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.
Decisions by senior faculty to make decisions about students’ work based primarily on vibes (rather than careful reading of their research output) were discussed in the comments on this Math Overflow post, in connection with the flameout of Daniel Biss,* who was hailed by some** as the greatest mathematician of his generation already when he was about twenty-three. Biss is by no means stupid, but he was treated as an unquestioned genius probably from even before he went to college. The comments from Andy Putnam are particular trenchant.
* After the sloppiness of his work was recognized when he was at the University of Chicago, he went into politics. My aunt and uncle voted for him when he was elected to the Illinois state legislature, and he is apparently now the mayor of Evanston.
** I would hope that Mike Hopkins’ reputation has suffered from his total failure to supervise Biss’ dissertation properly, but realistically, that seems unlikely.
Yes, Biss is actually my mayor. I’d known he was a mathemetician but somehow the “greatest intellect of his generation” stuff doesn’t make it into the letters to the editor if the local paper.
Ever since Evanston abandoned its weirdo pseudo-Utopian roots and allowed liquor licenses within the city limits the amount of fun associated with being its mayor has probably decreased.
Mathias Rousset in the comments: “That Biss gentleman seems good at making incorrect arguments look amazing, he should try politics.”
well, it may be a Freudian strike of a genius since Mayakovski REALLY talks about peoples and attitudes he hates in НАТЕ!
I know! Talk about a felix culpa.
Через час отсюда в чистый переулок
вытечет по человеку ваш обрюзгший жир,
а я вам открыл столько стихов шкатулок,
я — бесценных слов мот и транжир.
Вот вы, мужчина, у вас в усах капуста
где-то недокушанных, недоеденных щей;
вот вы, женщина, на вас белила густо,
вы смотрите устрицей из раковин вещей.
Все вы на бабочку поэтиного сердца
взгромоздитесь, грязные, в калошах и без калош. Толпа озвереет, будет тереться, ощетинит ножки стоглавая вошь.
А если сегодня мне, грубому гунну,
кривляться перед вами не захочется — и вот
я захохочу и радостно плюну,
плюну в лицо вам я — бесценных слов транжир и мот.
—
An hour from now in a clean lane,
Your bloated fat will leak out in a human way.
And I revealed to you so many subtleties of poems
I, spendthrift and dissipater of priceless words.
Look at you, man, cabbage in your moustache
From some unfinished inedible/ insipid [undernourished] cabbage soups somewhere,
Look at you, woman, thick white on you,
you look like an oyster from the shell of things
You all perch/stand, dirty, on the poetic heart of a butterfly
Wearing wellies and without wellies
The crowd will go wild, rubbing their hundred-headed louse legs together.
And if today, I, the rough Hun,
Do not want to sneer at you [grimace before you], and look,
I will laugh and spit with joy,
I, dissipater and spendthrift of priceless words, will spit in your face(s).
—
For me this is juvenile, a cross between Swinburne and the beat poets. It is very artful, but I feel the content lets the art down. I am not motivated to try a verse translation, but here are some notes
1. rhymes of plain and poetic words: lane (pereulok) and subtleties (shkatulok).
2. spitting ryhming pairs (kapusta/gusta, veshchei/shchei, kalosh/vosh’).
3. echoes of laughing sound: zakhochetsa, zakhokhochu
Your bloated fat will leak out in a human way => “will leak out into the street one person at a time” (alluding to “one drop at a time”)
The cabbage is just from the soup which wasn’t finished, someone was satiated enough to not eat it all up
you look like an oyster from the shell of things => you look out like an oyster from the shell of your possessions
Juvenile indeed, but Swinburne you say? I actually think that Maykovsky was totally authentic in his childish anti-establishment hate and pride. An orphan, arrested for subversive activities many times while still in grade school, having spent a year in confinement while barely 16, blacklisted from schools, plodding through the hostile years of victorious counter-revolution, still a teenager when НАТЕ! was written, he was a natural in his circle of Futurist poets who declared (in the very first book Maykovsky contributed too) that they shall jettison the classics from the steamboat of modernity, that even the most acclaimed contemporary authors were mere craftsmen toiling for their own personal gain, that the Futurists coolly observe the mediocrity of these other authors “from the heights of the skyscrapers” and that even the very vocabulary of the preceding literature deserves nothing but hate and rejection. Oh, and this entire short Futurist manifesto was entitled “Slap in the face of the sensibilities of the society”.
@dp
Thanks for the corrections, I could not find an English version and should have checked more before posting. I will find a poem of M I like better.
Was the following posted here before?
Q. What were the poet Majakovski’s last words before he committed suicide?
A. Don’t shoot, comrades!
“the preliminary cause” has been ruled an accident, the Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported.
Do I have any reason to believe “painkillers for a back injury” would explain the falling: “Shklyarov “went out onto the balcony to get some air and smoke” and “lost his balance” on the “very narrow balcony”.”? That is, the balcony of his apartment where he often went for smoko, presumably. Who exactly saw this loss of balance?
This kind of a hate easily goes both ways, I agree
I have the impression that Jacobson had read my undergraduate paper when we spoke about it in his office later.
A different professor–though usually quite helpful, and I’m grateful–for some unknown-to-me reason declined to read one of my papers. A revised version now resides in that Festschrift.
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
Me in Intro to Linguistics for Graduate Non-Majors, 1972 or 73: *Asks theoretical question*
Instructor: “Well, last year in Texas Chomsky got up and said A, but then X got up and said B, so we don’t know yet.”
I’ve written about this fellow before. Ask an empirical question, get a theoretical answer. Ask a theoretical question, get that sort of thing. It’s why I abandoned a linguistics minor.
Marginally related alphabet confusion: I couldn’t go past a salad restaurant in Chapel Hill called CHOPT without thinking, why would anyone name a restaurant SNORT?
Back before the whole 2022 mess started and I ended up leaving Russia, one of my favorite places-for-food (combined cafe and small grocery store), near Pervomayskaya in eastern Moscow, prominently provided an all-caps sign of PECHOTA.
At some point I got curious enough to ask whether that name was in fact supposed to be read in Cyrillic or Latin; it made about as little sense in either, and of course either was realistic in relatively-cosmopolitan Moscow.
(It’s the former. Resnota.)
(TIL that it’s supposed to be an ancient Slavic word for “truth”.)
(You can see the sign here on Google Street View. It has some Russian text underneath the name, but honestly in Moscow that doesn’t exactly guarantee that the name above it is Cyrillic.)
Vasmer:
Interesting; thanks!