The poem is emphatically about a Russian war and I had no intention of domesticating it, as Maria’s own grief and invention would have been blunted. However, as in ‘Spolia’ there was plenty of scope to replace scraps and tatters of other texts with English ones, especially where those were internal associations, ones that might not even be clear to the Russian reader.
So when Boris Johnson, Foreign Secretary at that time, started reciting lines from a highly inappropriate colonial-era Kipling poem (‘The Road to Mandalay’) in a Burmese temple, it was to the British Ambassador’s horror and my own creative gain: lines from the poem, much mutilated, found their way into the translation. A pre-battle quote from Anthony and Cleopatra replaced a line from a Russian poem about lovers on the eve of a battle, for that play has always been for me about colonising and possessing. There are many other small swap-ins. As the Russian itself is not always clear I don’t feel I need to enumerate all of these.
In the end this work is a triangulation rather than a translation. It is the result of a dance between the original poem, Maria and I, and it has at its heart Russian poet Grigory Dashevsky’s concept of the existence of ‘a poem’s pre-textual body’ from which poet and translator can both draw.
SASHA DUGDALE
FROM Spolia
(2015)
Spolia
for my father
totted up
what was said
amounted to
she simply isn’t able to speak for herself
and so she always uses rhyme in her poems
ersatz and out of date poetic forms
her material
offers no resistance
its kiss is loveless, it lies motionless
she’s the sort you’d lift onto a chair
read us the poem about wandering lonely
she’s the sort who once made a good soviet translator
careful unadventurous
where is her I place it in the dish
why on earth does she speak in voices
(voices ‘she has adopted’, in quote marks:
obvs anyone-without-an-I cannot adopt anything
for anyone-without-an-I will wander, begging alms
pretending to be a corner, a jar of mayonnaise, a cat
although no one believes him quite)
I’m a bagel I’m a bagel says the speaker-without-an-I,
some people are stuffed with soft cheese but oh no not me
some people are engorged with character and culture
potato scones, hot stones,
I’ve got the biggest hole empty yawning
I’m the earth I send my cosmonauts floating
the mouths of my eaters, the teeth of my tenants,
converging from the east and the south,
they take a last chew swallow
when a quick nought has licked up the last crumb
fire’s sharp tongue will scour the granaries –
I won’t even remain as air, shifting
refracting sound
fading with the light on the river’s ripple
sucking the milk and vodka from still-moist lips
anyone-without-an-I
is permitted a non-i-ppearance
wants libert-i
*
Tramcar, tramcar, squat and wide!
Pushkin pops his clogs inside!
Dingle-dangle Pushkin-Schmushkin
Dying cloudberries in the bushkin
Demigod theomorph
Dig the burning peaty turf
Innokenty Annensky
Stuck between heresky and theresky
Is feeling miserably empty
At the station in Tsarskoselsky
All the hungry passengers
Waiting in the railway shack
Say Look! A Bone is stuck in your Throat!
But the bone is red-lipped gabriak.
No I won’t be your good boy,
The teenage poet blurts –
Voloshin can have his way with them
Stick his fingers up their skirts,
Crimean wine, bearded philanderer…
Now Blok appears – is gone again
Under the sun of Alexander
Polyakov picks up the reins.
Ancient Scythian stone women
Glow as they crumble
Instagram posts for Soviet airmen,
Seizing wheat ears as they scramble
Now fire the search engine!
Fix eyepiece on the earth’s sphere!
Glazova and Barskova
Are coming over loud and clear.
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
All the poets were full of woe
And nobody knew what to do.
Dying, like clearing out a room
Without making a fuss
Resurrection, if and when
*
visible delicate
invisible inviolate
nearest dearest
souring, steeping
delayed en route
root of the
wormwood
clamped
in the teeth
wordeed
wordtree
word wood
beasting
the unbested
suspended, resisted
put by in secrets
halfcracked halfvolk
*
let her come out herself and say something
(and we’ll listen to you)
she won’t come out
it won’t come right
speaks from the heart
(tchaikovsky! let me die but first)
but she says it like she doesn’t mean it
it even seems like her words
might have come from someone else
always over-stylising
like she’s dressing a corpse
where’s her inimitable intonation
the breath catching in her throat
that individual stamp
recognisable from a single note
(the work of an engineer and not of a poet)
(not lyrics, mechanics –
signs not of a lady but of a mechanic)
and these projects all the time
as if the cold sweat of inspiration
on her forehead never made her hair stand on
enough, I said, I’m prigov
you prigs can fuck off
*
when blossoms tum-ti-tum
for the last time the blossom
in the dooryard bloomed
the lilac in the dooryard bloomed
and stars that shoot along the sky
not yet will measureless fields be green
and dancing by the light of the moon
the light of the moon
and after april when may follows
banquet halls up yards and bunting-dressed
and breasts stuck white with wreath and spray
marked off the girls unreally from the rest
who lined the sidings grimly gay
(she loves embedding quotes because
she can’t be without love)
washed by the rivers blest by the suns of home
my land, I love your vast expanses!
your steppe & coachmen, costumed dances!
your peddlers of mystic trances!
and murdered tsar nicholas
oh, and kitezh’s watery kingdom
and how above our golden freedom
rises gloom dusk cumulus
how early that star drooped in the chilled western air
I’ll remember may the first and the scent of your hair
when for the last time
when we saw
last one to the gate is a rotten egg
and they run and run
*
and so I decided
I was told
curly feathers of metro marble
milk white enamel girls
in gilded kazakh skull caps
and children with gently determined faces
you, blue-eyed aeronauts and machine gunners
saboteurs, cavalrymen and tank drivers
fringe-finned guardsmen, officers
platforms of shaggy crouching partisans
and especially the border guard’s alsatian
plum blossom in a golden bowl
early morning crimea
ballerina winding herself widdershins
apollo in singlet and hockey shorts
alabaster profile on wedgwood medallion
clearly sketched in a golden oval
aeroplane wreathing omens in the clouds
hercules, given to omphale
you must have forgotten
in the passageway leading to the circle line
*
Do you remember, Maria
our twilit corridor
nineteen-forties Russia
a settlement, post war
dances to the radiogram