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
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.’
Of Beasts and Animals
Maria Stepanova wrote her epic works ‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ in 2014 and 2015 respectively, during the ‘hot’ war in the Donbas Region of Ukraine. She once told me that the genesis of the two poems, or perhaps more accurately one of their many tap roots, was arriving back in Moscow in the summer of 2014, and noticing how the city was basking in the carefree warmth, untouched by a war which was wreaking devastation in the Donbas.
In the same conversation Maria noted that every war is a civil war. Whilst this is undoubtedly true on a philosophical level, it is particularly true in the case of Donbas, which is the epicentre of a war between Ukraine and Russia – ‘brother nations’ in the past, linguistically, culturally and ethnically joined at the hip, sharing many elements of history and, more recently, a common Soviet and post-Soviet society. The war has changed all of this and now mutual fear and suspicion characterise the relations between the countries and their peoples. The fault line of hatred runs through all neighbourhoods, between lovers and colleagues, parents and children.