What would this poem be about?

I think it’s sardonic. It sounds to me that the poet has been the victim of derisive laughter.

You think? It can’t be used in a “let’s laugh” kind of way?

Now that I picture a guy with a large goblet of wine and rosy cheeks, maybe you’re right. I think it may be the mood one is in when they read it. This might be the intention of the poet. Interesting.

It’s a major word play involving 1 word.

I think it’s supposed to be in an optimistic way. The way she said the words seemed sarcastic and playful.

Language is notorious for the loss of nuance and poignancy when it comes to translation. Both the poem and this question about the poem shift considerably in relevance with the revelation that it is Russian. Just listen to the rhythm and meter in the woman’s recitation, then read the English translation. My first take was that the thing was tongue twisting gibberish. There is clearly a gap in that woman’s enthusiasm and the awkward pain that comes with wrapping your tongue around laugheringly, outlaughinglishly, etc. I’ve been told all my life that Russians far more than we English speakers have a profound and deep appreciation of poetry. This must be a disheartening example of “lost in translation”.

I think it’s just trying to be a playful invocation of laughter from the translation. It’s hard to read a mood from the original recitation since poems are often intoned seriously. You probably have a better read on it than us if you understand Russian.

I would say that it’s about a dozen lines too long.

Khlebikov wrote this in 1908/9 in Russia when futurism was in vogue. Futurists rejected the art of the past and the poem ‘Invocation of Laughter’ may be part of that movement as it is a poem without meaning.

I found this explanation online:

“The “Incantation by Laughter” radically deviates from the Hegelian understanding of poetry in that it rejects the meaning making dimension of poetry altogether. In this sense, this poem could be seen as an example for “poem without poem.” The poem indicates a case where poem as an art form is used as a site of scientific experimentation on language. Instead of using language, which is the medium of poetry, to make meaning that would eventually lead to higher order thinking, the poem dissects its own medium while drawing attention to the technical dimension of the medium. The fact that this dissection of its medium happens necessarily within the art form of poem indicates a conscious attempt on the part of the poet to push the boundaries of poem as an art form.”

@flutherother So, it has no meaning? I can make my own understanding, or simply accept it as it is? That’s both cool and not coll at the same time heh.

@janbb I understand only a bit of Russian, but the poem still makes no sense to me.

Did anyone else get to the end of reading the poem and find that the word “laugh” started to look very strange?

… I don’t know if it would have the same effect in Russian, because I think part of the effect might be the unusual use of the word, building it up into new compound words—e.g., “unlaugh it outlaughingly, belaughering laughists”—before shrinking it back down more closely to simply “laugh”... and I don’t know if it’s the same in Russian. Also, I don’t know Russian or Russian poetry’s history/culture/development, etc.

Maybe the poem is purposefully trying to deconstruct the meaning of the word “laugh,” or disassociate the sounds from the meaning, so that it just becomes the sounds in the listeners’ ears? (According to Wikipedia, the phenomenon is called “semantic satiation.”) That plays into @flutherother‘s comment about how the poem may be a poem with out meaning, and perhaps a poem that dissects meaning… By the end, the poem itself alters the way the listener hears a word, and the word itself begins to lose the crispness it had at the beginning… at least for a period of time.

(My second time through the poem, it didn’t have the same effect on me.)

@Sneki95 This is something else I found online

‘The poet Velimir Khlebnikov composed his famous etymological poem Invocation of Laughter, in which he invented expressions derived from the word ‘smej’ (“laughter”), drawn from all the languages of the Russian Empire, thereby generating a kind of magic formula, as if it had been taken from the ritual of a Siberian shaman. Khlebnikov’s neologisms and verbal games were later to influence Russian cubo-futurism in its search for the “self-sufficient word” out of the syntactic roots of their language.’

^^ It sounds like it loses a lot in translation then, @flutherother .

@janbb I think that’s the problem. The original seems to have a greater variety of words in it than the English translation

Ya, it could probably benefit from a different translation… and/or some of the meaning is probably not translatable, and the context may be important, as seen from the comments people have found.

I think it clearly has some intended points and subtleties that are lost without context and in translation.

Some patient in an asylum for the permanently bewildered fastened into a giggle jacket & staring into their reflection in a bowl of pissy vegetable soup…is what that’s about.

It is absolutely sarcastic. It reeks of jealous rage. It ridicules the act of laughter. It was likely generated by someone who is incapable of laughter. Or someone who is often put down and laughed at for some reason. Or perhaps a very depressed person with mental issues.