Baku

Baku.
City of wind.
Sand spits in the eyes.
Baku.
City of fires.
The blazing of the Balakhans.
Baku.
Leaves—soot.
Branches—wires.
Baku.
Streams—
  inky oil.
Baku.
Flat-roofed houses.
Hump-nosed people.
Baku.
No one settles here for fun.
Baku.
An oily stain on the jacket of the earth.
Baku.
Reservoir of mud,
  but to you
I am drawn
          with love
              greater—
than draws the dervish of Tibet,
than Mecca draws the pious,
    than Jerusalem—
          Christians
            to prayer.
For you
  billions
of pistons and wheels
           sigh as machines.
They kiss
and again
        kiss, without stopping,
quietly 
sucking
    with oil
      and petroleum.
Not daring to resist
      the city’s will,
in a chain of enchained bodies
even the snakes
of writhing cisterns
        flow
          to Baku
      submissively.
If I believe
  firmly in the future—
it is because 
     there pours out
to the very brim
      to the heart of the capitals
Baku’s
black
      thick blood. 

* * *  

Two Moscows

When a bus,
                      dispersing the dust,
moves 
             among the waxen chapels,
I see clearly:
                       they are two,
two they are in Moscow—
                                              Moscows.

                                    1

One—
             is the snore of scrap, its scrape.
The sagging mushroom of the Kitai wall.
Just like this
                      in the gray-haired centuries
here
         the rubble-man’s swearing spread.
Around the rubble people mumble randomly
that this
               paper is being brought to Glavbum.
But I am convinced
                                   that, evading blows,
they have defeated the Polovtsians,
                                                              and carry loot.
From the steppes and fields outside Moscow
the Polovtsian women taken captive
and there, 
                  by the word “Mosselprom”
under the hammer
                                  and under the sickle,
stands
            with his eyes devouring the windows,
a Votyak
                here for a congress
and like a Pecheneg,
                                    he’s unaware
of pastilles and ham.
And to the side,
                             an accordion and dancing
tavern doors clang.
In the pubs, 
                      Yesenins
as in the old days
                               rub shoulders.
And at night it’s quiet,
                                        and in the quiet,
There are no factory bells
                                              or tires…
Moscow snores like a village,
and in the sky
                          the color of cream
like a deaf old ancient lady
the good-for-nothing
                                       black Kremlin.

                                    2

You don’t have to be some prophet-seer,
or the most holy Trinity’s all-seeing eye,
to see,
            how something new is digging in among us
a second Moscow
                                boiling and building.
The great construction site
                                                now begun.
And toward the sky
                                   they grow like forests:
there 
           the post office
here 
          the Lenin Institute.
Holes 
            meter-wide
                                  steeped in sweat,
so faster than wind
                                  the metro 
                                                     can fly underground,
and clamber
                       out
                              here
from beneath metropolitans’ chambers.
To see with astonishment
                                             next-door and together
the panting machines
                                       and strata of dust.
How carpenters 
                             from the Izvestiya skyscraper
spit 
       down
                  onto the Strastnoy monastery.
And there, 
                    replacing the packhorse’s snort
cargo trucks rumble,
                                     and buses pant.
And it seems: 
                         the center-core has broken through
the Garden Ring 
                               and the Cow Road.
From here
                    I too hear
the hissing of engine belts.
Like a poem
                      fastens blabbering prose
with a bolt,
the Hammer and Sickle factory,
the Dawn factory,
                                 and the Rose.
The impression grows
                                       of a new city,
that will 
               drag the village out by a rope.
The sleeper will stagger,
                                           stand,
                                                       stretch,
and will need
                        to be tractored and Fordsoned.
A rag reddens the flagpole,
the Kremlin sleepless,
                                       and its walls
call to work
                     to hurry,
hurling
             from Spasskaya
                                         a war hymn.

1  Baku | This poem is translated from the text in T. V. Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1., ed. V. A. Nikonov et. al. (Moscow: Nauka, 2013),  275–76.

2  Balakhans | line 6 | Balakhani, the settlement where many of Baku’s oil wells were located.

3  Three Moscows | This poem is translated from the text in V. V. Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2., ed. V. A. Nikonov et. al. (Moscow: Nauka, 2014), pp. 314-316.

4  Kitai wall | line 11 | The “Kitai wall” is the 16th-century wall surrounding the Kitai-gorod region of Moscow in Mayakovsky’s lifetime; it has since been demolished.

5  Glavbum | line 18 | Glavbum, a made-up name for a made-up Soviet bureaucracy for paper production. (The actual bureaucratic office for forest management and paper production was Glavlesbum). 

6  Polovtsians | line 21 | The Polovtsy, a Turkic tribal confederation frequently at war with Kievan Rus. 

7  Mosselprom | line 26 | Mosselprom, the Moscow Association of Enterprises Processing Agro-Industrial Products, managed much of the food production industry in early Soviet Moscow. 

8  Votyak | line 31 | “Votyak” is an outdated term for Udmurt, an indigenous people group living mostly in the Middle Volga region.

9  Pecheneg | line 33 | Pechenegs, the Turkic tribes frequently at war with Kievan Rus. 

10  Yesenins | line 40 | Sergei Yesenin, lyric poet well known for his dissolute lifestyle, who died by suicide in 1925. 

11  metropolitans | line 76 | i.e., high-ranking bishops in the Orthodox Church. 

12  Strastnoy Monastery | line 85 | Before its demolition in 1937, the Strastnoy (Passion) Monastery was across the street from the Izvestiya building, which housed the offices of the newspaper Izvestiya. While originally planned to be much taller, the Izvestiya building only reached six stories. 

13  Cow Road | line 93 | In contemporary Moscow, the Garden Ring is a ring road surrounding central Moscow; the Cow Road is a major street in central Moscow.

14  Fordsoned | line 111 | The Fordson tractor was produced in the Soviet Union from 1924-32 with a license from the Ford corporation.