Vladimir Mayakovsky
As a boy

I was gifted in measure with love.
Since childhood,
people
have been drilled to labor.
But I
fled to the banks of the Rion
and knocked about there,
doing absolutely nothing.
Mamma chided me angrily:
“Good for nothing!”
Papa threatened to belt me.
But I,
laying my hands on a false three-ruble note,
played at “three leaves” with soldiers under a fence.
Unconstricted by shirt,
unburdened by boots,
I was baked by the sultry sun of Kutaisi.
To the sun I proffered now my back,
now my belly,
until the pit of my stomach ached.
The sun was astonished:
“I can hardly see him, the brat!
Yet he’s got
a little heart too.
He does his small best!
Where,
in less
than a yard
is there place
for me
and the river
and the hundred-mile stretch of rock?!”

Translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey