Mayakovsky, Vladimir

Volodya: Selected Works

£14.99

Dimensions: 216 x 135mm
ISBN: 978-1-910392-16-4
Pages: 312
Format: Paperback

Volodya

This groundbreaking collection draws together for the first time Mayakovsky’s key translators from the 1930s to the present day, bringing some remarkable works back into print in the process and introducing poems which have never before been translated.

The radical scope of its representation makes for the most comprehensive account of Mayakovsky’s work to date – an account which charts not only the extraordinary range of his creative output, his rigorous and passionate innovation of language and form, and the intense power of his electrifying live performances, but also the fascinating and turbulent history of Mayakovsky’s cultural and political representation in the western world.

 

IMPOSSIBLE

I can’t do it alone –
carry the grand piano
(and even less,
the safe).
But if I can’t manage the safe
or the grand piano,
then, having retrieved it,
how can I carry my heart.
Bankers know:
‘We’re boundlessly rich.
If we don’t have enough pockets,
we can stuff our safes.’
In you –
I have hidden
my love,
like riches in steel,
and I walk about
exulting, a Croesus.
And,
if desire insist
I can draw out a smile,
a half-smile,
even less,
and, in company revelling,
in half a night expend some fifteen rubles’ worth of lyrical change.

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