Suffering Horses in Russian Literature MAYAKOVSKY, "Treating Horsies Nice"

Vladimir Mayakovsky
(1893-1930)

Хорошее отношение к лошадям 

Били копыта.
Пели будто:
- Гриб.
Грабь.
Гроб.
Груб.-

Ветром опита,
льдом обута,
улица скользила.
Лошадь на круп
грохнулась,
и сразу
за зевакой зевака,
штаны пришедшие Кузнецким клешить,
сгрудились,
смех зазвенел и зазвякал!
- Лошадь упала!
- Упала лошадь!-
Смеялся Кузнецкий.
Лишь один я
голос свой не вмешивал в вой ему.
Подошел
и вижу
глаза лошадиные...
Улица опрокинулась,
течет по-своему...

Подошел и вижу -
за каплищей каплища
по морде катится,
прячется в шерсти...

И какая-то общая
звериная тоска
плеща вылилась из меня
и расплылась в шелесте.
"Лошадь, не надо.
Лошадь, слушайте -
чего вы думаете, что вы их плоше?
Деточка,
все мы немножко лошади,
каждый из нас по-своему лошадь".
Может быть,
- старая -
и не нуждалась в няньке,
может быть, и мысль ей моя казалась пошла,
только
лошадь
рванулась,
встала нa ноги,
ржанула
и пошла.
Хвостом помахивала.
Рыжий ребенок.
Пришла веселая,
стала в стойло.
И все ей казалось -
она жеребенок,
и стоило жить,
и работать стоило.

1918 

Literal Translation (U.R.Bowie)

A Good Attitude Toward Horses (Treating Horses Well)

Horseshoes were pounding,

Seeming to sing:

Mushroom.

Plunder.

Coffin.

Coarse.

Drunk on the wind,

Shod in ice,

The street skidded.

Onto his croup

Came crashing

A horse,

And immediately,

One gaper after another,

Their trousers walking in to bell-bottom Kuznetsky [Kuznetsky Most, major street in Moscow],

They came in throngs,

Their laughter rang and clattered.

“A horse has fallen;

“A horse is down,”

Laughed Kuznetsky.

I alone

Did not blend my voice into that howl of his.

I walked up

And I saw

Equine eyes…

The street tipped over,

Flowed along on its own… [street as if reflected upside down in the horse’s eyes]

I walked up and saw:

One huge drop, then another huge drop

Down the snout dripping,

Hiding itself in the hair…

And some kind of universal

Animal anguish,

Splashing, flowed out of me

And went running and rustling.

“Horse, now don’t.

Horse, listen [using the polite ‘you’ in addressing the animal].

Why do you think that you’re worse than them? [substandard: How come you think you’re worsen…]

Kiddo,

We’re all at least a little bit horses;

Each of us is in his own way a horse.”

Maybe

She was old

And did not need a nanny;

Maybe my very thought she took as vulgar,

Only

The horse

Lurched,

Got up on her feet,

Whinnied,

And set off.

Swishing her tail,

A red-headed kid.

Merrily she arrived,

Stood in her stall.

And all the time it seemed to her

That she was a colt,

That life was worth living,

And work was worth working.

â

Translation by Andrey Kneller                                   Kindness to Horses The hooves stomped faster, singing as they trod: --Grip. Grab. Rob. Grub. - Wind-fostered, ice-shod, the street skidded. Onto its side, a horse toppled, and immediately, the loafers gathered, as crowds of trousers assembled up close on the Kuznetsky, and laughter snickered and spluttered. --“A horse tumbled!” --“It tumbled -- that horse!” The Kuznetsky cackled, and only I did not mix my voice with the hooting. I came up and looked into the horse’s eye... The street, up-turned, continued moving. I came up and saw tears, -- huge and passionate, rolling down the face, vanishing in its coat... and some kind of a universal, animal anguish spilled out of me and splashing, it flowed. “Horse, there’s no need for this! Horse, listen,-- look at them all, - who has it worse? Child, we are all, to some extent, horses,-- everyone here is a bit of a horse.” Perhaps she was old and didn’t want to be nursed, or maybe, she took in my speech with a scoff, but the horse, out of nowhere, suddenly burst, heaved to its feet, and neighing, walked off. Wiggling its tail, with its mane shining gold, It returned to the stall, full of joyful feelings. She imagined once more that she was a colt, and work was worth doing and life was worth living.

