The Voice Over

In unbounded O, like a window’s wide hole,

Two together home.

Translated by Zachary Murphy King

II

Displaced Person

Poems from books

The Lyric, the Voice (2010)

Kireevsky (2012)

Essays

In Unheard-of Simplicity (2010)

Displaced Person (2012)

from The Lyric, the Voice

And a vo-vo-voice arose

To make verbs roll.

Amid commercial roses

Fine weather to ring a bell.

The drought is over,

Now it’s Easter day,

Tenderness and tenterhooks

Run along the vertebrae.

Little sleep,

But spring has sprung,

All of the bird-cherry’s teeth are white fangs,

And the sky-womb’s opened out,

Murky-tender like smoked trout.

At thirty years old

I was not very old.

At thirty-three

’Twere a babe inside me.

At thirty-five

Time came back alive.

Now I am thirty-six

Time to eat myself up quick.

Scoop out my head

With a big pewter spoon,

So new beer can be poured in

And topped off after settling,

So that she not, like the olive tree,

Spend the winter blue and empty,

So that in my pupil, like sunshine in a boot,

At least kitschy icons will stand resolute,

Many-colored,

Not like the others.

Translated by Amelia Glaser and Ainsley Morse

In the festive sky, impassivable, tinfurled,

In the burning, immemoriable, tinfouled,

See the ladder neatly leaned against the clouds,

Trodden over top to bottom by the words.

One of them is mincing steps,

And another wails and weeps,

And mine just hangs and swings there on the bar and barely grips.

Barely mumbles,

Nearly tumbles.

Friends will crowd around excited, asking questions,

At the same time breathless, speechless and tempestuous,

Quacky and screechy:

What’s up? Whaddija see?

Back at them, as from a tongueless bell, comes almost losing

Any semblance: from the fifth bar up—oh boy, what mmoooosic!

Translated by Dmitry Manin

Saturday and Sunday burn like stars.

Elder trees foam and fizz.

By the railroad crossing’s striped bars

A communal wall hovers.

Past it are slabs, like canvases, dank in the dark,

And the moon cherry,

And tiny tightly-packed crosses, a darned

Sock or a cross-stitch embroidery.

Yellow dogs pass here at an easy trot,

And grandmas come to comb the sand,

Giant women grind their temples into the rock

Wailing and thrashing to no end.

But these are times, indistinguishable like stumps,

Like my pair of knees:

At the sun one stares, in the shade the other one slumps,

Both are dust and ashes.

But these are nights when the nettle-folk stands guard

Among the pickets here,

And the gentle May enters its peaceful orchard

Raining a tear.

And between hand and hand, between day and night

There is inhumane, brightly burning, eternal

Quiet.

Translated by Dmitry Manin

In every little park, in every little square,

Lovely people go about their lovely tasks,

Girls stroll with strollers to give babies some air,

Buying little presents and kaolin facial masks.

Kaolin is only clay,

Somewhere for your corpse to lay,

Mortal cells, your bread and doom,

A collective cozy tomb.

By the pond, with their laptops, the skypers

Are cutting a pretty figure.

On the high Moscow rooftops, the snipers

Let their fingers dance on the trigger.

The augoors of inaugooration

Walkie-talk their way to elation;

On the streets, the city’s protesters

Are brought down by their own posters.

Waaa! Goo! Shush, baby, please.

Moscow’s still there, no need to howl.

Igor’s Yaroslavna is crying like an owl.^*

I’ll go get some cottage cheese.

The selection of cheeses today is wide,

As if the city had eaten its fill and died.

Translated by Alexandra Berlina

—

^* An allusion to an episode from a twelfth-century Russian epic, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, in which Yaroslavna laments the defeat of her husband Prince Igor’s retinue.

from Kireevsky

from the cycle

YOUNG MAIDS SING

TRANSLATED BY EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY

Translator’s Note

Language is history. Maria Stepanova is a poet for whom that is the case. Her cycle Dèvushki poiùt, or Young Women Are Singing, which revisits the traumas of the Stalinist period and especially of World War II, is also historicist in its vocabulary, phraseology, and even versification. The poems of the cycle are ballads, palpably descended from the Russian adaptations of German Romantic horror ballads, but with a great dose of late Mandelstam infecting the diction, and with the emotional gestures that evoke stylizations of labor camp songs by 1960s folk singers. Stepanova amps up the disjunctions characteristic of the ballad form until they turn into the disjunctions of modern experimental poetry. We are the child taken for a ride in the forest, and we also know who the Erlkönig is.