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.