Vladimir Mayakovsky

Born: July 19, 1893, Baghdati, Georgia

Died: April 14, 1930, Moscow, Russia

Your thoughts,
dreaming on a softened brain,

like an over-fed lackey on a greasy settee,
with my heart's bloody tatters I'll mock again;
impudent and caustic, I'll jeer to superfluity.

Of Grandfatherly gentleness I'm devoid,
there's not a single grey hair in my soul!
Thundering the world with the might of my voice
I go by — handsome,
twenty-two-year-old.

Gentle ones!
You lay your love on a violin.
The crude lay their love on a drum.
but you can't, like me, turn inside out entirely,
and nothing but human lips become!

Out of chintz-covered drawing-rooms, come
and learn-
decorous bureaucrats of angelic leagues.

and you whose lips are calmly thumbed,
as a cook turns over cookery-book leaves.

If you like-
I'll be furiously flesh elemental,
or - changing to tones that the sunset arouses -
if you like-
I'll be extraordinary gentle,
not a man, but - a cloud in trousers!

You think malaria makes me delirious?

It happened.
In Odessa it happened.

"I'll come at four," Maria promised.

Eight.
Nine.
Ten.

Then the evening
turned its back on the windows
and plunged into grim night,
scowling
Decemberish.

At my decrepit back
the candelabras guffawed and whinnied.

You would not recognise me now:
a bulging bulk of sinews,
groaning,
and writhing,
What can such a clod desire?
Though a clod, many things!

The self does not care
whether one is cast of bronze
or the heart has an iron lining.
At night the self only desires
to steep its clangour in softness,
in woman.

And thus,
enormous,

I stood hunched by the window,
and my brow melted the glass.
What will it be: love or no-love?
And what kind of love:
big or minute?
How could a body like this have a big love?
It should be teeny-weeny,
humble, little love;
a love that shies at the hooting of cars,
that adores the bells of horse-trams.

Again and again
nuzzling against the rain,
my face pressed against its pitted face,
I wait,
splashed by the city's thundering surf.

Then midnight, amok with a knife,
caught up,
cut him down
out with him!

The stroke of twelve fell
like a head from a block.

On the windowpanes, grey raindrops
howled together,
piling on a grimace
as though the gargoyles
of Notre Dame were howling.

Damn you!
Isn't that enough?
Screams will soon claw my mouth apart.

Then I heard,
softly,
a nerve leap
like a sick man from his bed.
Then,
barely moving,
at first,
it soon scampered about,
agitated,
distinct.
Now, with a couple more,
it darted about in a desperate dance.

The plaster on the ground floor crashed.

Nerves,
big nerves,
tiny nerves,
many nerves!
galloped madly
till soon
their legs gave way.

But night oozed and oozed through the room
and the eye, weighed down, could not slither out of
the slime.

The doors suddenly banged ta-ra-bang,
as though the hotel's teeth
chattered.

You swept in abruptly
like "take it or leave it!"
Mauling your suede gloves,
you declared:
"D' you know,
I'm getting married."

All right, marry then.
So what,
I can take it.
As you see, I'm calm!
Like the pulse
of a corpse.

Do you remember
how you used to talk?
"Jack London,
money,
love,
passion."
But I saw one thing only:
you, a Gioconda,
had to be stolen!

And you were stolen.

In love, I shall gamble again,
the arch of my brows ablaze.
What of it!
Homeless tramp

A Cloud In Trousers - part II by Vladimir Mayakovsky

Glorify me!
For me the great are no match.
Upon every achievement
I stamp nihil

I never want
to read anything.
Books?
What are books!

Formerly I believed
books were made like this:
a poet came,
lightly opened his lips,
and the inspired fool burst into song
if you please!
But it seems,
before they can launch into a song,
poets must tramp for days with callused feet,
and the sluggish fish of the imagination
flounders softly in the slush of the heart.
And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth
of loves and nightingales,
the tongueless street merely writhes
for lack of something to shout or say.

In our pride, we raise up again
the cities' towers of Babel,
but god,
confusing tongues,
grinds
cities to pasture.

In silence the street pushed torment.
A shout stood erect in the gullet.
Wedged in the throat,
bulging taxis and bony cabs bristled.
Pedestrians have trodden my chest
flatter than consumption.

The city has locked the road in gloom.

But when
nevertheless!
the street coughed up the crush on the square,
pushing away the portico that was treading on its throat,
it looked as if:
in choirs of an archangel's chorale,
god, who has been plundered, was advancing in
wrath!

But the street, squatting down, bawled:
"Let's go and guzzle!"

Krupps and Krupplets1 paint
a bristling of menacing brows on the city,
but in the mouth
corpselets of dead words putrefy;
and only two thrive and grow fat:
"swine,"
and another besides,
apparently - "borsch."

