The Voice Over

The language of history is not a universal language at all. How do you translate it? How do you translate what the reader of the original—different child taken for the same ride—is supposed to pick up from inflections, innuendos, and incomplete gestures? How do you translate the meaning that inheres in the half-said, when the intended reading depends on shared historical experience that the reader of the translation will most certainly lack? I was grasping for straws, and my main straw in the particular instance of drowning that translating Stepanova’s poems was for me, became the classical Chinese literary ballad such as Du Fu’s “Song of the War Carts,” and in general I was remembering English-language translations of T’ang dynasty poetry: poetry whose formal concentration, citationality both erudite and pop, and constant sense of unsaid political and war trauma make it so kin to Russian poetry of the twentieth century.

This is why I called my selections from the cycle Young Maids Sing (I also toyed with Young Maid Sing). This is also why of the several experimental versions I did of “Mat’-otèts ne uznàli” (“Mom-pop didn’t know him”), I kept the one whose five-syllable lines allude to a T’ang meter, even though the Russian original alternates double and triple anapests. This is why my other, metrically sloppier translations still gesture—both rhythmically and in their discontinuities—at the kind of alienation that the pentasyllabic line can produce in English, for which the decasyllable is a far more natural meter. If I could not make an adequate translation of the original, I could at least make an adequate translation of the violence and alienation of its language of trauma. This is also why I happily translated Stepanova’s rewriting of pop songs, especially the poem whose understanding depends on knowing the lyrics of “Katyusha,” which gave its name to the Soviet transportable rocket launchers of World War II.

Unfortunately, the tortured Latinate syntax of Russian poetry, and of Stepanova’s poetry in particular, is really nothing like the straightforward syntax of classical Chinese verse. Although what I really wanted was to get rid of all the subordination of clauses, I failed at the task, but I do hope to liberate all clauses next time.

Mom-pop didn’t know him

Young wife didn’t know him

Colonel came back from

Below black blue ice

Victory vodka

The upright counts time

He went in winter

Left circles behind

Lights on in housing

A blank tenant book

In the deaf open

The dead falling in

All fire and smoke where

I passed and came out

Lentils on boil there

Blind root in the pot

No ship comes to dock

Whistle runs aground

Still the signaler

The kernel won’t sprout

Hole in my belly

Ice water within

Many tank turrets

Tear nets in the spring

I pumped up the spare

Burned papers, crushed coals

My housing permit

Here, let me go home

Safe conducts speechless

Lie sunk deep in ice

I will not know how

His wife doesn’t know him

Mama, what janitor

Lives in the basement

Can’t recollect

His scattering name

Now seldom that damned man

Comes out on burning ice

Shuffles the iron spade

Scrapes with the bright broom

When at dawn I get dressed

Come out for work

When at dusk get undressed

Stick pumps in the dresser

In that basement womb

Daylight or nightlight

He lies around like a bedspread

The abyss sets its sights on me

Child, how could we know

Our lost Alexei

Lies in the basement with no heating

Half-forgotten by people

And that you didn’t know him

For your groom and husband

It’s that life is a great hall

Where many souls take a stroll

And that they’re yellower than an orange

His non-Russian features

It too stands to reason

We too are not what once we were

We have grown old like tramcars

Ashen is your permanent

While he like a lava lamp

Glows alone in the basement

A train is riding over Russia

Along some great river

The passengers took off their shoes

The conductors don’t look sober

Slippery with grease and dreamy

Chicken thighs go sailing by

The faces of huddled humanity

Like trees in unsteady water

I walk in a state-owned throw

Through train cars full of people

And sing as earnestly

As a saved soul in paradise

It’s a dirty job, even dirtier

Than the bossman-conductor might deem

For a quality song in our business

Always rises up to a scream

Ladies gasp when with my naked larynx

Over the knee-jerk cursing of men

I sing of how poppies turn even more red

When the blood of our commander drips down on their head

My voice makes a hole in the comfort

Of the car like an out-of-nowhere shiv

Everyone starts feeling downcast

And takes turns beating me by the toilet

An honest song has such outrage in it

The heart cannot stomach the shame

The passengers keep their defenses up

Like a tear in the middle of a face

Ordnance was weeping in the open

For the hero’s open wound

There he lay, his breast thrown open halfway

In anticipation of the end

Battle-prattle rattled in the eardrums

Tattled, sent regrets for plodding hammers

Female installation the Katyusha

Fed with kasha the whole panorama