Jianing Zhao

on translating Vladimir Mayakovsky

Poem III is the most well-known and perhaps also most well-crafted poem within this series. It opens with a rhymed couplet about the sea, which is extremely difficult to translate, because it not only introduces the water imagery that will be elaborated by the metaphor of the love boat after a few lines, but also references a popular Russian children’s game that finds no parallels in Anglophone culture. In this game, a chosen водящий chants: «Море волнуется раз, море волнуется два…морская фигура на месте замри!» Игроки в это время раскачиваются и кружатся, но при слове «замри», они должные замирать в позе, otherwise they would lose. Due to the lack of similar games in English whose name keeps the water imagery, I decide to keep a literal translation for the first half of these lines (море уходит – “the sea goes”), but tweak the second half to create rhymed endings, especially with the use of the word “freeze” at the end to evoke the chant featured in the children’s game. The dash I put between “goes” and “freeze” allows for multiple interpretations: in context of the game, it could emphasize the abruptness of the action, when the game leader suddenly chants “морская фигура на месте замри!”; if we disregard the game reference, “freeze” can be conceived as synonymous as “sleep,” and the dash could suggest a long, dragged-out process during which the relationship, like the freezing sea, becomes cold and stagnant.

Mayakovsky coins the word исперчен from several similar sounding words: исчерпен (“to settle”), испорчен (“to spoil”), and перчить (“to pepper”). As there is no single English word to capture all these layers of meanings, I decided to use three words to be true to the complexity of Mayakovsky’s diction here. I used alliteration to create a sense of coherence amongst this three adjectives that were bred from the same source word (исперчен), and a dash in between to elucidate the logic: the incident looks like it has been settled, but in fact it has been spoiled and soured. In the ensuing lines, I translated в расчете as “all accounts have been sealed.” I thought about translating it as “we’re even,” which would be more idiomatic, but I decided to reflect the shared че root in исперчен and расчете (as well as in перечень in the next line) by extending the alliteration from “settled/spoiled/soured” to “sealed.” These чень/чет roots establish the motif of counting, which is centralized in this poem, most notably through the ideas of расчет (in my translation, “accounts”) and перечень (in my translation, “tallying up”), but also hinted through the children’s game (the counting in “Море волнуется раз… два… три…”). One finds this motif of counting even in the beginning of the first poem, when the lovers count off flower petals to make guesses about love.

As for the iconic refrain, at the time of Mayakovsky’s writing, there were few options of entertainment for the youth, and lovers often go on boat rides in the parks. To highlight this particular phenomenon, I translated лодка to not the more intuitive and literal answer – “boat” – but to “gondola,” which is a particular type of boat rented often by lovers to roam around the city of Venice in leisure, to evoke images of idealized romance associated with любовная лодка, as opposed to the harsh realism of the Soviet быт. The word быт itself is almost untranslatable. However, I also do not want to leave it untranslated, since readers without a Russian background would hardly understand what it means; the use of a footnote is possible, but would interrupt the rhythm of the poetry-reading experience. I considered “life,” “existence,” “being,” but all of them seem too broad and nonsensical in the context of this line. I eventually chose “mundane” to sharpen and focalize the contrast with what the любовная лодка represents.

As I translate these poems, I follow Mayakovsky along his journey of the mind and of the soul, in his frustrations as both a lover and a poet. We would never know why he eventually decided to commit suicide, having written these last lines that suggest optimism and self-respect (as a man with a backbone). Perhaps the pressure from the dancing heels was too much to bear; perhaps the love boat crashing against the mundane was too devastating. I do not know, but from reading Mayakovsky, what I have learned is the power of words to create, to destroy, to persist, and to transform, as his words still – as he himself predicted – race forward and ring in our world today.