1
Translating the Ethnic Avant-Garde
Da bud’ ia
And if I
i negrom preklonnykh godov,
were a Negro of withered years,
i to,
even then,
bez unyn’ia i leni,
without pause or idleness,
ia russkii by vyuchil
I would learn Russian
tol’ko za to,
only because
chto im
Lenin conversed
razgovarival Lenin.
in it.
—Vladimir Mayakovsky (from “To Our Youth” [Nashemu iunoshestvu], 1927)
The introduction presented two visions of the Tower of Babel rising from the Soviet Union of the 1920s, Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and Nikolai Marr’s “New Theory of Language.” Together they pointed to the restoration of a unified humanity through socialist revolution, a revolution linking ancient past to liberated future, and in doing so appealing to every people at every stage of historical development. This chapter focuses on the place of language and translation in creating this unity.
Babel evokes both “Babylon” and the Hebrew word for “confusion.” In Dante’s elaboration of the legend, Nimrod’s hubris prompted the replacement of a single divine language with a multiplicity of tongues that corresponded to the different skills of the tower’s builders. God had the architects speak one language, stone carriers another, “and so on for all the different operations…. As many as were the types of work involved in the enterprise, so many were the languages by which the human race was fragmented; and the more skill required for the type of work, the more rudimentary and barbaric the language they now spoke.”1 Dante thus imparted to the legend a class dimension: languages were doled out according to division of labor, and those who were first became last, a protosocialist redistribution of expressive eloquence. However, what I find more tantalizing about the Tower of Babel—what makes it relevant for the Soviet-centered ethnic avant-garde—is that it captures language as a source of both unity and fragmentation. The legend points to a single language transcending human divisions but also to the origins of linguistic confusion and miscomprehension. As a writer, Dante himself sought to reclaim this lost single language, and the introduction noted Marr’s similar effort to theorize a new, socialist language of “supreme beauty” that would unite all peoples. This chapter brings such efforts down to earth by focusing on a specific poetic form that seemed able to cross national and ethnic boundaries and, indeed, serve as a model for minority writing. This was the futurist form developed by Vladimir Mayakovsky, another towering icon of the Soviet avant-garde, whose stature and voice elicited rapt admiration from around the world.
This chapter unearths not only Mayakovsky’s imprint on minority and non-Western cultures but also how he sought to incorporate them into his own work. That is, it examines how Mayakovsky inspired artists and writers of color, but also how his encounters with these figures and their cultures affected his own writing. The key here is his 1925 journey to the United States via Cuba and Mexico and his accounts of these places in both a travelogue—published in 1926 as My Discovery of America—and poetry. During the trip he wrote poems in an “Afro-Cuban” voice, admired the murals of Diego Rivera, and found that his most dedicated American fans happened to be Russian and Jewish émigrés—all unexpected developments for the futurist author, who made the trip primarily to witness the world’s most advanced industrial society. That is, he had expected to bask in American technology and industry, but as I show, Mayakovsky’s journey prompted him to question his prior, headlong rush into the future, to reconcile his voice and vision with the diversity of the Americas. His “Afro-Cuban” poems in particular lay open the possibility that his distinctive poetic form—fragmented, staircase lines marked by irregular rhyme and rhythm—could incorporate minority voices without sacrificing their specificities.
What I suggest is that Mayakovsky presents us with yet another iteration of the Tower of Babel, namely, with an avant-gardist form capable of joining multiple languages, cultures, and peoples within a Soviet orbit. However, in keeping with the Babel legend, he also presents us with the confusion and miscomprehension that accompanied this effort. The first part of this chapter provides an overview of Mayakovsky as a model for minority writing. The main task here is to align him with the visions of avant-gardism and difference spelled out in the introduction, visions oriented toward both future and past. I do so by discussing his 1927 poem “To Our Youth,” which in addition to exhorting elderly blacks to learn Russian incorporates some of the many cultures and languages of the USSR. I then use Mayakovsky’s 1925 journey to apply such efforts to non-Soviet peoples. My focus is on the gaze that he applied in particular to Cuba and Mexico, where, I argue, he articulated a new, progressive kind of exoticism—one undergirded by Comintern anti-imperialism and that in turn undergirded the Soviet-centered ethnic avant-garde. The chapter’s second part then tests Mayakovsky’s ability to transcend racial, ethnic, and national divides by discussing Langston Hughes’s translations of his “Afro-Cuban” poems. Hughes produced these during his 1932–1933 visit to the Soviet Union, where he was advised to look to Mayakovsky as a model for balancing “proletarian internationalism” with a distinct “national [i.e., black] atmosphere.” However, Hughes departs drastically from the originals and in doing so highlights the limits of Mayakovsky’s voice and form. I explain this by emphasizing the inevitable gaps that emerge from translation, which, as will be seen, ultimately opened a space for the ethnic avant-garde to balance multiple languages and cultures.
 
A brief overview of futurism is first necessary, for more than any other grouping within the historical avant-garde, its connection to the past, descent, and the “ethnic” seems counterintuitive. F. T. Marinetti’s founding futurist manifesto (1909) drove away the “smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians” via speeding automobiles and art as violence, art as the Oedipal overthrow of all previous generations. Likewise, the Russian futurist manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912) threw “Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity,” thus enabling poets to achieve the “Summer Lightning of the New Coming Beauty of the Self-sufficient (self-centered) Word.”2 The aesthetic and political distinctions between Italian and Russian futurism—one now associated with fascism, the other with socialism—are beyond this chapter’s scope. Taken together, though, they point to a common “futurist moment,” which Marjorie Perloff has defined as rejecting the past in favor of chaos, motion, and simultaneity, the larger goal being to tear down canons and institutions and to address the masses directly.3 The futurists, of course, embraced the machine and industry—not the prehistoric paradises deployed by Walter Benjamin, as discussed in the introduction.
And yet Perloff adds that the “future” of the futurist moment was the result not of linear sequence but the incorporation of the past (albeit often through negation) into “the seamless web of the present.”4 Thus, in Perloff’s futurist exemplar—Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay’s verbal-visual La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913)—train travel through space (from Moscow to Siberia to Paris) becomes a journey through time: Moscow, with its “one thousand and three bell towers,” evokes Arabian Nights; Siberia menaces with Mongol hordes; and the North Pole is cast as the home of prehistoric ancestors. In line with Benjamin’s revolution as messianic arrest, Cendrars explicitly anticipates “the coming of the great red Christ of the Russian Revolution.”5 The indication here is that the futurist moment, which found its most powerful expressions in the economically “backward” countries of Italy and Russia, actively incorporated exotic, seemingly retrograde cultures. As Perloff puts it, locomotive technology could paradoxically go hand in hand with an “insistence on difference.”6 Thus, even while warding off “Mythology and the Mystic Ideal,” Marinetti also pushed poets to “swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.” Likewise, the signers of “Slap”—David Burliuk, Alexei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov—called their futurist group Hylaea, which, as Anna Lawton writes, referred to “the ancient land of the Scythians where in mythical times Hercules performed his tasks. It was a name pregnant with poetic suggestion to the initiators of a trend in art and literature who looked back to prehistory in order to build the future.”7 Indeed, in place of the foreign term “futurist,” Khlebnikov himself coined and preferred the Russian budetliane (people of the future), which one critic described as distinct from futurism in its embrace of the past, its “creation of new things, grown on the magnificent traditions of Russian antiquity.”8 This was in line with Khlebnikov’s stated goal of enabling the human brain to grasp the ever-elusive fourth dimension, that is, “the axis of time.” He envisioned artists and writers retreating to an “independent nation of time,” free from everyday life and consumerism.9
Such eccentric understandings of time made it possible for Soviet futurists to embrace far-flung traditions and cultures. However, they did so in ways that countered the hierarchies of race and empire lurking in Western futurism—for instance, in Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto, where he associates his memory of the “blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse” with the “nourishing sludge” of a factory drain.10 Against this repellent mixture of primitivism, misogyny, and industry, the Soviet futurists concocted a way of embracing the non-Western Other without relegating her or him. Again, the key figure here is Mayakovsky, who at first glance would seem an unlikely candidate for any backward-looking futurism. Among the Hylaeans, Khlebnikov was the one most interested in prehistory and Russia’s connection to Asia. Mayakovsky, in contrast, was the group’s urbanist, who even before the revolution pressed the abolition of “national differences” in his search for the language of the future. In Vladimir Markov’s words, he “had little use” for the “Hylaean primitivism” of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh.11 On the other hand, Mayakovsky was born in Georgia and occasionally interspersed his dramatic readings with Georgian—a coincidental echo of Marr’s own “Japhetic”-inflected language of the future. And despite his urbanist, cosmopolitan stance, Mayakovsky was also able to advance toward the future with an eye trained on the past. For example, as Christina Kiaer notes, Mayakovsky’s 1923 poem “About This” (Pro eto) briefly mentions “curly-headed Negroes” in order to imply a connection between the Bolshevik Revolution and “unspoiled African culture.”12 The suggestion here is that, like Benjamin, Mayakovsky grasped revolution as the cessation of time, and according to his friend Roman Jakobson, he looked to poetry as a means of overtaking both time and death, poetry as springing from “some primordial, mysterious force.”13 Thus, in 1918 he wrote and performed in a play in verse titled Mystery-Bouffe, which reimagined the Bolshevik Revolution as a Noah’s ark journey from a flooded, broken world through an innocuous hell, then an insipid heaven, and finally to a redeemed world—the heroes inspired by the brief appearance of a new Messiah walking on water and played by Mayakovsky himself.
This messianic futurism becomes clearer when turning to the actual voice of Mayakovsky, which projects both his ability and inability to transcend cultural and linguistic divides. Two accounts of this famously powerful, resonant voice prove instructive. The first comes from Diego Rivera, one of Mayakovsky’s hosts in Mexico City (though the poet stayed at the Soviet embassy). He recalled that when guns were drawn in a meeting of Mexican artists, writers, and political types, Mayakovsky
 
