TRANSLATORS’ NOTE
Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) was a prominent Russian Futurist poet, playwright, and artist whose works reflect the turbulent period of Russian history that coincided with World War I, the October Revolution of 1917, and the building of a new socialist society in the Soviet Union. He began writing poetry systematically during his eleven-month incarceration in Moscow’s Butyrka prison (1908–1909) and wrote his first futuristic works in 1911–1914, including the manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (coauthored by David Burliuk, Viktor Khlebnikov and Alexander Kruchenykh). Soon after, he participated in “futuristic tours” to various cities of the Russian empire, giving public poetry readings and lectures with Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky, and other artists. The shocking effect of the artists’ performances was reflected in Mayakovsky’s famous poem “Cloud in Trousers,” of which the introduction and Part I appear here in a new translation.
Mayakovsky began composing “Cloud in Trousers” in early 1914 and finished it in July 1915 in Kuokkala (now Repino), a resort on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, near Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). The autobiographical protagonist is a new apostle of Christ who announces his defiance of tradition, and the poem was originally entitled “The Thirteenth Apostle.” However, that title was rejected by the Russian censor. Mayakovsky recalled, “When I came with this work to the censors, I was asked, ‘You don’t want to go to a forced-labor camp, do you?’ I said, no way, under no circumstances. So they crossed out six pages, including the title.”1 When asked by the censors how he could connect lyric poetry with rudeness, Mayakovsky replied, “All right, if you want—I will be wild, if you want—I will be tender, not a man, but a cloud in trousers,” giving rise to the poem’s new title.2
Separate portions of the still-unfinished poem appeared in February 1915, in the Petrograd literary almanac Strelets: sbornik pervii, and in Mayakovsky’s article “About Different Mayakovskys,” published in the Journal of Journals in August 1915. These fragmentary publications included the subtitle tragedy, which was replaced by tetraptych3 in the first, blue-penciled edition, published by Osip Brik in September 1915. In 1916, the poem was published with fewer censor’s cuts in Mayakovsky’s collection Prostoe kak mychanie [Simple as Moo]. Its uncensored parts appeared in the periodical New Satiricon in March 1917.
In 1918, the Association of Socialist Art published the complete original version. For that edition, Mayakovsky wrote an extra introduction (not included here) wherein he inserted special structural subtitles to the four parts of the poem, as “four cries of the four parts”:
Mayakovsky dedicated “Cloud in Trousers” to his mistress Lilya Brik, the wife of his publisher Osip Brik, whom he met in 1915 when he had already completed the poem. Their lifelong affair had a profound effect on his work, especially his love lyrics. However, the plot of “Cloud” was inspired by his romantic relationship with Maria Aleksandrovna Denisova. The heroine is named Maria not only because of this personal association, but because Mayakovsky considered Maria to be the most feminine and symbolic name. The image of Maria in the poem combines features of several romantic acquaintances of Mayakovsky with the saintly virtues of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalena. Post-revolutionary Soviet interpretations understood the poem as a lyrical composition, but Mayakovsky himself proclaimed “Cloud” to be “a catechises of contemporary art.”
In the 1920s, Maykovsky worked as a journalist for numerous leading Soviet newspapers, traveling extensively around the Soviet Union and abroad. In 1923, he established the leftist art group and magazine publisher LEF. Contributors to the magazine included Boris Pasternak, Viktor Shklovsky, Sergei Eisenshtein, and Isaak Babel. He wrote several major plays in the late 1920s, which were produced by the innovative Meyerhold Theater in Moscow and were met with sharp criticism.
Hounded relentlessly by the watchdogs of Soviet literature and beset by personal disappointments, Mayakovsky shot himself in his Moscow apartment on April 14, 1930. In 1935, Stalin declared that “Mayakovsky was and remains the best and most talented poet of our Soviet era.”
Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) was a prominent Russian Futurist poet, playwright, and artist whose works reflect the turbulent period of Russian history that coincided with World War I, the October Revolution of 1917, and the building of a new socialist society in the Soviet Union. He began writing poetry systematically during his eleven-month incarceration in Moscow’s Butyrka prison (1908–1909) and wrote his first futuristic works in 1911–1914, including the manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (coauthored by David Burliuk, Viktor Khlebnikov and Alexander Kruchenykh). Soon after, he participated in “futuristic tours” to various cities of the Russian empire, giving public poetry readings and lectures with Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky, and other artists. The shocking effect of the artists’ performances was reflected in Mayakovsky’s famous poem “Cloud in Trousers,” of which the introduction and Part I appear here in a new translation.
