Reading Boland's "The War Horse" (1975) Part 8
Two poems “after Mayakovsky” follow. Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893 – 1930) was a Russian Futurist poet who celebrated the Revolution and the rise of the Soviet. Boland’s poems are free translations. “Conversation with an Inspector of Taxes,” a wryly humorous explanation for not paying taxes, is “Concerned to discern the role of the poet/ Within the ranks of the proletariat” (rhyming couplet concluding the 6-line stanza). The poet tries to explain writing poetry to the Tax Inspector in terms the latter would understand. So: rhyme is roughly equivalent to a promissory note; in the petty cash of sense, poets “moisten the coins of nuance”; as for the question of taxable travel, this poet has “bitted and stampeded Pegasus.” His debts, the poem turns, are not to Bureaucracy, but to Poetry, not monetary, but “debts of honor” to the revolutionary Red Army, to the “winter flowering cherry of Japan,” and to “the fastness of my winter cradle,” his homeland. “The Atlantic Ocean” is a far...