Tuesday Poem: 1917

 
A hard day’s plotting gives a man a thirst.
For Lenin, it’s something dark and strong,
a Black Mac for his blackest moods.
Trotsky can’t decide: maybe an Export
maybe something brewed with ice.

“V. I. -“
“Wait on, Leon, just the dregs to go.” A pause,
the glug and swish of beer. “Aaah. That’s better.
You were saying?”

Trotsky looks up, face serious
above a thin moustache of foam. “V. I.,
why don’t we just take over?
The Tsar could never stop us. He’s
still chugging Lion Red from cans.”

It’s settled. Trotsky will inspire the workers.
Lenin will fuel the revolution
with crates of Lowenbrau
smuggled in from Zurich by sealed train.

Drink deep, Leon. Bottoms up, Vladimir Illyich.
Life will never look this simple or this clear again.

Tim says: This poem from my first collection, Boat People, seemed like either a good, or a completely inappropriate, choice after a week of revolt and revolution in Tunisia and Egypt.

Check out all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog.

Tuesday Poem: Now My Love Is Not The Same, by Sergei Esenin, translated by Tim Jones

Now My Love Is Not The Same

(to Kliuev)

Now my love is not the same.
Ah, I know, you grieve, you
Grieve that pools of words
Have not spilled from the moon’s broom.

Mourning and rejoicing at the star
Which settles on your brows
You sang out your heart to the izba
But failed to build a home in your heart.

And what you hoped for every night
Has passed your roof by once again.
Dear friend, for whom then did you gild
Your springs with singing speech?

You will not sing about the sun
Nor glimpse, from your window, paradise
Just as the windmill, flapping its wing
Cannot fly up from the earth.

Tim says: Sergei Alexandrovitch Esenin (or Yesenin), 1895-1925, was a Russian poet of peasant origin who lived and worked in the period before, during, and after the Russian revolution. Well-known and much-loved as a poet in Russia, his work has received less attention than it deserves in English-speaking countries, where he may be best known as the ex-husband of Isadora Duncan.

In the final year of my BA in Russian, which I completed in 1995 at Victoria University, having started it several years before at Otago, I translated 15 of Esenin’s poems into English, and wrote an essay about him, as my final-year project. The translations are still pretty rough about the edges, but I’m keen to get them out into the world: I did this a little bit last year in the Esenin Translation Project on LibraryThing, and from time to time, as I tidy them up, I will publish some of those translations here.

I’ll say a little more about Esenin, his writing, and the poetry of the time as I do so.

Notes:

The “Kliuev” of the dedication refers to Esenin’s near-contemporary, poetic mentor, and (according to some biographers) lover Nikolai Kliuev (or Klyuev), one of the earliest peasant poets to gain some measure of acceptance in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. The essay I wrote to accompany my translations notes:

Kliuev and Esenin began to perform together in public, dressing in idealised peasant style to flatter the expectations of their audience. Esenin took to accompanying himself on an accordion; although the tal’ianka and garmonika are important motifs in his poetry, his skill in playing them lagged behind his skill in writing about them.

An “izba” is a Russian peasant hut.

A Short History Of The Twentieth Century, With Fries

By the time they got to the Finland Station, Lenin and his posse were famished.

“What’ll it be, boss, Burger King or McDonald’s?” asked Zinoviev.

Lenin rustled up the kopecks for a quarter-pounder and fries all round and they set to chowing down. By the time he finished, Lenin had had a better idea.

“I’m tired of this revolution business,” he said. “Let’s set up a chain of family restaurants instead.”

It took a while to convince the Mensheviks, left-SRs, and other petit-bourgeois elements. Nevertheless, Lenin’s will prevailed, and Party cadres fanned out across the land in a sophisticated franchising operation. By the end of 1917, Moscow and Petrograd were under complete control, and Siberia was falling into line. Lenin’s Bolshevik brand — “the burger for the worker” — was taking command.

The big international chains didn’t take this lying down. With an aggressive combination of discounting, free giveaways, and sheer intimidation, they muscled in on the Bolsheviks. For four years, the struggle went on. The starving inhabitants of Northern Russia woke up each morning not knowing whether the Golden Arches or the Hammer and Sickle would be standing atop their local fast food outlet.