Mayakovsky began composing “Cloud in Trousers” in early 1914 and finished it in July 1915 in Kuokkala (now Repino), a resort on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, near Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). The autobiographical protagonist is a new apostle of Christ who announces his defiance of tradition, and the poem was originally entitled “The Thirteenth Apostle.” However, that title was rejected by the Russian censor. Mayakovsky recalled, “When I came with this work to the censors, I was asked, ‘You don’t want to go to a forced-labor camp, do you?’ I said, no way, under no circumstances. So they crossed out six pages, including the title.”1 When asked by the censors how he could connect lyric poetry with rudeness, Mayakovsky replied, “All right, if you want—I will be wild, if you want—I will be tender, not a man, but a cloud in trousers,” giving rise to the poem’s new title.2
Separate portions of the still-unfinished poem appeared in February 1915, in the Petrograd literary almanac Strelets: sbornik pervii, and in Mayakovsky’s article “About Different Mayakovskys,” published in the Journal of Journals in August 1915. These fragmentary publications included the subtitle tragedy, which was replaced by tetraptych3 in the first, blue-penciled edition, published by Osip Brik in September 1915. In 1916, the poem was published with fewer censor’s cuts in Mayakovsky’s collection Prostoe kak mychanie [Simple as Moo]. Its uncensored parts appeared in the periodical New Satiricon in March 1917.
In 1918, the Association of Socialist Art published the complete original version. For that edition, Mayakovsky wrote an extra introduction (not included here) wherein he inserted special structural subtitles to the four parts of the poem, as “four cries of the four parts”:
Off with your love
Off with your art
Off with your regime
Off with your religion
Mayakovsky dedicated “Cloud in Trousers” to his mistress Lilya Brik, the wife of his publisher Osip Brik, whom he met in 1915 when he had already completed the poem. Their lifelong affair had a profound effect on his work, especially his love lyrics. However, the plot of “Cloud” was inspired by his romantic relationship with Maria Aleksandrovna Denisova. The heroine is named Maria not only because of this personal association, but because Mayakovsky considered Maria to be the most feminine and symbolic name. The image of Maria in the poem combines features of several romantic acquaintances of Mayakovsky with the saintly virtues of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalena. Post-revolutionary Soviet interpretations understood the poem as a lyrical composition, but Mayakovsky himself proclaimed “Cloud” to be “a catechises of contemporary art.”
In the 1920s, Maykovsky worked as a journalist for numerous leading Soviet newspapers, traveling extensively around the Soviet Union and abroad. In 1923, he established the leftist art group and magazine publisher LEF. Contributors to the magazine included Boris Pasternak, Viktor Shklovsky, Sergei Eisenshtein, and Isaak Babel. He wrote several major plays in the late 1920s, which were produced by the innovative Meyerhold Theater in Moscow and were met with sharp criticism.
Hounded relentlessly by the watchdogs of Soviet literature and beset by personal disappointments, Mayakovsky shot himself in his Moscow apartment on April 14, 1930. In 1935, Stalin declared that “Mayakovsky was and remains the best and most talented poet of our Soviet era.”
Your thought,
dreaming on a softened brain
like a blown-up lackey on a greasy couch,
I’ll taunt with a bloody scrap of heart,
mock to my full, insolent and caustic.
Not one gray hair is in my soul,
no old man’s tenderness!
The world shakes from the might of my voice,
I go—a handsome,
twentytwoyearold.
Tender ones!
You put your love on violins.
The vulgar put love on kettle drums.
But to turn yourself inside out, as I,
and become nothing but lips
this you can’t do!
Come learn—
from the drawing room, you cambric,
proper bureaucrat of the angelic league.
And the one who calmly flicks her lips
like a cook the pages of her cook book.
If you want—
I’ll rage from meat
—and, like the sky changing its tones—
if you want—
I’ll be irreproachably tender,
not a man, but—a cloud in trousers!
I don’t believe there’s flowering Nice!4
Again they praise themselves through me,
men stale like a hospital,
and women worn out like a proverb.
I.
You think it’s malaria raving?