shouted “Listen!” in Russian in a voice which subdued the commotion. Everyone stopped in their tracks and looked at him. He began reciting [his poem “Left March”], which got louder and louder. The Mexicans remained quiet and, when the poet had finished, burst into a large round of applause. Everyone fell to embrace him and each other…. Our respectable Soviet friends, who had been flabbergasted by the scene (which seemed more like the actions of madmen than the sane), slowly opened the door, surely satisfied that Vladimir had the power of Orpheus and that they could now allow these wild beasts out on the street.”14
 
The second account comes from the recollections of William Carlos Williams, who attended an apartment reading that Mayakovsky gave soon after his arrival in New York from Mexico. According to Williams’s biographer, “the Russian’s performance was unforgettable, as Mayakovsky, foot on coffee table in that small, crowded apartment, half read, half chanted his poems in his native Russian, until they sounded to Williams as if the Odyssey itself were being delivered by some ‘impassioned Greek.’”15 Thus, even for audiences that did not understand Russian—though Rivera himself did command some—Mayakovsky’s voice carried force. To hear him speak was to hear echoes of Greek mythology as well as, perhaps, Babel’s lost civilization and Marr’s intermixed language to come. More to the point, these accounts of Mayakovsky’s voice underscore Russian futurism’s commitment to (as the eponymous 1913 zaum pamphlet put it) “the word as such”—language freed from any fixed referent and catering more to intuition than rationality.16 Based on Rivera’s and Williams’s impressions, Mayakovsky’s voice conveyed precisely this promise—of words that could be felt, if not understood, and that could thus cross cultural and linguistic divides. However, these accounts also underscore the difficulty presented by such divides. Mayakovsky commanded only Russian and a bit of Georgian, while those who lacked Russian likely failed to process the revolutionary content of “Left March” or “Black and White.” The latter was one of the poems that Williams heard and was in fact about an Afro-Cuban worker rather than Odysseus.17
Turning from his voice to his writing, we find a similar tension between understanding and misunderstanding, namely, in his famously fragmented form, which accommodated multiple, often contradictory positions. This was true of Mayakovsky’s works from both before and after 1917, when the revolution prompted a utilitarian turn to agitational verses, advertising slogans, newspaper reporting—but never the loss of his pursuit of the new.18 Again, the case in point here is “To Our Youth” (1927), in which Mayakovsky uses this form to join various Soviet nationalities. The sprawling 178-line poem recounts his journeys by train around the USSR to deliver lectures and readings—as his autobiography puts it, continuing “the interrupted tradition of troubadours and minstrels.”19 His signature step-ladder lines prove well suited to capturing movement from Moscow to Ukraine and then the Caucasus, as well as the vast country’s diversity.
Lechu
I fly
ushchel’iami, svist priglushiv.
by the canyons, the whistle muffled.
Snegov i papakh sedíny,
Gray streaks of snows and papakhas,
Szhimaia kinzhaly, stoiat ingushi,
Ingushes stand, gripping daggers,
slediat
watching
iz sedla
from saddles—
osetiny.
Ossetians.20
A papakha is a Caucasian fur hat, and elsewhere in the poem Mayakovsky likens the silvery Don River to another kind of traditional headgear (kubanki) and also references colorful, straw-roofed Ukrainian huts (mazanki). However, these obvious efforts at inclusion are countered by an overarching sense of distance between poet and his surroundings. Mayakovsky’s speeding-train vantage affords him only a fleeting glance at these peoples, and his lines seem poised to scatter amid the movement and irregular rhythms. As in almost all his poetry, the placement of accents is flexible (e.g., “SnegOv i papAkh sedIny”), and the number of accents alternates line by line. This enhances the poem’s sense of fragmentation and of a world come undone, with different places and cultural markers blurring together. However, Mayakovsky’s own overriding presence—his Whitman-influenced “I”21—as well as his use of rhyme serve to keep this world intact. My literal translations do not capture this, but these lines in particular use rhyme specifically to harmonize the named Caucasian minorities with standard Russian words: “priglushiv / ingushi,” “sedíny / osetiny.”
This is all to highlight the poem’s tension between order and disorder—the Soviet mélange of peoples as a source of both harmony and confusion. Accordingly, the poem later focuses on language as a distinguishing marker through the insertion of non-Russian tongues. We are told that everyone learns the alphabet “in their own way” (po-svoemu), and the poet declares that he himself bears “Three / different sources / in me / as to speech.” He recalls this encounter from Ukraine:
Odnazhdy,
Once,
zabrosiv v gostinitsu khlam,
having dumped my stuff in a hotel,
zabyl,
I forgot,
gde ia nochuiu.
where I was spending the night.
Ia
I asked
adres
the address
po-russki
in Russian
sprosil u khokhla,
to the khokhol,
khokhol otvechal:
khokhol answered:
—Ne chuiu.—
“Ne chuiu.”
Kogda zh perekhodiat
Turning now
k nauchnoi teme,
to scholarly themes,
im
the frame of Russian
ramki russkogo
is narrow
úzki;
for
s Tiflisskoi
the academies of Kazan
Kazanskaia akademiia
and Tbilisi,
perepisyvaetsia po-frantsuzski.
corresponding in French.22
Visually evoking the spirals of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, these lines on linguistic confusion, I would like to suggest, illustrate the contours of Mayakovsky’s own Tower of Babel. The difference is that the building material here is language itself, as opposed to Tatlin’s iron and glass. The scattered words combine into a structure that houses a mix of Russian, Ukrainian, and French, a mix marked by mutual incomprehension and perhaps even intolerance: the obstreperous khokhol is a crude Russian term for a Ukrainian person, while “Ne chuiu” is Ukrainian for “I don’t hear.” However, Mayakovsky once again creates a sense of order through his own presence, as well as through rhymes that enfold Ukrainian and French into Russian (“khlam / khokhla,” “Ne chuiu / nauchnoi,” “úzki / frantsuzski”). These lines thus convey a contradictory push and pull—linguistic confusion but also cohesion—which in turn anticipates the Janus-faced conclusion of “To Our Youth”: that all Soviet peoples (and, indeed, elderly blacks) should learn Russian, but at the same time, those previously without alphabets should use “the freedom of Soviet power” to “Find your root / and your verb, / enter the depths of philology.” Thus, Mayakovsky presents to us a fast-paced, futurist form that emphasizes the differences between languages even while enfolding them into a Russo-centric whole.
Having provided a brief overview of this form, my goal now is to focus on its resonance with non-Soviet peoples, including, as it happens, blacks in Cuba and a black poet and translator from the United States. Before proceeding, however, I should note that the utilitarian advice in “To Our Youth” rather unfortunately fell in line with the Soviet policy of “double assimilation,” that is, assimilating into both national units and a Soviet whole. This advice also anticipates Moscow’s emphasis, beginning in the early 1930s, on Russification and on Russia itself as the “first among equals.” In the decades after Mayakovsky’s 1930 suicide, such apparent alignments with official policy led Soviet critics to enshrine him as a standard-bearer for the state’s “friendship of peoples,” his wide-ranging influence as providing “indubitable evidence of Soviet Russian culture’s leading, enormous role in the development of the socialist-in-content, national-in-form cultures of the peoples of the USSR.”23 In other words, there is a dubious precedent for reading Mayakovsky as a model for minority writers, one bearing the heavy-handed imprint of Soviet officialdom. However, the poet’s iconoclastic form and perspective cannot be so easily pinned down. Ultimately, he was transformed by his American travels, as well as by encounters with the likes of Rivera and Hughes—encounters that expanded the inclusive, cross-cultural potential of the futurist poet’s writing.
Mayakovsky Discovers America
He anticipated his 1925 journey six years prior, with the writing of his extended agitational poem “150,000,000.” It cast the poet himself as a folk-tale giant named Ivan who encompassed the entire Soviet population and journeyed to Chicago to wreck global capitalism. Lenin denounced the work as “double-dyed stupidity and pretentiousness,” though the fortunes of Soviet futurism only worsened after the leader’s death in 1924. After the revolution the futurists had reorganized as the Moscow-centered Left Front of the Arts (LEF, which published a journal by the same name) with Mayakovsky as one of its leaders, but in June 1925—the same month that he set sail for the Americas—the state stripped LEF of support in favor of a rival, more accessible group of “proletarian writers.”24 Thus, he was ambassador of an avant-garde movement that was increasingly embattled, something his overseas audiences tended to miss.
If his American audiences had little sense of what was happening in the Soviet Union, he likewise had difficulty apprehending the Americas. This difficulty—related to his limited command of languages—defines his writings from Cuba, Mexico, and (in defamiliarizing Soviet parlance) the “North American United States.” His American poems and travelogue heighten the sense of distance between himself and his surroundings that we previously encountered. “America I only saw from the windows of a train,” he concedes in the travelogue, which is filled with inaccuracies, as well as several wonderfully bizarre observations—for instance, “There is iron in celery. Iron is good for Americans. Americans love celery.” The travelogue also claims that Americans are so dollar obsessed that a common greeting is “Make money?” or as Mayakovsky hears it, “Mek monei?” (Мек моней?)—perhaps a misconstrual of “Mac.”25 This is an outsider’s perspective, grasping at outlandish claims absent intimate knowledge, and accordingly, a sense of bemused estrangement pervades My Discovery of America, particularly the sections on Cuba and Mexico. “I had never seen such a land, and didn’t think there were such lands,” he writes of the Mexican desert (15), which he also observes by train. Likewise, upon stepping off the boat in Havana, he abruptly interjects,
 
