War of the Beasts and the Animals

‘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.