The day before yesterday, I heard a poem by Mayakovsky about clouds at least a hundred times, which Masha found difficult to grasp. And yesterday, I tried explaining it to Alice, who was learning Russian. Indeed, Mayakovsky is untranslatable. So, does anyone have thoughts on what part of speech, or what form the word “сжирав” is? 😉 And the poem is excellent:
Clouds were floating across the sky.
Four little clouds in all:
from the first to the third — people,
the fourth was a little camel.
Driven by curiosity,
a fifth one tagged along on the road,
from it, in the azure embrace of the sky,
elephants scattered after a little elephant.
And I don’t know if it was the sixth that scared them,
but all ten clouds just melted away.
And following them, chasing and devouring,
the sun chased after them — a yellow giraffe.
[1917—1918]
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 