What is rain?
It’s air with a film of water.
Tropical rain—that’s sheer water with a film of air. (8)
 
For Mayakovsky, these are exotic places filled with an “incomprehensible, idiosyncratic and amazing way of life” (12), places that prompted for him new ways of seeing and an uncharacteristic loss for words.
What I would like to suggest is that during these earlier legs of his journey, Mayakovsky developed an exoticist interest in preserving traditional cultures but also in pairing exoticism with anti-imperialism—in harnessing the exotic for revolution. In other (namely, Stephen Greenblatt’s) words, Mayakovsky’s rendition of the New World encounter is marked by an open-ended wonder that—in a departure from the explorer and adventure genres—refuses to give way to apprehension and possession.26 For example, his poem “Mexico” (1925) notes his boyhood fantasies about Native Americans as he encountered them in the pages of James Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Mayne Reid, both enduring favorites among Russian readers. As he disembarks in Vera Cruz, he imagines that it is “Montihomo Hawk’s Claw” who assists him with his suitcase stuffed with copies of Lef—an allusion to a young Chekhov character who, himself having read Reid’s adventure novels, assumes this “Indian” nickname. However, Mayakovsky’s misinformed excitement soon passes:
image
FIGURE 1.1 Mayakovsky’s travel sketches of Mexico and Cuba, published with his poem “Tropics” in KRASNAIA NIVA, No. 35 (1926): 11.
Glaz toropitsia slezoi nalit’sia.
The eye quickly fills with tears.
Kak? chemu ia rad?—
How? Why am I happy?
—Iastrebinyi Kogot’!
“Hawk’s Claw!
Ia zh
I’m
tvoi “Blednolitsyi
your ‘Pale-Faced
Brat.”
Brother.’
Gde tovarishchi?
Where are the comrades?
chego taish’sia?
why are you hiding?
Pomnish’,
Remember how
iz-za klumby
from behind the flowerbed
strelami
with poisoned
otravlennymi
arrows
v Kutaise
in Kutais
bili
we
my
beat
po korabliam Kolumba?—
against Columbus’s ships?”
Tsedit
Hawk’s Claw
zlobno
strained out
Kogot’ Iastrebinyi,
darkly,
medlenno,
slowly,
kak tresnuvshaia krynka:
like a cracked decanter:
—Netu krasnokozhikh—istrebili
“No more redskins. Wiped out by
gachupíny s gríngo.
gachupins and gringos.27
In light of the unhesitating flight in “To Our Youth” across linguistic and national boundaries, this rebuke of the poet, this admission of ignorance is striking. Just as in that poem, here he blurs together different places—conflating indigenous peoples in the United States (i.e., the tales of Fenimore Cooper and Reid) with those in Mexico, and connecting his boyhood home of Kutais, Georgia, to the Americas. With “Hawk’s Claw’s” derogatory terms for Spaniards and Americans, Mayakovsky likewise brings in a foreign tongue—though otherwise it is unclear which language the porter speaks. (It could be Mayakovsky’s own: at one point the travelogue describes Cuban pineapple vendors cursing to one another in Russian.) However, immediately after these lines, the porter proceeds to rebuff the poet’s fantasies by relating how those not killed were ravaged by alcoholism and exploitation. Instead of slinging arrows, they are lugging suitcases, including Mayakovsky’s own.
Thus, in his encounter with this indigenous figure, the futurist poet concedes the limits of his perspective, but as the poem proceeds, he is able to recalibrate how he sees the Other. He does so by delving into Mexican history, in contrast to the only cursory glance at Ingushes and Ossetians in “To Our Youth.” “Mexico” describes the glories of Tenochtitlán, Cortés’s arrival in Veracruz, the shortcomings of Montezuma, and the subsequent conquest. To be sure, Mayakovsky was not the only one to explore this subject. His dive into a past “so long ago / as though it never was” brings to mind not only Mystery-Bouffe and Khlebnikov but also William Carlos Williams’s 1925 account of “The Destruction of Tenochtitlan”—portrayed as the battle of primal forces—which in turn evokes Williams’s account of Mayakovsky as Greek orator.28 However, amid these perhaps predictably modernist turns to the ancient past, what distinguishes the Soviet futurist is his choice to identify with the defeated Aztecs after he describes the death of one of their leaders: “I vot stoim, / indeets da ia, / tovarishch / dalekogo detstva.” (And here we stand, / the Indian and myself, / a comrade / from long-ago childhood.)29 After thus reaffirming this youthful bond, Mayakovsky then casts the Aztecs as revolutionaries in the present day: the poem concludes with his juxtaposing their history with the Mexico he finds, leading him to bemoan the passing of heroism, the rise of a Mexican bourgeois society hardly distinguishable from others, and the fact that “Montezuma became a beer brand.” However, amid capitalist homogenization, Mayakovsky envisions a revolution made up of “Aztec / Mestizo / Creole,” that is, of the country’s impoverished indigenous peoples. All this points to the flexibility of Mayakovsky’s perspective—his ability, within a single poem, to disidentify with, then reidentify with, then radicalize these peoples.30
This flexibility enabled Mayakovsky to reject an uninformed embrace of the future and to instead seek new, revolutionary configurations of the modern and premodern. This becomes clearer when delving deeper into his travelogue, particularly his observations from his two-day stay in Cuba and three weeks in Mexico. Mayakovsky’s disorientation there brings to mind McKay’s and Benjamin’s impressions of “Byzantine” Moscow, also from the 1920s. “Everything seemed the wrong way round,” he recounts from his train journey from Veracruz to Mexico City:
 
In a completely blue, ultramarine night, the black silhouettes of the palms looked absolutely like long-haired bohemian artists.
The sky and the land merge. Both on high and low down there are stars. Two arrays. Above—are the motionless, accessible heavenly bodies; and below—the darting and flitting sparkle of fireflies. (14)
 
