky, Rosy Carrick
Enitharmon Press
Copyright © 2015 Rosy CarrickAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-910392-16-4
CHAPTER 1
A SLAP IN THE FACE OF PUBLIC TASTE
To the readers of our New First Unexpected.
WE ALONE ARE THE FACE OF OUR TIME. The horn of time blares through us in the art of the world.
The past is too crowded. The Academy and Pushkin are more unintelligible than hieroglyphics.
Chuck Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and all that lot overboard from the Ship of Modernity.
They who do not forget their FIRST love will not recognize their last.
Who is naïve enough to direct their last love towards the perfumed lechery of Balmont? Is that really a reflection of today's potent soul?!
Who is so spineless as to take fright at swiping the paper armour off Warrior Bryusov's tattered black coattails? Or do they contain the dawns of unknown beauty?
Wash your hands, you who have fingered the filthy slime of books written by all those countless Leonid Andreyevs.
All those Maxim Gorkys, Krupins, Bloks, Sologubs, Remizovs, Averchenkos, Chyornyis, Kuzmins, Bunins, etc, etc, need only a dacha on the river. Such is the manner tailors are rewarded by destiny.
From the heights of skyscrapers we gaze down upon their insignificance! ...
We COMMAND you to honour the RIGHTS of poets:
1) To enlarge THE SCOPE of vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words (word-innovation).
2) To feel an insuperable hatred towards that language which exists before their own.
3) To discard in horror from their proud brows the wreaths of dirt-cheap fame manufactured by you from bathhouse birch-switches.
4) To stand on the solid rock of the word 'WE' amidst a sea of catcalls and indignation.
And if FOR THE TIME BEING the filthy brand of your 'common sense' and your 'good taste' are yet present in our lines, they nevertheless – FOR THE FIRST TIME – already thrill with the Summer Lightning of the New Impending Beauty of the Self-valuable (self-creating) Word.
Moscow, 1912, December David Burliuk, Alexander Kruchënykh, Vladmir Mayakovsky, Victor Khlebnikov
CHAPTER 2 from A TRAGEDY
PROLOGUE
Can you understand,
for what reason I,
tranquil,
like the threat of a jeer
carry my soul on a plate
to the dinner of passing years.
Down unshaven plaza-cheeks
flowing like an unneeded tear,
I
may be
the last poet.
Have you noticed –
swinging
in the cobblestone tracks
the striped face of hanged boredom,
and across swirling rivers
on lathered-up necks
the iron bridges wring their cold hands.
The heavens cry
impetuous,
resonant;
and a cloud
has a scowl on its wrinkled countenance,
as if a woman expected a baby,
but god flung her a half-blind dunce.
With fat red-haired fingers
the sun caressed you like a stubborn gadfly –
in your souls there's an overkissed slave.
I, undaunted,
carried my hatred for rays of daylight though centuries;
with soul drawn out like taut, like telegraph nerves,
I
am king of lights!
Approach me all you
who tore the silence,
who roared
because the nooses of noon were too tight –
I will reveal to you
with words
that are simple, like lowing,
our new souls,
glowing
like the arcs of streetlights.
I'll lightly touch your heads with my fingers,
and you
will grow lips
for enormous kisses
and a tongue,
to all nations native.
And I, hobbling on my mean soul,
will depart for my throne
with starry holes hung across the tattered vault.
I'll lie down,
bright,
in my clothes of sloth,
on a soft bed of bona fide dung,
and quiet,
kissing railroad-tie knees, the steam engine wheel
will grab my neck and squeeze.
(1913)
I
1
On the pavement
of my trampled soul
the steps of madmen
weave the prints of rude crude words.
Where cities
hang
and in the noose of cloud
the towers'
crooked spires
congeal –
I go
alone to weep
that crossroads
crucify
policemen.
2
A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY WIFE
Along far beaches of uncharted seas
the moon –
my wife – goes driving.
She's red-haired, my beloved.
Behind her turnout,
a variegated throng of constellations scurries,
screaming.
She weds with a garage,
kisses newspaper kiosks,
while a fluttering-eyed page tinsels her train, the
Milky Way.
And I?
To me, ablaze, the yoke of brows
has lugged fresh pails from deep-eyed wells.
In lacustrine silks you hung,
an amber fiddle chanting in your thighs?
You threw no baited line
into the regions of malignant roofs.
In sands' nostalgia bathed, I drown in boulevards;
for that's your daughter –
my song
in mesh of stocking gliding
by the coffee houses!
3
A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY MAMMA
I have a mamma on blue cornflower wallpaper.
But I pace about in peahen colours,
torturing shaggy camomiles with my measuring stride.
When the evening sounds its rusty oboes,
I walk to the window,
believing
I shall see again
the cloud
reposing
upon the house.
But mamma's sick in bed,
and from it
a rustling of people scurries to an empty corner.