It happened,
happened in Odessa.5
“I’ll come at four,” Maria said.
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
Then evening
left the windows
into a night horror,
frowning,
Decemberish.
The candelabras sneer and neigh
at the senile back.
You wouldn’t know me now:
A sinewed colossus
groans,
writhes.
What could such a clod want?
But the clod wants much!
Because for me it’s nothing
that I’m bronze—
and the heart’s—cold iron scrap.
At night I want to bury my sound
in softness,
in woman.
And so,
colossal,
I hunch at the window,
melt the little pane with my forehead.
Will love be or not?
What kind—
big or tiny?
Big, how from such a body:
It must be small,
a submissive baby love.
It cringes from the blaring horns.
Loves the clink of harness bells.
Still and still,
burying my face in the rain
against its pitted face,
I wait,
spattered by the thunder of the city’s surf.
Midnight, racing with a knife,
caught up,
slaughtered—
to Hell with him!
Twelve o’clock fell
like a head from the executioner’s block.
Gray raindrops wailed together
on windowpanes,
massed into a grimace,
as the chimeras wail
on the Parisian Cathedral of the Mother of God.6
Bitch!
What, still not enough?
Soon my mouth’ll rip itself apart with a scream.
I hear:
Quietly,
a nerve jumped
like a patient from his bed.
And so—
at first, barely-barely,
it paced around,
then ran,
frantic,
precise.
Now with another two
race in a tap dance of despair.
Plaster crashed on the ground floor.
Nerves—
big,
little,
many!—
gallop enraged,
and already
the nerves’ legs give way!
And the night oozes and oozes around the room,—
the waterlogged eye can’t pull itself from the ooze.
Doors banged suddenly,
as would the hotel’s
chattering teeth.
You entered,
sharp, like “so there!”
tormenting your suede gloves,
you said:
“You know—
I’m getting married.”
Okay, so get married.
It’s nothing.
I’ll make it.
You see—how calm I am!
Like a dead man’s
pulse.
Remember?
You said:
“Jack London,7
money,
love,
passion”—
But I saw only one:
you—Gioconda
that had to be stolen!8
And they stole.
Again, in love I’ll go and play around,
the arch of my brows lit by fire.
So what!
Even in a house burned to the ground
homeless bums sometimes live!
You taunt me?
“Your emeralds of madness are fewer
than a beggar’s kopeks!”
Remember!
Pompeii perished
by taunting Vesuvius!9
Heh!
Gentlemen!
Lovers
of sacrileges,
crimes,
butcheries—
but the most horrible
have you seen it?—
my face
when
I
am absolutely calm?
And I feel—
“I”
is tight on me.
Someone stubbornly pushes out of me.
Hello!
Who’s speaking?
Mama?
Mama!
Your son is beautifully sick!
Mama!
He has fire of the heart.
Tell his sisters, Lyuda and Olya,—
he has nowhere to go.10
Each word,
even a joke,
vomited from his scorching mouth,
leaps like a naked prostitute
from a burning brothel.
People sniff—
smells of burnt flesh!
They herded ’em.
Shining ones!
In helmets!
No beetle-crushers! 11
Tell the firemen:
Climb gently up the burning heart.
I myself.
I’ll roll out my tearing eyes like barrels.
Let me lean against my ribs.
I’ll leap out! Leap out! Leap out! Leap out!
They crashed.
You can’t leap out of the heart!
On the burning face
from a crack in the lips,
out popped a charred kisslet about to jump.
Mama!
I can’t sing.
In the chapel of my heart the kliros12 is catching fire!
The scorched figurines of words and numbers
from the skull,
like children from a burning building.
Thus, fear,
to seize heaven,
raised up
the burning arms of the Lusitania13.
To the trembling people
in the apartment quiet
a hundred-eyed glow explodes from the harbor.
Last cry—
moan through centuries
that I burn!
dreaming on a softened brain
like a blown-up lackey on a greasy couch,
I’ll taunt with a bloody scrap of heart,
mock to my full, insolent and caustic.
Not one gray hair is in my soul,
no old man’s tenderness!
The world shakes from the might of my voice,
I go—a handsome,
twentytwoyearold.
Tender ones!
You put your love on violins.
The vulgar put love on kettle drums.
But to turn yourself inside out, as I,
and become nothing but lips
this you can’t do!
