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![2: A note to the translation of Mayakovsky’s ‘Fiddle-Ma-Fidgin’
In the triptych by Hieronymus Bosch known as The Garden of Earthly Delights, the ‘Hell’ panel shows a man crucified on a harp, with the strings passing through his body, but his arms free, embracing it, in an extraordinary image of mingled pain, beauty, and yearning. In the same picture, this man is surrounded by much more grotesque images, where figures of desperation are doing things to and with various musical instruments
Which even to name wad be unlawfu’.
The poetry of Mayakovsky from his futurist period shows a similar conjunction of extreme yearning and coarsely grotesque asseverations, held together in a web of convincing fantasy where animate and inanimate react on one another. In the present poem (actual title The Violin and a Little Nervously, date 1914), written when Mayakovsky was twenty, the poet expresses in miniature the situation of his whole life: loneliness, desire to communicate and ‘contribute’, sympathy towards the outcast and the misunderstood. The potential desperation in this, however, finds voice through fantasy, fun, and caricature. A violin (the word is feminine in Russian) begins to ‘sing’ in such a personal and yearning way that the other instruments in the orchestra get annoyed with it and tell it to shut up until it can control itself; the poet bursts in on the orchestra and despite their ribald laughter embraces the […]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vmd2oqboco524fhpqdu7pnbn/bafkreigvqyld4m2qtaw4a23yqymq7zk3zm2e6h5dx7jfww6jtukoxj3dtm)
![[…] violin and proposes to this ‘wooden bride’, which he sees as a kindred soul.
I wanted in my translation to bring out if I could the distinctive Mayakovskian mixture of grotesque high-jinks and underlying seriousness of purpose. To do this, I used Scots, trying to tap an enduring Scottish tradition of grotesque exaggeration or fantasy which is found in Dunbar and the ballads, Burns and MacDiarmid.
They’ll turn me in your arms, lady,
Into an esk and adder;
But haud me fast, and fear me not,
I am your bairn’s father.
The use of Scots, apart from the relative ease of working up the right atmosphere, also helps (though dangerously) because of the verbal freedom it confers on a harassed translator. What can only be weakly called ‘expressive’ words tumble from the Caledonian cornucopia: slunkert, daunert, glinkit, sprachlt, crunkelt, yowp and yowl, for which ‘slunk’, ‘wandered’, ‘glanced’, ‘sprawled’, ‘folded’, ‘bawl and howl’ are unimpressive equivalents. The temptation in this is to make the poem look more continuously vivid or ‘strange’ than it really is. Fortunately it is difficult to make Mayakovsky look over-vivid, as his diction employs every liberty the genius of Russian allows, but the method would work only with poets who were similarly inventive and uninhibited in their linguistic texture. I don’t look on Scots as a medium that can now be widely or thoughtlessly used in poetry, but against the argument that we have reached the stage where it should be given up altogether I would offer the evidence of my own experience in translating Mayakovsky (and add to it Sydney Goodsir Smith’s Scottish version of Blok’s The Twelve): Scots gets closer than English to the ‘barbarian lyre’ of the revolutionary spirit. If people can be persuaded to read it, it will give them a sensation they cannot at the moment get from English verse.
The Review 1, April/May 1962.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vmd2oqboco524fhpqdu7pnbn/bafkreig3s3baoejirvuc57pl3m33slhl6ygnuoa72otci7rtvet2rsk3fi)
