The Voice Over

Besides the mismatch between the archaic genre frame of a ballad and the register and subject of the narration, the peculiarity of this and other ballads from Songs of the Northern Southerners rests on a bizarre amalgam of familiar patterns of everyday life and of fantastic elements, such as the Pilot’s celestial and earthly encounters with The Heavenly Daughter, “dressed every time as a Young Pioneer” (that is, as a member of the Soviet mass youth organization). His wife’s attempt at bridging these two worlds results in her killing a twelve-year-old girl wearing that uniform on a local bus.

The title of the book, Songs of the Northern Southerners, alludes to Alexander Pushkin’s cycle Songs of the Western Slavs (1834) and to the literary hoax that inspired it—Prosper Mérimée’s La Guzla (1827), a collection of pseudo-folk songs from South Slavic lands that Mérimée wrote as a mockery of the Romantic fascination with couleur locale. Unlike these works of her predecessors, Stepanova’s book locates “singers,” with their voices and stories, in a geographical limbo (“northern southerners”), emblematic of their fluid identity; their songs, however, are utterly “authentic” in conveying the singers’ insecurity about who they are and what space they inhabit. One may posit that the horror ballad is a form of cultural production in this space because of the experience of mental dislocation that unites its dwellers as they are trying to cope with the aftermath of trauma. It is thus the fantastic plane of the ballads that makes them, as Stepanova once said about a work of contemporary Russian fantasy, “an accurate ‘physiological sketch’ of Russian life, drawn from nature” (“Intending to Live”).

Stepanova’s poems from On Twins and The Here-World, in contrast to Songs, in most cases use a more conventional lyric voice, and their poetic utterance is centered on private space, in which love, death, creativity, and solitude are landmarks of experience. If anything, many of these poems echo the Romantic fragment, but their distinguishing poetic feature is intense experimentation with language, and their verbal and syntactic density, coupled with the regularity of meter and rhyme, make them particularly difficult to translate. Of the few poems translated for this volume, one stands out in its use of tradition: “For you, but the voice of the straitened Muse,” which is the final poem in The Here-World. Its opening line is almost identical to the first line of the “Dedication” that opens Pushkin’s historical narrative poem Poltava (1828), which lends Stepanova’s poem an aura of nineteenth-century Romantic verse. Her vocabulary, tone, and subject, however, progressively depart from her source. Stepanova’s poem is a dedication-turned-elegy, and, appearing at the end of the book, it renders the entire collection an epistle. This epistle cannot be read or heard by the deceased addressee, Stepanova’s mother, but it owes its hereworldly shape to the speaker’s impulse of seeing beyond and including there between its covers:

Recognize, if nothing else, the seeing

That is stitching together the book’s cover,

Leaping in lilacs like a swing

Into here-world—and there-.

While a few poems in this early corpus are programmatic at some level, “A Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a Russki” from On Twins touches on a theme that runs through Stepanova’s work (poetry and prose) including her novel In Memory of Memory: that of a bond with one’s kin—ancestry as predicating and informing her poetic gift. A grotesque image of ancestors that “crash, like multi-stories, on the saucer,” fighting over the poet, is juxtaposed with a contest of a different order, in which the poet’s fitness for her task is perpetually evaluated:

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.

The grotesque here becomes a voice for the sublime, and it is a variation on a pattern that has been one of the hallmarks of Stepanova’s poetic diction: a mismatch between the tone, the image, and the actual subject, allowing the reader to contemplate the peculiar effect of a simultaneity of transpositions into various keys that such poems produce.