Velimir Khlebnikov
The Lone Performer

And while above Tsarskoye Selo¹
Akhmatova’s song and tears were pouring,
I, unwinding the skein of the sorceress,
Plodded through the desert like a sleepy corpse²,
There where impossibility lay dying:
An exhausted mummer Determined to break through.
And meanwhile in dark caves
The curly brow of the underground bull
Bloodily champed and dined on people
Amid the smoke of threats immodest.
And wrapped in the will of the moon,
As in a sleepy cloak, the twilight wanderer
Jumped in his sleep above the chasms
And went from cliff to cliff.
Blinded, I went on while The wind of freedom moved me
And beat with slanting rain.
And the bull’s head I took from mighty meats and bone
And stuck beside the wall.
Above the world I shook it, like a soldier of the truth:
Behold it, here it is!
Here is that curly brow which once inflamed the crowds!³
And horrified
I understood that I was seen by none:
That one must sow the eyes,
That the eye-sower must go!

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1. Tsarskoye Selo, near St. Petersburg, is the location of the lycee where Pushkin studied. Renamed Pushkin in 1937.

2. An echo of Pushkin’s poem “The Prophet” (“I plodded through the dismal desert”).

3. An allusion to the myth of the Marathonian Bull and the Minotaur, both of which were killed by Theseus.

Translated by Gary Kern