Vladimir Mayakovsky
As a young man

Youth has a mass of occupations.
We hammer grammar into the thickest skulls.
But I
was expelled from the fifth class.
Then they began to shove me into Moscow prisons.
In your
cosy
little apartment world,
curly-headed lyricists sprout in bedrooms.
What do you find in these lapdog lyricists?!
As for me,
I learned
about love
in Butyrki.
Does nostalgia for the Bois de Boulogne mean anything?!
Or to gaze at the sea and sigh?!
In the “Funeral Parlor,”
I
fell in love
with the keyhole of Cell 103.
Staring at the daily sun,
people ask:
“How much do they cost, these little sunbeams?”
But I
for a yellow patch
of light jumping on the wall
would then have given everything in the world.

Translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey