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    War of the Beasts and the Animals
    War of the Beasts and the Animals
    War of the Beasts and the Animals
    Ebook136 pages1 hour

    War of the Beasts and the Animals

    By Maria Stepanova

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    War of the Beasts and the Animals is Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s first full English-language collection. Stepanova is one of Russia’s most innovative and exciting poets and thinkers, and 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 the 2021 Fitzcarraldo publication of her prize-winning documentary novel In Memory of Memory and her new poetry collection from Bloodaxe this 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. This collection 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. Poetry Book Society Translation Choice.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateMar 25, 2021
    ISBN9781780375359
    War of the Beasts and the Animals
    Author

    Maria Stepanova

     Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, journalist and the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. She has received several Russian and international literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship).  In Memory of Memory  won Russia’s Bolshaya Kniga Award in 2018. Her collection of poems,  War and the Beasts and the Animals , is published by Bloodaxe in Sasha Dugdale’s translation in 2021, and is a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice. Stepanova is the founder and editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal  Colta.ru , which covers the cultural, social and political reality of contemporary Russia. 

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      Book preview

      War of the Beasts and the Animals - Maria Stepanova

      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

      fromSPOLIA(2015)

      Spolia

      War of the Beasts and the Animals

      fromKIREEVSKY(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

      War of the Beasts and the Animals draws largely from Maria Stepanova’s recent works, her collection Kireevsky (2012), and her two long poems ‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’. A third long poem ‘The Body Returns’ was a commission by the Hay Festival to commemorate the First World War Centenary and it makes up the triptych of long poems. In ‘The Body Returns’ Stepanova, like Ailbhe Darcy, uses the Fibonacci structure of the poetic work alphabet by Inger Christensen, to reflect on 20th-century war in the West. Two poems come from earlier collections: the epic poem ‘Fish’ which draws on the tropes and clichés of 20th-century Soviet polar exploration literature, and ‘Israelitischer Friedhof ’.

      The choice of the work for this English-language collection was made jointly by Maria and me. Maria was very keen that I should focus on ‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’, and I shared her sense that these works, published together in 2015, were urgent and particular to the world now. I wrote a short essay on translating ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ in 2018 and as my thoughts have not changed, I have enlarged that essay to include my approach to ‘Spolia’ here.

      Maria Stepanova is, on the face of it, an exceptionally difficult poet to translate as her poems are both formally complex and they inhabit a world of

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