Ay, But Can Ye?
Wi a jaup the darg-day map’s owre-pentit –
I jibbled colour frae a tea-gless;
Ashets o jellyteen presentit
To me the gret sea’s camshach cheek-bleds.
A tin fish, ilka scale a mou –
I’ve read the cries o a new warld through’t.
But you
Wi denty thrapple
Can ye wheeple
Nocturnes frae a rone-pipe flute?
- Translated by Edwin Morgan
****
Scots-English glossary
jaup – splash, slap
darg-day – work-day
owre-pentit – painted over
jibbled – dribbled, splashed
gless – glass
ashets – dishes
jellyteen – gelatine
camshach – crooked
cheek-bleds – cheek-bones
ilka – each
mou – mouth
denty – dainty
thrapple – windpipe
wheeple – whistle feebly
rone-pipe – spout for rainwater
Edwin Morgan’s translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky into Scots are justly admired, and who better than these two innovative 20th-century poets to consider on Poem of the week a century (more or less) after Russia’s Bolshevik revolution?
Like the socialist revolutionary poets (in fact, as something of one himself) Edwin Morgan believed that literary movements “should serve the ends of life as well as the ends of art” (Introduction to Sovpoems, 1961). Written in 1913, Mayakovsky’s poem asks one of the earliest questions that revolution will pose: what sort of art can be distilled from, and equal to, the new order? At this stage, it’s more precisely an aesthetic than an ethical question, and perhaps it includes a young poet’s question-to-self.
Mayakovsky, after joining the Social Democratic Labour Party at the age of 15, and serving several jail terms, began writing poetry during a spell of solitary confinement. Poetry and revolution had got inextricably tangled into one, he noted in his autobiography I, Myself. In Ay, But Can Ye? the creative challenge is acutely, if humorously, perceived, and a lot of artistry goes into its brief formulation.
Morgan brings out sonorities audible in the Russian but beyond the scope of standard English. He even interpolates additional touches of assonance. For example, there’s a single unrhymed line in the original, the one in which Mayakovsky challenges his audience (or himself) about the performing of nocturnes. He wants to strike a flat, unmusical note at this point. Morgan, contrastingly, brings in an extra, mischievous echo with his “thrapple / wheeple” couplet.
The delicious ambiguity of the Russian conjunction and interjection, “A”, thrusts a translator aboard the lingo-waltzer with the first word of the title. “And Could You?”, “But Could You?”, “So Could You?” etc, are perfectly feasible alternatives. Morgan’s Scots solution is rather more invigorating than any of these. Lurking in that colloquial “Ay, But …” is a riposte, a note of incredulity against an over-confident or uncomprehending opposition. You think you can, yes – but if you had to, could you? Maybe it’s not so easy.
The poem’s first-person, past-tense narrative springs a surprise. Mayakovsky, it seems, might have already made his poem and proven himself capable of the task. He has “suddenly smeared the weekday map” in the English version, which is closer to the original first line than Morgan’s, and conjured outlandish and arresting images from everyday things. The tea-glass (stakan in Russian means a tall glass) seems to contain liquid paint, and the splashing on to the plate of fish-jelly transforms it into an ocean with “crooked cheek-bones”. This richly physical metaphor turns food into art, and synaesthetically mixes up tasty sounds with surreal images.
Morgan chooses a Scots word that means “crooked” in preference to “slanted” (both possible) to describe the sea’s cheekbones, and makes his own thick harmonies in “the gret sea’s camshach cheek-bleds”. His four-beat lines, a little jumpier than Mayakovsky’s, cleverly reinvent the ABBA rhyme scheme, energising it with unexpected verbs (“owre-pentit”, “presentit”).
In the next segment, the poets assert their fidelity to the new ideals. Morgan, on this occasion, creates a particularly weird and striking image, turning the fish-scales into “mouths” (“ilka scale a mou”) as if going all out to “make strange” as the Russian formalists advised. Mayakovsky seems more restrained in his reference to reading “the cries of new lips” on the fish-scales.
While some commentators have linked the image of the fish with cubist art, the more likely reference is a shop sign. The fish combines comedy and horror in Morgan’s emphases: it demands a particular response to a “new warld” that cannot exclude all commerce. It’s now that Morgan fleshes out the “you” with extra description, so as to emphasise the artistic challenge: “But you / Wi denty thrapple / Can ye wheeple / Nocturnes fra a rone-pipe flute?” In summoning a listener cursed with a dainty windpipe, Morgan introduces a more explicitly anti-aristocratic critique. His use of Scots has lifted the poem out of the poetry class (in both senses). Now he seems to glare scornfully at the timid and overeducated aesthetes. The question of the title takes on the full weight of its difficulty: can you honestly play nocturnes on a rainpipe? And should you try? What other, truer music will you invent?
Morgan’s Scots has different registers. It’s literary as well as colloquial. Contrast the phonetically spelled “jellyteen” with the French-flavoured “ashets” (from “assiettes”). The linguistic paint-jibbling is an abundantly varied source of colour.
Ay, But Can Ye? appears in Morgan’s Collected Translations, a modern classic that features a grand variety of poets. For more of Mayakovsky in Scots, Morgan’s volume Wi the Haill Voice was reissued by Carcanet in 2016.
While you check out the original Russian text of this week’s poem and its accompanying translation into English, you can also enjoy a recitation by Mayakovsky himself. And, for a visual feast, some of the poet’s agitprop posters are included with the biography here.
See also El Lissitzky and his pictorial “translation” of this week’s poem.