Poets,
soaked in plaints and sobs,
break from the street, rumpling their matted hair
over: "How with two such words celebrate
a young lady
and love
and a floweret under the dew?"

In the poets' wake
thousands of street folk:
students,
prostitutes,
salesmen.

Gentlemen!
Stop!

thousands of street folk:
students,
prostitutes,
salesmen.

Gentlemen!
Stop!
You are no beggars;
how dare you beg for alms!

We in our vigour,
whose stride measures yards,
must not listen, but tear them apart
them,
glued like a special supplement
to each double bed!

Are we to ask them humbly:
"Assist me!"
Implore for a hymn
or an oratorio!
We ourselves are creators within a burning hymn
the hum of mills and laboratories.

What is Faust to me,
in a fairy splash of rockets
gliding with Mephistopheles on the celestial parquet!
I know
a nail in my boot
is more nightmarish than Goethe's fantasy!

I,
the most golden-mouthed,
whose every word
gives a new birthday to the soul,
gives a name-day to the body,
I adjure you:
the minutest living speck
is worth more than what I'll do or did!

Listen!
It is today's brazen-lipped Zarathustra
who preaches,
dashing about and groaning!
We,
our face like a crumpled sheet,
our lips pendulant like a chandelier;
we,
the convicts of the City Leprous,
where gold and filth spawned leper's sores,
we are purer than the azure of Venice,
washed by both the sea and the sun!

I spit on the fact
that neither Homer nor Ovid
invented characters like us,
pock-marked with soot.
I know
the sun would dim, on seeing
the gold fields of our souls!

Sinews and muscles are surer than prayers.
Must we implore the charity of the times!
We
each one of us
hold in our fists
the driving belts of the worlds!

This led to my Golgothas in the halls
of Petrograd, Moscow, Odessa, and Kiev,
where not a man
but
shouted:
"Crucify,
crucify him!"
But for me
all of you people,
even those that harmed me
you are dearer, more precious than anything.

Have you seen
a dog lick the hand that thrashed it?!

I,
mocked by my contemporaries
like a prolonged
dirty joke,
I perceive whom no one sees,
crossing the mountains of time.

Where men's eyes stop short,
there, at the head of hungry hordes,
the year 1916 cometh
in the thorny crown of revolutions.

In your midst, his precursor,
I am where pain is everywhere;
on each drop of the tear-flow
I have nailed myself on the cross.
Nothing is left to forgive.
I've cauterised the souls where tenderness was bred.
It was harder than taking
a thousand thousand Bastilles!

And when,
the rebellion
his advent announcing,
you step to meet the saviour
then I
shall root up my soul;
I'll trample it hard
till it spread
in blood; and I offer you this as a banner
.

A Cloud In Trousers - part III by Vladimir Mayakovsky

Ah, wherefrom this,
how explain this
brandishing of dirty fists
at bright joy!

She came,
and thoughts of a madhouse
curtained my head in despair.

And
as a dreadnought founders
and men in choking spasms
dive out of an open hatch
so Burlyuk, panic-stricken,
crawled
though the screaming gash of his eye.
Almost bloodying his teary eyelids,
he crawled out,
rose,
walked,
and, with tenderness unexpected in one so obese,
announced:
"It's fine!"

It's fine, when a yellow shirt
shields the soul from investigation!
It's fine,
when thrown at the gibbet's teeth,
to shout:
"Drink Van Houten's Cocoa!"

That instant
crackling
like a Bengal light,
I would not exchange for anything,
not for any ¡

Out of the cigar smoke,
Severyanin's drink-sodden face lurched forward
like a liqueur glass.

How dare you call yourself a poet,
and twitter greyly like a quail!
This day
brass knuckles
must
split the world inside the skull!

You,
who are supremely worried by the thought:
"Am I an elegant dancer?"
Look at my way of enjoying life
I
a common
pimp and cardsharp!

On you,
steeped in love
who watered
the centuries with tears,
I'll turn my back, fixing
the sun like a monocle
into my gaping eye.

Donning fantastic finery,
I'll strut the earth
to please and scorch;
and Napoleon
will precede me, like a pug, on a leash.

The earth, like a woman, will flop on her back,
a mass of quivering flesh, ready to yield;
things will come to life
and their lips
will lisp and lisp:
"Yum-yum-yum!"

Suddenly,
the clouds
and other cloudy things in the sky
will roll and pitch madly
as if workers in white when their way
after declaring a bitter strike against the sky.

More savagely, thunder strode from a cloud,
friskily snorting from enormous nostrils;
and, for a second, the sky's face was twisted
in the Iron Chancellor's grim grimace.

