The Maximum Cost of Living (Marina Tsvetaeva)
Conversations in the Realm of the Dead (Lyubov Shaporina)
What Alice Found There (Alisa Poret)
The Last Hero (Susan Sontag)
From That Side: Notes on Sebald
Over Venerable Graves
Notes
PREFACE
BY IRINA SHEVELENKO
Maria Stepanova (b. 1972) is one of the most original and complex poets on the literary scene in Russia today. She has published ten books of poetry, the last of which came out in Moscow at the end of 2019. Two volumes of her collected poems, which together represent the corpus of her work from 1995 to 2015, appeared in 2010 and 2017. She is the recipient of a number of Russian and international poetry awards. During the 2010s, Stepanova also earned recognition for her work in a genre that does not have a stable tradition in Russian literature—that of the essay. She is virtually the only Russian author of comparable caliber in her generation who has worked consistently to reestablish the essay as an important form of creative discourse—a work of art and an intellectual statement—that addresses topics ranging from the contemporary political climate to the work of famous and lesser-known authors of the past, from current literary politics to metapoetical reflections. Three collections of her essays came out between 2014 and 2019. In 2017, Stepanova published a novel entitled In Memory of Memory (Pamiati pamiati), which received three Russian literary awards, including the first prize of the highly prestigious Bolshaya Kniga (Great Book) award. This novel blends memoir, letters from Stepanova’s family archive, essays, and documentary novellas centered on various figures of the past to create an epic narrative in which the task of recounting a “private history” of the author’s family over the course of the twentieth century coalesces with a critical inquiry into practices of remembrance and of narrating memory. An extraordinary achievement in a new form, this novel is at the same time deeply grounded in Stepanova’s work as a poet and essayist. Translations of this novel into several languages have already appeared and more are expected, including the English translation forthcoming from New Directions in the United States and Fitzcarraldo in the UK in early 2021. At this juncture, bringing a broader array of Stepanova’s writings to an international audience is all the more important.
STRUCTURE OF THE VOLUME
This volume offers a systematic introduction to Stepanova’s work for the Anglophone reader: it includes a representative selection of poems and essays from a period of twenty years, 1996–2016. A bibliographic note on Stepanova’s Russian publications from which this volume draws follows the preface.
The first three parts of this volume are organized chronologically, giving the reader an opportunity to follow the principal transformations in Stepanova’s poetic practice. Small selections from several early poetry collections that comprise part I provide insight into the author’s engagement with a series of lyric idioms. More recent collections are represented by substantially broader selections, with about half of the poems from Kireevsky (2012) included in part II, and with complete translations, in part III, of two longer works, Spolia and War of the Beasts and the Animals, which compose Stepanova’s book Spolia (2015). Parts II and III also include essays that share common themes with poetry—the author’s reflections on the politics of writing and on the situation of a writer confronting the political atmosphere of the 2010s in and outside Russia. Part IV consists of essays in which Stepanova’s engagement with other authors’ works and ideas intertwines with reflections on the ethics and pragmatics of writing in general.
The introduction to the volume offers an interpretative survey of Stepanova’s work set against the background of cultural and political conditions of the post-Soviet period. Drawing on translations included in this volume, it situates them within the body of the author’s work and connects them, where appropriate, to other works by Stepanova, particularly to her novel In Memory of Memory.
The author provided significant input on the composition and structure of this volume. Poetry translators chose individual poems from a list compiled by the editor or made their own selections from suggested collections and cycles. Both the editor and the author reviewed drafts of poetry translations, most of which went through several rounds of revisions. The editor read drafts of essay translations, suggested revisions, and closely collaborated with translators throughout the revision process. Near-final versions of essay translations were then reviewed by the author.
Unless stated otherwise, notes to poems and essays were added by the editor, including bibliographic citations for passages quoted in essays; these citations are not part of the original Russian text.
NOTE ON POETRY TRANSLATIONS
Translators of Stepanova’s poetry face many challenges, some of which are common for translations of Russian experimental poetry into English in general. Metric organization, rhythmic expressiveness, and rhyme remain key elements of poetic form in much of contemporary Russian poetry, particularly in Stepanova’s poetry. Some of these prosodic patterns are not necessarily associated with contemporary poetic idioms for an Anglophone reader, yet their complete obliteration in translation would change the essence of many poems. Stepanova’s complex syntax, lexical and morphological inventions, and disjointed diction complement prosodic challenges, as does the high degree of allusiveness of her works.
Among the short poems included in parts I and II, only a small number are not rhymed in the originaclass="underline" all the poems from Happiness, the first part of “July 3rd, 2004” from Physiology and Private History, poems from the second cycle in Kireevsky, and the first three poems from the Four Operas cycle (the second of them is partially rhymed, however). Whether rhymed or not, the vast majority of poems are metric (syllabotonic or accentual), though often consisting of polymetric segments; only a few clearly gravitate toward free verse, such as the last two poems from Happiness and the third poem in Four Operas. In part III, Spolia and War of the Beasts and the Animals combine free verse and polymetric sections, both rhymed and unrhymed.
One aspect of prosody that most translators tried to retain was the rhythmic contour of poems. In some cases, the meter of the original was reproduced with a great degree of precision; in others it was relaxed or slightly modified. Rhymes were preserved with substantial accuracy in some translations, but in the majority of them rhyming is less systematic to allow for greater semantic proximity to the original and to avoid an impression of forced rhymes. Among translations of metric rhymed poems, prosodic qualities of the original are most closely conveyed in “The Pilot,” the second part of “July 3rd, 2004,” in poems from The Lyric, the Voice and from the cycle Underground Pathephone in Kireevsky.
Eugene Ostashevsky’s translations from the first cycle of Kireevsky constitute an exception to this general approach of rhythmic faithfulness; thus, a note addressing his choices as translator opens the cycle. Sasha Dugdale’s note to her translation of War of the Beasts and the Animals explains in particular how she handled the high degree of allusiveness of this text; this note could apply equally well to her translation of Spolia.