Tag Archives: Communism

Weekend read: Odd poem: Joseph Stalin, ‘The Outcast’

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He knocked on strangers’ doors,
Going from house to house,
With an old oaken panduri
And that simple song of his.

But in his song, his song—
Pure as the sun’s own gleam—
Resounded a truth profound,
Resounded a lofty dream.

Hearts that had turned to stone
Were made to beat once more;
In many, he’d rouse a mind
That slumbered in deepest murk.

But instead of the laurels he’d earned,
The people of his land
Fed the outcast poison,
Placing a cup in his hand.

They told him: “Damned one, you must
Drink it, drain the cup dry…
Your song is foreign to us,
We prefer to live in a lie!”

*****

Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili was a Georgian romantic poet who led a million-dollar heist that killed 40 people and funded the Bolshevik revolution. We know him as Joseph Stalin. His story is fascinating… and he is the model for the anti-hero Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) in the Star Wars spin-off TV series Andor.

The BBC has an excellent background article on him and the Andor connection: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250417-how-a-young-joseph-stalin-inspired-star-wars-series-andor:
Yes, the troubled outlaw beloved by Star Wars fans everywhere is based in part on one of history’s most notorious mass murderers, as the series’ creator, Tony Gilroy, has acknowledged. “If you look at a picture of young Stalin, isn’t he glamorous,” Gilroy said in an interview in Rolling Stone in 2022. “He looks like Diego!”

The above poem and two others, all translated by David Shook, can be found here: https://molossusexperiment.tumblr.com/fall1/stalin. The link also contains Shook’s observations on Stalin’s qualities as a poet, and on his persecution of poets like Osip Mandelstam for the Stalin Epigram:
... the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men...

Not having found a title for Stalin’s poem, in this blog post I titled it ‘The Outcast’, though I considered ‘Panduri’.

Photo: “David and Panduri” by sarah&patrick is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Sonnet: “Flags We Have Feared”

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The Swastika, that ancient Vedic sign,
the lightning wheels with which the Aryan bands
in lightning war overrun other lands,
wheeled juggernauts that crush, self-claimed divine.
Hammer and Sickle, commoners’ work-tools;
weapons for rising up, and tearing down
the castle of the rich, the bourgeois town;
fake honour to the poor the Party rules.
A flag with Stripes, memorial for flogged slaves,
striped jail clothes for resulting underclass;
and Stars like bullets through the windshield’s glass
for leaders by the CIA shot down,
star earned for each election overthrown,
star for each land the flag invades, or ‘saves’.

This sonnet was originally and ironically published in Ambit in the UK. The irony being, of course, that the Union Jack is viewed by much of the world with as much fear and hostility as any of the other three flags. But you don’t learn that, or the reasons for it, in school in the UK–at least not in England. The British (at least the English) have a warm and fuzzy feeling toward their flag, and are innocent or puzzled that anyone else should find it negative. Similarly in the times of the other three flags, the Germans (at least the Aryans), the Soviets (at least the Russians) and the Americans (at least the whites) have been happy and proud of their flag, puzzled that anyone else should fear or dislike it.

Another irony: the jury is still out on to what extent one of the leaders shot down by the CIA was their own.

Technically it’s a sonnet with a non-standard rhyme scheme: ABBA CDDC EFFGGE. But the rhymes and the scansion are OK. As for the volta, the requisite turn of mood or argument between the octave and the sestet… well, after dealing with the two great enemies of western democracy, you weren’t expecting me to pick on the US, were you?