Such dazzled responses were, again, unexpected given that Mayakovsky made the trip to witness American industry, with Cuba and Mexico intended as mere way stations. In Paris, he had been warned that “Mexican art is an outgrowth from the ancient, variegated, primitive, folkloric Indian art,” that is, ostensibly not of much interest to a futurist (16). However, he found himself taken by Diego Rivera and his famous Ministry of Education pieces (then in progress), which he deemed the “world’s first Communist mural” (16). More specifically, he praised Rivera’s murals for their harmonious marriage of a “primordial paradise” with “the construction of the world of the future” (16)—a combination that resonates well with Benjamin’s visions of revolution and avant-gardism. That is, Mayakovsky found in Mexico and Rivera’s revolutionary history the same intermingling of the old and new that Benjamin saw as ripe with irruptive possibility.31
However, Mayakovsky was not simply applying a Soviet or European vision to Mexico but was transformed by what he saw. More specifically, the travelogue shows him learning to distinguish between imperialist and anti-imperialist varieties of exoticism. He excoriates the kind practiced by American tourists, who condemn Mexicans to the “exotica of starvation” while purchasing souvenirs—“jumping beans, glaringly bright serapes which all the donkeys of Guadalajara would shy away from, handbags with printed Aztec calendars, postcards of parrots from real parrot feathers” (24, 26). This is the exotic as kitsch, bound to U.S. exploitation, which Mayakovsky rejects in favor of another kind of exoticism—that found in Rivera’s premodern utopias, as well as in instances of Cuban and Mexican culture untainted by American tourists:
 
Everything to do with traditional exoticism is colourfully poetic and non-profitable. An example is the very beautiful cemetery of the multitudinous Gomez and Lopez breeds, with its dark alleys, even in daytime, of some sort of interwoven tropical and bewhiskered trees. (9)
 
Mayakovsky juxtaposes the “traditional exoticism” of this Havana cemetery with the stultifying, unthinking orderliness of an American-organized telegraph office, as well as with the tall buildings representing American firms—“the first tangible signs of the sway held by the United States over all three Americas: North, South and Central” (9). What emerges from this contrast between old and new is a notion of the former that exists beyond U.S. imperialism and, indeed, potentially enables a critique of imperialism. The futurist poet thus gained from his time in Cuba and Mexico an ability to specify a “traditional exoticism” that was preferable to American industry and could bolster progressive ends.32
During his three months in the United States, this nuanced perspective served him in good stead. His account of Havana’s telegraph office anticipates the fact that in New York he found himself ambivalent about innovations like the automobile (“stinking out the streets”) and skyscraper (“in which you can’t live, though people do”). His travelogue dismisses them as instances of “primitive futurism,” a (for him) repellent combination of a “backwoods psyche [derevnie psikhiki]” and naked technology (102–3), a noisome, haphazard technology with little concern for human needs and comforts. He expresses hope that the USSR will avoid “primitive futurism” by, for instance, fitting silencers on trains so that poets can converse, as well as by achieving “motorless flight” and a “wireless telegraph” (103). In short, just as his travels brought him to a variegated understanding of exoticism, the same can be said of futurism. Mayakovsky’s resulting desire for quieter, more humane technologies evokes Charles Fourier’s utopias and Benjamin’s dialectical image (e.g., modern bombers juxtaposed with Da Vinci’s airplanes dropping snow in the summertime). The din of American cities prompts him to cast the “deliberate age-old clinging” of the countryside in a favorable light (105–6) and to arrive at new combinations of future and past. For example, his paean to the Brooklyn Bridge, which he links to his own struggle “for constructions / in place of style,” examines the steel structure from the perspective of geologists unearthing it long after the passing of this civilization. However, the poet also describes himself staring at it “as an Eskimo looks at a train”—the futurist poet once again adopting a premodern, indigenous vantage.33
This layered perspective—this ability to inhabit multiple points of time at once—provides the bridge between Mayakovsky and minority writing in the United States. For this perspective undergirded his encounters with American ethnics, helping him to make sense of the country’s astounding diversity. As his travelogue puts it, “Negroes, Chinese, Germans, Jews, Russians—they all live in their own districts, with their own customs and language, preserving these through the decades in unadulterated purity…. An enigmatic picture: who then, essentially, are the Americans, and how many of them are hundred per cent American?” (55). Mayakovsky concludes that “it’s the white man who calls himself ‘an American’. He considers even the Jew to be black, and will not shake hands with the Negro” (83). To be American, in short, means to cling to biological racism, which Mayakovsky excoriates. Moreover, just as he identifies Americans as buying kitsch souvenirs in Mexico, in New York he describes well-off “idiots” who board “a car adorned with fancy lights to Chinatown, where they will be shown perfectly ordinary blocks and houses, in which absolutely ordinary tea is drunk—only not by Americans, but by the Chinese” (60). “Americans” also venture into the city’s Russian quarter in order “to buy an exotic samovar” (82). Thus, to be American also means to practice a false, commodified exoticism that assigned a kitsch past to the ethnic Other—both abroad and at home.
In contrast, Mayakovsky embarked on more intimate encounters with different kinds of Americans, namely, ethnic Americans. Along with his ambivalence toward industry, this was the other unexpected aspect of his trip—the fact that he was surrounded by mostly immigrants and minorities, again, mainly Russian and Jewish émigrés. He entered Laredo, Texas, from Mexico with the help of that city’s Russian Jewish community, one member of which translated for him at border control. In New York his visit proved a sensation and “moral boost” for the vibrant writing circles of the Russian and Jewish left, which, aspiring to generate “American Mayakovskys,” sponsored his lectures and ran newspaper “reports on his daily peregrinations.”34 The interest he drew from left-leaning Jewish immigrants seems particularly relevant here. The pro-Soviet Yiddish newspaper Frayhayt published an interview in which Mayakovsky—oddly described as resembling a “Mexican cowboy”—proclaimed the USSR more vibrant than the United States despite its relative backwardness. To escape New York’s “primitive futurism,” he thrice visited a Frayhayt-sponsored summer camp, where he “indefatigably read his poems before an attentive workers’ auditorium, his lion’s voice often resounding over the mountains, over the Hudson River.” These visits resulted in the poem “Camp ‘Nit Gedaige’” (Yiddish for “Don’t Be Down”), which features Mayakovsky in a tent at night hearing sirens howling over the Hudson and imagining eternity as a flying creature unfurling its tail—time as weaving “not hours / but canvas,” so that all can be clothed. That is, he situates his Jewish American hosts outside time and space: ultimately he is awakened by the call of young communist campers pledging to fight for Soviet power. The poem concludes, “Through song / they make / the Hudson flow to Moscow.”35
Here we find the leading Soviet futurist bending time and space at Jewish summer camp, and in fact, upon his return to the USSR, he suddenly became involved in Jewish cultural projects there.36 However, more interesting (and less limited to any single group) is the way he engaged questions of Otherness—indeed, his own marginality in New York—through language. Again, he spoke only Russian and Georgian, and his efforts to pick up English were foiled by his mostly Russian-speaking hosts. Despite Rivera’s and Williams’s triumphant accounts, this was a source of great personal frustration for Mayakovsky whenever he confronted non-Russian speakers—his booming voice reduced to repeating stock lines like “Gif me pliz sam tee.”37 However, he managed to make good use of the linguistic mix he encountered. He contributed to and possibly coedited the first issue of the “American revolutionary” trilingual journal Spartak/Spartacus (1925), published that October by a group of young Jewish émigré authors and intended as a conduit between the United States and USSR.38 Divided into three sections (the first and largest in Russian, the second in English, and the third in Yiddish), it featured a wide range of pieces on American and Soviet life and culture, including Mayakovsky’s never-before-published poem “The Six” (Shesterka) and a Russian translation of Langston Hughes’s “Drama for Winter Night.” These juxtaposed languages evidently inspired the futurist poet. At a celebration for the journal shortly before his departure, he read another new poem, “American Russians,” which tries to capture the mixed vernacular of his immigrant hosts.39 The poem centers around a fictional, presumably Jewish character named Kaplan trying to arrange a meeting with a fellow émigré via a hybrid of Russian and English, the Russian intermixed with phonetic Cyrillic renderings of “appointment” (apointman), “good-bye” (gud bai), “job” (dzhab), and “bootlegger” (butleger). Alongside these English words, the poem includes new Russian acronyms emerging from the bourgeoning Soviet bureaucracy (TsUP and TsUS), and at least one Russian word spoken by Kaplan is rendered with a Yiddish accent—“tudoi, an adaptation of the standard tuda (thither), which Mayakovsky performed aloud in an exaggerated, perhaps stereotyped manner.40 In short, the poem shows the Russian language creolizing in both the United States and the USSR—the language absorbing Americanisms, Sovietisms, and different accents—and becoming increasingly incomprehensible to the poet. The result, he concludes, is a new, all-devouring language that, like Spartak/Spartacus, combines Russian, English, and Yiddish:
image
FIGURE 1.2 SPARTAK/SPARTACUS, “Publication of the ‘Rezets’ group of proletarian writers” (1925).
 