Mamma's aware –
this is the helter-skelter of mad thoughts
crawling from behind the roofs of the Shustov factory.
And when the dimming window-frame
bloodies my forehead, crowned with a felt hat,
then I shall speak out,
pushing apart with my bass voice the wind's howl:
'Mamma.
If I should feel sorry
for the vase of your torment,
knocked down by the heels of the cloud dance –
who then would fondle the golden hands,
imploringly twisted on the signboard by the shopwindows of
Avanzo?'
4
A FEW WORDS ABOUT MYSELF
I love to watch children dying.
Do you note, behind protruding nostalgia,
the shadowy billow of laughter's surf?
But I –
in the reading room of the streets –
have leafed so often through the volume of the coffin.
Midnight
with sodden hands has fingered
me
and the battered paling,
and the crazy cathedral galloped
in drops of downpour upon the cupola's bald pate.
I have seen Christ escape from an icon,
and the slush tearfully kiss
the wind-swept fringe of his tunic.
At bricks I bawl,
thrusting the dagger of desperate words
into the swollen pulp of the sky:
'Sun!
Father mine!
If at least thou wouldst have mercy and stop tormenting me!
For my blood thou spilled gushes down this nether road.
That is my soul yonder
in tatters of torn cloud
against a burnt-out sky
upon the rusted cross of the belfry!
Time!
You lame icon-painter,
will you at least daub my countenance
and frame it as a freak of this age!
I am as lonely as the only eye
of a man on his way to the blind!'
(1913)
LISTEN!
Listen,
if stars are lit,
it means there is someone who needs it.
It means that someone wants them to be,
that someone deems those speckles of spit
magnificent.
And overwrought,
in the swirls of afternoon dust,
he bursts in on God,
afraid he might be already late.
In tears,
he kisses God's sinewy hand
and begs him to guarantee
that there will definitely be a star.
He swears
he won't be able to stand
that starless ordeal.
Later,
he wanders around, worried,
but outwardly calm.
And to someone else, he says:
'Now,
it's all right.
You are no longer afraid,
are you?'
Listen,
if stars are lit,
it means there is someone who needs it.
It means it is essential
that every evening
at least one star should ascend
over the crest of the building.
(1914)
from THE BACKBONE-FLUTE
PROLOGUE
To all of you –
those I liked or like –
cherished as icons in the cave of my soul,
solemnly, I raise as a goblet of wine
the skull filled with my poetry.
I contemplate –
so often –
ending my days
with the full stop of a bullet.
This evening,
for all of you –
just in case –
I am giving a farewell concert.
Memory,
pack the brain's auditorium
with inexhaustible swarms of beloveds.
Spatter laughter from eye to eye,
sate the night with former weddings' glory.
Fill every soul with a jocular mood
so that this night is forgotten by no one.
Today, I shall play the flute –
my backbone.
(1915)
A CLOUD IN TROUSERS
PROLOGUE
I
Will goad you with a bloody shred of heart
You
Slumped in thought
Soft in the head
Like a fat lackey on a greasy settee
And I'll have my fill of bitterness.
Not a single grey hair in my soul
No senile tenderness there!
My voice crashes through the universe
I walk – the handsome
Twenty-two year old.
Tenderhearted lovers
Whisper fiddle music
While the vulgar bang love on a drum
But can you turn yourselves inside out
And be like me, just a smacking pair of lips!
Come learn from me
Leave your stuffed drawing-rooms
Petty angelic bureaucrats
Quietly licking your leafy lips
Like a cook looking through a cookery book.
If you want
I'll rage on raw meat
And like the sky changing hue
If you want
I'll be as tender as you please
Not a man but a cloud in trousers!
I don't believe that blooming Nice exists!
Again I sing the praises of
Men as crumpled as hospital beds
Women used time after time like a rhyme.
I
The ravings of malaria, you think?
But this happened.
In Odessa. This is how it was.
'I'll come at four,' said Maria.
Eight o'clock.
Nine o'clock.
Ten o'clock.
And evening, look,
Decemberish evening, louring,
Draws back from the windows,
Skulks off into night black as murder.
Candelabras laughing, sniggering
Behind its tattered back.
You wouldn't recognise me now.
This muscular bulk of me
Groaning
Writhing
What the hell does it want, this great clod?
A clod wants lots of things.
For oneself, of course, it's small comfort
That one is bronze-hard
That one's heart is a cold lump of iron.
At night you want just to muffle
Your ringing hardness
In something soft, something woman.
Just look:
Massive as I am
Hunched at the window,
I melt the glass with my forehead.
To make love or not to make love?
And what kind –
An ecstasy or a sad little love?
A great love from a body like hers?
A little love, surely,
A tiny, gentle, self-effacing little love.
She even jumps when a car hoots.
She loves the jingling bells of the horse-trams.
So it goes on and goes on.
