The Voice Over

takes on ersatz and out of date date forms

and there is no knowing where her quotes are from

nineteen thirty or nineteen seventy

they’re all in there  pell-mell  all at once

not to remind us, you understand, just to plug the holes

(appalling really)

her raw material

her diamonds her dust tracks her dirt-coloured trailers

ancient forests mountain ranges

snow leopards desert roses gas flow

needed for global trade arrangements

her raw material doesn’t want to do business with her

gives itself up without love will do as she wants

unclear what she needs

where’s your I, where is it hidden?

why do strangers speak for you

or are you speaking

in the voices of scolds and cowards

get out of yourself

put that dictionary back on the shelf

she won’t come out

it won’t come right

look how ferry fleet she is

see her wings in aeroplansion

woolscouring steelbeating pasteurizing

thousand-eyed thousand-bricked civic expansion

weavers singing at their non-functioning looms

voluntary wine-drinking zones

supre (forgive my french) matists striding forth

junckerlords kalashnikovs

bolshoiballet dancing out from behind the fire curtain

the fenced-in ghost of a murdered orchard

this[fucking]country

paradise sleeping in hell’s embrace

——

let her stay like that, in bloom

I’ll take my stand here

with the brief falling petals

with the night sentry

prostitutes pale shadows

under the shadows of trees on the arterial road

blinded by headlamps

approach the cars

careful like deer to the feeder

wagon-restaurant  plastic flowers

menu in gilded letters on leatherette

waitress with bitemarks on her neck

anyone who speaks as I can’t yet speak

dust storm at the railway halt

where on another day we could have lit up a cigarette

the expanse of fields, rain-moist and restless

a retired officer in a military coat

a truck driver in his lit cabin, now we can see

whether it’s high-walled like a palace’s eaves

and whether light will dispel darkness between two tiny towns.

place your hand on my I and I will give way to desire

June 2014

Translator’s Note to

War of the Beasts and the Animals

By Sasha Dugdale

Maria Stepanova wrote her epic poem War of the Beasts and the Animals in 2015, when the war in the Donbas region of Ukraine was at its height. Every line in this densely populated and highly allusive poem emerges from a consciousness of conflict and the martial culture and mythology that allows state-sponsored violence to happen. Stepanova traces the mythmaking culture of war from ballads and films of the Russian Civil War through the Second World War and into the twenty-first century, and Russia’s illegal and covert involvement in a war against Ukraine.

War of the Beasts and the Animals is impossible to translate in a superficially “faithful” way; the language is so much a captive of the surrounding culture: folk refrains jostle for space against psalms, Silver Age Russian poetry, the Old Russian epic The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, pop ballads, phrases from popular culture, Paul Celan, T. S. Eliot—the list is endless. Many of these allusions are simply not accessible to a non-Russian audience and the challenge in translating this extraordinary poem was to find strategies to deal with this super-charged and highly specific “modernism.”

Maria and I worked on this translation together during her residency at The Queen’s College in Oxford in 2017, and I used her extensive notes and comments to guide me through. Often, where I felt an image wouldn’t work in translation, I could return to Maria’s notes on her intended effect and choose a slightly different image, or extend the image in some way. Maria also gave me the freedom to use images with a currency in the UK, and as both Russia and Britain suffer from martial and imperial mythmaking, this gave me great satisfaction. Lines from Kipling found their way into the poem, for example, and a pre-battle quote from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra replaced a line from a Russian poem about lovers on the eve of a battle.

In the end this text is a triangulation rather than a translation. It is the result of a dance between the original poem, Maria, and me, and it has at its heart the Russian poet Grigory Dashevsky’s concept of the existence of “a poem’s pre-textual body” from which we can both draw.

WAR OF THE BEASTS AND THE ANIMALS

TRANSLATED BY SASHA DUGDALE

look, the spirits have gathered at your bedside

speaking in lethean tongues

hush-a-bye, so flesh and fine,

for what do you long?

——

I smiled

he said, marusya,

marusya, hold on tight and down

we went

—

no vember

the cruellest month, the hoarsest mouth

driving from the dead clay

peasants forged to the field,

cows, curs, leaving over their dead body