This discussion has centred thus far on how the aesthetic and stylistic markers of the playful, "hooliganistic" conflict defining a movement having a sibling relation with its European fellows may be translated in a way that resists neutralisation and homogenization, their transmutation into the hegemonic code of "Drab" seriousness of their (here, metropolitan) target language - in fact how to preserve grosso modo the infrastructure of avantgarde literary practice. Parenthetically, the "war games" enacted by the multifarious acts of resistance of avant-garde practice recall Mikhail Bakhtin's evocations of the laughing principle of carnival, which at every point "doubles and parodies moments of serious-minded ceremony", subverts the "monolithically serious cultic forms of the established world order", and celebrates the "protean dynamism and transformative logic of a world turned inside out" (Bakhtin 1986: 291-304). Not to be lost sight of however is the regulatory function of the carnival - the world is turned upside down but for the time being only.

The issue of the situatedness of this translation has a larger, ideological dimension, discussed at length in works by Venuti, and alluded to above. The moment of the poem's writing is singular - a singularity reflected in the poem's weaving. This was an historically fleeting interval, from midNovember 1918 until approximately March 1919 when the Great Powers, through covert diplomacy, or overt military action, clearly identified the revolutionary soviet government as one not to be done business with (as an erstwhile ally and hopefully still malleable global partner) but to be crushed, when it began to be understood as an Enemy more considerable than a gang of ruffians to be cleared off the street, powerful enough to be labeled Evil with a good conscience, a moment when its Opponent was finally able, by reflection, to discern as yet in outline to be given precision in coming decades, its own true essence, the embodiment and guardian of the Free World. Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem '150, 000, 000' of October 1920, represents a diabolic carnival inversion of this manichean conflict in its formative phase.

The third, “difficult”, purpose served by this translation idiom mentioned above concerns the situatedness of this translation within the poet’s living, historical trajectory, at a conjunctural moment - 10 March 1919 - the events of which have been glimpsed "through" the foregoing discussion and which, as said below, is a moment of bifurcation, a historical forking of the ways - and a forking of the self. The facts of the trajectory of 1919 formed the ground imperatively requiring the construction of a kind of differential semiosis, whose signifiers were the styles (modes) of translation - code became message. At the beginning of 1919, Khlebnikov worked as a newspaper correspondent for the local (Astrakhan) newspaper Red Soldier. He wrote journalism of a kind suited to record his first-hand experiences of, for example, street battles in Moscow in 1918, the writing of prospectuses for local college courses, such as railway tunneling through the Himalayas and Sanskrit, and to urge visionary reconstruction incorporating sky screens, clouds on which war updates would be projected. Travelling near Kharkov across the British-fuelled war in the South, he wrote 'Kamennaia baba' and 'Night in a Trench' (discussed below), was admitted to a lunatic asylum to assess his military fitness for the (White) draft during the White summer advance on Moscow, where he wrote poetry in a grand, pastoral style emulating Pushkin. Prior to this, in May 1919, he produced a major theoretical text, 'Our Fundamentals' expounding a theory of language "exploding the deaf mute strata of linguistic silence" with a conclusion of great value for an understanding of the annihilating transformation (under pressure of civil war and the terrorism of forced allegiances) of the centredness of the self and its immersion in its own actualities, the real world, engendering another kind of fission or splitting: "we must bifurcate our being, be at once the scientist controlling the radiating waves and the tribes populating the rays' waveforms under the scientist's tutelage…" (Khlebnikov 1986: 632).

The dual aspect of the relationship of a source text to its translation, of the commission of original sin to the subsequent manning, or violation, of the ideological cordon sanitaire of containment, a relationship in which translation is theoretically free, in Venuti's sense, to choose to perform either the functions of illegal migrant or frontier guard, in dialogue with the Other, or policing the monologue of Empire - can most economically be identified in comparing two very different translations of the same segment of text, from a poem also by Khlebnikov, "Noch' v okope" - "Night in a Trench", seen by Vladimir Markov, key historian of Russian Futurism, as closely related, in both style and content, to 'Kamennaia baba'. Markov convincingly argues that the two poems have a kind of doppelganger relationship, and are two "recordings" from different physical and mythical vantage points, of the same military event (Markov 1962: 130-131).

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