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Is it even worthwhile reading poetry in translation? Isn't it rather like phone sex: kind of vicarious and mediated and unfulfilling? One PRESUMES, of course, never having read poetry in translation before...

Yeah, anyway. Mayakovsky. Hard to say what he might sound like in Russian. I'm guessing quite dazzling and muscular at times. At others, like bad Slavic Beat poetry. The Soviet Bukowski? Just maybe. He did admire Whitman, after all, and that's usually a dangerous inheritance, whatever you might think of old Walt himself. Plus, there's the propaganda. Reams and reams of the stuff. Politically, his oeuvre is just as compromised as that of Pound or Benn on the other side of the ideological spectrum, and probably even more cringe-inducing (as early as 1915, we find him urging lampposts to 'hoist higher/the bloodied carcasses of hawkers'. Which the lampposts obligingly did.)

Still, I can't deny it - he was a great poet. Even when he's just striking tough-guy poses, he can be zanily brilliant, as in 'For You', where he explains why he never bothered to get his ass shot off in the war:

'To give a life for you,
lovers only of food and fucking -
I'd rather serve pineappple liquor
to whores at the bar.'

Take that, bourgeois scum! Ha! And pour me some of that pineapple liquor. Sounds tasty.