Marina Tsvetaeva
Readers of Newspapers

It crawls, the underground snake,
crawls, with its load of people.
And each one has his
newspaper, his skin
disease; a twitch of chewing;
newspaper caries.
Masticators of gum,
readers of newspapers.

And who are the readers? old men? athletes?
soldiers? No face, no features,
no age. Skeletons — there’s no
face, only the newspaper page.

All Paris is dressed
this way from forehead to navel.
Give it up, girl, or
you’ll give birth to
a reader of newspapers.

Sway he lived with his sister.
Swaying he killed his father.
They blow themselves up with pettiness
as if they were swaying with drink.

For such gentlemen what
is the sunset or the sunrise?
They swallow emptiness,
these readers of newspapers.

For news read: calumnies.
For news read: embezzling,
in every column slander
every paragraph some disgusting thing.

With what, at the Last Judgement
will you come before the light?
Grabbers of small moments,
readers of newspapers.

Gone! lost! vanished! so,
the old maternal terror.
But mother, the Gutenberg Press
is more terrible than Schwarz’ powder.

It’s better to go to a graveyard
than into the prurient
sickbay of scab-scratchers,
these readers of newspapers.

And who is it rots our sons
now in the prime of their life?
Those corrupters of blood
the writers of newspapers.

Look, friends much
stronger than in these lines, do
I think this, when with
a manuscript in my hand

I stand before the face
there is no emptier place
than before the absent
face of an editor of news-
                                papers’ evil filth.

Translated by Elaine Feinstein