A Slap in the Face of Translator Taste
Augustus Young writes: This free version of Mayakovsky’s ‘The Cloud In Pants’ (1915) attempts to understand and present a Futurist poem for the new century.
Previous translations by Max Hayward and George Reavey (The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, Meridian Press, 1960) and Bob Perelman and Kathy Lewis (Russian Poetry; The Modern Period, University of Iowa Press, 1974) are out of print. Both tend towards literal renditions.
Reading Pasternak’s Safe Conduct in the 1960s, I came across Mayakovsky for the first time. He leaped off the page into my imagination: ‘The accumulating thunder of his voice’; ‘A man for whom truth held an almost animal attraction’; ‘Poetry that flows though history and its collaboration with real life’; ‘The novelty of the age ran through his veins’; ‘I was astonished by the gift he had for seeing the perfect frame for any landscape’.
‘Cloud’ anticipated Mayakovsky’s suicide note by fifteen years. His last words are a coda to it: ‘The love boat has crashed against the everyday. You and I, we are quits, and there is no point in listing mutual pains, sorrows and hurts.’ Pasternak remarks: ‘His drama needed the evil of mediocrity to highlight it’, and he describes Andrei Beily listening to Mayakovsky reciting his poems ‘entirely lost within himself, carried away on a joy which regrets nothing, because on the heights where it feels itself at home, only sacrifices exist and the eternal eagerness for these’. Pasternak’s ‘His dead body resembled the State’ is an epitaph for the Revolution. This lumberjack’s son from Georgia was already a totem in my mind.
In the mid-1970s Brian Coffey commissioned me to obtain a copy of the original on a visit to Leningrad. Subsequently, over several years, we delved into versions of ‘Cloud’ comparing them against the Russian topography. He regarded translation as the poet’s way of understanding alien corn or foreign gold. That nothing came of our exploration may have been due to our mutual ignorance of Russian. But something was learned. Brian’s epic poem ‘Advent’ derives structural and topographical effects from Mayakovsky. I came to realise, after conscientious efforts, that a literal translation of ‘Cloud’ could never do justice to its poetry. In ‘The Cloud in Pants’ Mayakovsky rarely says one thing when he can say another to compound or confound it. It is more than punning. As many things as possible are being communicated in order to create a public world of personal chaos. The intimate and the political coexist in a universe of multiplicities.
Last year, after an interval of fifteen years, I resumed my quest to adapt ‘Cloud’ into English. In the no man’s land between arrogance and desperation, impatience took over. Largely monoglot and ignorant of scholarly trends, I threw caution to the wind and let fly. Within a week a draft was completed. My method (or madness) was blind as Braille. I traced the meaning and significance of the poem with clumsy hands, feeling for its shape and sharpnesses. Mayakovsky in life was clearly a great actor. I employed Method School techniques to enter his character, aspiring to more rather than less, inscaping into his personality through memoirs by people who knew him, a rich and varied field. I became his understudy, fumbling the lines on his night off.
But what about the original? Lila Brik, his great love, used to muse over the distinction between honest lying and dishonest lying. I went for the spirit rather than the letter, which is closer to the former, I think. Andrei Voznesensky wanted an explosion, not a monument, to commemorate Mayakovsky’s 80th anniversary in 1984. I decided to detonate, believing the whole to be greater than the fragments. I have taken liberties with meanings and prosodic modes. Making the poem come alive demanded risks and wild guesses. To Mayakovsky arrogance and desperation were not vices. Adapting him in his own spirit struck me as a left-handed way of being faithful to him. I trust that the original has not been compromised by my presumption.
The spirit of Mayakovsky’s poem is a ghost visiting a very different age. In this version I respond to ‘Cloud’ personally, rather than its historical context. Lila Brik in Notebooks records: ‘Vladimir appeared at the Evening of Satire. The speaker maintained that in our conditions satire was unnecessary, that it was simpler to report things to the proper authority.’ The proper authority for Mayakovsky is poetry. This is my report.
Page(s) 95-96
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