                                                               TRANSLATION BY U.R.BOWIE

Translator’s Note

My translations of poetry from the Russian are far from literal. I often go to the opposite extreme, and this Mayakovsky translation is one of the freest that I’ve done. It’s an original poem in English, based on the themes of Mayakovsky’s poem, on his rhythms, rhymes, his neologisms. Although I sometimes change lines, even add things on, I don’t think that I traduce Mayakovsky. If anything, my poem remains truer to the spirit of his than other, more literal, and—on the surface—more “faithful” translations.

 

Treating Horsies Nice

Hoofbeats were pounding out,

Seeming to sing:

Grip

Grab

Rude

Rip.

Shit-faced on wind,

Brogans in ice,

The street lost its grip

On the ground.

Down on his rump

Came crashing a horse.

Their trousers bell-bottomous

Sweeping the street,
Gapers and lollygags
Gathered around.

Guffawers, hehawers,

Jack-assèd grin-jawers:

“What a lark!

It’s a gas!

A horse done fell down

On his ass!”

I was the onliest beast in the pack

Who eschewed sneeriness,

Lewd smirks and leeriness.

Strolls up, does I,

Takes a look in the eye

Of Horsiemus fallimus…

The street in that eye

Upside-down rolled awry.

Walked up, does I

And I seen:

Horsie-tears, big and hot,

Down the snout dribbly-drop,

Damping the horsie-hair wet…

And some sort of generalized

Animal anguish

Came rustling and

Splashing

From out of my

Sanguinished

Soul:

“Listen now, horsie,

Kiddo, don’t cry.

You’ll have your neigh

At the sky by and by.

How could you think

Your life’s badder than theirs?
Horsiekins, all of us

Have in us dorkiness;

Humanness often is worsen

Than horsiness.”

Could be he was old,

And in need of no nanny,

Could be that my plea

Was insulting to he.

Anyways.

The horsie

Lurched up and

Stood tall

On his leggywegs,

Whinnied out sweet

And set off down the street.

Swishing his tail, well!

Don’t he look swell!

Happily made it home,

Stood in his stall,

Forgotten the fall,

Feeling a colt again,

Crunching his oats again:

“Ain’t life a ball

In spite of it all?”

June, 2018

Note on Mayakovsky

Written one hundred years ago, on the eve of the Soviet Era, this poem about the fallen horse in some odd way foreshadows Vladimir Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930. A founder of the Futurist movement in Russian poetry, known before the Revolution for his wild antics and hooliganism, Mayakovsky accepted the new Soviet Union with alacrity, became its best spokesman. He is still known largely for his thunderous declamations of revolutionary poetry, with his macho-man stance, and his condemnation of the whole lyrical tradition in Russian literature.

But somewhere beneath all the bluster there was a truly lyrical poet, a “cloud in trousers” with a sensitive soul and a love for animals. He wrote poems in which he portrayed himself as a kind of freak, an animal tormented by the crudity of humankind. His letters to his mistress, Lilya Brik, are full of his childlike adoration of animals, and he signed off with drawings of small creatures, including himself as “puppy dog.”

Despite his position as champion of the U.S.S.R. and the new socialist life, he could not have failed to notice that the workers and peasants exalted in the age of the “New Man” were no less crass and cruel, no less ignorant than they had ever been. His famous play, “The Bedbug,” makes that point clearly. Critics have surmised that Mayakovsky actually witnessed the scene on Kuznetsky Most, described in the poem, and that he took the side of the horse, as does the poet/narrator.

See here for some recent commentary on Mayakovsky's poem:

https://dianasenechal.wordpress.com/tag/vladimir-mayakovsky/

Declamation of "Treating Horsies Nice" by six-year-old Elizaveta Bugulova, Moscow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA4nx_nfyfc

Notes on Dostoevsky's CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. Beaten Horses

Poster with Painting of Raskolnikov, for an Exhibition on The 150th Anniversary of "Crime and Punishment"

                             M. Shemyakin, Raskolnikov's Dream of the Beaten Mare

The scene describing drunken peasants beating a mare to death in Part One of Crime and Punishment is one of the most famous scenes in all of Russian literature. It is the scene that Dostoevsky often chose to read in his public readings of the novel. Coming early in the action, before Raskolnikov commits murder, it foreshadows that murder, while illustrating all the horror of the act in the divided mind of the main hero, and presenting the conflict between good and evil that is at the center of the book.

