Re: Mayakovsky's poetry. I did find a translation much better than the excerpt from the Prologue of The Cloud in Trousers , as rendered above. I cannot do justice to him in Russian yet - maybe never, I agree with all above at the difficulty of understanding poetry, with its deep roots, as a non-native speaker - but this translation helps English readers appreciate a bit more, I think. It does much more with sounds, striking language combinations, and clashing images:

Prologue

I'll tease your thought musing
on soft tissue overstuffed
flunkey on a greasy sofa
I'll razz away brazen and acid
these bloody rags

Without a grey hair in my soul
or snip of senility's gentleness
Raiding the world with
sheer force of voice I'm strutting
handsome
22 years old

You tune your loves on violins
tender ones
The crude club them on drums
but you can't turn them
insideout like me
become pure lips alone

Come on and learn your satiny
prim functionary of
angelic leagues and you
leafing through lips like
a cook paging recipes

You want I be meateating madman
or changing tone like a sky
You want I'll be irreproachably
tender no man but a cloud
in trousers

Screw Nice and its pretty flowers
Once more to intone
men bedsick as hospital women
decrepit proverbs...

translated from the Russian by Jack Hirschman and Victor Ehrlich

Selection taken from Poems for the Millenium, Vol I, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, pub by University of California Press, 1995. ISBN 0-520-07225-1