War of the Beasts and the Animals

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’.

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ersatz and out of date poetic forms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