place your hand on my I and I will give way to desire
June 2014
Translator’s Note to
War of the Beasts and the Animals
By Sasha Dugdale
Maria Stepanova wrote her epic poem War of the Beasts and the Animals in 2015, when the war in the Donbas region of Ukraine was at its height. Every line in this densely populated and highly allusive poem emerges from a consciousness of conflict and the martial culture and mythology that allows state-sponsored violence to happen. Stepanova traces the mythmaking culture of war from ballads and films of the Russian Civil War through the Second World War and into the twenty-first century, and Russia’s illegal and covert involvement in a war against Ukraine.
War of the Beasts and the Animals is impossible to translate in a superficially “faithful” way; the language is so much a captive of the surrounding culture: folk refrains jostle for space against psalms, Silver Age Russian poetry, the Old Russian epic The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, pop ballads, phrases from popular culture, Paul Celan, T. S. Eliot—the list is endless. Many of these allusions are simply not accessible to a non-Russian audience and the challenge in translating this extraordinary poem was to find strategies to deal with this super-charged and highly specific “modernism.”
Maria and I worked on this translation together during her residency at The Queen’s College in Oxford in 2017, and I used her extensive notes and comments to guide me through. Often, where I felt an image wouldn’t work in translation, I could return to Maria’s notes on her intended effect and choose a slightly different image, or extend the image in some way. Maria also gave me the freedom to use images with a currency in the UK, and as both Russia and Britain suffer from martial and imperial mythmaking, this gave me great satisfaction. Lines from Kipling found their way into the poem, for example, and a pre-battle quote from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra replaced a line from a Russian poem about lovers on the eve of a battle.
In the end this text is a triangulation rather than a translation. It is the result of a dance between the original poem, Maria, and me, and it has at its heart the Russian poet Grigory Dashevsky’s concept of the existence of “a poem’s pre-textual body” from which we can both draw.
WAR OF THE BEASTS AND THE ANIMALS
TRANSLATED BY SASHA DUGDALE
look, the spirits have gathered at your bedside
speaking in lethean tongues
hush-a-bye, so flesh and fine,
for what do you long?
——
I smiled
he said, marusya,
marusya, hold on tight and down
we went
—
no vember
the cruellest month, the hoarsest mouth
driving from the dead clay
peasants forged to the field,
cows, curs, leaving over their dead body
the postbag snagged in the stream
the tin spoon
the quick streams slipping the quicksilver
slip sliding away to the estuary
this little piggy went to market
and this little piggy froze to death
and the landowner put a gun to his head
and a black car came for the officer
the greek in odessa, the jew in warsaw
the callow young cavalryman
the soviet schoolboy
gastello the pilot
and all those who died in this land
out of the murky pool, the surface still warmed by the sun
in a night in may, steps rus al ka and quickly begins her work
throws her wet clothes from her tramples with her wet feet
her black body shines her white smock cast
mother, mother is that you? alyosha I don’t rightly know
o swallow, swallow, is it her? she flew away, my friend
——
such high-minded intercourse
topples and must fall at last
a plague a’ both your
(ivy-clad turret, waterside folly)
masha learns on breakfast tv
’er petticoat was yaller an’ ’er little cap was green
till apples grow on an orange tree
breaches of password security
if I were drowned in the deepest sea
thus sung the maid down in the valley
russian actor mikhail porechenkov
fingers his warm little rifle
like the latest novelty musical box
like he’s desperate
to grow his own golden fleece
and the narrow water’s already round his knees
svyatoslav in kiev did hear the ringing of that knell
and tom thumb
bid them listen
who were of the lands of surozh and korsun:
black night brings long strings
foot-foot-foot-foot slogging
all the millers-of-god
hi ho hi ho and off they go
to civil war
——
lay to the left
a general touched his side
over the marxist’s chest
the liberal’s curls spread wide
o your goldenes haar
and a pair of blue eyes
few words spoken
feel free to surmise
thou art the armorer of the heart
sing me a ditty, something from rossini
rosina, perhaps, like on radio rossiya
——
as in a chariot race
the chosen one, glistening like quartz
in his roaring metal carapace
whips this way along the course
but the chariot is cleverer
throwing up stones
crashes the barrier
and crushes
the marrow from bones,
so, setting out rooks and queen
in their checkered chambers
culture leads fear
down the gauntlet of human nature,
stinking of laurel wreaths
steeped in a boiling pan,
to where there’s a lively trade
in the living unit of man
sing to me of how, on an ancient alley on your family’s estate,
the weathered bones lay bleached and scattered
under a birch tree; quietly they chattered:
there was no point to us, we didn’t lend each other our hands
like babes we lay in the nursery in our swaddling bands
——
I can just imagine coming under him
says one, and I can hear everything
and the other is speaking, speaking
fruits of the curbside reads the jar label
from whatever takes root in the stony rubbish
embers, sawdust, scorched wood
suspended in sweet amber sugar
cockerel-shaped lollies for the day of the dead.
when I’m off to market, or when I’m coming home
I always remember what she said back then
——
one leg crossed the other: who goes on top
one leg vows to the other: I’ll top you
——
when we seize all the banks!
share out the fruits of labor!
and the engines in all the tanks
flooded with rainwater
then we’ll help the poor earth
shake the wig from her head
erect a polytunnel instead
with a multiplication of those poles: cold and dead
and the south will come knocking at our ears
pears will droop in the heat
gleaming bulbous pears
swollen globular fruit
and the pizza delivery’s well-oiled
and the truth wears at our heart:
for the rapid soil
shall bring forth its own bard.
——
were it not seemly, citizens