Courtesy of Yivo Institute for Jewish Research.
Gorlanit
Across this very America
po etoi Amerike samoi
yells
stoiazykii
a hundred-tongued
narod-ogoltets.
people-frenzier.
Uzh esli
If already
Odessa—Odessa-mama,
Odessa is the Odessa-mama
to N’iu-Iork—
then New York is
Odessa-otets.
the Odessa-father.41
These lines further substantiate the notion of a Mayakovskian Tower of Babel, here assuming a monstrous form. Swallowing multiple peoples and tongues, it joins Odessa (a center of Eastern European Jewish culture) and New York (the center of Russian and Jewish American immigration). Indeed, Mayakovsky came to imagine the United States precisely as a Tower of Babel: his travelogue describes the “language of America” as “the imaginary language of the pandemonium of Babel, with just one difference—that there the languages were mixed so that no one understood them, whereas here they are mixed so that everyone understands them” (82). America thus enables Mayakovsky to imagine a new iteration of the legend and, in turn, a new means of crossing linguistic divides. If originally Babel referenced a unified language followed by mutual misunderstanding, misunderstanding here gives way to an intermixture that yields comprehension. To put this differently, Mayakovsky seems to register William Carlos Williams’s avowed ability to make sense of the Russian poet. According to the travelogue, Americans are not at all fazed by—indeed, thrive on—a multiplicity of languages.
But Mayakovsky himself was fazed. He returned to the USSR eager to be surrounded only by Russian speakers again, after which he immediately embarked on the speaking tour that resulted in “To Our Youth.” However, as he describes in an essay about his return, relief soon gave way to confusion: an inability to relate with fellow train passengers, and a hotel attendant suspecting him of making sexual advances.42 His limited communication abilities in the Americas, it seems, somehow followed him home, a development he anticipated in a poem that he wrote while crossing back over the Atlantic. Called “Homeward!” it originally concluded,
Ia khochu byt’ poniat moei stranoi,
I want to be understood by my country,
A ne budu poniat—
But if I’m not understood—
chto zh.
what of it.
Po rodnoi strane
Through my native country
proidu storonoi,
I’ll pass to the side,
Kak prokhodit
As passes
kosoi dozhd’.
the slanting rain.43
At first glance, these lines seem to convey Mayakovsky’s awareness about the embattled position of LEF, something he could momentarily forget while in the Americas. What I would like to suggest, though, is that they also signal Mayakovsky’s adoption of an outsider’s perspective—the perspective of a Russian-speaking émigré in New York, doubtful about his ability to make himself understood. That is, in the Americas he came to question not only his previous embrace of the future but also the capacity of his language and poetry to overcome his sense of distance and alienation. Perhaps nostalgic for his Russian Jewish hosts in New York, as part of his return tour he visited Odessa, but here too he was unable to shake this sense of alienation. One of the poems he read there was “American Russians,” but strangely, his efforts to mimic Jewish vernacular fell on deaf ears. By one first-person account, while “the poem provoked laughter everywhere,” in Odessa this was not the case. There it “did not have success,” suggesting that this particular largely Jewish audience—if not the one in New York—was not at all flattered by Mayakovsky’s attempts at imitation.44
As we saw, “To Our Youth” addresses precisely such thwarted efforts to cross linguistic boundaries, which in turn evoke Mayakovsky’s often frustrating encounters with the American Babel. However, in a departure from his earlier, American writings, “To Our Youth” ends with his confident assertion of Russian as the Soviet lingua franca, an assertion that, again, anticipated the Soviet state’s own pending turn to Russification. Mayakovsky in the Americas was not so confident, and in fact there are indications that after 1925 he sought to develop a more tendentious style of writing. As he wrote to a young poet in a letter, this is precisely why he chose, sometime between his return and 1928, to excise “Homeward’s” quoted conclusion—in his words, a “paradisiacal tail [raiskii khvostik]” that was too facilely “plaintive [noiushchii].”45 Prior to this turn, however, Mayakovsky’s American writings accentuated the Soviet futurist’s tentativeness, his acceptance of confusion and misunderstanding—in short, that which enabled him to embrace but not quite encroach upon the different cultures that he encountered. As I show below, Hughes’s translations further accentuated these qualities, revealing in the process that the ethnic avant-garde was not simply about emulating figures like Mayakovsky but rather was a two-way street.
“Blek end Uait” / “Black and White”: Hughes Translates Mayakovsky
In 1927 Diego Rivera himself made what Claude McKay called the magic pilgrimage to the Soviet Union. Upon his arrival he was surprised to find that “almost everyone within Moscow’s intellectual and cultural community, it appeared, as well as many ordinary citizens, had heard of him and his work because of Mayakovsky.” While there, he participated actively in debates about the role of old techniques and traditions in new, revolutionary art forms, but he left in May 1928 disillusioned by the state’s growing control of the arts, as well as the increasing prominence of what would become socialist realism.46 Indeed, LEF found itself ever more embattled through the late 1920s. As previously alluded to, its journal lost state support and ceased publication in 1925, and though it was relaunched two years later, at that point the group declared an end to its past iconoclasm in favor of journalistic writing and factography—a turn covered in chapter 2. Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930, perhaps because of the increased cultural constraints, though his final note pointed more to thwarted love. This, however, did not mark the end of the Soviet avant-garde, nor its engagement with minority and non-Western cultures. During his Moscow stay, Rivera—in addition to reuniting with Mayakovsky—met the film director Sergei Eisenstein, of Battleship Potemkin fame, another member of LEF. Their meeting resulted in Eisenstein’s own, prolonged visit to Mexico from 1930 to 1932 to shoot his never-completed ¡Que viva México! which I discuss at the end of this chapter. The year 1932 was also the year that Hughes made his own “magic pilgrimage” to Moscow. There he assisted with the production of another never-completed film, Black and White, a Soviet dramatization of African American struggles and the focus of chapter 3.
Suffice it to say for now, “Black and White”—or, more precisely, “Blek end uait” (Блек энд уайт), the phonetic Cyrillic rendering of these words—was also the title of one of Mayakovsky’s two “Afro-Cuban” poems, which Hughes translated during his visit. My goal in the remainder of this chapter is to juxtapose the originals and translations in order to test Mayakovsky as a model for minority writing. In the preceding, the key to this model was a fragmented, irregular form that incorporated transliterated foreign words as well as a flexible perspective discerning different varieties of the exotic. However, I paired this potential with Mayakovsky’s distance from his surroundings and audiences—an enduring iconoclasm that might seem contrary to his appeal across racial, ethnic, and national lines. Accordingly, by turning to Mayakovsky’s “Afro-Cuban” poems and Hughes’s translations of them, we get a stronger sense of the difficulty of crossing such boundaries, in particular, of the racial and linguistic barriers between Mayakovsky and persons of African descent. Nonetheless, by juxtaposing “Blek end uait” and Hughes’s “Black and White,” we can ultimately read this poem as a collaborative, cross-racial, Soviet-American effort. In the gaps between the two, we are able to hear hints of that transcendent, unifying voice described by Rivera and Williams.
Of course, all translations operate within the interstices between languages, and as several scholars have shown, it is in these interstices that questions of nationalism and internationalism come to the fore. According to Lawrence Venuti, even seemingly transparent translations highlight national differences, since both languages involved in the process bear their own histories, contradictions, and struggles. This means that in order to make a foreign text legible, the translator must impart to it a “domestic remainder,” which Venuti defines as “an inscription of values, beliefs, and representations linked to historical moments and social positions in the domestic culture.” In turn, a self-critical awareness of these inherent asymmetries makes it possible to discern translation’s utopian undercurrent, namely, the dream of “a future reconciliation of linguistic and cultural differences.”47 That is, translation highlights the gaps between languages and cultures but also the desire to overcome them—translation as a concrete step toward new Towers of Babel and Marr’s unified language, or what Walter Benjamin calls in his essay “The Task of the Translator” (1923) the integration of “many tongues into one true language.”48 From this perspective, translation can serve as the basis of new communities and groupings, and, indeed, in discussing Hughes vis-à-vis Mayakovsky, I seek to use translation as a tool for binding together the internationalist, interwar ethnic avant-garde.
Venuti suggests that such utopian aims are best realized by translations that do not aim for transparency but that self-consciously add elements to convey some of the understandings available to the original text’s readers. That is, such translations use domestic remainders to convey the original text’s foreignness, and as a result, they override the notion that cultural differences are fixed or essential; they open the possibility of defamiliarizing and reinventing the domestic culture and language.49 My literal translations of Mayakovsky have not attempted to do this, though I have resisted transparency by juxtaposing my renderings with the original lines, as well as by reverting to the Russian to illustrate accents and rhymes. My goal has been to convey the poet’s bare meaning and layout, but also to maintain a sense of the gaps between the Russian originals and my English renderings. In contrast, Hughes’s more ambitious undertakings accentuate precisely the gaps between cultures and languages, and at first glance, they thus throw into question Mayakovsky’s applicability to the black diaspora. However, I present Hughes’s translations as not only diverging from but also supplementing Mayakovsky. Examining the translations vis-à-vis the originals makes it possible to imagine the two authors as part of a shared effort to realize Benjamin’s one true language.50
Let’s begin with the two Mayakovsky poems. “Blek end uait” (1925) follows Willie, a black sweeper at an American cigar company in Havana as he slowly gains awareness of racial inequity. However, when he demands to know from his employer, Mr. Bragg, why blacks perform all the labor for whites, Bragg beats him unconscious. “Syphilis” (1926) describes a black itinerant named Tom, a third-class boat passenger who is quarantined in Havana’s harbor, while a wealthy white American from first class, Swift, the syphilitic “pig king,” disembarks. Encountering Tom’s starving, beautiful wife, Swift propositions her, and thinking she has been abandoned by her husband, she agrees to prostitute herself. The anti-imperial content—the plight of Afro-Cubans—is obvious in both poems. More interesting is the way in which Mayakovsky conveys this message, namely, through his characteristically fragmented lines. For instance, “Blek end uait” begins,
Esli
If
Gavanu
at Havana
okinut’ migom—
you flash a glance—
rai-strana,
paradise-country,
strana chto nado.
the best country there is.
Pod pal’moi
Under a palm
na nozhke
on thin leg
stoiat flamingo.
stand flamingos.
Tsvetet
Callario
kolario
blooms
po vsei Vedado.
over all Vedado.51
These lines convey a now familiar push and pull between past and present—the futurist poet once again basking in a premodern, exotic setting. They also convey an equally familiar push and pull between order and disorder: on the one hand scattered details and fragmented lines, on the other, frequent rhymes (“migom / flamingo”; “nado / Vedado”) and alliteration (“Pod pal’moi,” “na nozhke”).
Remarkably, this ability to reconcile extremes was explicitly presented to Hughes as something to emulate. In an article published in the Moscow-based journal International Literature while he was still in the USSR, Lydia Filatova, a young Soviet critic of African American literature, applauded Hughes’s adoption of a revolutionary voice and “working class themes.” However, she followed this praise with a fascinating caveat:
 