And someone,
entangled in a cloudy mesh.
held out his hands to a caf';
and it looked somehow feminine,
and tender somehow,
and somehow like a gun carriage.

You believe
the sun was tenderly
patting the cheeks of the caf'?
No, it's General Gallifet,
advancing again to mow down the rebels!

Strollers, hands from your pockets
pick a stone, knife, or bomb;
and if any of you have no arms,
come and fight with your forehead!

Forward, famished ones,
sweating ones,
servile ones,
mildewed in the flea-ridden dirt!

Forward!
Painting Mondays and Tuesdays in blood,
we shall turn them into holidays.
Let the earth at knife's point, remember
whom it wished to debase!
The earth,
bulging like a mistress
whom Rothchild has overfondled!

The flags may flutter in a fever of gunfire
as on every important holiday
will you, the street lamps, hoist high up
the battered carcasses of traders.

I swore,
pleaded,
stabbed,
fought to fasten
my teeth into somebody's flesh,

In the sky, red as Marseillaise,
the sunset shuddered at its last gasp.

It's madness.

Nothing at all will remain.

Night will arrive,
bite in two,
gobble you up.

Look
is the sky playing Judas again
with a handful of treachery-spattered stars?
Night came.
Feasted like Mamai,
squatting with its rump on the city.
Our eyes cannot break this night,
black as Azef!

I huddle, slumped in corners of saloons;
with vodka drenching my soul and the cloth,
I notice
in one corner rounded eyes:
the madonna's, which bite into the heart.
Why bestow such radiance of the painted form
upon a horde infesting a saloon!
Don't you see! They spit
on the man of Golgotha again,
preferring Barabbaas.

Deliberately, perhaps,
I show no newer face
amid this human mash.
I,
perhaps,
am the handsomest
of your sons.

Give them,
who are mouldy with joy,
a time of quick death,
that children may grow,
boys into fathers,
girls big with child.

And may new born babes
grow the hair of the magi
and they will come anon
to baptise the infants
with the names of my poems.

I, who praised the machine and England,
I am perhaps quite simply
the thirteenth apostle
in an ordinary gospel.

And whenever my voice
rumbles bawdily
then, from hour to hour,
around the clock,
Jesus Christ may be sniffing
the forget-me-nots of my soul.

Let me in, Maria!
I can't suffer the streets!
You won't?
You'd rather wait
until my cheeks cave in,
until, pawed by everyone,
I arrive,
stale,
toothlessly mumbling
that today I am
"amazingly honest."

Maria,
as you see my shoulders droop.

In the streets
men will prick the blubber of four-story craws,
thrust out their little eyes,
worn in forty years of wear and tear to snigger
at my champing
again! on the hard crust of yesterday's caress.

Rain has drowned the sidewalks in sobs;
the puddle-prisoned rougue,
all drenched, licks the corpse of the streets by cobbles clobbered,

but on his grizzled eyelashes yes!
on the eyelashes of frosted icicles,
tears gush from his eyes yes! from the drooping eyes of the drainpipes.

The rain's snout licked all pedestrians;
but fleshy athletes, gleaming, passed by in carriages;
people burst asunder,
gorged to the marrow,
and grease dripped through the cracks;

and the cud of old ground meat,
together with the pulp of chewed bread,
dribbled down in a turbid stream from the carriages.

Maria!
How stuff a gentle word into their fat-bulged ears?
A bird
sings
for alms,
hungry and resonant.
But I am a man, Maria,
a simple man,
coughed up by consumptive night on the dirty hand of the Presnya.

Maria, do you want such a man?
Let me in, Maria!
With shuddering fingers I shall grip the doorbell's iron throat!

Maria!

The paddocks of the streets run wild.
The fingers of the mob mark my neck.

Open up!

I'm hurt!

Look -my eyes are stuck
with ladies' hatpins!

You've let me in.

Darling!
Don't be alarmed
if a mountain of women with sweating bellies
squats on my bovine shoulders through life I drag
millions of vast pure loves
and a million million of foul little lovekins.
Don't be afraid
if once again
in the inclemency of betrayal,
I'll cling to thousands of pretty faces "that love Mayakovsky!" for this is the dynasty
of queens who have ascended the heart of a madman.

Maria, come closer!

Whether in unclothed shame
or shudders of apprehension,
do yield me the unwithered beauty of your lips:
my heart and I have never got as far as May,
and in my expended life
there is only a hundredth April.

Maria!
The poet sings sonnets to Tiana,
but I
am all flesh,
a man every bit I simply ask for your body
as Christians pray:
"Give us this day
our daily bread!"

Maria - give!

Maria!
I fear to forget your name
as a poet fears to forget some word
sprung in the torment of the night,
mighty as god himself.

Your body
I sh

Vladimir Mayakovsky 1930

Past One O’Clock ...

