Now it’s Easter day,
Tenderness and tenterhooks
Run along the vertebrae.
Little sleep,
But spring has sprung,
All of the bird-cherry’s teeth are white fangs,
And the sky-womb’s opened out,
Murky-tender like smoked trout.
At thirty years old
I was not very old.
At thirty-three
’Twere a babe inside me.
At thirty-five
Time came back alive.
Now I am thirty-six
Time to eat myself up quick.
Scoop out my head
With a big pewter spoon,
So new beer can be poured in
And topped off after settling,
So that she not, like the olive tree,
Spend the winter blue and empty,
So that in my pupil, like sunshine in a boot,
At least kitschy icons will stand resolute,
Many-colored,
Not like the others.
Translated by Amelia Glaser and Ainsley Morse
In the festive sky, impassivable, tinfurled,
In the burning, immemoriable, tinfouled,
See the ladder neatly leaned against the clouds,
Trodden over top to bottom by the words.
One of them is mincing steps,
And another wails and weeps,
And mine just hangs and swings there on the bar and barely grips.
Barely mumbles,
Nearly tumbles.
Friends will crowd around excited, asking questions,
At the same time breathless, speechless and tempestuous,
Quacky and screechy:
What’s up? Whaddija see?
Back at them, as from a tongueless bell, comes almost losing
Any semblance: from the fifth bar up—oh boy, what mmoooosic!
Translated by Dmitry Manin
Saturday and Sunday burn like stars.
Elder trees foam and fizz.
By the railroad crossing’s striped bars
A communal wall hovers.
Past it are slabs, like canvases, dank in the dark,
And the moon cherry,
And tiny tightly-packed crosses, a darned
Sock or a cross-stitch embroidery.
Yellow dogs pass here at an easy trot,
And grandmas come to comb the sand,
Giant women grind their temples into the rock
Wailing and thrashing to no end.
But these are times, indistinguishable like stumps,
Like my pair of knees:
At the sun one stares, in the shade the other one slumps,
Both are dust and ashes.
But these are nights when the nettle-folk stands guard
Among the pickets here,
And the gentle May enters its peaceful orchard
Raining a tear.
And between hand and hand, between day and night
There is inhumane, brightly burning, eternal
Quiet.
Translated by Dmitry Manin
In every little park, in every little square,
Lovely people go about their lovely tasks,
Girls stroll with strollers to give babies some air,
Buying little presents and kaolin facial masks.
Kaolin is only clay,
Somewhere for your corpse to lay,
Mortal cells, your bread and doom,
A collective cozy tomb.
By the pond, with their laptops, the skypers
Are cutting a pretty figure.
On the high Moscow rooftops, the snipers
Let their fingers dance on the trigger.
The augoors of inaugooration
Walkie-talk their way to elation;
On the streets, the city’s protesters
Are brought down by their own posters.
Waaa! Goo! Shush, baby, please.
Moscow’s still there, no need to howl.
Igor’s Yaroslavna is crying like an owl.*
I’ll go get some cottage cheese.
The selection of cheeses today is wide,
As if the city had eaten its fill and died.
Translated by Alexandra Berlina
—
* An allusion to an episode from a twelfth-century Russian epic, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, in which Yaroslavna laments the defeat of her husband Prince Igor’s retinue.
from Kireevsky
from the cycle
YOUNG MAIDS SING
TRANSLATED BY EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY
Translator’s Note
Language is history. Maria Stepanova is a poet for whom that is the case. Her cycle Dèvushki poiùt, or Young Women Are Singing, which revisits the traumas of the Stalinist period and especially of World War II, is also historicist in its vocabulary, phraseology, and even versification. The poems of the cycle are ballads, palpably descended from the Russian adaptations of German Romantic horror ballads, but with a great dose of late Mandelstam infecting the diction, and with the emotional gestures that evoke stylizations of labor camp songs by 1960s folk singers. Stepanova amps up the disjunctions characteristic of the ballad form until they turn into the disjunctions of modern experimental poetry. We are the child taken for a ride in the forest, and we also know who the Erlkönig is.
The language of history is not a universal language at all. How do you translate it? How do you translate what the reader of the original—different child taken for the same ride—is supposed to pick up from inflections, innuendos, and incomplete gestures? How do you translate the meaning that inheres in the half-said, when the intended reading depends on shared historical experience that the reader of the translation will most certainly lack? I was grasping for straws, and my main straw in the particular instance of drowning that translating Stepanova’s poems was for me, became the classical Chinese literary ballad such as Du Fu’s “Song of the War Carts,” and in general I was remembering English-language translations of T’ang dynasty poetry: poetry whose formal concentration, citationality both erudite and pop, and constant sense of unsaid political and war trauma make it so kin to Russian poetry of the twentieth century.
This is why I called my selections from the cycle Young Maids Sing (I also toyed with Young Maid Sing). This is also why of the several experimental versions I did of “Mat’-otèts ne uznàli” (“Mom-pop didn’t know him”), I kept the one whose five-syllable lines allude to a T’ang meter, even though the Russian original alternates double and triple anapests. This is why my other, metrically sloppier translations still gesture—both rhythmically and in their discontinuities—at the kind of alienation that the pentasyllabic line can produce in English, for which the decasyllable is a far more natural meter. If I could not make an adequate translation of the original, I could at least make an adequate translation of the violence and alienation of its language of trauma. This is also why I happily translated Stepanova’s rewriting of pop songs, especially the poem whose understanding depends on knowing the lyrics of “Katyusha,” which gave its name to the Soviet transportable rocket launchers of World War II.
Unfortunately, the tortured Latinate syntax of Russian poetry, and of Stepanova’s poetry in particular, is really nothing like the straightforward syntax of classical Chinese verse. Although what I really wanted was to get rid of all the subordination of clauses, I failed at the task, but I do hope to liberate all clauses next time.
Mom-pop didn’t know him
Young wife didn’t know him
Colonel came back from
Below black blue ice
Victory vodka
The upright counts time
He went in winter
Left circles behind
Lights on in housing
A blank tenant book