Yet there is danger here of lacking proportion, of falling into schematism and rhetorics. A synthesis based on living, concrete reality is always more convincing than abstract symbols. The ability to give generalisations while retaining the concrete individual substance may be seen in the work of the great poet of the October Revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Revolutionary art is international in character. Hughes’s verses are impregnated with the spirit of proletarian internationalism, which ought to be welcomed in every way. Yet the poem goes to extremes by obliterating national boundaries and to some extent destroys the specific national atmosphere of his poetry; in this sense it is a step backward in comparison with his earlier works. We are for an art that is national in form and socialist in content. Hughes first of all is a poet of the Negro proletariat…. The force of Hughe’s [sic] poems will be stronger, the influence deeper, if he will draw closer to the Negro masses and talk their language.52
 
According to Filatova, Hughes has abandoned blackness for revolution, which to her is cause for alarm. In effect, she anticipates the frequent dismissals of his communist-influenced poetry as stunted and whitewashed. Ostensibly, her solution for balancing a distinctly black “atmosphere” and “proletarian internationalism” can be summed up with the slogan “national in form and socialist in content”—basically, poems that portray working-class struggle but using black dialect. Filatova here seems to subscribe to the crude essentialism of Soviet nationalities policy.53 However, her invocation of Mayakovsky points to a more subtle solution—a poetic form that can balance “individual substance” and “generalization,” which Filatova here implicitly analogizes to the particular and universal, black identity and world revolution.
We can test this solution, first by exploring what distinguishes these two poems within Mayakovsky’s oeuvre, namely, their depictions of black bodies and voices; and, second, by seeing how Hughes responded to these depictions in his translations, which he produced with Filatova’s assistance. Most notably, the fragmented quality of Mayakovsky’s writings allows the poems to be simultaneously exoticist and antiexoticist. For instance, he distances and objectifies the wife’s body in “Syphilis,” likening it to a glossy consumer good: she has hair “dense like oil” and skin “black and rich” like “the wax / ‘Black Lion.’” Here Mayakovsky seems to partake in a fetish for black, female bodies, but then provides a detailed, repellent account of this fetishism’s outcome, namely, the “pig king’s” arousal:
A misteru Sviftu
And Mister Swift’s
posledniuiu strast’
last passion
razdula
was swelled by
eta ekzotika.
this exotica.
Potelo
His body
telo
sweated
pod bel’etsom
under his briefs
ot chernen’kogo miastsa.
from the little piece of black flesh.
Thus, for Mayakovsky, the “exotic” serves as a source of both allure and disgust, and by the end of the poem, the spell of the fetish is broken. Tom returns, contracts syphilis himself, and he, his wife, and future children become street beggars:
I slazilo
And the rot
chernogo miasa gnil’e
of black flesh fell
s gnilykh
from rotting
negritianskikh kostei.
Negro bones.54
The earlier, fetishized “little piece of black flesh” (conveyed through the diminutive chernen’kogo miastsa) here becomes neutral “black flesh” (conveyed through the nondiminutive chernogo miasa). The outcome of colonial and capitalist exoticism—operating under the guise of “civilization”—is the unadorned decay of black bodies. And Hughes apparently agreed: though he does not translate nuances like diminutive versus nondiminutive suffixes, he diligently provides each of Mayakovsky’s details.55 He voices no objection to the “socialist content” of the original poems.
While “Syphilis” shows Mayakovsky depicting black bodies, in “Blek end uait,” he presents a black voice. It is here—and on the level of form rather than content—that gaps arise. The climax is the question Willie asks his American employer, the white “sugar king”:
“Ai beg yor pardon, mister Bregg!
“I beg your pardon, Mister Bragg!
Pochemu i sakhar,
Why should sugar,
belyi-belyi,
white-white,
dolzhen delat’
need to be made
chernyi negr?
by a black Negro?
Chernaia sigara
A black cigar
ne idet v usakh vam—
doesn’t suit your moustache—
ona dlia negra
it’s for a Negro
s chernymi usami.
with black moustache.
A esli vy
And if you
liubite
love
kofii s sakharom,
coffee with sugar,
to sakhar
then sugar
izvol’te
please
delat’ sami”.
make yourself.”56
Just as in “To Our Youth,” “Mexico,” and “American Russians,” Mayakovsky here inserts a foreign language—the transliterated English of “I beg your pardon, Mr. Bragg.” It is unclear in what language Willie proceeds to ask his question: he could either be continuing in English, or else the turn from transliterated English to Russian could mark Willie’s own switch from English to Spanish. In either case, Mayakovsky translates him into Russian. There are two problems here. The first is that it makes little sense for Willie to be addressing Bragg in English rather than Spanish. While Willie may simply be greeting Bragg in Bragg’s own language before switching to Spanish, “I beg your pardon” (as opposed to, say, “Hello”) seems too formal for this. My sense is that Mayakovsky is presenting Afro-Cubans as English speakers, which in turn suggests an erroneous conflation of this group and African Americans. However, the more pressing problem is that, whether Willie proceeds in Spanish or English, his voice is indistinguishable from Mayakovsky’s own. The sweeper’s spoken lines maintain the poet’s use of rhyme, alliteration, and fragment (“belyi-belyi,” “dolzhen delat,’” “usakh vam / usami / sami”). The only possible distinction between Willie’s voice and Mayakovsky’s own is that the sweeper’s question consists of mostly short, simple words, indicating his lack of education. Earlier in the poem, his brain is described as having “few convolutions / few sprouts / few sown seeds.”57
Mayakovsky’s effort to transcend cultural and linguistic divides here seems questionable, seems too sheer. To put this differently, his effort to translate from either English or Spanish into Russian is too transparent. Aside from the ambiguous insertion of transliterated English, the poet fails to capture the linguistic and cultural distinctions between Soviet poet and Afro-Cuban worker. All we know of Willie is that his speech and perspective are severely limited. As a result, Mayakovsky’s form here seems constraining and, indeed, infantalizing, a problem borne by the poem’s content as well. In response to Willie’s question, Bragg turns from white to yellow and punches him in the face, leaving the poet to conclude,
Otkuda znat’ emu,
How could he know
chto s takim voprosom
that with such a question
nado obrashchat’sia
you need to turn
v Komintern,
to the Comintern
v Moskvu?
to Moscow?58
Thus, Willie’s only recourse is to look to Moscow and follow the Comintern’s lead, though he purportedly has no way of knowing this. Not only does Mayakovsky deny his character a distinctive voice and a developed mind, but he also denies Willie any means of local resistance. This is all to reveal the limits of Mayakovsky’s fragmented form and, in turn, political content—to question the notion that he could provide a model for preserving “individual substance” and black particularity. Likewise, despite its anti-imperial orientation, the exoticist gaze that the poem applies to Willie here seems retrograde and disempowering, asserting a clear hierarchy between Soviet center and Cuban periphery.
Enter Langston Hughes. If Mayakovsky’s figurative translations of this character lose the cultural and linguistic specificity separating the Soviet Union and Cuba, Hughes’s own translations add precisely this specificity. That is, his translations work to keep Mayakovsky in check—to rework the form and language of the poems, if not the content. For both “Black and White” and “Syphilis,” Hughes presents blocks of text in place of scattered fragments. There is no rhyme, little alliteration, and a much more sober tone. Note, for instance, Hughes’s opening for “Black and White”:
 
