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.
Last edited by Carl Copeland; 05-28-2022 at 02:56 PM.
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