War of the Beasts and the Animals

Translator’s Foreword

War of the Beasts and the Animals draws largely from Maria Stepanova’s recent works, her collection Kireevsky (2012), and her two long poems ‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’. A third long poem ‘The Body Returns’ was a commission by the Hay Festival to commemorate the First World War Centenary and it makes up the triptych of long poems. In ‘The Body Returns’ Stepanova, like Ailbhe Darcy, uses the Fibonacci structure of the poetic work alphabet by Inger Christensen, to reflect on 20th-century war in the West. Two poems come from earlier collections: the epic poem ‘Fish’ which draws on the tropes and clichés of 20th-century Soviet polar exploration literature, and ‘Israelitischer Friedhof ’.

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 Kireevsky bears the name of a 19th-century collector of folksongs, and the title cycle is composed of ten poems which draw on folklore and traditional lyric. Although these works precede Spolia we can see in them the same preoccupation with cultural memory and collective mythmaking.

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.

The war in Donbas was initiated by Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and its invasion of the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014. As I write (in 2020) the hostilities are more or less over, although the ceasefire is often broken. While the fact of covert Russian military engagement was widely accepted outside Russia, within Russia the war was presented as a conflict between local pro-Russian separatists and a fascist and US-supported Ukraine. Russian state propaganda is so powerful and entrenched that this view prevails in much of Russian society and it sets Russians entirely at odds with their Ukrainian neighbours, who see the war as a fight for Ukraine’s existence. The Russian government remained silent when lines of tanks moving towards Donbas were photographed or videoed, and even when young Russian soldiers were returned home in coffins. This silence was a terrible cruelty not least because it rendered those Russians who had suffered in the war voiceless. Of course, it also served to make the Ukrainian reality of national conflict, as well as large numbers of casualties and displaced peoples, a slippery thing, subject to international doubt, bias and false reporting. Language and truth have been sacrificed in this war, as they are in any war.

Over recent decades the Russian state has developed a cult of vital and enduring military strength which builds on Soviet martial myths. The distance between myth, shored up by intricate and incredible propaganda stories, and credible and researched truth grows ever wider, and as the words diverge from anything that might be called ‘truth’ so the language bends under the strain of its falsehoods. When Maria and I spoke about the impetus of the poems she noted that the language she had hitherto used for poetry had been deformed by power and untruth and it was no longer possible for her to write in the way she had always written – she described it as the ‘internal fragmentation of the language’. Her visual image for this was the classical language shattering, as if after an explosion, and all the splinters hanging in the air. ‘The only way’, she continued, ‘to resist this fragmentation is from the inside.’

This sense that resistance is only possible from the inside reminds me of the position of Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, who said in an interview published in Modern Poetry in Translation (Autumn 2016), translated by Don Mee Choi:

We know that resistance is not outside of power, don’t we? Every time a terrible incident happens, we who have grown to be adults know in our bodies that we can’t run from power, that power has no outside, don’t we? We have shamefully stayed alive, and, submerged in the sorrow of complicity, we weep and are enraged, aren’t we? Inside the terrible incidents, we speak and write adequately enough, not realising that each one of us has become Pontius Pilate. Despite all that, for me, poetry is a machine that doesn’t dissipate into history. For me, poetry is the machine that has to stand up infinitely, within the hours that fracture infinitely.

‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ are both poems that stand up infinitely within the infinitely fracturing hours. They were published in Russian in 2015 as a single collection called Spolia. ‘Spolia’ is the Latin word for ‘spoils’, as in ‘the spoils of war’. The term was introduced at the turn of the 16th century to describe the ancient marble ornaments and dressed stone embedded in medieval settings. It enfolds the principle and theme of Maria Stepanova’s long works: that language and culture are translated and transported as fragments and re-used in new settings and to new ends. So fragments of classical poetry, prose, war films, soldiers’ songs are prominent in these densely populated and highly allusive poems. All these fragments, when placed side by side, illuminate the development of a culture and mythology, by emphasising the motley nature of language.

We might consider the two poems as a pair, united in form, tone and shape, but considering nation and identity in different ways. When I asked Maria about the pairing of the poems she replied that they were war and peace, with ‘Spolia’ representing peace. ‘Spolia,’ she continued, ‘is the attempt to love a country, despite everything, because someone has to, because what are we without love?’

