MARIA STEPANOVA
WAR OF THE BEASTS AND THE ANIMALS
Translated by Sasha Dugdale
War of the Beasts and the Animals is Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s first full collection in English translation. One of Russia’s most innovative and exciting poets and thinkers, Stepanova is founding editor of Colta.ru, an online independent site which has been compared to Huffington Post in its status and importance. Immensely high-profile in Russia, her reputation has lagged behind in the West, but with her prize-winning documentary novel In Memory of Memory published by Fitzcarraldo in 2021, along with her poetry from Bloodaxe, that is sure to change.
War of the Beasts and the Animals includes her recent long poems of conflict, ‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and Animals’, written during the Donbas conflict, as well as a third long poem, ‘The Body Returns’, commissioned by Hay International Festival in 2018 to commemorate the Centenary of the First World War. In all three long poems Stepanova’s assured and experimental use of form, her modernist appropriation of poetic texts from around the world and her constant consideration of the way that culture, memory and contemporary life are interwoven make her work both pleasurable and deeply necessary.
The book also includes two sequences of poems from her 2015 collection Kireevsky: sequences of ‘weird’ ballads and songs, subtly changed folk and popular songs and poems which combine historical lyricism and a contemporary understanding of the effects of conflict and trauma. Stepanova uses the ready forms of ballads and songs, but alters them, so they almost appear to be refracted in moonlit water. The forms seem recognisable, but the words are oddly fragmented and suggestive, they weave together well-known refrains of songs, apparently familiar images, subtle half-nods to films and music.
Front cover painting (detail):
The Flood (St 28 recto) (c. 1514) by Hieronymus Bosch
museum boijmans van beuningen, rotterdam. loan:
stichting museum boijmans van beuninge
CONTENTS
Title Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD
from SPOLIA (2015)
Spolia
War of the Beasts and the Animals
from KIREEVSKY (2012)
from Girls, Singing
Young aeronauts, floating to land…
In the white white sky…
Mother and Father didn’t know him…
What is that sweeper, mother…
A train runs right across Russia…
Over the field the guns howled…
Empty featherbeds cooling…
Two classical athletes, Culture and Sport…
Running, running…
By the church’s black fence
Kireevsky
1. The light swells and pulses at the garden gate…
2. In the village, in the field, in the forest…
3. Tear tears along, chasing tear, and kicks it…
4. My lady neighbour drives out on black sables…
5. Where the dance was shaped in flame…
6. Chorus line, on our feet…
7. You my gifts, o my gifts…
8. Who guards our picket fences, our blooming hedges…
9. A deer, a deer stood in that place…
10. The last songs are assembling…
from Underground Pathephone
Stop, don’t look, come close,…
Don’t wait for us, my darling…
POEMS FROM EARLIER COLLECTIONS
Bus Stop: Israelitischer Friedhof
(as they must)
Fish
The Body Returns (2018)
The Body Returns
About the Author
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The original Russian texts used for this publication are published in Spolia (Новое издательство, 2015), Киреевский (Издательство Пушкинского фонда, 2012), Старый мир. Починка жизни (Новое издательство, 2019), Физиология и малая история (Прагматика культуры, 2005), and Счастье (Новое литературное обозрение, 2003).
Translations from this collection have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, Poetry London, and Little Star. ‘The Body Returns’ was written in response to a commission by the Hay International Festival in 2018. ‘(as they must)’ was published in The Best of Poetry London (Poetry London, 2014), ‘Bus Stop: Israelitischer Friedhof ’ was published in Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History (The Rewiring History project, 2014). Excerpts from ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ are published in Best American Experimental Writing 2020 (Wesleyan University Press, 2020).
Translator’s Foreword
War of the Beasts and the Animals draws largely from Maria Stepanova’s recent works, her collection Kireevsky (2012), and her two long poems ‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’. A third long poem ‘The Body Returns’ was a commission by the Hay Festival to commemorate the First World War Centenary and it makes up the triptych of long poems. In ‘The Body Returns’ Stepanova, like Ailbhe Darcy, uses the Fibonacci structure of the poetic work alphabet by Inger Christensen, to reflect on 20th-century war in the West. Two poems come from earlier collections: the epic poem ‘Fish’ which draws on the tropes and clichés of 20th-century Soviet polar exploration literature, and ‘Israelitischer Friedhof ’.
The choice of the work for this English-language collection was made jointly by Maria and me. Maria was very keen that I should focus on ‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’, and I shared her sense that these works, published together in 2015, were urgent and particular to the world now. I wrote a short essay on translating ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ in 2018 and as my thoughts have not changed, I have enlarged that essay to include my approach to ‘Spolia’ here.
Maria Stepanova is, on the face of it, an exceptionally difficult poet to translate as her poems are both formally complex and they inhabit a world of Russian language and culture, which is often inaccessible to the non-Russian reader. What is more, they scrutinise this world of language and culture, apparently so monolithic and manifest, and reveal its shifting and elusive qualities, its corruptions and mythic untruths.
Stepanova has always had a deep interest in traditional formal structures – odes, folksongs and ballads. In her hands these are distorted and made strange through the lens of contemporary thought to produce a landscape and soundscape which are weird and hyper-real. There is no sure way to render this effect in English, as both our folkloric motifs and our recent history differ. Her collection Kireevsky bears the name of a 19th-century collector of folksongs, and the title cycle is composed of ten poems which draw on folklore and traditional lyric. Although these works precede Spolia we can see in them the same preoccupation with cultural memory and collective mythmaking.
In the cycle ‘Kireevsky’ the ballad form compresses and elides mythical history to great effect, chief amongst these, the myths of the Second World War, the 1930s, the Russian Revolution. Ghost-like figures and wild animals wander through the ruins of myth: the dead, the forgotten and the uncounted. The poems distort images from Soviet songs and poems as if Kireevsky himself was seeing songs in a feverish nightmare. The poet, critic and friend of Stepanova, Grigory Dashevsky wrote of her work, ‘These ballads do not depict someone else’s darkness, but the dimmed consciousness we carry within ourselves.’