Vladimir Mayakovsky 1930

At the Top of My voice

First Prelude to the Poem

Source: The bedbug and Selected poetry, translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey. Meridian Books, New York, 1960;

Transcribed: by Mitch Abidor.

My most respected

comrades of posterity!

Rummaging among

these days’

petrified crap,

exploring the twilight of our times,

you,

possibly,

will inquire about me too.

And, possibly, your scholars

will declare,

with their erudition overwhelming

a swarm of problems;

once there lived

a certain champion of boiled water,

and inveterate enemy of raw water.

Professor,

take off your bicycle glasses!

I myself will expound

those times

and myself.

I, a latrine cleaner

and water carrier,

by the revolution

mobilized and drafted,

went off to the front

from the aristocratic gardens

of poetry -

the capricious wench

She planted a delicious garden,

the daughter,

cottage,

pond

and meadow.

Myself a garden I did plant,

myself with water sprinkled it.

some pour their verse from water cans;

others spit water

from their mouth -

the curly Macks,

the clever jacks -

but what the hell’s it all about!

There’s no damming al this up -

beneath the walls they mandoline:

“Tara-tina, tara-tine,

tw-a-n-g...”

It’s no great honor, then,

for my monuments

to rise from such roses

above the public squares,

where consumption coughs,

where whores, hooligans and syphilis

walk.

Agitprop

sticks

in my teeth too,

and I’d rather

compose

romances for you -

more profit in it

and more charm.

But I

subdued

myself,

setting my heel

on the throat

of my own song.

Listen,

comrades of posterity,

to the agitator

the rabble-rouser.

Stifling

the torrents of poetry,

I’ll skip

the volumes of lyrics;

as one alive,

I’ll address the living.

I’ll join you

in the far communist future,

I who am

no Esenin super-hero.

My verse will reach you

across the peaks of ages,

over the heads

of governments and poets.

My verse

will reach you

not as an arrow

in a cupid-lyred chase,

not as worn penny

Reaches a numismatist,

not as the light of dead stars reaches you.

My verse

by labor

will break the mountain chain of years,

and will present itself

ponderous,

crude,

tangible,

as an aqueduct,

by slaves of Rome

constructed,

enters into our days.

When in mounds of books,

where verse lies buried,

you discover by chance the iron filings of lines,

touch them

with respect,

as you would

some antique

yet awesome weapon.

It’s no habit of mine

to caress

the ear

with words;

a maiden’s ear

curly-ringed

will not crimson

when flicked by smut.

In parade deploying

the armies of my pages,

I shall inspect

the regiments in line.

Heavy as lead,

my verses at attention stand,

ready for death

and for immortal fame.

The poems are rigid,

pressing muzzle

to muzzle their gaping

pointed titles.

The favorite

of all the armed forces

the cavalry of witticisms

ready

to launch a wild hallooing charge,

reins its chargers still,

raising

the pointed lances of the rhymes.

and all

these troops armed to the teeth,

which have flashed by

victoriously for twenty years,

all these,

to their very last page,

I present to you,

the planet’s proletarian.

The enemy

of the massed working class

is my enemy too

inveterate and of long standing.

Years of trial

and days of hunger

ordered us

to march

under the red flag.

We opened

each volume

of Marx

as we would open

the shutters

in our own house;

but we did not have to read

to make up our minds

which side to join,

which side to fight on.

Our dialectics

were not learned

from Hegel.

In the roar of battle

it erupted into verse,

when,

under fire,

the bourgeois decamped

as once we ourselves

had fled

from them.

Let fame

trudge

after genius

like an inconsolable widow

to a funeral march -

die then, my verse,

die like a common soldier,

like our men

who nameless died attacking!

I don’t care a spit

for tons of bronze;

I don’t care a spit

for slimy marble.

We’re men of kind,

we’ll come to terms about our fame;

let our

common monument be

socialism

built

in battle.

Men of posterity

examine the flotsam of dictionaries:

out of Lethe

will bob up

the debris of such words

as “prostitution,”

“tuberculosis,”

“blockade.”

For you,

who are now

healthy and agile,

the poet

with the rough tongue

of his posters,

has licked away consumptives’ spittle.

With the tail of my years behind me,

I begin to resemble

those monsters,

excavated dinosaurs.

Comrade life,

let us

march faster,

march

faster through what’s left

of the five-year plan.

My verse

has brought me

no rubles to spare:

no craftsmen have made

mahogany chairs for my house.

In all conscience,

I need nothing

except

a freshly laundered shirt.

When I appear

before the CCC

of the coming

bright years,

by way of my Bolshevik party card,

I’ll raise

above the heads

of a gang of self-seeking

poets and rogues,

all the hundred volumes

of my

communist-committed books.