Source: The Bedbug and selected poetry, translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey. Meridian Books, New York, 1960;
Transcribed: by Mitch Abidor.

This poem was found among Mayakovsky’s papers after his suicide on April 14, 1930. He had used the middle section, with slight changes, as an epilogue to 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.

Thanks http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/mayakovsky/1930/past-one-o-clock.htm

1

She loves me-loves me not.
My hands I pick
and having broken my fingers
fling away.
So the first daisy-heads
one happens to flick
are plucked,
and guessing,
scattered into May.
Let a cut and shave
reveal my grey hairs.
Let the silver of the years
ring out endlessly !
Shameful common sense -
I hope, I swear -
Will never come
to me.

2

It's already two.
No doubt, you've gone to sleep.
In the night
The Milky Way
with silver filigrees.
I don't hurry,
and there is no point in me
waking and disturbing you
with express telegrams.

3

The sea goes to weep.
The sea goes to sleep.
As they say,
the incident has petered out.
The love boat of life
has crashed on philistine reefs
You and I
are quits.
No need to reiterate
mutual injuries,
troubles
and griefs.

4

D'you see,
In the world what a quiet sleeps.
Night tributes the sky
with silver constellations.
In such an hour as this,
one rises and speaks
to eras,
history,
and world creation.

5

I know the power of words, I know words' tocsin.
They're not the kind applauded by the boxes.
From words like these coffins burst from the earth
and on their own four oaken legs stride forth.
It happens they reject you, unpublished, unprinted.
But saddle-girths tightening words gallop ahead.
See how the centuries ring and trains crawl
to lick poetry's calloused hands.
I know the power of words. Seeming trifles that fall
like petals beneath the heel-taps of dance.
But man with his soul, his lips, his bones.

“A line is a fuse
that's lit.
The line smolders,
the rhyme explodes—
and by a stanza
a city
is blown to bits.”

― Vladimir Mayakovsky

Karthik Writes

https://plus.google.com/u/0/104420982245321364957

Shanmugam Subramaniam commented on this.

நேச மித்ரன்December 23 at 11:16pm ·2015

மணி ஒன்றை கடந்து விட்டது
------------------------------------------+----
மணி ஒன்றை கடந்து விட்டது
நீ உறங்கி இருக்கக் கூடும்
இரா முழுவதும் வெள்ளி ஓடையென
பால்வீதி
மின்னல்தந்தி சேதிகளோடு நானும்
எவ்வித துரிதத்திலுமில்லை
உன்னை எழுப்பி ஊறு செய்யும் காரணங்களேதுமில்லை
மேலும் அவர்கள் சொல்வது போல்
நிகழ்வு முற்று பெற்றுவிட்டது
அன்றாடத்தின் பற்சக்கரங்களில்
மோதி பொடிந்து விட்டது காதலின் படகு
இப்போது நீயும் நானும் கைவிடப் பட்டவர்கள்
பிறகேன் வருந்த வேண்டும்
பரஸ்பரதுயரங்களுக்கு,வலிகளுக்கும்
காயங்களுக்கும்
பிரபஞ்சத்தை மௌனம் ஆற்றுப் படுத்துவதை
கைக்கொள்
இரவு நட்சத்திரங்களின் நினைவாஞ்சலியாக
ஆகாயத்தை தழுவுகிறது இது போன்ற பொழுதுகளில்
ஒருவன்
நேற்றின் காலங்களை,வரலாற்றினை
படைப்புகளைப் பற்றி பேச எழுகிறான்

- மாயகோவ்ஸ்கி-யின் தற்கொலைக் குறிப்பிலுள்ள வரிகள்

தமிழில் : நேசமித்ரன்

குறிப்பு :

பொது புத்தியின் கன்னத்தில் ஓர் அறை , கால்சராயுள் மேகங்கள் போன்றவை மாயகோவ்ஸ்கியின் குறிப்பிடத்தகுந்த தொகுப்புகள். மார்க்ஸியக் கவியின் காலம் 1893 -1930

பிரமிள்

Pages

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Violin And A Little Nervous by Vladimir Mayakovsky

Violin And A Little Nervous by Vladimir Mayakovsky

A Cloud In Trousers - Vladimir Mayakovsky

A Cloud In Trousers - epilogue

A Cloud In Trousers - part I

A Cloud In Trousers - part II by Vladimir Mayakovsky

A Cloud In Trousers - part III by Vladimir Mayakovsky

A Cloud In Trousers - part IV

Maria! Maria! Maria!

It will be too late, I tell you ..... Frantz Fanon

It will be too late, I tell you

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Past One O’Clock ... Vladimir Mayakovsky 1930 & A line is a fuse ....

Past One O'Clock from allpoetry.org

Karthik Writes