I bury my face in the rain
My face in its pock-marked face
And I wait,
And the din of the town washes over me like breaking waves.
Midnight: the steel blade poised
Thrust down
Severs the neck –
Take him away!
And the twelfth hour dropped
Like a head from the executioner's block.
Grey raindrops on the window panes
Twisted a wreath of lament
A huge blubbering face
As if the gargoyles of Notre Dame
Were howling tearfully.
DAMN HER!
What, isn't that enough?
Shall I split my mouth open with a scream?
I hear
A nerve twitch quietly
Like a sick man jerking out of bed,
Look – there! –
Strolling along at first
Easy does it
Then off at a run
Frightened
Exposed
Now this one, and two more,
Whirl in a mad dance.
Downstairs, plaster crashed to the floor.
Nerves big
Nerves small
Little ones
Scores of 'em.
And already
Their nerveless legs give way.
And night oozes, oozes through my room.
Eyes stuck in the ooze can scarcely be pulled out.
Suddenly the hotel's doors clattered
Like dentures that don't fit properly.
And in you came.
Brusquely, so to say, 'Well, here I am,'
Screwing up your suede gloves
You said
'Did I tell you?
I'm getting married.'
What the hell, get married.
You think I care?
I hold myself back
Watch me – I don't move a muscle!
Still as a dead man's heartbeats.
You remember
What you used to say?
'Jack London
Money
Love
Passion' –
But all I saw was
You – the Mona Lisa.
To keep you one must steal you.
They stole you.
And so again I shall gamble my heart away,
Love's blazing testimony branded on my arched brow.
But so what?
The house has been gutted by fire, but still
A few homeless tramps live there.
Are you laughing at me?
'Fewer than a beggar's kopecks
The jewels of your distracted love.'
Let me remind you
Pompeii perished
When they poked fun at Vesuvius!
Hey, you!
You fine fellows who
Dabble in sacrilege
In crime
In violence!
Have you seen
The most terrible thing?
My face, when
I
Hold myself calm?
And what I feel –
That 'I' is too small
Some me breaks through uncheckable.
Hullo!
Who's there?
That you, Ma?
Hey, Ma,
Your son's ill, seriously ill!
Ma!
What's he got? – Inflammation of the heart!
Tell his sisters, Lyuda and Olya,
He doesn't know where to put himself.
Every word,
Even jokes,
That he vomits out of his scorched mouth
Stumble out like naked prostitutes
From a burning brothel.
People sniff –
A smell of roast flesh!
They've gathered some men together,
Great fellows!
Helmets, yes,
But no big boots, by request!
Give instructions to the firemen:
Burning hearts to be scaled gently.
I'd better do it myself, and
Pump out my tearfilled eyes by the barrelful,
Just let me force my way here through my ribs, and
I'll jump! I'll jump! I'll jump! I'll jump!
But they've collapsed.
You can't jump out of your heart!
On my scorched face
Out of the slit of my lips
A little charred kiss struggled out and flung itself free.
Ma!
I can't sing.
The choirstalls in my heart's church are in flames!
Little scorched ciphers of words and numbers
File from my skull
Like children from a burning building.
Just as fear
Clutching at the sky
Forced up those
Burning hands from the Lusitania.
The trembling people
In the quiet of their flats
Were stormed by a hundred-eyed glow from the bay.
And you, at any rate,
Groan down the centuries
O my burning!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Volodya by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Rosy Carrick. Copyright © 2015 Rosy Carrick. Excerpted by permission of Enitharmon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Acknowledgements,
Introduction by Rosy Carrick,
A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1912),
from A Tragedy: Prologue (1913),
I (1913),
Listen! (1914),
from The Backbone-Flute: Prologue (1915),
A Cloud in Trousers (1915),
Concern for Horses (1918),
An Extraordinary Adventure Which Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky in a Summer Cottage (1920),
ROSTA poster: 'What to do in order not to die from cholera?' (1921),
Order No. 2 to the Army of the Arts (1921),
Mayakonferensky's Anectidote (1922),
I Love (1922),
from Pro Eto – That's What (1923),
from Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1924),
from The Flying Proletarian: II. Daily Life in the Future (1925),
Drag Forth the Future (1925),
What Is Good And What Is Bad (1925),
This Here Little Book of Mine's About the Sea, About the Lighthouse (1926),
Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry (1926),
For British Workers (1926),
To Sergey Esenin (1926),
Goavy Dick! (1927),
My Soviet Passport (1928),
Comrade Teenager! (1930),
At the Top of My Voice (1930),
Past One O'Clock (1930),
Verse fragments (1930),
Essays & Lectures,
Notes,
List of Translators,
Scots Language Glossary,
Appendix: On the Captain's Bridge by Lev Kassil (1928),
Further Reading,
Permissions acknowledgements,
from A Tragedy: Epilogue (1913),