Wi the Haill Voice

25 poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky translated into Scots by Edwin Morgan (Second Edition)

Mayakovsky Vladimir

Forty-four years after their first publication, Edwin Morgan's versions of the great twentieth-century Russian futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky are back in print. Wi the haill voice collects twenty-five of Morgan's translations into Scots, accompanied by his own introduction and glossary.

Writing in a letter to Daniel Weissbort in 1971, Morgan explained: "I took up the translation of Mayakovsky primarily because I was strongly taken by his poetry and felt impelled to try to convey the quality and pleasure and power of his work to others. I felt I was sufficiently near his wavelength to understand him sympathetically, and in translation that is half the battle. But I soon discovered that the problems of making straight English versions of Mayakovsky are formidable, and it was almost as if the spirit of the language was against me. The Mayakovskian exclamatoriness, the abrupt changes of tone, the unusual mixture of fantasy, lyricism, and direct civic and moral concern – all seemed recalcitrant to the English medium and to English models. But with the use of Scots, I found that many of the problems quickly dissolved. It is possible to tap a Scottish tradition of both grotesque exaggeration and fantasy and of linguistic extraversion and dash that goes back through MacDiarmid, Burns, and Dunbar. And at the same time, it may be that the linking of the fantastic / wild / grotesque with the moral / political / social comes more easily to the Scottish than to the English poet. [...] Scots as a language can get closer than English to the 'barbarian lyre' of the revolutionary spirit".

About the Author

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (July 19 1893 – 14 April 1930) was a Russian Soviet poet, playwright, artist and stage and film actor. During his early, pre-Revolution period leading into 1917, Mayakovsky became renowned as a prominent figure of the Russian Futurist movement; being among the signers of the Futurist manifesto, "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste" (1913), and authoring poems such as "A Cloud in Trousers" (1915) and "Backbone Flute" (1916). Mayakovsky produced a large and diverse body of work during the course of his career: he wrote poems, wrote and directed plays, appeared in films, edited the art journal LEF, and created agitprop posters in support of the Communist Party during the Russian Civil War. Though Mayakovsky's work regularly demonstrated ideological and patriotic support for the ideology of the Communist Party and a strong admiration of Lenin, Mayakovsky's relationship with the Soviet state was always complex and often tumultuous. Mayakovsky often found himself engaged in confrontation with the increasing involvement of the Soviet State in cultural censorship and the development of the State doctrine of Socialist realism. Works that contained criticism or satire of aspects of the Soviet system, such as the poem "Talking With the Taxman About Poetry" (1926), and the plays "The Bedbug" (1929) and "The Bathhouse" (1929), were met with scorn by the Soviet state and literary establishment.In 1930 Mayakovsky committed suicide. Even after death his relationship with the Soviet state remained unsteady. Though Mayakovsky had previously been harshly criticized by Stalinist governmental bodies like RAPP, Joseph Stalin posthumously declared Mayakovsky "the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch".

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