'Vladimir Mayakovsky' and other poems
By: Vladimir Mayakovsky ; translated & edited by James Womack
Contributors: Womack, James William, 1979- editor, translator
Series: Fyfield books
Publisher: Carcanet
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 239
ISBN-13: 9781784102920
Subjects: Russian poetry; Translations into English
Work titles: Poems
Description: 'Vladimir Mayakovsky' & Other Poems is the only single-volume selection in English to fully represent the work of one of Modernism's vital literary forces. The poems encompass Mayakovsky's pre-Revolutionary surrealism as well as his exclamatory agitprop of the 1920s, by which time he had become the pre-eminent Soviet poet. New translations of key works are included alongside several poems that have never been translated into English before, while an introduction and notes provide helpful contexts and elucidations. Screenplays, dramatic scripts and advertising slogans give a sense of the unusual breadth and invention of Mayakovsky's project, and his skill both as poet and propagandist. 'A poet needs to be good at life as well', he writes; his job is to 'smooth brains with the file of his tongue'. Womack's translations help to revise the predominant image of Mayakovsky as a hectoring egoist, offering a more nuanced impression of a poet whose concern was as much comradeship and intimacy as politics and posterity: 'all of this - do you want it? - I will abandon for one single tender human word.' -- from back cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Translated from the Russian.
Table of contents: title: Night; title: Morning; title: Port; title: Street scene; title: Could you?; title: Me; title: Exhausted portrait of Spring; title: In tiredness; title: Love; title: We; title: Cries and whispers; title: Up yours!; title: They just don't get it; title: In a car; title: Valdimir Mayakovsky; title: War is declared; title: Mother and the evening the Germans killed; title: Cloud in trousers; title: I and Napoleon; title: You!; title: And that's how I became a dog; title: Hey!; title: To Lily, instead of a letter; title: I'm bored; title: Going cheap; title: A moonlit night; title: To his own self, with affection, the author dedicates these lines; title: To Russia; title: My borther writes; title: The revolution; title: How red is your riding hood?; title: Eat your pineapple; title: Our march; title: Spring; title: How to treat horses; title: Ode to the revolution; title: Battle-order to the army of art; title: The poet worker; title: Left march; title: Stunning facts; title: Vladimir Ilich!; title: Vladimir Mayakovsky rented a Dacha one summer; you won't believe what happened next; title: À la Heine; title: Grief; title: A story about how a little old lady spoke about Vrangel without understanding anything; title: About the filth; title: All meetinged out; title: Bastards!; title: The bureaucratiad; title: I love; title: Worker correspondent; title: A universal answer; title: Baku; title: Moscow-Königsberg; title: Mad about the movies; title: Be prepared; title: Kiev; title: Two Berlins; title: Jubilee; title: Hooliganish stuff; title: Brooklyn bridge; title: To Sergei Yesenin; title: How's it going?; title: Conversation with the taxman about poetry; title: To Comrade Nette; title: A letter from the writer Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky to the writer Aleksei Maksimovich Gorky; title: Jew; title: Beer and socialism; title: Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva; title: ''Productivity...'; title: Monte Carlo; title: Lines on the Soviet passport; title: I'm happy!; title: The witching hour...