Mayakovsky’s “Brooklyn Bridge”
I’m posting this translation over here because it isn’t mine. It is masterful and worth musing on, as of course is the original, my favorite of Mayakovsky’s American poems. The translator, Theo Merrill Sparks, was an American entertainer, songwriter, poet and improbably prolific translator, judging from his 400 pages in Modern Russian Poetry (MacGibbon & Kee, 1966). He would have turned 100 this year. Mayakovsky’s basic form—jazzed up with irregularities, slant rhymes and stairstep lineation—is still the classic Russian iambic tetrameter. Sparks is even less regular and more sparsely rhymed, but he’s got enough to keep me grooving. I tinkered with a few lines, but the translation’s splendid breeziness is all his. Enjoy (and see if you can catch Mayakovsky’s factual error)!
Brooklyn Bridge Hey, Coolidge boy, give a shout of joy! When a thing is good then it’s good. Blush from compliments like our flag’s calico, even though you’re the most super-united states of America. Like the crazy believer who goes to his church or retreats to a monastery simple and rigid – so I in the gray haze of evening humbly approach the Brooklyn Bridge. Like a conqueror on cannons with muzzles as high as a giraffe jabbing into a broken city besieged, so, drunk with glory, alive to the hilt, I clamber proudly upon Brooklyn Bridge. Like a stupid painter whose enamored eyes pierce a museum Madonna like a wedge. So from this firmament, speckled with stars, I look at New York through Brooklyn Bridge. New York, heavy and stifling till night, has forgotten what makes it dizzy and a hindrance, and only the souls of buildings rise in the transparent sheen of windows. Here the itching hum of the ‘el’ is hardly heard, and only by this hum, soft but stubborn, can you feel the trains crawl with a rattle as when dishes are jammed into a cupboard. And when from a mill at the river’s edge a merchant transports sugar heaped in bins – then the masts passing under the bridge are no bigger in size than pins. I’m proud of this mile of steel. In it my visions are alive and real – a fight for structure instead of arty style, the harsh calculation of bolts and steel. If the end of the world comes – and chaos wipes out this earth and if only this bridge remains rearing over the dust of death, then as little bones, thinner than needles, clad with flesh, standing in museums, are dinosaurs, so from this bridge future geologists will be able to reconstruct our present course. They will say: this paw of steel joined seas, prairies and deserts, from here, Europe rushed to the West, scattering to the wind Indian feathers. This rib here reminds us of a machine – imagine, hands with a good enough grip, while standing with one steel leg in Manhattan, to drag toward yourself Brooklyn by the lip! By the wires of electric yarn I know this is the Post-Steam Era. Here people already yelled on the radio, here people already flew by air. For some here was life carefree, unalloyed. For others a prolonged howl of hunger. From here the unemployed jumped headfirst into the Hudson. And now, strung on cables without a hitch, my canvas extends to the foot of the stars, and I see: here stood Mayakovsky, here he stood putting syllable to syllable. I look, as an eskimo looks at a train, I dig into you, like a tick into an ear. Brooklyn Bridge. Yes, you’ve got something here. |
Good to see this version again after — gulp — more than fifty years!
Clive |
Clive, so you’ve never forgotten this translation either. I came across it nigh on 40 years ago. Since then, I’ve seen a couple other versions, but they can’t touch this one. I’ve tinkered with a few lines that strayed from the original, but I’m afraid of cramping its jazzy style. Before I attempt anything by Mayakovsky, I have a lot to learn yet from this translation.
Carl |
Hi Carl,
You mean the Chicago reference? This is splendid, and will make me rethink my avoidance of Mayakovsky after a couple of brief dips into his work. I have mixed feelings about the C20th Russians, of whom my favorite is I think Mandelstam. The layout, now, is fairly close to WCW's ternary interlineation, no? I wonder if the one influenced the other somewhere along the way, they are I think fairly contemporary. :-) Cheers, John |
Carl, I hope you don't mind me putting Mandelstam's Stalin Epigram here? It's really why I love him.
The Stalin Epigram Osip Mandelstam - 1891-1938 Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can’t hear our words. But whenever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, the ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weight, the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot-rims. Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses he toys with the tributes of half-men. One whistles, another meows, a third snivels. He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom. He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes, One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye. He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home. From Against Forgetting, edited by Carolyn Forché, translated by W.S. Merwin and Clarence Brown, published by W.W. Norton & Co. All rights reserved. |
John, Mandelstam is always welcome in my threads. A devastating epigram. I think the “cockroach whiskers” are especially famous. Amazing that he lived five years after writing it. I didn’t understand a few things in the translation, and they seem to be unclear in the original as well: 1) the verb translated as “go boom” is a neologism that’s open to interpretation; 2) the last two lines literally read: “Not an execution of his without raspberries / And the broad chest of an Ossetian.” Scholars think the Ossetian is Stalin himself, though of course he was Georgian. I found a whole article on the topic, but didn’t have time to get to the bottom of it. “Raspberries” also has some meaning that’s lost on me.
No, not Chicago. I believe there were still elevated trains in New York at the time. It may take a native New Yorker. Carl |
Hi Carl,
Very interesting about Mandelstam! I knew he died in the gulag after writing that piece, "of heart failure," they told his brother, but didn't know it took five years. Thank you for your insight into the Russian, which of course is totally unknown to me. The poem seems shrouded a bit in mystery. Raspberries in British English are what is called in the US a Bronx cheer. I wonder... Cheers, Joh |
Mandelstam is a great poet. His selected poems are one of the few books of poetry which I routinely return to.
Hart Cranes Brooklyn Bridge and Voyages is such another. |
John, one of my guilty pleasures is old British sitcoms like “Are You Being Served?” so I’m more familiar with “blowing a raspberry” than I am with a Bronx cheer. I don’t think that’s what’s going on in Mandelstam, though. I’ve found two suggestions. One is that “raspberry” is criminal slang referring to an underworld hangout. The other is an idiom I’ve never heard, “Not life, but raspberries,” meaning something like “This isn’t life, it’s heaven!” On this view, Stalin is savoring the executions, like rolling raspberries on his tongue.
Various associations have been suggested for the neologism babachit’ (go bang), and the translator went for what seems like the strongest of these. The verb does sound like it’s made from the interjection babakh, which essentially means “bang” and is used to imitate loud noises like the firing of a gun. The last line of the poem, “And the broad chest of an Ossetian” is the most controversial. Scholars generally agree that the Ossetian is Stalin himself. There were rumors that Stalin had Ossetian blood, which explained his barbarism, and critics have felt that such a false and even racist slur were unworthy of Mandelstam. Pasternak reportedly said, “How could he write that verse? He’s a Jew!” The article I found suggests that Mandelstam was also associating Stalin with the Ossetian villain of a popular Georgian novel. The parallels with Stalin were close enough that the book’s author and translator were later executed. In fact, the villain headed a band of cutthroats, which might lend credence to the criminal interpretation of “raspberry.” In short, as you say, it’s a bit of a mystery. I don’t think I’m going to get much more traffic in this thread, so I’ll give you the answer: the Brooklyn Bridge spans the East River, not the Hudson. |
Hi Carl,
I should have caught that about the Brooklyn Bridge! I've crossed it, after all. But anyway. My wife, asked about raspberries, also gave your bed of roses meaning but had no handle on why Mandelstam would have said it. Russian is her first language. I like your alternative theory myself. And Are You Being Served is an interesting slice of time. Maybe Mandelstam was referring to that novel - that would be nicer than assuming he was stereotyping. It's a bit more acid in that reading, and the poem is certainly that. Cheers, John |
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