In the dream Raskolnikov sees himself as a seven-year-old boy, who is much immersed in the Russian Orthodox tradition that becomes so important later in the novel. He is on the way to the graveyard with his father, to visit the graves of his grandmother and little brother.

The mare dream is a kind of preview of the act of violence that Raskolnikov is soon to carry out. In its hideous detail and the horrible effect that it produces on his distraught mind, it is a warning to him to give up his misguided idea. The dream also demonstrates the conflict within him, since he is, in effect, playing two roles in the action. He is the little boy--who defends the beaten horse and cries over it, kissing its muzzle after it is dead--and he is the brutal peasant Mikolka, the murderer, who, as he beats his horse to death, keeps screaming, "My property."

The expression in Russian is "Мое добро." Another meaning for the word "добро (dobro)" is "good," so that Mikolka is also saying, in a way, "My good." This suggests one of  Raskolnikov's professed motives for committing his crime. He will kill the old lady, but then he will use the stolen money to alleviate social ills, thereby "doing good."

The name "Mikolka" (a peasant nickname for Nikolai/Nicholas) is significant here, since it is also the name of the fanatical Russian peasant who confesses to the murder later in the novel and whose religious zealotry is the complement to Raskolnikov's atheistic fanaticism. Both Mikolkas are something of doubles, mirror images of Raskolnikov himself. The second Mikolka is used to propagate Dostoevsky's religious idea--that one must accept suffering in order to reunite oneself with one's fellow human beings.

Ruth Mortimer has suggested that the mare dream also is connected with one of the big social issues of the Russian 1860s, the so-called "woman question. The dream relates directly to the suffering of female characters in C and P. We recall that just previous to the scene of the mare dream Raskolnikov had received a letter from his mother, describing how his sister Dunya is, in effect, about to prostitute herself, by making a marriage with the despicable Luzhin.

Dunya is soon to become as much the "property" of Luzhin as that poor mare is the property of Mikolka. The eternally suffering Sonya is also the "property" of all the men who use her for sexual satisfaction. Therefore, it is not by accident that the beaten horse is a female. Raskolnikov himself is soon to murder two helpless females, one of them, Lizaveta, who is much the same saintly suffering type as Sonya is.





The famous dream of the mare has links to events in Dostoevsky's childhood and to his own reading of Russian writers. 

A poem by N.A. Nekrasov, "Do sumerek (Before Twilight)" describes a peasant beating a disabled horse on its "weeping, gentle eyes."

As a sixteen-year-old boy, Dostoevsky witnessed something similar, as described in this semi-fictional scene:

Man Beating Man Beating Horse

(May, 1837)

It was a glorious time for the two Dostoevsky brothers, Mikhail and Fyodor. Before leaving home they had gone to seek the blessing of the Iverskaya Mother of God, in her famous little chapel in downtown Moscow. She had not provided them with any coherent and tangible sign, but they felt that She, as always, was with them. Now, their brains stuffed with glorious Romantic dreams, they were riding with their father, the dour Mikhail Andreevich, military physician, in a droshky (light, four-wheeled carriage), on their way from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Only recently their beloved mother had passed on to her reward. Their father had big plans for the boys. They would be enrolled in a boarding school, where they would prepare to take entrance examinations for the Academy of Military Engineers, which would prepare them for a career steeped in bourgeois respectability. Unbeknownst to MA, however, neither of the brothers had any intention of becoming an engineer. They were aloft in visions of literary splendor, steeped in “the beautiful and sublime.” Mikhail wrote poetry throughout the journey, while Fyodor composed in his mind a novel of Venetian life.

They depended on the same horses for the whole trip, which would take a week. The roads were muddy, barely passable at points. In other words, they were Russian roads in spring. The puddles were enormous, as only puddles in Russia can be, but the weather that day was glorious, sunny. The boy Fyodor, sixteen years old, looked up from his lucubrations over Venice to watch the jackdaws and magpies that circled the droshky, cawing out their odes to vernal rejuvenation. Sticky little green leaves were poking out on wayside birches, and he feasted on the shrill green and the stickiness of those leaves, as the sun shone on what could only be the future happiness of him and his older brother.

