‘Vladimir Mayakovsky’ and Other Poems Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in 1893 in Baghdati, a village in Georgia. Following the death of his father in 1906, the family moved to Moscow. Mayakovsky was an active Communist from an early age, and in 1909 served an eleven-month jail sentence for revolutionary activities. During his imprisonment, aged sixteen, Mayakovsky began to write. The leading Russian Futurist writer, best known for his poetry, Mayakovsky also had an immense influence on the visual arts, cinema, drama and general culture of the early Soviet period. He committed suicide in 1930. James Womack was born in Cambridge in 1979 and studied English, Russian, and translation at university. He currently lives in Madrid, where he helps to run Nevsky Prospects, a publishing house specialising in Spanish translations of Russian literature. He has translated widely from Russian and Spanish into English and Spanish, both independently and in collaboration with his wife, the writer Marian Womack. Among his published translations are works by Silvina Ocampo, Roberto Arlt, Sergio del Molino, Ivan Turgenev, and Gaito Gazdanov. His translation of Mayakovsky’s essays on cinema was published in 2013 as Escritos sobre cine. He contributed translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov to the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry  (2015). A collection of his own poems, Misprint, was published by Carcanet in 2012.