Sebald simply removes the “boring/not-boring” gauge from the dashboard and honestly recollects everyone he is capable of reaching—in the mode of a common cause. His grief and his passion reside in the fact that all the component parts of the created world deserve recollection and re-understanding—and he works himself off his feet, attempting to utter a word (a picture, a quote, a hint) for each one of those who have lived.
This is one of the framing motifs in Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory, and Sebald’s example looms large in her novel. But perhaps the most succinct and important early introduction to the novel is her essay “Over Venerable Graves.” Its title alludes to a line from Pushkin’s poem “When lost in thought I wander beyond the town.” The “venerable graves” of that poem are ancestral graves in a village, which lack pompous decorations and inscriptions. What such graves evoke in our minds is a sense of private, inconspicuous existence as the foundation of the world:
Our natural inclination to look at history as an exhibit of accomplishments (or a sequence of traumas) is suddenly pushed out by other kinds of histories. Cooking pots, bedsheets, irons, porcelain, faience, diapers, baby powder, hollow gold rings, underskirts, postcards from the city of Gorky, a Niva edition of Chekhov, sleds, a Napoleon cake, union fees, ring four times, theater clutch bags, two-kopeck coins, quarter-kopeck coins, a monthly pass (September), a vocabulary notebook, a butter dish, a mimosa, a ticket to the Moscow Art Theater. Over each grave, like a post, like a beam, there is an invisible (maybe glowing, maybe devoid of any color or weight) mass of what has been. It reaches as high, it seems to me, as the sky, and indeed the sky rests on it.
It is remarkable how Stepanova’s vision in “Over Venerable Graves” resonates with her early poem “A Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a Russki,” that opens this volume. In it, “unforeseen ancestors” come to invade the poet’s space (or mind), demanding recognition and acceptance. Ancestors or not, these people seek the poet out because they want to be remembered, and a “plaintive bead” made of crystal that hangs around the speaker’s neck (evoking a “crystal voice”) explains the choice of this unruly crowd. Over the span of two decades and across dramatic transformations of poetics, one aspect of the pragmatics of Stepanova’s speech keeps coming back like a pendulum. It has to do with an archaic notion of poetry as speaking on behalf of multitudes—yet it appears ever more modern with every return.
NOTES
* This and subsequent quotations come from the present edition.
1. Dmitry Kuzmin, “The Vavilon Project and Women’s Voices Among the Young Literary Generation,” in An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets, ed. Valentina Polukhina and Daniel Weissbort (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 211.
2. Cynthia Haven, “Mad Russia Hurt Me Into Poetry: An Interview with Maria Stepanova,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 15, 2017, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mad-russia-hurt-me-into-poetry-an-interview-with-maria-stepanova/.
3. Haven, “Mad Russia Hurt Me Into Poetry.”
4. Cf. in Horace: “The transformation begins: rough skin forms / on my legs, and I am turning into a white bird / above, smooth feathers growing / through my arms and fingertips.” Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry: An Anthology of New Translations, ed. Diane J. Rayor and William W. Batstone (New York: Garland, 1995), 149.
5. Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry, 149.
6. Haven, “Mad Russia Hurt Me Into Poetry.”
7. The two poems I specifically mean here have not been translated (and they would present significant difficulty for translation): “Zhenskoe. Babskoe. Iz-pod-sarafannoe” and “Bylo, ne ostalosia nichego podobnogo.”
8. Ilya Kukulin, “Narrative Poetry,” in Russian Literature Since 1991, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 252.
9. Kukulin, “Narrative Poetry,” 253.
10. Kukulin, “Narrative Poetry,” 251.
11. Haven, “Mad Russia Hurt Me Into Poetry.”
I
The Here-World
Poems from books and cycles
On Twins (2001)
The Here-World (2001)
Songs of the Northern Southerners (2001)
Happiness (2003)
Physiology and Private History (2005)
O (2006)
from On Twins
A Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a Russki,
All crowded round the festive table.
A plaintive bead hangs round my neck,
From the mountains, throat, some crystal.
Unforeseen ancestors descend to play,
Crash, like multi-stories, on the saucer.
They swarm about your elbows like mosquitoes,
And mere grandmas can’t push through to me.
On the balcony with hand and heel
To shove and push against these flying crowds—
Let them hide and seek with someone else,
Don’t sing to me, don’t flock into dark clouds!
Breed or blood won’t drown us, though, like kittens,
—they’ll have their fun as long as suits their fancy.
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.
Translated by Sibelan Forrester, Amelia Glaser, Martha Kelly, Ainsley Morse, and Michael Wachtel*
—
* This translation was undertaken collectively, and with Stepanova’s participation, as part of the AATSEEL 2019 Translation Workshop.
The North of sleep. Head’s in a pillow cradle,
And feet and toes are all pointing south.
And I fly like a cabin boy on a cable,
Spinning like a mace in battle’s wrath.
Some time you will see me too in your dreams
As a map smoothly laid out flat.
Two polar explorers there, one tent,
One hardtack biscuit and the post that’s last.
No, if in your dream (some bedroom) I’d appear
It will be as a magnitude unrecompensed:
On the cheekbone—a permafrosted tear,
Which, like a lamp, will light dispense.
Translated by Andrew Reynolds
from The Here-World
Adieu, until one branched floor higher,
One flight up fir tree under windowsill,
Where a bird darts like an adder,
Beneath the heavens, as before an icon wall.
It flits and flutters in my pupils,
And I, bespectacled monkey from the fable,*
Eyes for necessary vision framed,
Do not get off scot-free.
On an empty windowsill.
Like Moses before the bush, so still.
In a light of a particular composition.
I could have become a bird, but didn’t.