War of the Beasts and the Animals

The war in Donbas was initiated by Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and its invasion of the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014. As I write (in 2020) the hostilities are more or less over, although the ceasefire is often broken. While the fact of covert Russian military engagement was widely accepted outside Russia, within Russia the war was presented as a conflict between local pro-Russian separatists and a fascist and US-supported Ukraine. Russian state propaganda is so powerful and entrenched that this view prevails in much of Russian society and it sets Russians entirely at odds with their Ukrainian neighbours, who see the war as a fight for Ukraine’s existence. The Russian government remained silent when lines of tanks moving towards Donbas were photographed or videoed, and even when young Russian soldiers were returned home in coffins. This silence was a terrible cruelty not least because it rendered those Russians who had suffered in the war voiceless. Of course, it also served to make the Ukrainian reality of national conflict, as well as large numbers of casualties and displaced peoples, a slippery thing, subject to international doubt, bias and false reporting. Language and truth have been sacrificed in this war, as they are in any war.

Over recent decades the Russian state has developed a cult of vital and enduring military strength which builds on Soviet martial myths. The distance between myth, shored up by intricate and incredible propaganda stories, and credible and researched truth grows ever wider, and as the words diverge from anything that might be called ‘truth’ so the language bends under the strain of its falsehoods. When Maria and I spoke about the impetus of the poems she noted that the language she had hitherto used for poetry had been deformed by power and untruth and it was no longer possible for her to write in the way she had always written – she described it as the ‘internal fragmentation of the language’. Her visual image for this was the classical language shattering, as if after an explosion, and all the splinters hanging in the air. ‘The only way’, she continued, ‘to resist this fragmentation is from the inside.’

This sense that resistance is only possible from the inside reminds me of the position of Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, who said in an interview published in Modern Poetry in Translation (Autumn 2016), translated by Don Mee Choi:

We know that resistance is not outside of power, don’t we? Every time a terrible incident happens, we who have grown to be adults know in our bodies that we can’t run from power, that power has no outside, don’t we? We have shamefully stayed alive, and, submerged in the sorrow of complicity, we weep and are enraged, aren’t we? Inside the terrible incidents, we speak and write adequately enough, not realising that each one of us has become Pontius Pilate. Despite all that, for me, poetry is a machine that doesn’t dissipate into history. For me, poetry is the machine that has to stand up infinitely, within the hours that fracture infinitely.

‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ are both poems that stand up infinitely within the infinitely fracturing hours. They were published in Russian in 2015 as a single collection called Spolia. ‘Spolia’ is the Latin word for ‘spoils’, as in ‘the spoils of war’. The term was introduced at the turn of the 16th century to describe the ancient marble ornaments and dressed stone embedded in medieval settings. It enfolds the principle and theme of Maria Stepanova’s long works: that language and culture are translated and transported as fragments and re-used in new settings and to new ends. So fragments of classical poetry, prose, war films, soldiers’ songs are prominent in these densely populated and highly allusive poems. All these fragments, when placed side by side, illuminate the development of a culture and mythology, by emphasising the motley nature of language.

We might consider the two poems as a pair, united in form, tone and shape, but considering nation and identity in different ways. When I asked Maria about the pairing of the poems she replied that they were war and peace, with ‘Spolia’ representing peace. ‘Spolia,’ she continued, ‘is the attempt to love a country, despite everything, because someone has to, because what are we without love?’

‘Spolia’ binds the subjectivity of a woman, a poet, a country and a history into a single richly metaphorical bundle. It opens with a list of criticisms which might pass as the sort levelled at a woman poet – careful, unadventurous, lacking ambition and ego:

she’s the sort who once made a good Soviet translator