takes on ersatz and out of date forms
But this poem is a paean to place, however unlovable that place makes itself. The poem paints a series of stylised pictures of 20th-century Soviet Russia, much in the manner of the Soviet Metro station iconography, itself described in the poem: ‘milk white enamel girls / in gilded kazakh skull caps’. Tiny filmic moments, the war and the postwar period, the seventies, with women in headscarves, motorbikes racing along Soviet roads, and the bread cooling on racks in shops. A long sequence, interspersed with camera shutter clicks, mimics the act of gazing at a family album of the 20th century:
brooch at her throat, hair gathered in a bun
my grandmother (only a little older than me)
feeding a squirrel in a park on the outskirts of moscow
lonely soldier drinking mineral with syrup
school uniform, fitting room, apron-winged, unhemmed
‘Spolia’ has a number of striking parallels with Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (2017; Fitzcarraldo, 2021), a prose work which examines the nature of memory and archive and their role in our survival, as well as documenting Maria’s own family history. In places the two texts overlap and inform one another: In Memory of Memory circles around the historical family photo album, those defining images of the past which are as elusive as they are apparent and manifest. The images in ‘Spolia’ are recognisably the same people: grandparents in army uniform and in evacuation; great grandparents outside institutions for early revolutionaries; celebrations at the end of the war.
This is a Russia that is unloved, unhappy, scattered by war, decentred – and yet strangely beautiful and resilient, glowing with Tarkovskian light; loveable and desirous in the ugly-lyrical images that end the poem.
‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ uses the same structural and compositional techniques as ‘Spolia’ but to quite a different end and effect. It is loosely chronological although it circles and repeats, binding together different wars and histories into a single narrative which opens with the Russian revolution and Civil War, the first incidence of a Soviet myth of war and sacrifice. There are hints and scraps of ballads and films of the Russian Civil War, such as the following short section which describes shorthand a famous civil war battle scene in an early Soviet film (‘Chapaev’):
from the river the bayonets glittered
glimpses of white sleeve
volunteer walking at volunteer
cigarette in the death-grip of teeth
human waves
drum bangs
machine gun strafes
camera pans
The poem also reaches back into Russian history to include several tiny episodes from a beautiful medieval text, ‘The Tale of Igor’s campaign’, the story of an unsuccessful military campaign with many exquisitely lyrical portents of doom:
voices raised in lament
which once were full of joy
‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ also ingests and regurgitates in a visceral and gutting way scraps of psalms, Silver Age Russian poetry, pop ballads, phrases from popular culture, Paul Celan, and many other references. Much of it may be accessible to a highly literate Russian reader, some of it is Maria Stepanova’s personal and private palette of associations and would not have been possible to translate without her help. This salute to a composite modernism is signalled by a series of references to the work of T.S. Eliot, including this lyrical interlude in the poem:
Vlas the volunteer, a fortnight dead
forgot the ruble rate, and what the sparrows said
and where he was from.
A current of explosive air
held his bones in embrace. As he flew
the years passed from him, chubby-cheeked
babbling.
Russky or Ukrainian,
o you, whoever you are, in this neglected crossing place,
consider Vlas. Vlas was nicer than you.
I have described this approach as a ‘super-charged and highly specific’ modernism in Modern Poetry in Translation. But it is far more than a response to the composite nature of modern myth and the fragmentary nature of the language under pressure, or even a return to the high modernism of the period in which the Soviet myth began to overshadow and choke all more complicated and less heroic forms of truth. Stepanova’s linguistic and cultural play has a subtler and more sinister end, one which implicates us all.
Anyone who studies languages knows that we are all associative learners, our language is composed of moments and contexts and built as a verbal accumulation of these moments: a family’s history, a nation’s history, its abuses, culture, crimes, proverbs, eccentricities. When I write as a poet I am always highly aware of the long train of associations each word and phrase has. But there are other association in the undertow which I am not always aware of: the long etymological histories of the words I use, the long histories of engagement with the phrases and situations. In other words, my poetic and linguistic fingerprint betrays entirely my history and the history of those around me. To my mind this is simply a linguistic manifestation of the ‘power with no outside’ which Kim Hyesoon speaks of. We cannot escape this situation, our own language is bent and tainted (but also illuminated and made miraculous) by our past and our culture, our societies’ crimes and peculiarities.
Stepanova’s poem demonstrates the poet’s own endless lyrical complicity with war and the society and culture of a country at war. As a result ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ is impossible to translate in a superficially faithful way. It would be possible to translate literally, word-for-word, but where would it get us, when nothing of this remarkable linguistic revelation would survive?
A few years ago, when I began to consider working on the poem, I was wary. Maria and I talked a great deal at that time and I translated other work by her, but ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ seemed out of my reach. But in 2016 I finally committed to translating the poem, and the following year we began discussing it line-by-line during intense meetings at The Queen’s College in Oxford, where Maria had a residency. The translation was finished in time for my final issue of Modern Poetry in Translation.
What had changed? Why did I feel suddenly able to translate this work? The short answer is that I realised how similar our countries’ imperial and martial cultures had become. I might have known this intellectually, but during the course of 2016 it became emotionally, even physically, clear how wedded Britain was to a version of the imperial past in which military glory (the First and Second World War, the Falklands) played such an important role. The debates around the referendum on leaving the EU were often emotional and irrational, but the rhetoric from the winning side focussed largely on the imperial and military victories which had made us a force to be reckoned with; we were an ‘exceptional country’. The referendum subsequently unleashed a horrible wave of xenophobia, nationalism, racism and intolerance. It was as though people had collectively thrown off their masks of rational, progressive, tolerant, international modernity, as though the masks had just been that, masks, and underneath the masks an Edwardian spirit of jingoism. The horror and isolation I felt personally were precisely the shock I needed for Maria’s words to suddenly come to me, converted into a new currency and with the energy needed to make the crossing into English.
But for the most part, however, it was guilt that made the difference. Guilt at my own reticence, my slowness. It was my own equivalent sense of arriving home on a summer evening when everything is radiant, knowing that somewhere someone is being beaten or killed in my name, and I could float through life without ever properly accounting for what I knew all along: that we are complicit, unless we do something that (in Kim Hyesoon’s words) ‘stands up infinitely’.