The Voice Over

2.  Cynthia Haven, “Mad Russia Hurt Me Into Poetry: An Interview with Maria Stepanova,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 15, 2017, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mad-russia-hurt-me-into-poetry-an-interview-with-maria-stepanova/.

3.  Haven, “Mad Russia Hurt Me Into Poetry.”

4.  Cf. in Horace: “The transformation begins: rough skin forms / on my legs, and I am turning into a white bird / above, smooth feathers growing / through my arms and fingertips.” Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry: An Anthology of New Translations, ed. Diane J. Rayor and William W. Batstone (New York: Garland, 1995), 149.

5.  Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry, 149.

6.  Haven, “Mad Russia Hurt Me Into Poetry.”

7.  The two poems I specifically mean here have not been translated (and they would present significant difficulty for translation): “Zhenskoe. Babskoe. Iz-pod-sarafannoe” and “Bylo, ne ostalosia nichego podobnogo.”

8.  Ilya Kukulin, “Narrative Poetry,” in Russian Literature Since 1991, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 252.

9.  Kukulin, “Narrative Poetry,” 253.

10.  Kukulin, “Narrative Poetry,” 251.

11.  Haven, “Mad Russia Hurt Me Into Poetry.”

I

The Here-World

Poems from books and cycles

On Twins (2001)

The Here-World (2001)

Songs of the Northern Southerners (2001)

Happiness (2003)

Physiology and Private History (2005)

O (2006)

from On Twins

A Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a Russki,

All crowded round the festive table.

A plaintive bead hangs round my neck,

From the mountains, throat, some crystal.

Unforeseen ancestors descend to play,

Crash, like multi-stories, on the saucer.

They swarm about your elbows like mosquitoes,

And mere grandmas can’t push through to me.

On the balcony with hand and heel

To shove and push against these flying crowds—

Let them hide and seek with someone else,

Don’t sing to me, don’t flock into dark clouds!

Breed or blood won’t drown us, though, like kittens,

—they’ll have their fun as long as suits their fancy.

Our Lyubka, led to market, gets stripped down:

There, sizing up her muscles, gropes the muse,

Assessing us, deciding which to ride.

And every single birthday is a duel.

Translated by Sibelan Forrester, Amelia Glaser, Martha Kelly, Ainsley Morse, and Michael Wachtel^*

—

^* This translation was undertaken collectively, and with Stepanova’s participation, as part of the AATSEEL 2019 Translation Workshop.

The North of sleep. Head’s in a pillow cradle,

And feet and toes are all pointing south.

And I fly like a cabin boy on a cable,

Spinning like a mace in battle’s wrath.

Some time you will see me too in your dreams

As a map smoothly laid out flat.

Two polar explorers there, one tent,

One hardtack biscuit and the post that’s last.

No, if in your dream (some bedroom) I’d appear

It will be as a magnitude unrecompensed:

On the cheekbone—a permafrosted tear,

Which, like a lamp, will light dispense.

Translated by Andrew Reynolds

from The Here-World

Adieu, until one branched floor higher,

One flight up fir tree under windowsill,

Where a bird darts like an adder,

Beneath the heavens, as before an icon wall.

It flits and flutters in my pupils,

And I, bespectacled monkey from the fable,^*

Eyes for necessary vision framed,

Do not get off scot-free.

On an empty windowsill.

Like Moses before the bush, so still.

In a light of a particular composition.

I could have become a bird, but didn’t.

Translated by Andrew Reynolds

—

^* An allusion to Ivan Krylov’s fable “The Monkey and the Spectacles” (1815), in which the protagonist (the monkey) acquires glasses but is unable to figure out how to properly use them for improving its vision.

Ahoy! Beyond the azure’s tempest,

Of excess stars bereft—

Glides non-dark side, the independent

Eye of heavenly nests.

Looking down, she throws light shades

Above the paper sheets.

We cultivate darkling beneath her sway

A face’s eyes.

And then we our breasts display

For others’ eyes and thrills.

Then, under a candle, as on a plate,

Are buzzing with our quills.

Then we ascend with silent steps

The steamboat, in full stride.

… and after palms have splashed with claps

Of ebb and flow of tide,

And having wolf-howled at this darling,

Roaming with dealers in kills,

And having bayed with hounds a-lapping

Her from puddles bright as rills,

I give her up, don’t give a toss,

(Sound the all-clear, Trumpet, do!)

For an hour in a moonless fosse

With you, with you.

Translated by Andrew Reynolds

For you, but the voice of the straitened Muse

Isn’t right for an ear without ears,

Nor for an ear the size of heaven’s sphere,

Nor for a body that’s not in use.

So, black earth must have a dweller.

So here’s black earth, but where’s she who dwelt there?

And there’s the air—it swirls as you,

And you calm the air down too.

Recognize, if nothing else, the seeing

That is stitching together the book’s cover,