CRIMSON COMPASS

So this is the great Twentieth,

Century of the Sputnik.

What a scarey and scared century it is!

A fine century

And a century of quicklime and pits…

A century with many fine ideas.

A century that eats those ideas again.

A century to be hated

by those who are young in it—

yes, they hate it, all right.

Their looks could murder it all right.

They hate their governments,

they hate their politics,

they don't like the Church too much—

they don't have much use for philosophers,

and they don't have much use for women either,

except for sleeping with them once in a while.

They don't much like the world,

to tell the truth.

They don't much like its banks and cashiers,

they don't like themselves,

for not liking anything much,

they know,

they know all about it, that misery.

The Great Twentieth is just their bad, old, stepfather.

They hate him all right!

And their hatred is black and strong,

moving fast, beating along

the dark banks of the Hudson,

the Tiber, the Seine,

or the Thames,

they are moving, they are there, they're the same,

black shiny dogs from the same kennel.

They're tough, they're hip, they're cool

and they're very strange,

this is the first century they've ever been here.

And I can see through their eyes,

I can see what they

don't want to have any part of,

there's nothing wrong with that vision.

But what do they want?

What are they waiting for?

Or could it be—

they just want to go on sneering and putting it all down,

to be put down themselves,

and that's about it?

Then I want to say this to them: talking

plain talk: no shit, here I am,

in this City of Moscow

and I too have my hates and many things to be scared of,

yet I know they're all part of what I Love!

and what has loved me!

though it has some evil faces,

and I make a noise against those,

a big noise, sometimes,

trying to shout them down!

But not shouting

a dull nothing sneer.

I know there is truth, somewhere,

there is, in this century, too,

there is truth in what Lenin said

there is truth in the things you can work with,

like hammers and plows.

And when I come fighting, here,

I know I'm fighting for friends,

I'm fighting for them, even

when I'm fighting against them.

But you,

what happened

to you?

Is it some truth like this

you are waiting for, scowling, in pain, standing there?

"Mass psychosis"—sure thing,

that's what the brainshrinkers say

across two continents,

on the road in Europe

on the American road…

The Great Twentieth: the Sputnik—

Century,

you're not dead yet!

Why don't you live things up

why don't you shake them up

and out of that endless, sinister groove?

Don't hand them any "security" crap, Century,

give them something to grab hold of—

something like a belief

in the right things, the good things you have!

They're not your enemies, Century.

These kids, your kids can't be enemies.

You've got to do something for them,

do you hear me,

you've got to give,

you've got to give them a new road!

All these borders–

they bug me!

Nothing do I know

of Buenos Aires,

or New York

–and I should know!

I should be able to go

to London

and walk around,

and talk to the people,

even if I can't talk so good,

just walking around.

Like a little kid

I want to ride a bus

through Paris

some morning,

and I want an art

this is something else,

is an exciting sound–

"Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens."

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday lifted a decade-long ban on public murals, marking a decisive victory for artists who argued the law made no sense in a city with such a rich tradition of…

I’m busy! I am building a model, of an entirely new heart

a heart for the future: to feel and love with. A heart to understand men with:

Citizen tax collector! Forgive my bothering you… Thank you… don’t worry… I’ll stand…

My business is of delicate nature: about the place of the poet in the workers’ ranks.

Along with owners of stores and property I’m made subject to taxes and penalties.

You demand I pay five hundred for the half year and twenty-five for failing to send in my returns.

Now my work is like any other work.

Look here— how much I’ve lost, what expenses I have in my production and how much I spend on my materials.

You know, of course, about “rhyme.”

Suppose a line ends with the word “day,” and then, repeating the syllables in the third line, we insert something like “tarara-boom-de-ay.”

In your idiom, rhyme is a bill of exchange to be honored in the third line!— that’s the rule.

And so you hunt for the small change of suffixes and flections in the depleted cashbox of conjugations and declensions.

You start shoving a word into the line, but it’s a tight fit— you press and it breaks.

Citizen tax collector, honestly, the poet spends a fortune on words.

In our idiom rhyme is a keg.

A keg of dynamite. The line is a fuse.

The line burns to the end and explodes, and the town is blown sky-high in a strophe.

Where can you find, and at what price, rhymes that take aim and kill on the spot?

Suppose only half a dozen unheard-of rhymes were left, in, say, Venezuela.

And so I’m drawn to North and South. I rush around entangled in advances and loans.

Citizen! Consider my traveling expenses. —Poetry— —all of it!— is a journey to the unknown.

Poetry is like mining radium. For every gram you work a year.

For the sake of a single word you waste a thousand tons of verbal ore.

But how incendiary the burning of these words compared with the smoldering of the raw material.

These words will move millions of hearts for thousands of years.

Of course, there are many kinds of poets. So many of them use legerdemain!

And, like conjurers, pull lines from their mouths— their own— and other people’s.

Not to speak of the lyrical castrates?! They’re only too glad to shove in a borrowed line.

This is just one more case of robbery and embezzlement among the frauds rampant in the country.

These verses and odes bawled out today amidst applause, will go down in history as the overhead expenses of what two or three of us have achieved.

As the saying goes, you eat forty pounds of table salt, and smoke a hundred cigarettes in order to dredge up one precious word from artesian human depths.

So at once my tax shrinks.

Strike out one wheeling zero from the balance due!

For a hundred cigarettes— a ruble ninety; for table salt— a ruble sixty.

Your form has a mass of questions: “Have you traveled on business or not?”

But suppose I have ridden to death a hundred Pegasi in the last 15 years?

And here you have— imagine my feelings!— something about servants and assets.

But what if I am simultaneously a leader and a servant of the people?

The working class speaks through my mouth, and we, proletarians, are drivers of the pen.

As the years go by, you wear out the machine of the soul.

And people say: “A back number, he’s written out, he’s through!”

There’s less and less love, and less and less daring, and time is a battering ram against my head.

Then there’s amortization, the deadliest of all; amortization of the heart and soul.

And when the sun like a fattened hog rises on a future without beggars and cripples, I shall already be a putrefied corpse under a fence, together with a dozen of my colleagues.

Draw up my posthumous balance! I hereby declare— and I’m telling no lies:

Among today’s swindlers and dealers, I alone shall be sunk in hopeless debt.

Our duty is to blare like brass-throated horns in the fogs of bourgeois vulgarity and seething storms.

A poet is always indebted to the universe, paying, alas, interest and fines.

I am indebted to the lights of the Broadway, to you, to the skies of Bagdadi, to the Red Army, to the cherry trees of Japan — to everything about which I have not yet written.

But, after all, who needs all this stuff? Is its aim to rhyme and rage in rhythm?

No, a poet’s word is your resurrection and your immortality, citizen and official.

Centuries hence, take a line of verse from its paper frame and bring back time!

And this day with its tax collectors, its aura of miracles and its stench of ink, will dawn again.

Convinced dweller in the present day, go to the N.K.P.S. take a ticket to immortality and, reckoning the effect of my verse, stagger my earnings over three hundred years!

But the poet is strong not only because, remembering you, the people of the future will hiccup. No!

Nowadays too the poet’s rhyme is a caress and a slogan, a bayonet and a knout!

Citizen tax collector, I’ll cross out all the zeros after the five and pay the rest.

I demand as my right an inch of ground among the poorest workers and peasants.

And if you think that all i have to do is to profit by other people’s words, then, comrades, here’s my pen.