War of the Beasts and the Animals

MARIA STEPANOVA

WAR OF THE BEASTS AND THE ANIMALS

Translated by Sasha Dugdale

War of the Beasts and the Animals is Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s first full collection in English translation. One of Russia’s most innovative and exciting poets and thinkers, Stepanova is founding editor of Colta.ru, an online independent site which has been compared to Huffington Post in its status and importance. Immensely high-profile in Russia, her reputation has lagged behind in the West, but with her prize-winning documentary novel In Memory of Memory published by Fitzcarraldo in 2021, along with her poetry from Bloodaxe, that is sure to change.

War of the Beasts and the Animals includes her recent long poems of conflict, ‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and Animals’, written during the Donbas conflict, as well as a third long poem, ‘The Body Returns’, commissioned by Hay International Festival in 2018 to commemorate the Centenary of the First World War. In all three long poems Stepanova’s assured and experimental use of form, her modernist appropriation of poetic texts from around the world and her constant consideration of the way that culture, memory and contemporary life are interwoven make her work both pleasurable and deeply necessary.

The book also includes two sequences of poems from her 2015 collection Kireevsky: sequences of ‘weird’ ballads and songs, subtly changed folk and popular songs and poems which combine historical lyricism and a contemporary understanding of the effects of conflict and trauma. Stepanova uses the ready forms of ballads and songs, but alters them, so they almost appear to be refracted in moonlit water. The forms seem recognisable, but the words are oddly fragmented and suggestive, they weave together well-known refrains of songs, apparently familiar images, subtle half-nods to films and music.

Front cover painting (detail):

The Flood (St 28 recto) (c. 1514) by Hieronymus Bosch

museum boijmans van beuningen, rotterdam. loan:

stichting museum boijmans van beuninge

CONTENTS

Title Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

 

from SPOLIA (2015)

 

Spolia

War of the Beasts and the Animals

 

from KIREEVSKY (2012)

 

from Girls, Singing

Young aeronauts, floating to land…

In the white white sky…

Mother and Father didn’t know him…

What is that sweeper, mother…

A train runs right across Russia…

Over the field the guns howled…

Empty featherbeds cooling…

Two classical athletes, Culture and Sport…

Running, running…

By the church’s black fence

 

Kireevsky

1. The light swells and pulses at the garden gate…

2. In the village, in the field, in the forest…

3. Tear tears along, chasing tear, and kicks it…

4. My lady neighbour drives out on black sables…

5. Where the dance was shaped in flame…

6. Chorus line, on our feet…

7. You my gifts, o my gifts…

8. Who guards our picket fences, our blooming hedges…

9. A deer, a deer stood in that place…

10. The last songs are assembling…

 

from Underground Pathephone

Stop, don’t look, come close,…

Don’t wait for us, my darling…

 

POEMS FROM EARLIER COLLECTIONS

Bus Stop: Israelitischer Friedhof

(as they must)

Fish

 

The Body Returns (2018)

The Body Returns

 

About the Author

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The original Russian texts used for this publication are published in Spolia (Новое издательство, 2015), Киреевский (Издательство Пушкинского фонда, 2012), Старый мир. Починка жизни (Новое издательство, 2019), Физиология и малая история (Прагматика культуры, 2005), and Счастье (Новое литературное обозрение, 2003).

Translations from this collection have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, Poetry London, and Little Star. ‘The Body Returns’ was written in response to a commission by the Hay International Festival in 2018. ‘(as they must)’ was published in The Best of Poetry London (Poetry London, 2014), ‘Bus Stop: Israelitischer Friedhof ’ was published in Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History (The Rewiring History project, 2014). Excerpts from ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ are published in Best American Experimental Writing 2020 (Wesleyan University Press, 2020).

Translator’s Foreword