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Bragg Billy Talking With Taxman About Poetry Talking With The Taxman About Poetry - Vladimir Ma [Translated from the Russian by Peter Tempest] ---------------------------------------------- Sorry to bother you, Citizen taxman! No thanks... Don't worry... I'd rather stand. I've come to see you on a delicate matter; the place of the poet in a worker's land. Along with storekeepers and land users I'm taxable too, and am bound by the law. Your demand for the half-year is 500 roubles, and for not filling forms - 25 more. My labour's no different from any other labour. Examine these figures of loss and gain, the production costs I have been facing, the raw material I had to obtain. With the notion of "rhyme" you're acquainted, of course? When a line of ours ends with a word like "plum" in the next line but one we repeat the syllable with some other word that goes "tiddle-ti-tum". A rhyme is an IOU, as you'd put it. "Pay two lines later" is the regulation. So you seek the small charge of inflexion,suffix in the depleted till of declensions, conjugations. You shove a word into a line of poetry but it just won't go - you push it and it snaps. Upon my honour, Citizen taxman, words cost poets a pretty penny in cash. As we poets see it, a barrel the rhyme is, a barrel of dynamite, the fuse is each line. The line starts smoking, exploding the line is, and the stanza blows a city sky-high. Where to find rhymes, in what tariff list, that hit the bull's eye with never a failure? Maybe a handful of them still exist faraway somewhere in Venezuela. I have to scour freezing and tropical climes. I flounder in debt, I get advance payments. My travel expenses bear in mind. Poetry - all poetry - is an exploration. Poetry is just like mining radium. To gain just a gram you must labour a year. Tons of lexicon ore excavating all for the sake of one precious word, But how searing the heat of this word is alongside the smouldering heap of waste. There are the words that go rousing,stirring millions of hearts from age to age. Of course, there are different brands of poet. Famed for sleight of hand are quite a few. Verses they pull, like a conjuror, boldly out of their own mouths - and others' too. What can one say of the poetry eunuchs? They write stolen lines in - not turning a hair. Thieving like that is nothing unusual in a country where thieves are enough and to spare. These contemporary odes ans verses which with rapt ovations audiences greet will go down in history as overhead charges for the achievements of a few of us - two or three. It takes quite a time, to get to know people, smoke many a packets of cigarettes till you raise that wonderful word you're needing from the deep artesian folk wells. straightaway the rate of tax grows less. Knock that wheel-zero of the total due. I pay one rouble 90 for a hundred cigarettes and one rouble 60 for the salt I consume. I see your form there's a host of questions: "travelled abroad? Or spent all the time here?" What if I've run down a dozen Pegasuses in the course of these fifteen years?! You want to know how many servants I'm keeping, what houses? My special casee please observe: where do I stand if I lead people and simultaneously the people serve? The class speaks with the words we utter and we proletarians push the pen. The soul-machine wears out, begins to splutter. They tell us: "Your place now is on the shelf." There's ever less love, less bold innovation, time strikes my forhead a running blow. There comes the most terrifying depreciation, the depreciation of heart and soul, When one day this sun shall like a fattened hog in a land rid of beggars and cripples rise, dead by the fence I'll have long been rotting along with ten or so colleagues of mine. Drae up my posthumous balance-sheet! I tell you - upon this I'm ready to bet - unlike all the dealers and climbers you see I'll be a unique case - hopelessly in debt. Our duty is to roar like brass-throated sirens in philistine fog and in stormy weather. Paying fines in cash and high interest on sorrow, the poet is always the Universe's debtor. And I owe a debt to the lights of Broadway, a debt to you also, Bagadady skies, to the Red Army and to Japan's cherry blossom - to all about which I had no time to write. Why did I undertake this burden? With rhyme to shoot, with metre anger to spark? Your resurrection the poet's word is, your immortality, Citizen clerk. Read any line a hundred years after and it brings back the past, as fast as a wink, all will come back - this day with the taxman with a glint of magic and the reek of ink. Come,you smug dweller in the present era, buy your rail ticket to Eternity here. Calculate the impact of verse and distribute all that I earn over three hundred years! Not only in this lies the power of a poet, that it's you future generations will think about. Oh no! Today too are the rhymes of a poet a caress, a slogan, a bayonet, a knout. Five - not five hundred - roubles I'll pay you,Citizen taxman! Delete every nought! As of right I'm demanding a place with workers and peasants of the poorest sort. But if you think all I do is just press words other people use into my service Comrades, come here, let me give you my pen and you can yourselves write your own verses! ============================================================================== transcription:Rami Zakh (danh@vms.huji.ac.il) |
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