Havana in a glance—
Paradise land, all it ought to be.
Under a palm, on one leg, a flamingo stands.
Calero blossoms all over Vedado.59
 
If Mayakovsky’s lines bear some resemblance to Tatlin’s Tower, Hughes renders the poem into a more conventional structure—the original’s spirals here compressed into a block. These lines mostly match my literal translation, but compare them with another, more transparent translation from 1933, which better captures the original’s tone:
 
When over Havana
You cast your glance…
Paradise country—
Luxurious land!
Under palm
stands flamingo
in a one-legged trance
Over all Vedado
Blooms callario
Grand!60
 
In short, Hughes excludes from his translation Mayakovsky’s expansive, playful persona. The poem’s original content is present, but the form—that unique combination of individual voice and revolutionary sweep—is missing.
Of course, one might attribute Hughes’s translation to a limited command of Russian—though, as mentioned, he was assisted by Filatova. Another explanation might lie in his general method of translation. Ryan James Kernan writes that for much of his career, Hughes embraced “collaborative literal translations as the best way to avoid limiting the poetic potential of the source text in translation and the ethical pitfalls of speaking for the Other.”61 Thus, as John Patrick Leary has shown, his effort to translate the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén for a 1948 volume emphasized literal fidelity over “musicality and colloquial cadences.” For Leary, the resulting loss of the original poem’s “locality” points to the gaps, contradictions, and struggles inherent to diasporic internationalisms, and accordingly, when Hughes himself visited Cuba in 1927, 1930, and 1931, he fetishized Afro-Cuban culture “like a hungry tourist seeking some local dish.” These accounts affirm what Brent Hayes Edwards calls the décalage and difference within unity of diasporic and internationalist formations—in the case of “Black and White,” the distance between both Hughes and Mayakovsky and Hughes and Cuba.62 Just as with Mayakovsky, Cuba was for Hughes an exotic place; the connection between the African American poet and his Afro-Cuban colleagues was far from seamless. Indeed, in a coincidental echo of Mayakovsky’s juxtaposition of Havana cemetery and telegraph office, Hughes’s 1931 poem “To the Little Fort of San Lazaro on the Ocean Front, Havana” begins with the romantic past of the eponymous stone fortress repelling pirates and ends with the unromantic present of U.S. banks ensconced in the city. In short, both poets could present Cuba only from the outside, and both applied to the island a similarly exoticist gaze.63
Given their limited perspectives on Cuba, what I would like to suggest is that Hughes supplemented Mayakovsky’s efforts to represent this place that both had only visited. Returning to Hughes’s “Black and White” and, in particular, his rendering of Willie’s question, here we find an English translation of a Russian translation of either English or Spanish speech. While the first translation at hand (Mayakovsky’s) provides a minimal sense of the distance between the Soviet Union and Cuba, the second translation (Hughes’s) emphasizes this precisely by departing from Mayakovsky’s distinctive voice and fragmented form:
 
“Excuse me, Mr. Bragg,
But why’s your white, white sugar ground by black, black Negroes?
A black cigar don’t go with your moustach—[sic]
That’s for a Negro with a black moustach!
And since you like coffee with sugar,
Why don’t you grind the sugar yourself?”64
 
It would be absurd to say that Hughes here presents what an Afro-Cuban laborer might actually say, for of course an actual Afro-Cuban would use Spanish. Rather, Hughes seems to confer upon Willie an African American voice (“A black cigar don’t go”)—despite the fact that he himself resisted using such dialect when subsequently translating Guillén.65 Dialect here functions as an English domestic remainder deployed by Hughes to achieve two ends: first, to accentuate the gap between his language and Mayakovsky’s, and second, to highlight Willie’s own distinctness, which the original poem downplays. Again, this distinctness has more of an African American than Afro-Cuban inflection, which raises the possibility that Hughes, like Mayakovsky, is simply imparting his own voice to Willie. However, the crucial difference is that Hughes’s version grants Willie a potency, an agency that is lacking in the original. In place of Mayakovsky’s bouncing playfulness, Hughes imparts to him a simmering reserve. The original’s manic, transliterated “Ai beg yor pardon, mister Bregg!” becomes a terse “Excuse me, Mr. Bragg.” Willie’s closing line—“then sugar / please / make yourself”—becomes more pointed and defiant: “Why don’t you grind the sugar yourself?” While Hughes still advises this character to turn to the Comintern and Moscow, and portrays his brain as housing “few furrows: / Little sown, little harvest,” his voice gains a forthrightness and, I think, a sophistication lacking in the original.
Much, of course, is lost in Hughes’s translation—Mayakovsky’s incorporation of transliterated English, for example. Indeed, Hughes’s domestic remainders do not seem geared toward capturing the foreignness (as Venuti would have it) of “Blek end uait” but rather toward improving the Soviet poet’s efforts to speak for the Other. This is not to say that Hughes refused Mayakovsky’s voice and form: in Willie’s speech, Hughes not only maintains the original’s bubbly repetition (“white, white”) but also adds some of his own—the new, second “black” in “black, black.” In other words, Hughes builds upon rather than counters Mayakovsky. He enables the Soviet poet to realize the potential identified by Filatova, namely, by enhancing, in “Blek end uait,” the balance of “generalizations” and “individual substance,” world revolution and ethnic particularities.66 We can thus see “Blek end uait” / “Black and White” as a shared effort between Hughes and Mayakovsky to render (in Russian and English) an Afro-Cuban voice (presumably Spanish)—a collaboration that occurred via translation, three years after Mayakovsky’s suicide. In this posthumous literary encounter, translation provides a means of connecting cultures and languages without obliterating their differences.67
Accordingly, using Walter Benjamin’s famous account of it, we can see translation as a tangent touching a circle, the original, and, by this light touch, the translation proceeding into infinity, following “its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.”68 One language does not impose on the other, but the two remain discrete, supplementing and estranging each other by this touch but still pursuing their own courses. Seen from the perspective of the Mayakovsky-Hughes encounter, Benjamin here provides a model for balancing cultural unity and difference, but of course he also presents translation in a more utopian light. For him translation reveals the “innermost kinship of languages” (255) and thus serves to regain “pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux” (261):
 
In translation the original rises into a higher and purer linguistic air, as it were. It cannot live there permanently, to be sure; neither can it reach that level in every aspect of the work. Yet in a singularly impressive manner, it at least points the way to this region: the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfillment of languages. (257)
 
This is all to heighten the significance of Hughes’s Mayakovsky translations—his translations as not simply an instance of intercultural, internationalist collaboration but also a means of forging new Towers of Babel. Benjamin almost but does not quite reference that tower here—tangent and circle giving rise to something in the air, however so briefly. In turn, we can imagine that this particular tangent (Hughes’s “Black and White”) and circle (Mayakovsky’s “Blek end uait”) approximate some of the component spirals and trusses of Tatlin’s Tower.
To put this in less fanciful terms, what I am suggesting is that Hughes takes Mayakovsky’s iconoclastic form and perspective as a starting point and then extends them—the tangent touching the circle to chart a new course. Perhaps the clearest, most concrete indication of this can be found in Hughes’s 1934 poem “Cubes,” published in the New Masses soon after his return from the USSR via East Asia. Linking “the broken cubes of Picasso” to the presence of Africans in Paris, it explicitly pillories the Western avant-garde’s interest in blackness:
 
God
Knows why the French
Amuse themselves bringing to Paris
Negroes from Senegal.
 