It was a bad time all round, but at the end of it, the red flag with the yellow emblem reigned supreme across Russia. Crowds flocked to enjoy the cheery, efficient service and chomp their way through the basic Bolshevik burger or such additional menu choices as the Red Square (prime Polish beef in a square bun) and the Bronze Horseman (horse testicles on rye — an acquired taste). Fuelled by Bolshevik burgers, Russia was on the move. Tractor production went up twenty per cent. Electricity output doubled in five years.

After Lenin choked to death on a fishburger on 1924, new CEO Joseph Stalin launched a full-scale campaign of collectivisation and industrialisation. Horse testicles were out, borscht was in. These changes were far from universally popular, but, as the slogan went, “You can’t say no to Uncle Joe”. From Murmansk to Magadan, it was Joe’s way or the highway.

The years 1939 to1945 were bad ones for the Bolshevik brand. An ill-advised attempt at a strategic alliance with Schickelgruber’s, an aggressive new German franchise, ended in disaster. The names Leningrad and Stalingrad will forever be remembered from that period as examples of poor service and unusual burger ingredients. But Schickelgruber’s was finally seen off and the Bolshevik brand entered a new phase of expansion. It was time, said Uncle Joe, to export Lenin’s legacy to the world.

This wasn’t an unqualified success. What goes down well in Kharkov can cause indigestion in Kabul. The expansion policy did net Bolshevik the important Chinese market, but even there, Russian attempts to include cabbage in Chinese burgers were soon met by Chinese demands that all Bolshevik meals include a side-order of rice. Before long, there were two competing Bolshevik brands, and then three once the Albanians got in on the act.

It was the beginning of the end. Weakened by the massive costs of enforcing brand compliance in territories as diverse as Kazakhstan and Cuba, the Bolshevik empire collapsed in debts and squabbling. It was all over for one of the major franchises of the 20th Century.

For a nostalgic reminder of those days, take a trip to the Finland Station, where you can still see a statue of Lenin addressing the workers, burger in one hand, fries in the other.

Tim says: “A Short History Of The Twentieth Century, With Fries” was first published in Flashquake (2004), and is included in my short story collection Transported.

Transported cover

You can buy Transported online from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad. You can also read review excerpts and find out more about Transported

Boat People, my first poetry collection

Boat People is my first poetry collection. It was published in 2002 by HeadworX, the year after my first short fiction collection, Extreme Weather Events. There are forty poems in Boat People. The book is divided into four sections. As the HeadworX publicity blurb says:

“Boat People” is in four sections. The first is inspired by the poet’s childhood in Southland and adolescence in Otago. The second focuses on the Wellington region, and includes poems about the poet’s experiences of fatherhood. Section III takes in Russia – Tim Jones speaks Russian and has a longstanding interest in the country – while Section IV journeys to the alternate world of time and space also depicted in “Extreme Weather Events”.

A number of poems from Boat People dealing with parenting have already been posted on this blog. Here’s one more poem from Boat People, a personal favourite.

1917

A hard day’s plotting gives a man a thirst.
For Lenin, it’s something dark and strong,
a Black Mac for his blackest moods
Trotsky can’t decide: maybe an Export
maybe something brewed with ice.

“V. I. -“
“Wait on, Leon, just the dregs to go.” A pause,
the glug and swish of beer. “Aaah. That’s better.
You were saying?”

Trotsky looks up, face serious
above a thin moustache of foam. “V. I.,
why don’t we just take over?
The Tsar could never stop us. He’s
still chugging Lion Red from cans.”

It’s settled. Trotsky will inspire the workers
Lenin will fuel the revolution
with crates of Lowenbrau
smuggled in from Zurich by sealed train

Drink deep, Leon. Bottoms up, Vladimir Illyich.
Life will never look this simple or this clear again.

Boat People got some good reviews and I usually read a selection of poems from it when I do poetry readings. If you’d like a copy, you can order it from me for $5 plus postage & packing (in NZ, p&p will be $2, making a grand total of $7 for the book. I’ll need to work out the postage & packing for other territories). Please send an email to senjmito@gmail.com saying you’d like a copy, and we’ll take it from there.

UPDATE: One of the poems in Boat People, “Fallen”, is appearing in Wildes Licht, ed Dieter Riemenschneider, an anthology of New Zealand poetry translated into German. It should be coming out in October.