            The marvelous Aleksandr Pushkin, poet supreme, had died in a duel only four months ago. The brothers planned a pilgrimage to the spot outside the city where the duel was held, then to the apartment where he breathed his last. They cherished his verses, repeated them aloud, especially his paean to the magnificence of St. Petersburg. “That young city of the northern lands, from dank of forests and damp of bogs, rose up in all its grandeur and pride. Today ships swarm from all earth’s ends to that rich port. Neva has clothed herself in vestments of stone, bridges span her waters, her isles are blanketed in groves dark-green, and now before this young and puissant capital, old Moscow dims and fades, as if before the new Tsarina, Great Peter’s bride.”

            Somewhere in Tver Province the simple droshky in which the brothers rode pulled up at a wayside posting station. The brothers and their father climbed out, and, stepping around the huge puddle at the doorway, they went into the inn to drink tea. Their spirits were high, the tea delicious, all was well in their world. Looking out the window they saw a government courier come galloping up to the inn in a three-horse brichka (one-seater carriage, resembling a European calash). The courier was on official business, basking in his own self-importance. At this posting station he would get fresh horses before continuing on his whirl of a journey.

            Shouting something at his driver, the courier strode the edges of the puddle—taking tiptoe steps, trying not to muddy his magnificent spit-shined boots—and made his way into the inn. Mikhail Andreevich, as usual, was off somewhere in his gloomy thoughts, but the brothers exchanged glances, looking with admiration at this model of masculine strength. He was a large red-faced man, dressed in full military uniform, which included a black three-cornered hat with plumes. Seating himself at a nearby table, removing his hat, he called out in a peremptory voice for a hundred grams of vodka. When the waiter delivered the carafe he quickly poured it into the dram glass, downed it in one gulp and banged the glass on the table. Then, taking a sniff at a hunk of black bread, he bit off one corner. He arose and threw down a coin on the table for payment. Slowly chewing the bread, he got up and made his way to the exit, walking with head held high and shoulders squared, as the brothers looked on, fascinated.     

Outside the fresh horses were ready, hitched to a new troika. The brawny courier leaped into the back and sat down. No sooner was he seated than he rose halfway to his feet and began beating the driver, a young peasant lad with curly blond hair, on the back of his head. Frantically applying his whip to the horses, the driver flinched, squirmed in his seat—trying, failing to soften the blows to his neck and head. The three horses lurched forward, anxious to please, hoping in their dim equine brains that the whipping would soon stop.

            --Papa, look, look what he’s doing (cried Fyodor)! He’s beating the man on the head!

            Mikhail Andreevich put on a still more somber frown and turned away.

            --Don’t look at that, boys (he said). Best not to watch such a spectacle.

            He spit on the floor in disgust.

The white, yellow and green plumes on the three-cornered hat of the courier were waving in the wind, while the troika rushed off out of the courtyard. As the brichka vanished in the distance, the brothers could still see the courier’s arm working its way up and down, while the driver’s whip rose and fell, rose and fell.

Years later, after he had become a renowned writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky looked back on that scene with repugnance and abhorrence. He saw it somehow as a metaphor for all that was wrong with his country. He even imagined an extension of the scene. The peasant driver Yakim Ponomar, arrives home after the journey, bruises and scratches all over the back of his neck and head. He drowns his humiliation in drink, then shouts at his wife Agashka. She responds with a few choice words, and soon he is beating her, taking relish in smacking her face, punching her ribs. Russia: the beatings, the beat being beat, the beat perpetuating the beating by beating others—kicking dogs, lashing horses, striking loved ones. Russia. My sad, hopeless homeland.

            In his maturity as a writer, the boy in the inn, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (FMD) was to formulate a creed. Jesus loves us, yes. He never doubted that. But life is not just reveries of brotherhood and faith in the Lord, not all magpies in sunshine and little sticky green leaves. Life is brutality and squalor as well, and you, reader, do not have the right not to look at people beating people or people beating a horse.

Just before he goes to commit murder in Crime and Punishment, the protagonist Raskolnikov dreams a horrible dream. Drunken peasants are beating a mare to death, while a little boy looks on in horror. FMD takes the reader by the hair and pushes his nose down into the vomit. There, see? Take a sniff of that, reader. That’s life on this God’s green earth of ours.

