Ilya Vinitsky at Facebook tells a wonderful story (in Russian) about Roman Jakobson. Apparently Omry Ronen, the great Mandelstam scholar (see this LH post), was a student of his, and used to say that Jakobson was a great teacher despite never reading any of his students’ work — if he decided a student was a genius he would recommend that student for posts and, sight unseen, for publication. As an example he adduced a student whose dissertation on Mayakovsky was published at his insistence; it turned out that the student had mentioned a poem with the strange English title “Hate.” This was, of course, his famous 1913 poem Нате! (text), whose title means “here you are!; there you are!, here! (said formally or to a group of people when giving someone something, i.e., ‘take it!’)” — it’s been translated by Maria Enzensberger (in this book) as “Take It!” The word is often used in an aggressive way (‘Take that!’), and this is how Mayakovsky uses it (“I will guffaw and spit in your face”), so it is not entirely inappropriate that the hapless dissertator mistook the all-capital version in the title, НАТЕ, for the identical-looking English word HATE!
I know what you’re thinking: nice story, but probably invented or exaggerated. That was my reaction too. But no, Vinitsky checked it out and discovered that sure enough, in Lawrence Leo Stahlberger’s The symbolic system of Majakovskij (Mouton, 1964), p. 66, we find “In his poetry of this period, Majakovskij, although expressing his hatred for the bourgeoisie in such poems as Hate (title in English) …” Embarrassing! (Interestingly, Jakobson himself in his French version of another Mayakovsky poem translated «Нате!» as “un mot de dédain” — see the FB post for details.)
I only wish Edwin Morgan had translated this poem in Wi The Haill Voice: 25 poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky (Carcanet Press, Translations, [South Hinksey, Eng.], England, 1972), recommended here by Geraint Jennings and in the following comment by keith100; his Scots versions are a delight. As a sample, here’s his translation of the brief А вы могли бы? (text):
Wia jaup the darg-day map’s owre-pentit—
I jibbled colour fae a tea-gless;
ashets o jellyteen presentit
to me the great sea’s camshach cheek-bleds.
A tin fish, ilka scale a mou—
I’ve read the cries о a new warld through’t.
But you
wi denty thrapple
can ye wheeple
nocturnes fae a rone-pipe flute?
One of my own undergraduate linguistics professors once mentioned that Jakobson had over the course of his career totally revised his opinions about various important/fundamental issues in linguistics multiple times and that you could identify different chronological strata of his former grad students that had themselves become linguistics professors around the country based on which iteration of Jakobson’s beliefs they themselves still held to. This was contrasted to Chomsky’s former grad students who via some sort of poorly-understood “spooky action at a distance” mechanism would actually change their own opinions in lockstep with the Master back in Cambridge some years after their own departures from Cambridge.