Both in the early aftermath of the Revolution and later, the pre-revolutionary "war games" played by the Futurists wired them to Bolshevik cultural requirements, adding a political dimension to their avant-gardism at a time when Bolsheviks such as Enlightenment Commissar Anatolii Lunacharsky were eagerly seeking cultural legitimation and welcomed practical input from whichever quarter. Implicit in the preceding discussion of Futurism is an argument for the sociolinguistic responsibility of literary translation, the urging of a need for translation to respect the situatedness of its source texts, especially when a literary practice problematizes its site, and assigns significance to conflict - when the normal conditions of textual reproduction are disrupted and when disruption is intentionally constitutive of the aggressor texts' semiosis. The Futurists played an exuberant game, assigning high aesthetic value to "rough" qualities, to things

written [the Russian word "pisat" means to represent graphically, and denotes both writing and painting] and seen in the wink of an eye, the arranging of clumsy structures, tensile reading and writing, more awkward than greased boots or a lorry in the drawing room - a lot of knots, bundles and patches, jagged, grainy surfaces …

(Kruchenykh cited in Khardzhiev 1976: 52)

Everything said so far bears on the problem of how the situatedness of an original language text may be translated. The mapping or translation of its theoretical or aesthetic keywords onto those of rap poetry begs questions regarding the degree of hospitality the host site may show towards a potentially foreign body. If an original text's situatedness requires translation, the translation's own situatedness requires definition. What can be said about the displacing of a vernacular idiom (rap) having a particular kind of roughness into the foreigness of a mainstream site of hegemonic culture, an

overarching, global genre nameable as "published modern poetry in translation"? Here, one arrives at the second staging post of the "journey" being plotted by this paper, namely the proposed siting of this translation in particular.

It can be said that the "rapping" of KB acquired a conflictual signification within the global text or discursive universe of which the TP anthology is a particular statement. Indeed, as the discussion of Futurism's posture above indicates, this was intended - its insertion is an essay in the transposition or metatranslation of that movement's "roughness" - how far however does the writ for rough translation run? While, historically and originally, this quality, or rather bundle of qualities was in Poggioli's usage "antagonistically" intended, the differences it constructs are not intrinsically or necessarily readable as conflictual, especially in a culture which celebrates difference, some would say of a non-signifying kind, suitable to the End of History (Derrida 1997). If conflict exists in this world, is it not obliged to do so in an outlawed and disavowed form?

The question receives an implicit and elegant response from James S Holmes, in support of his own, representative, one would say mainstream, view of requirements which poetry in translation should respect: "The average reader of a translation in English wants to find the kind of experience which has become identified with "poetry" in his readings of English Literature. The translator who wishes to be read must in some degree satisfy this want" (Holmes 1988: 14). Holmes cites a provocative observation by W H Auden to evoke the stuff of that experience:

…my own conviction is that in this age poetry can no longer be written in the High, even in the Golden Style, only in a Drab Style… By a Drab Style I mean a quiet tone of voice and a modesty of gesture which deliberately avoids drawing attention to itself as poetry with a capital P. Whenever a modern poet raises his voice he makes me feel embarrassed. (ibid.: 14-15)

Holmes further advocates a translation posture designed to achieve discursively an illusion of authenticity, the textual equivalent of trompe-l'oeil pictorial rhetoric: "like the poet [the translator] will strive to exploit his own creative powers, the literary traditions of the target culture, and all the expressive means of the target language in order to produce a verbal object that to all appearances is nothing more or less than a poem” (ibid.: 11). It is, clearly, beyond the scope of this paper, to argue in favour of the broad applicability of this "method" to the whole field of English language translation of modernist literature, here, poetry, and correspondingly refute its being dismissed as a case of special pleading. For the moment, I will simply signal the field of translation theoretics developed by Lawrence Venuti, claiming precisely this reach (and offering an opposed response to the "question"), which has been developed polemically but also has considerable empirical consistency and extends to "difficult" domains of modernist literature such as Pound's archaizing translations, and translation methods informed by French post-structuralism (elaborated in Chadwick 2004).