            “I’ll make her gallop, she’ll gallop all right,” and Mikolka took the whip, enjoying the thought of beating the old mare. They all clamored into his wagon, cracking jokes and roaring with laughter. There were six of them, with room for still more. They took up with them a fat, red-faced peasant woman in red cotton, in a headdress trimmed with beads. She was cracking nuts and laughing. Who could help laughing at the idea that a sorry nag like that was about to pull such a load, and at a gallop?

            “Get in, everybody, get in,” yelled Mikolka. “She’ll pull you all,” and he lashed away in a frenzy, hardly aware of his actions.

            “Papa, papa,” cried the boy, “look what they’re doing. They’re beating the poor horse!”

            Two men in the crowd got whips, ran up to the mare, one on each side, and began to lash at her ribs.

            “Hit her on the nose and across the eyes, beat her on the eyes!” yelled Mikolka. The fat young peasant woman went on cracking nuts and giggling.

            
           And so on, and so on. Take a look at it, reader. Have a sniff.

[from U.R. Bowie, unpublished semi-fictional biography of Dostoevsky]

In his notebooks for Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky's recalls this episode and remarks, "My first personal insult; the horse, the courier."

See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871, p.106 footnote.

Illustrations to "Crime and Punishment" by Fritz Eichenberg, 1938

IVAN BUNIN, Translation into English of Poem, "Настанет день, исчезну я" ("The Day Will Come; I'll Disappear")

Переводчик Бунина, Роберт Буи, сидит на коленях мастера. Автор смотрит искоса, "А кто же этот типчик?"

Translator of Ivan Bunin, U.R. Bowie, Sitting in the Lap of Bunin, While the Author Looks Askance (Who is this guy, anyway?)

Памятник Бунину, Елец

Statue of Ivan Bunin by Sculptor Yury Grishko, in Yelets, Russia; Photo taken in Sept., 2000

                                                             Tortoiseshell Butterfly

Ivan Bunin

(1870-1953)

Настанет день — исчезну я,

А в этой комнате пустой

Все то же будет: стол, скамья

Да образ, древний и простой.

И так же будет залетать

Цветная бабочка в шелку —

Порхать, шуршать и трепетать

По голубому потолку.

И так же будет неба дно

Смотреть в открытое окно

И море ровной синевой

Манить в простор пустынный свой.

                                     August 10, 1916

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Upon its first publication the poem had a title: “Без меня (Without Me).” In his Speak, Memory (p. 128), the lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov mentions “Bunin’s impeccable evocation of what is certainly a Tortoiseshell [butterfly].” Nabokov translates the second stanza literally as follows:

And there will fly into the room

A colored butterfly in silk

To flutter, rustle and pit-pat

On the blue ceiling . . .

Here the poet Bunin, age forty-five, imagined his death by conceiving of the way things would be (exactly the same but with himself missing) in the same Russian room where he wrote the poem. 

In his wildest dreams he could not have imagined how his life was soon to change: the Russian Revolution and the Civil War; the establishment of the U.S.S.R., which embodied everything Bunin loathed. 

His forced emigration from Russia only a few short years after this poem was written, the long emigre life in France, where he would receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (1933), where he would die, in Paris, in 1953--in a room probably quite different from the one he conjures up in his poem, and most likely with different butterflies in attendance.

LITERAL TRANSLATION

(by U.R. Bowie)

The day will come; I will disappear,

And in this empty room

Everything will be the same: the table, bench,

The icon, ancient and stark.

And in just the same way will fly in

That colored butterfly in silk,

To flit, to rustle, to pitter-pat

Against the light-blue ceiling.

And in just the same way will the bottom of the sky

Gaze into the open window,

And the steady blue of the sea

Will beckon into its empty expanse.

                                         RHYMED AND METERED TRANSLATION

The day will come; I’ll disappear,

While in this selfsame empty room,

That table, bench, icon austere

The same contours of space consume.

And just as now will flutter in

That silken butterfly serene,

To rustle, palpitate and ding

Against the ceiling’s bluish-green.

And the sky’s horizon, cerulean glow

Will peer in, gaze through this window,

While the steady unruffled blue of the sea

Beckons toward emptiness: “Come. Follow me.”

(translated by U.R. Bowie, May, 2018)

Poem declaimed by Boris Vetrov; music by Rachel Portman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSBBrEuXi_A