‘Spolia’ binds the subjectivity of a woman, a poet, a country and a history into a single richly metaphorical bundle. It opens with a list of criticisms which might pass as the sort levelled at a woman poet – careful, unadventurous, lacking ambition and ego:

she’s the sort who once made a good Soviet translator

The meditation on lack of ego and ‘I’ following from this opening appears to refer to the poet forever going through the motions without a sense of grounded identity, the criticism ballooning into the surreal: anyone-without-an-I will wander, pretending to be ‘a jar of mayonnaise’ or a cat. The criticism levelled at this subject is that she has no sense of self, therefore no originality, no authentic voice. Because there is an emptiness at the heart of her, she loves ‘embedding quotes’, incorporating the voices and narratives of others.

‘Spolia’ is certainly rich with embedded quotes, they jut from the poem’s wall like classical marble ornaments: Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, the Russian Silver Age poet Mikhail Kuzmin, Osip Mandelstam, Rilke – usually subtly altered or edited. Because the poem highlights texture and poetic process, I have left some in place in translation, and replaced others with similar English-language quotes the reader may or may not recognise, or that leave a nagging sensation of familiarity.

As the poem progresses, the opening motif of a single female poetic consciousness is bodied forth and amplified to become the consciousness of a poetic culture, from Pushkin to the contemporary women poets Polina Barskova and Anna Glazova; in nursery rhymes, ballads, translations (of Goethe’s ‘Erlkönig’, for example) and riffs on style and preoccupation. But ‘Spolia’ also embodies the female consciousness of a nation, Russia (‘Russia’ is a feminine proper noun in Russian). When the poem rounds to its close with a passage that parallels the original criticisms levelled at the individual poet, the same criticisms are now levelled at a country:

she simply isn’t able to speak for herself

so she is always ruled by others

because her history repeats and repeats itself

takes on ersatz and out of date forms

But this poem is a paean to place, however unlovable that place makes itself. The poem paints a series of stylised pictures of 20th-century Soviet Russia, much in the manner of the Soviet Metro station iconography, itself described in the poem: ‘milk white enamel girls / in gilded kazakh skull caps’. Tiny filmic moments, the war and the postwar period, the seventies, with women in headscarves, motorbikes racing along Soviet roads, and the bread cooling on racks in shops. A long sequence, interspersed with camera shutter clicks, mimics the act of gazing at a family album of the 20th century:

brooch at her throat, hair gathered in a bun

my grandmother (only a little older than me)

feeding a squirrel in a park on the outskirts of moscow

lonely soldier drinking mineral with syrup

school uniform, fitting room, apron-winged, unhemmed

‘Spolia’ has a number of striking parallels with Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (2017; Fitzcarraldo, 2021), a prose work which examines the nature of memory and archive and their role in our survival, as well as documenting Maria’s own family history. In places the two texts overlap and inform one another: In Memory of Memory circles around the historical family photo album, those defining images of the past which are as elusive as they are apparent and manifest. The images in ‘Spolia’ are recognisably the same people: grandparents in army uniform and in evacuation; great grandparents outside institutions for early revolutionaries; celebrations at the end of the war.

This is a Russia that is unloved, unhappy, scattered by war, decentred – and yet strangely beautiful and resilient, glowing with Tarkovskian light; loveable and desirous in the ugly-lyrical images that end the poem.

‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ uses the same structural and compositional techniques as ‘Spolia’ but to quite a different end and effect. It is loosely chronological although it circles and repeats, binding together different wars and histories into a single narrative which opens with the Russian revolution and Civil War, the first incidence of a Soviet myth of war and sacrifice. There are hints and scraps of ballads and films of the Russian Civil War, such as the following short section which describes shorthand a famous civil war battle scene in an early Soviet film (‘Chapaev’):

from the river the bayonets glittered

glimpses of white sleeve

volunteer walking at volunteer

cigarette in the death-grip of teeth

human waves

drum bangs

machine gun strafes

camera pans

The poem also reaches back into Russian history to include several tiny episodes from a beautiful medieval text, ‘The Tale of Igor’s campaign’, the story of an unsuccessful military campaign with many exquisitely lyrical portents of doom:

voices raised in lament

which once were full of joy

‘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.

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