Vladimir Mayakovsky
My university

French you know.
You divide.
Multiply.
You decline wonderfully.
Well, decline then!
But tell me —
can you sing in tune
with a house?
Do you understand the idiom of tramcars?
The human fledgling —
barely out of the egg —
grasps at a book,
at quires of exercise paper.
But I learned my alphabet from signboards,
leafing through pages of iron and tin.
People take the earth,
trim
and strip it —
and they teach you a lesson.
It’s just a tiny globe.
But I
learned my geography with my ribs —
no wonder I
flop down to earth
for my night’s rest!
Painful questions torment the Ilovaiskys:
Did Barbarossa have a red beard? —
What if he did!
I do not rummage in dust-laden rubbish —
I know all the histories in Moscow!
They take Dobrolyubov (to hate evil),
but the name objects,
the family whimpers.
Since childhood,
I’ve always hated
the overfed,
for I always had to sell myself
for a meal.
They learn
to sit down —
to please a lady;
their trifling thoughts clink against tinpot foreheads.
But I
talked
only to houses.
Water towers were my only company.
Listening closely with their dormer windows,
the roofs caught what I threw in their ears.
Afterwards,
they prattled
about the night
and about each other,
wagging their weathercock tongue.

Translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey