GREGORY CORSO

Грегори Корсо

ПОЛНЫЙ БАРДАК... ПОЧТИ

Я пробежал шесть лестничных пролетов
к своей меблированной комнатке,
открыл окно
и стал выбрасывать
все эти вещи, главные в жизни.

Первой вылетела Правда, визжа, как стукачок:
"Не надо! Я всем расскажу, чем ты ты дышишь!"
"Да ну? Отлично, мне нечего скрывать... ВОН!"
Затем пошел Господь, сердясь и удивленно хныча:
"Я не виноват! Они все сами выдумали!" "ВОН!"
Потом Любовь, воркуя подкупающе: "Ты не узнаешь импотенции!
Все девушки с обложек Vogue — твои!"
Я вытолкал ее толстую задницу и крикнул вдогонку:
"Ты всегда заканчиваешься обломом!"
Сгреб в охапку Веру, Надежду, Милосердие,
вцепившихся друг в дружку:
"Без нас ты точно умрешь!"
"А с вами — чокнусь! Пока!"

Затем Красота... ах, Красота —
подведя ее к окну,
я сказал: "Тебя я любил больше всех
... но ты — убийца; Красота убивает!"
Не желая и вправду сбрасывать ее,
Я тут же сбежал вниз,
как раз вовремя, чтобы подхватить.
"Ты спас меня!" заплакала она,
я поставил ее и сказал: "Иди."

Вернулся через шесть пролетов —
выбросить деньги,
но денег не оказалось.
Лишь смерть осталась комнате,
прячась за мойкой
и рыдая: "Я понарошку!
Я всего лишь выдумка жизни"
Смеясь, я выкинул ее, мойку и все остальное,
и вдруг обнаружил Юмор —
только он остался.
Все что я мог поделать с Юмором — сказать:
"Проваливай, и забери с собой окно!"

Перевод Павла Погоды


Оригинал:
The whole mess...almost

I ran up six flights of stairs
to my small furnished room
opened the window
and began throwing out
those things most important in life

First to go, Truth, squealing like a fink:
“Don't! I'll tell awful things about you!”
“Oh yeah? Well, I've nothing to hide ... OUT!”
Then went God, glowering & whimpering in amazement:
“It's not my fault! I'm not the cause of it all!” “OUT!”
Then Love, cooing bribes: “You'll never know impotency!
All the girls on Vogue covers, all yours!”
I pushed her fat ass out and screamed:
“You always end up a bummer!”
I picked up Faith Hope Charity
all three clinging together:
“Without us you'll surely die!”
“With you I'm going nuts! Goodbye!”

Then Beauty ... ah, Beauty —
As I led her to the window
I told her: “You I loved best in life
... but you're a killer; Beauty kills!”
Not really meaning to drop her
I immediately ran downstairs
getting there just in time to catch her
“You saved me!” she cried
I put her down and told her: “Move on.”

Went back up those six flights
went to the money
there was no money to throw out.
The only thing left in the room was Death
hiding beneath the kitchen sink:
“I'm not real!” It cried
“I'm just a rumor spread by life ...”
Laughing I threw it out, kitchen sink and all
and suddenly realized Humor
was all that was left —
All I could do with Humor was to say:
“Out the window with the window!”

Photo courtesy of New Directions.

Gregory Corso

Gregory Nunzio Corso was born in New York's Greenwich Village on March 26, 1930, to teenage Italian parents. A year later, his mother moved back to Italy. After living in orphanages and foster homes, at age eleven Corso moved back in with his father, who had just remarried. After two years, however, he ran away; upon being caught he was placed in a boys' home for two years. He also spent several months in the New York City jail while being held as a material witness in a theft trial. He was returned to his father, but after running away again was sent to Bellevue Hospital for three months "for observation." At age sixteen, he began a three-year sentence at Clinton State Prison for another theft. While in prison, he read widely in the classics, including Dostoevsky, Stendahl, Shelley, Thomas Chatterton, and Christopher Marlowe, as well as the dictionary; it was there that he also began writing poems.

In a Greenwich Village bar in 1950, the year of his release from prison, he met Allen Ginsberg, who introduced him to experimental poetry. In 1954 he moved to Boston, where again he devoted himself to the library—this time at Harvard University. His first published poems appeared in the Harvard Advocate in 1954, and the publication of his first book, The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems (1955), was underwritten by Harvard and Radcliffe students. Corso worked at times as a laborer, a newspaper reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner, and a merchant seaman.

The following year he went to San Francisco, where he performed readings and interviews with Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and became known as one of the major figures of the Beat movement. From 1957 to 1958 Corso lived in Paris, where he wrote many of the poems that became his book Gasoline, which Lawrence Ferlinghetti/City Lights Books published in 1958. From 1970 to 1974 Corso worked on a manuscript that was to be titled Who Am I—Who I Am, but the manuscript was stolen. He did not issue another major work until 1981's Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit. Among other notable books are Bomb (1958), The Happy Birthday of Death (1960), Long Live Man (1962), Elegaic Feelings American (1970), and Mindfield: New and Selected Poems (Thunder's Mouth, 1989).

Corso traveled extensively, and taught briefly at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and for several summers at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. (He was dismissed from the SUNY teaching position in 1965 for refusing to sign an affadavit certifying that he was not a member of the Communist Party.) He was married three times and had five children. Gregory Corso died on January 17, 2001, at the age of seventy.