I would like
to be born
in every country,
have a
passport
for them all
to throw
all foreign
offices
into panic,
be every fish
in every ocean
and
every dog
in the streets of the world.
I don’t want to bow
down
before any idols
or play at being
a Russian Orthodox
church hippie,
but I would like to plunge
deep into Lake
Baikal
and surface snorting
somewhere,
why not in the
Mississippi?
In my damned beloved universe
I would like
to
be a lonely weed,
but not a delicate Narcissus
kissing his own
mug
in the mirror.
I would like to be
any of God’s
creatures
right down to the last mangy hyena--
but never a
tyrant
or even the cat of a tyrant.
I would like to
be
reincarnated as a man
in any image:
a victim of prison
tortures,
a homeless child in the slums of Hong Kong,
a living
skeleton in Bangladesh,
a holy beggar in Tibet,
a black in Cape
Town,
but never
in the image of Rambo.
The only people whom
I hate
are the hypocrites--
pickled hyenas
in heavy
syrup.
I would like to lie
under the knives of all the surgeons in
the world,
be hunchbacked, blind,
suffer all kinds of
diseases,
wounds and scars,
be a victim of war,
or a
sweeper of cigarette butts,
just so a filthy microbe of
superiority
doesn’t creep inside.
I would not like to be in the
elite,
nor, of course,
in the cowardly herd,
nor be a guard
dog of that herd,
nor a shepherd,
sheltered by that
herd.
And I would like happiness,
but not at the expense of the
unhappy,
and I would like freedom,
but not at the expense of the
unfree.
I would like to love
all the women in the
world,
and I would like to be a woman, too--
just
once...
Men have been diminished
by Mother Nature.
Why
couldn’t we give motherhood
to men?
If an innocent
child
stirred
below his heart,
man would
probably
not be so cruel.
I would like to be man’s daily
bread--
say,
a cup of rice
for a Vietnamese woman in
mourning,
cheap wine
in a Neapolitan workers’ trattoria,
or
a tiny tube of cheese
in orbit round the moon.
Let them eat
me,
let them drink me,
only let my death
be of some
use.
I would like to belong to all times,
shock all history so
much
that it would be amazed
what a smart aleck I was.
I
would like to bring Nefertiti
to Pushkin in a troika.
I would like
to increase
the space of a moment
a hundredfold,
so that in
the same moment
I could drink vodka with fishermen in Siberia
and
sit together with Homer,
Dante,
Shakespeare,
and
Tolstoy,
drinking anything,
except, of
course,
Coca-Cola,
--dance to the tom-toms in the
Congo,
--strike at Renault,
--chase a ball with Brazilian
boys
at Copacabana Beach.
I would like to know every
language,
like the secret waters under the earth,
and do all kinds
of work at once.
I would make sure
that one Yevtushenko was merely
a poet,
the second--an underground fighter
somewhere,
I
couldn’t say where
for security reasons,
the third--a student at
Berkeley,
the fourth--a jolly Georgian drinker,
and the
fifth--
maybe a teacher of Eskimo children in Alaska,
the
sixth--
a young president,
somewhere, say, modestly speaking, in
Sierra Leone,
the seventh--
would still be shaking a rattle in his
stroller,
and the tenth...
the hundredth...
the
millionth...
For me it’s not enough to be myself,
let me be
everyone!
Every creature
usually has a double,
but God was
stingy
with the carbon paper,
and in his Paradise Publishing
Corporation
made a unique copy of me.
But I shall muddle
up
all God’s cards--
I shall confound God!
I shall be in a
thousand copies to the end of my days,
so that the earth buzzes with
me,
and computers go berserk
in the world census of me.
I
would like to fight on all your barricades,
humanity,
dying each
night
like an exhausted moon,
and resurrecting each
morning
like a newborn sun,
with an immortal soft
spot--fontanel--
on my head.
And when I die,
a smart-aleck
Siberian Francois Villon,
do not lay me in the earth
of
France
or Italy,
but in our Russian, Siberian earth,
on a
still-green hill,
where I first felt
that I
was
everyone.
Composed and translated from the original Russian
by
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Loved above all other poems
by
Homeless with a Laptop, That is my Name
This is the one poem that is
written in my heart and I wished to write, but Yevgeny wrote it first and more
beautifully than I could ever possibly hope to do. Only a Russian could write
such a poem ...
