Prologue

I’m many-sided. I’m overworked, and idle too. I have a goal and yet I’m aimless. I don’t, all of me, fit in; I’m awkward, shy and rude, nasty and good-natured. I love it, when one thing follows another and so much of everything is mixed in me: from west to east, from envy to delight. I know, you’ll ask: 'What about the overall goal? ' There’s tremendous value in this all! I’m indispensable to you! I’m heaped as high as a truck with fresh-mown hay! I fly through voices, through branches, light and chirping, and butterflies flutter in my eyes, and hay pushes out of cracks. I greet all movement! Ardor, and eagerness, triumphant eagerness! Frontiers are in my way. It is embarrassing for me not to know Buenos Aires and New York. I want to walk at will through London, and talk with everyone, even in broken English. I want to ride through Paris in the morning, hanging on to a bus like a boy. I want art to be as diverse as myself; and what if art be my torment and harass me on every side, I am already by art besieged. I’ve seen myself in every everything: I feel kin to Yesenin and Walt Whitman, to Mussorgsky grasping the whole stage, and Gauguin’s pure virgin line. I like to use my skates in winter, and, scribbling with a pen, spend sleepless nights. I like to defy an enemy to his face, and bear a woman across a stream. I bite into books, and carry firewood, pine, seek something vague, and in the August heat I love to crunch cool scarlet slices of watermelon. I sing and drink, giving no thought to death; with arms outspread I fall upon the grass, and if, in this wide world, I come to die, then it’s certain to be from sheer joy that I live. 1955 Translated by George Reavey (revised)