Me and Napoleon

I live on Bolshaya Presnya,
36, 24.
A quiet little spot.
Peaceful.
Well?
What is it to me, one would think,
that somewhere
in the storm-world
they have gone and invented a war?

Night has come.
A fine one.
Ingratiating.
And why do some of the young ladies
tremble, timidly turning
eyes enormous as searchlights?
The street crowds have pressed burning lips
to the heavenly moisture,
while the city, having shaken out its little hands, the flags,
prays and prays with red crosses.
The bareheaded little church has pressed itself
to the boulevard's pillow, a sack stuffed with tears,
and the flowerbeds of the boulevard bleed
like a heart torn by the fingers of bullets.
Alarm grows fatter and fatter,
devours the stale reason.
Already Noah's greenhouses
are covered with deathly-pale gas!
Tell Moscow:
let it hold out!
No need!
Let it not tremble!
In a second
I shall meet
the autocrat of the skies,
I shall simply go and kill the sun!
Do you see!
The flags are being rinsed across the sky.
There he is!
Fat and ginger.
Crashing a red hoof upon the square,
he rides in over the corpses of roofs!

To you,
who shout:
"I shall destroy,
I shall destroy!",
who cut the night out of bloodied cornices,
I,
who have kept a fearless soul,
hurl a challenge!

Come, you who are eaten away by sleeplessness,
pile your faces into a bonfire!
It is all the same!
This is our last sun,
the sun of Austerlitz!

Come, madmen, out of Russia, out of Poland.
Today I am Napoleon!
I am a commander and more.
Compare:
I and he!
Once he came near the plague with his throne,
trampling death with his courage,
I go every day to the plague-stricken
through thousands of Russian Jaffas!
Once he stood unflinching under bullets
and is famed for a hundred centuries,
while I have crossed in July alone
a thousand bridges of Arcole!
My cry is chiselled in the granite of time,
and will thunder and does thunder,
because
in a heart scorched like Egypt
there are a thousand thousand pyramids!
After me, you who are eaten away by sleeplessness!
Higher!
Faces into the bonfire!
Hail,
my sun before death,
sun of Austerlitz!

People!
Enough!
Into the sun!
Straight on!
The sun will shrivel up!
Louder, from the clenched throat of the temple,
wheeze, funeral march!
People!
When you canonise the names
of the fallen,
more famous than I,
remember:
the war has killed one more,
the poet from Bolshaya Presnya!

Literal translation

Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1915