In Memory of Memory

Translator’s note

Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory is a living text and the English translation has been changed and modified from the original Russian in collaboration with the author.

The Russian text embeds unattributed quotes from other texts in a flowing narrative, and the English translation follows this convention. The translators whose work has been quoted in this English version are listed here in the order they appear:

Harold N. Fowler (Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus); Thomas Scott-Railton (Arlette Farge’s The Allure of the Archives); John Felstiner (Paul Celan’s “Conversation in the Mountains”); Don Reneauith, (Thomas Mann’s letter to Heinrich Mann of February 27, 1904); C. K. Scott Moncrieff (Proust quotes); Richard and Clara Winston (Thomas Mann’s Diaries); Anthea Bell (W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction and Austerlitz); Michael Hulse (W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn); Maureen Freely (Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories of a City); Alan Myers (Lydia Ginzburg’s Notes from the Blockade, revised by Emily van Buskirk); Alistair McEwen (Robert Calasso’s Tiepolo Pink); Robert A. Maguire (Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls); Seán Jennet (Journal of a Younger Brother: The Life of Thomas Platter); Michael R. Katz (Vladimir Jabotinsky’s The Five); Charles H. Kahn (Heraclitus fragments). Translations of Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or Theater? are taken from the digitalized version online at the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam.

Thanks are due to Aviva Dautch, Henry Hardy, Ruth Martin, and Robina Pelham Burn. I’d also like to thank J. O. Morgan, for his invaluable and patient help, and my family, especially Max and Paul, who have contributed words, sense and encouragement. I’ve benefited from Maria Stepanova’s highly literary understanding of English and English-language culture, and the generosity and freedom she gave me to recreate her brilliant work in a new poetic language.