My Universities

I learned not only from those who brightly beam out of golden frames, but from everyone whose ID photo didn't come out quite right. More than from Tolstoy I learned from blind beggars who sang in train cars about Count Tolstoy. From barracks I learned more than from Pasternak and my verse style was hot 'barracko'. I took lessons on Yesenin in snack bars from invalids of war who tore their striped sailor shirts after spilling out their plain secrets. Mayakovsky's stepped verse didn't give me as much as the dirty steps of staircases with handrails polished by kids' pants. I learned in Zima Junction from my most untalkative Grannies not to be afraid of cuts, scratches, and various other scrapes. I learned from dead-end streets that smell of cats, from crooked spattered lanes, to be sharper than a knife, more ordinary than a cigarette butt. Empty lots were my shepherds. Waiting lines my nursing mothers. I learned from all the young toughs who gave me a whipping. I learned from pale-faced harried hacks with fatal content in their verse and empty content in their pockets. I learned from all the oddballs in attics, from the dress cutter Alka who kissed me in the dark of a communal kitchen. I was put together out of the birthmarks of the Motherland from scratches and scars, cradles and cemeteries, hovels and temples. My first globe was a rag ball, without foreign threads, with brick crumbs sticking to it, and when I forced my way to the real globe, I saw-it was also made of scraps and also subject to blows. And I cursed the bloody soccer game, where they play with the planet without refs or rules, and any tiny scrap of the planet, which I touched, I celebrated! I went round the planet as if it were a gigantic Zima Station, and I learned from the wrinkles of old women, now Vietnamese, now Peruvian. I learned folk wisdom taught by the worldwide poor and scum, the Eskimo's smell for ice, and the Italian's smiling non-despair. I learned from Harlem not to consider poverty poor, like a Black whose face is only painted white. And I understood that the majority bends its neck on behalf of others, and in the wrinkles of those necks the minority hides as if in trenches. I am branded with the brand of the majority. I want to be their food and shelter. I am the name of all without names. I am a writer for all who don't write. I am a writer created by readers, and readers are created by me. My debt has been paid. Here I am your creator and your creation, an anthology of you, a second edition of your lives. I stand more naked than Adam, rejecting court tailors, the embodiment of imperfections- yours and my own. I stand on the ruins of loves I destroyed. The ashes of friendships and hopes coldly fly through my fingers. Choking on muteness and the last man to get in line, I would die for any one of you, because each of you is my homeland. I am dying from love and I howl with pain like a wolf. If I despise you- I despise myself even more. I could fail without you. Help me to be my real self, not to stoop to pride, not to fall into heaven. I am a shopping bag stuffed with all the world's shoppers. I am everybody's photographer, a paparazzo of the infamous. I am your common portrait, where so much remains to be painted. Your faces are my Louvre, my private Prado. I am like a video player, whose cassettes are loaded with you. I am an attempt at diaries by others and an attempt at a worldwide newspaper. You have written yourself with my tooth-marked pen. I don't want to teach you. I want to learn from you. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Albert C. Todd and Yevgeny Yevtushenko