It’s the old game of the boss and the bossed,
boss and the bossed,
amused
and
amusing,
worked and working,
Behind the cubes of black and white,
black and white,
black and white
 
Here Hughes emphasizes the exploitation underlying cubist renderings of African masks, the imperialism that undergirds Western modernist primitivism.69 Perhaps, too, we find here disapproval of Mayakovsky, with the blatant references to “Black and White” hinting that the Soviet poem also contains this familiar interplay of “amused / and / amusing.” But Moscow is not Paris, and “Cubes” is clearly not just a criticism of but homage to Mayakovsky, a synthesis of “Black and White” and “Syphilis.” The Afro-Cuban Willie is replaced by a Senegalese man (the bossed), the American Mr. Bragg is replaced by the French (the boss), and Hughes uses the sex trade to illustrate the relationship between the two: the Senegalese wanders the boulevards of Paris, contracts venereal disease from three French prostitutes (named Liberty, Equality, Fraternity), and then transmits the disease to Africa, “To spread among the black girls in the palm huts.” In line with Mayakovsky, here we find an exoticist vision of Africa, but one geared toward a critique of imperialism, the disease transmitted “From light to darkness,” “From the boss to the bossed.”
Beyond these obvious readings, I would like to suggest that “Cubes” shows the aftereffects of Hughes’s encounter with Mayakovsky, but with a difference—again, the tangent touching the circle but proceeding on its own course. Hughes’s multiple repetitions and fragmented, scattered lines gesture to Mayakovsky’s form, but the tone remains reserved—almost as though Hughes’s Willie himself were the one speaking. As in Mayakovsky’s poems, Hughes’s layout highlights the shape of each line, the materiality of each word, though if Mayakovsky’s lines seem to approximate Tatlin’s Tower, here we find an arguably more complicated, less-regular structure. And yet “Cubes” does conclude with a one-word spiral of sorts:
 
d
i
s
e
a
s
e
 
Though it is unclear whether Hughes ever encountered Tatlin’s design, this parting word works well with the Monument to the Third International—both serving as springboards for attacking Western dominance, artistic and political. In this evocation of Tatlin and, in turn, Babel, we find the now-familiar yearning for a unified language that might cross the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and nation. Gesturing to Soviet avant-gardist form, the poem adopts Mayakovsky’s combination of exoticism and anti-imperialism, and applies its critical gaze elsewhere.
Hughes in Central Asia, Eisenstein in Mexico
This gaze redirects our attention from language to a way of seeing that connected these two poets—a similar way of understanding different cultures. “Read Mayakovsky’s poem Black and White, or Syphilis, if you don’t know what life is like in Cuba,” Hughes advises in a slim travelogue that he wrote in Moscow, around the same time that he translated these works.70 Titled A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (1934), it contrasted the American South and the Soviet “East” and, specifically, the treatment of minorities in both places. As noted, Hughes had arrived in Moscow in the summer of 1932 to assist with a Soviet film on African American struggles. After this project fell through, he spent several months traveling the steppes of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan in order to see how the USSR treated its own “dark races.”71 He was not the first to make such a trip: he spent Christmas of 1932 in a remote kolkhoz in Uzbekistan settled by a group of African Americans helping the Soviets to cultivate cotton.72
The travelogue resulting from this journey is similar to Mayakovsky’s writings in that it pairs the exotic with revolution. In Uzbekistan, wandering the Silk Road city of Bukhara, he is just as enchanted as Mayakovsky is by Cuba and Mexico:
 
I walk through the streets of Bukhara, eastern city of song and story, place of legend. I walk through the crumbling walls of sun-dried brick, beneath the empty towers and minarets, past the palaces and mosques. I remember how, as a boy in far-away Kansas, I dreamed of seeing this fabulous city of Bukhara—as distant then as a fantasy of the Thousand and One Nights. And now, in 1932, here I am (dreams come true) travelling through the courtesy of a Soviet newspaper throughout Central Asia, and seeing for myself all the dusty and wonderful horrors that feudalism and religion created in the dark past, and that have now been taken over by socialism. (28)
 
These lines echo Claude McKay’s “Afro-Orientalist” poem on Moscow (discussed in the introduction), as well as Mayakovsky’s criticism but also embrace of the exotic—here taking the form of the feudal and religious past, seen by Hughes as both wonderful and horrible. Indeed, even as he praises Soviet nationalities policy—in particular, Moscow’s elimination of czarist segregation as well as its campaign to unveil Uzbek women—he yearns for instances of the exotic in harmony with revolution, beyond the limits of “national form, socialist content.” And ultimately, Hughes finds this merging in the dances of Tamara Khanum, “the first woman in the history of the peoples of Uzbekistan to perform on a public stage” (41–42). Before the revolution, he explains, women were forbidden to dance, and several unveiled theater performers were murdered in the early days after the revolution. Instead, young boys played the roles of women, and as Kate Baldwin has elaborated, Khanum’s performances thus enabled Hughes to recast the “veil of race” in terms of female agency and sexuality.73 In the travelogue Khanum enables him to trouble the boundaries between new and old, Soviet power and Uzbek tradition, male and female: “She has taken over the best of the old dances of the former boy-dancers, and has created new patterns of her own” (47).
This synthesis of new and old is precisely what Mayakovsky found in the murals of Diego Rivera, as did Sergei Eisenstein, who went to Mexico in 1930 to shoot a film based on these same murals. Unfortunately, the Kremlin ordered Eisenstein back to the USSR in early 1932 before he could finish shooting, just as later that year it ordered the cancellation of Hughes’s Soviet film project. That is, the same year that Langston Hughes wandered the Central Asian steppe Eisenstein was in the Mexican desert, enchanted by its flatness—in his words, “the geographic coexistence of different stages of cultures, something that makes Mexico so surprising.”74 The film itself (partly reconstructed and released by Mosfil’m in 1979) was to present all of Mexico’s history—from a premodern, matriarchal utopia to the Spanish conquest to the revolution of 1910–1920—and conclude with dancing skeletons from a Day of the Dead celebration. As Eisenstein elaborated, “This is a remarkable Mexican day, when Mexicans recall the past and show their contempt of death…. With victory of life over death, the film ends. Life brims from under the cardboard skeletons, life gushes forth, and death retreats, fades away.” In short, just as Hughes found hints of a new Uzbekistan in traditional Uzbek dance, Eisenstein sought to harness this vestige of pre-Columbian culture to usher in a “new growing Mexico.”75 Also like Hughes, Eisenstein used his travels to trouble gender roles—in his case, to explore fully his own bisexuality—thus subverting the heteronormative masculinism frequently associated with the historical avant-garde.76 Thus, in their mirror-image journeys to the opposite ends of the earth, Hughes and Eisenstein, Hughes and Mayakovsky were looking for something quite similar—exotic cultures that could point to a liberated, boundary-crossing future.
Hughes in the Central Asian steppe, Eisenstein in the Mexican desert, Mayakovsky at Camp “Nit Gedaige”—the threads connecting these fragments are common efforts to pair artistic innovation with revolutionary politics; ethnic identity with socialist internationalism; exoticism with anti-imperialism. There were certainly challenges facing these efforts, namely, the constant dilemma of mutual misunderstanding and misrepresentation—a dilemma that LEF’s turn to factography sought to remedy, as discussed in the next chapter. Nonetheless, rearticulating such fragments makes it possible to at least begin to discern the visions and languages of this polyglot ethnic avant-garde.