Mayakovsky's Anguish
FEUER, KATHRYN
Mayakovsky's Anguish The Bedbug and Selected Poetry. Vladimir Mayakovsky. Meridian. 317 pp. $1.55. Revieived by Kathryn Feuer Lecturer in Russian Literature, University of California at...
...more often than seems possible they achieve miracles of imaginative accuracy...
...his pain was on the scale of his love, too huge to bear...
...One could also quarrel with the English of this word or that line, but chiefly as an exercise in self-display, for there are no aspersions to be cast on these excellent translations by George Reavey and Max Hayward...
...Finally, there is The Bedbug, in Max Hayward's really brilliant translation...
...My ribs' staves will not stand the thrust./ The cage of the chest cracks under the strain...
...But two wrongs don't make a right, and this version can only, in the long run, asperse the many true victims of Stalinism...
...Mayakovsky's death was eminently "personal," but somehow the Stalinist myth—that he took his life as a consequence of political persecution by "enemies of the people"—has lived on, not only in Russia but also abroad, where it is sometimes transmuted into Mayakovsky as the victim of Stalinism...
...I have thought of one criticism—the Russian texts should have stress marks...
...we'd rather have a tango...
...I feel/ my T/ is much too small for me./ Stubbornly a body pushes out of me...
...the "miracle worker of all that is festive" had once more "no companion to share this festivity...
...And meanwhile the lover too was rubbing his eyes: He became apprehensive (as in The Bedbug...
...Perhaps...
...You laugh till you cry...
...It was not long, however, before the new beloved also came to prefer "something smaller...
...Revieived by Kathryn Feuer Lecturer in Russian Literature, University of California at Berkeley ONE SIMPLY COULDN'T ask for a better volume of Mayakovsky than this one...
...If, in so doing, he had to elevate a crazy poet to the rank of "best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch," well, the man was safely dead, his works could be properly edited...
...the lump of the heart has grown huge in bulk...
...In what delirious/ and ailing/ night,/ was I sired by Goliaths—/ I, so large,/ so unwanted...
...Stalin found it convenient to use Mayakovsky's suicide as a club to beat the RAPP, a group of his literary henchmen whom it had become expedient to discard...
...There are a dozen poems—brief lyrics and some of Mayakovsky's most notable longer works...
...This force is love: "But with me/ anatomy has gone mad:/ nothing but heart/ roaring everywhere...
...an appendage of the heart I dragged myself about...
...is a wonderful play, not only witty but funny, even in its life-or-death irony...
...One could greedily demand more selections, but not at the expense of those chosen...
...began to fear lest he had sacrificed himself in vain ("But 1/ subdued myself/ setting my heel/ on the throat/ of my own song"), sought desperate formulas of self-reassurance ("At the Top of my Voice...
...Readers wondering what to expect from a comedy by Mayakovsky may think of The Dos, Beneath the Skin or The Ascent of F-6...
...Patricia Blake's introduction is a superb biographical-critical essay...
...Lenin had bourgeois-humane tastes in literature and opted for Pushkin, while the new literary bureaucrats saw presumption and indeed danger in Mayakovsky's ex-perimentalism, his daring, his vitality, his singularly unclouded vision...
...informed, condensed, it sets Mayakovsky and his poetry in a light which illuminates both at the expense of neither...
...But the hunger was too deep, the eager embrace too crushing, the heart's cry too anguished for any one woman to assuage or return: " 'We'd prefer something smaller...
...Again and again in his poems Mayakovsky presents himself as the bearer of a living force which cannot be contained or endured...
...Mayakovsky's suicide is not hard to understand...
...so Mayakovsky sought something larger, and pledged his love to the Revolution, the Party, the great Ivan, the 150 million...
...He kept stirring people up, he didn't seem to realize that the Revolution was over...
...for the original poems are printed on facing pages, which is the only way it ought to be legal to publish translated verse...
...Poetic" justice...
...His suicide has, however, been repeatedly misinterpreted, and in her introduction to this volume Patricia Blake does a great service by putting the facts in their proper perspective before a wide audience...
...The reader who has even a little Russian is well served here, however...
...I don't know how any translation can convey the two most striking qualities of Mayakovsky's best verse: its revelatory language—not only the oft-mentioned puns and neologisms —but the often more extraordinary neosyntaxes, and its singing core, exultantly and heart-breakingly poetic...
...And thus,/ enormous,/ I stood hunched by the window,/ and my brow melted into the glass...
Vol. 43 • December 1960 • No. 47
