гимн ученому

Another round of translation. The process takes much long than I ever expect, but there is a lovely glint to reforming a thought, particularly a thought you hardly understand at the first.

Anthem to the Scientist

The population of the whole empire –
people, birds, centipedes,
were bristling their hairs, were ruffling their feathers,
they hang on a window with reckless curiosity.

The sun and even April are interested,
even the blackened chimney-sweep was interested,
by the astounding, unusual spectacle –
the figure of the renowned scientist.

They are watching: not a single human trait.
Not a man, but bipedal impotence,
with a head cleanly bitten off
by a treatise “Concerning Warts in Brazil.”

The devouring eyes sunk their teeth into the letter, –
ah, how sadly sunk into the letter!
It was thus, probably, that by chance a captured violet
was gnawed in the jaw of a nearly extinct ichthyosaurus.

The vertebrae had bent, as a beaten shaft,
but would the scientist think about the petty defect?
He knows perfectly the writings by Darwin,
that we are only the offspring of a monkey.

The sun is trickling through a tiny crevice,
like a small pursuant wound,
it hides itself on a dusty shelf,
where it ascends onto a money jar.

It’s the heart of a girl, extracted in iodine.
It’s the fossilized remnant of the previous year.
And yet, on the pin is something like
the small desiccated tail of a comet.

He sits the whole night. From behind the houses
the sun again grinned on human deformities,
and below, the students vigorously walk
along the sidewalk and into the school.

The measles pass by, but to him it is not boring,
that man grows asinine and submissive;
after all, he is able to extract
a square root every second.

V.V. Mayakovsky

гость

I've been translating poems for my thesis as of late.
Here is one of Akhmatova's:

The Guest

All as before: out the kitchen window
Beats the snowstorm’s fine snow,
And I have not become new,
And then a man came to me.

I inquired, “What do you want?”
He said, “To be with you in hell.”
I laughed, “Ah, perhaps you
Prophesy calamity to us both.”

But raising his dry hand,
He slightly touched the flowers,
“Tell me how they kiss you,
Tell me how you kiss.”

And his eyes, dimly staring,
Did not move from my ring.
And not one muscle moved
On his inviolate-evil face.

O, I know: tensely and
Hotly his pleasure is to know
That he needs nothing,
That I have nothing to refuse him.

1 January 1914