Come learn—
from the drawing room, you cambric,
proper bureaucrat of the angelic league.
And the one who calmly flicks her lips
like a cook the pages of her cook book.
If you want—
I’ll rage from meat
—and, like the sky changing its tones—
if you want—
I’ll be irreproachably tender,
not a man, but—a cloud in trousers!
I don’t believe there’s flowering Nice!4
Again they praise themselves through me,
men stale like a hospital,
and women worn out like a proverb.
I.
You think it’s malaria raving?
It happened,
happened in Odessa.5
“I’ll come at four,” Maria said.
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
Then evening
left the windows
into a night horror,
frowning,
Decemberish.
The candelabras sneer and neigh
at the senile back.
You wouldn’t know me now:
A sinewed colossus
groans,
writhes.
What could such a clod want?
But the clod wants much!
Because for me it’s nothing
that I’m bronze—
and the heart’s—cold iron scrap.
At night I want to bury my sound
in softness,
in woman.
And so,
colossal,
I hunch at the window,
melt the little pane with my forehead.
Will love be or not?
What kind—
big or tiny?
Big, how from such a body:
It must be small,
a submissive baby love.
It cringes from the blaring horns.
Loves the clink of harness bells.
Still and still,
burying my face in the rain
against its pitted face,
I wait,
spattered by the thunder of the city’s surf.
Midnight, racing with a knife,
caught up,
slaughtered—
to Hell with him!
Twelve o’clock fell
like a head from the executioner’s block.
Gray raindrops wailed together
on windowpanes,
massed into a grimace,
as the chimeras wail
on the Parisian Cathedral of the Mother of God.6
Bitch!
What, still not enough?
Soon my mouth’ll rip itself apart with a scream.
I hear:
Quietly,
a nerve jumped
like a patient from his bed.
And so—
at first, barely-barely,
it paced around,
then ran,
frantic,
precise.
Now with another two
race in a tap dance of despair.
Plaster crashed on the ground floor.
Nerves—
big,
little,
many!—
gallop enraged,
and already
the nerves’ legs give way!
And the night oozes and oozes around the room,—
the waterlogged eye can’t pull itself from the ooze.
Doors banged suddenly,
as would the hotel’s
chattering teeth.
You entered,
sharp, like “so there!”
tormenting your suede gloves,
you said:
“You know—
I’m getting married.”
Okay, so get married.
It’s nothing.
I’ll make it.
You see—how calm I am!
Like a dead man’s
pulse.
Remember?
You said:
“Jack London,7
money,
love,
passion”—
But I saw only one:
you—Gioconda
that had to be stolen!8
And they stole.
Again, in love I’ll go and play around,
the arch of my brows lit by fire.
So what!
Even in a house burned to the ground
homeless bums sometimes live!
You taunt me?
“Your emeralds of madness are fewer
than a beggar’s kopeks!”
Remember!
Pompeii perished
by taunting Vesuvius!9
Heh!
Gentlemen!
Lovers
of sacrileges,
crimes,
butcheries—
but the most horrible
have you seen it?—
my face
when
I
am absolutely calm?
And I feel—
“I”
is tight on me.
Someone stubbornly pushes out of me.
Hello!
Who’s speaking?
Mama?
Mama!
Your son is beautifully sick!
Mama!
He has fire of the heart.
Tell his sisters, Lyuda and Olya,—
he has nowhere to go.10
Each word,
even a joke,
vomited from his scorching mouth,
leaps like a naked prostitute
from a burning brothel.
People sniff—
smells of burnt flesh!
They herded ’em.
Shining ones!
In helmets!
No beetle-crushers! 11
Tell the firemen:
Climb gently up the burning heart.
I myself.
I’ll roll out my tearing eyes like barrels.
Let me lean against my ribs.
I’ll leap out! Leap out! Leap out! Leap out!
They crashed.
You can’t leap out of the heart!
On the burning face
from a crack in the lips,
out popped a charred kisslet about to jump.
Mama!
I can’t sing.
In the chapel of my heart the kliros12 is catching fire!
The scorched figurines of words and numbers
from the skull,
like children from a burning building.
Thus, fear,
to seize heaven,
raised up
the burning arms of the Lusitania13.
To the trembling people
in the apartment quiet
a hundred-eyed glow explodes from the harbor.
Last cry—
moan through centuries
that I burn!