Poetic perspective on economic orthodoxy

Poetry to the rescue! Early 20th century Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote the following poem in 1926, which I post here as both a follow-up to Friday's post about the dominance of economics in our "value" system and in honor of the upcoming April 15 tax filing deadline here in the U.S.  Enjoy.

Conversation with a tax collector about poetry

translation by George Reave

Citizen tax collector!

                Forgive my bothering you ...

Thank you ...

        don't worry ...

                          I'll stand ...

My business is of a 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 hundered 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 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-day."

In your idiom rhyme is a bill of exchange

to be honoured 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 it 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 now

            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 cigaretts -- 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.

Take

            a crack at it

                        yourselves!