Monolog of an Effigy - Yevgeny Yevtushenko

When my charitable fellow-writers

               were burning my effigy

and not poking my guts with their pocket-knives —

                    thank God!

They wasted on me

          their bottle of gasoline in vain,

because I had already

          burnt myself down to ashes.

Inhaling the charming aroma of human shit

near the wooden outhouse,

               I was minding

                    radishes, garlic and onions.

I had stuck up too long as a romantic scarecrow,

clumsily trying to embrace the world

                    with my stiff pine hands.

I was stuffed with straw.

               I never noticed

how life was changing,

          and how arrogantly sparrows were behaving.

I was burnt as punishment

               because of my dangerous talent

for being so readily inflammable

                    in politics, and in love.

Only my charred framework was saved in the clouds of smoke,

but the fire couldn’t altogether destroy my hands.

In the cinders of myself I was slowly dying,

But my black stumps

          desperately wanted

               to embrace, to embrace, to embrace.

And when one of my brother-writers struck another match,

I heard his envious whisper:

          “Scarecrow, you wanted too much, my dear!

A great role in history

               is not for you.

Trying to tower over the turnips and cabbages,

you pretended to be a genius.”

And with my last, almost dead blue flame,

I sputtered like a torched fireman,

          who couldn’t save himself from the fire.

All my medals of honor

          were melted like buttons.

If the Soviet Union were burnt down,

               why couldn’t they burn me?

And when so-called patriots

          splashed the rest of the gas on my effigy,

and one nightingale from Army headquarters

               sang sadistically through his nostrils,

one unembraceably humongous woman street cleaner

was sweeping up my ashes with her tender broom.

And all the saccharine ladies

               and sleazy, vaselined intellectuals

were coolly observing

          my last convulsions,

and some of my comrades-in-arms,

                    the noblest of my generation,

threw the finest oil onto the fire —

                    their greasy goodbye.

My beloved, what are you searching for

                    in the field of ashes?

My heart, if it survived after all,

was probably not empty, but still able to love,

not forgetting it too was loved.

---

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932 - 2017) Russia

Translated Geoffrey Dutton and Albert Todd

Source: Ashville Poetry Review 6 Vol. 3 No. 2, 1996