The Voice Over, by Maria Stepanova ("Young Maids Sing, " translated by Eugene Ostashevsky)

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The Voice Over

from Kireevsky from the cycle YOUNG MAIDS SING T R A N S L AT E D B Y E U G E N E O STA S H E V S K Y

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE Language is history. Maria Stepanova is a poet for whom that is the case. Her cycle Dèvushki poiùt, or Young Women Are Singing, which revisits the traumas of the Stalinist period and especially of World War II, is also historicist in its vocabulary, phraseology, and even versification. The poems of the cycle are ballads, palpably descended from the Russian adaptations of German Romantic horror ballads, but with a great dose of late Mandelstam infecting the diction, and with the emotional gestures that evoke stylizations of labor camp songs by 1960s folk singers. Stepanova amps up the disjunctions characteristic of the ballad form until they turn into the disjunctions of modern experimental poetry. We are the child taken for a ride in the forest, and we also know who the Erlkönig is.

The language of history is not a universal language at all. How do you translate it? How do you translate what the reader of the original—different child taken for the same ride—is supposed to pick up from inflections, innuendos, and incomplete gestures?

How do you translate the meaning that inheres in the half-said, when the intended reading depends on shared historical experience that the reader of the translation will most certainly lack? I was grasping for straws, and my main straw in the particular instance of drowning that translating Stepanova’s poems was for me, became

the classical Chinese literary ballad such as Du Fu’s “Song of the War Carts,” and in general I was remembering English-language translations of T’ang dynasty poetry: poetry whose formal concentration, citationality both erudite and pop, and constant sense of unsaid political and war trauma make it so kin to Russian poetry of the twentieth century.

This is why I called my selections from the cycle Young Maids Sing (I also toyed with Young Maid Sing). This is also why of the several experimental versions I did of “Mat’-otèts ne uznàli” (“Mompop didn’t know him”), I kept the one whose five-syllable lines allude to a T’ang meter, even though the Russian original alternates double and triple anapests. This is why my other, metrically sloppier translations still gesture—both rhythmically and in their discontinuities—at the kind of alienation that the pentasyllabic line can produce in English, for which the decasyllable is a far more natural meter. If I could not make an adequate translation of the original, I could at least make an adequate translation of the violence and alienation of its language of trauma. This is also why I happily translated Stepanova’s rewriting of pop songs, especially the poem whose understanding depends on knowing the lyrics of “Katyusha,” which gave its name to the Soviet transportable rocket launchers of World War II. Unfortunately, the tortured Latinate syntax of Russian poetry, and of Stepanova’s poetry in particular, is really nothing like the straightforward syntax of classical Chinese verse. Although what I really wanted was to get rid of all the subordination of clauses, I failed at the task, but I do hope to liberate all clauses next time.

Displaced Person

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The Voice Over

Mom-pop didn’t know him Young wife didn’t know him Colonel came back from Below black blue ice Victory vodka The upright counts time He went in winter Left circles behind Lights on in housing A blank tenant book In the deaf open The dead falling in All fire and smoke where I passed and came out Lentils on boil there Blind root in the pot No ship comes to dock Whistle runs aground Still the signaler The kernel won’t sprout Hole in my belly Ice water within Many tank turrets Tear nets in the spring

I pumped up the spare Burned papers, crushed coals My housing permit Here, let me go home Safe conducts speechless Lie sunk deep in ice I will not know how His wife doesn’t know him

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The Voice Over

Mama, what janitor Lives in the basement Can’t recollect His scattering name Now seldom that damned man Comes out on burning ice Shuffles the iron spade Scrapes with the bright broom When at dawn I get dressed Come out for work When at dusk get undressed Stick pumps in the dresser In that basement womb Daylight or nightlight He lies around like a bedspread The abyss sets its sights on me Child, how could we know Our lost Alexei Lies in the basement with no heating Half-forgotten by people And that you didn’t know him For your groom and husband It’s that life is a great hall Where many souls take a stroll

And that they’re yellower than an orange His non-Russian features It too stands to reason We too are not what once we were We have grown old like tramcars Ashen is your permanent While he like a lava lamp Glows alone in the basement

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The Voice Over

A train is riding over Russia Along some great river The passengers took off their shoes The conductors don’t look sober Slippery with grease and dreamy Chicken thighs go sailing by The faces of huddled humanity Like trees in unsteady water I walk in a state-owned throw Through train cars full of people And sing as earnestly As a saved soul in paradise It’s a dirty job, even dirtier Than the bossman-conductor might deem For a quality song in our business Always rises up to a scream Ladies gasp when with my naked larynx Over the knee-jerk cursing of men I sing of how poppies turn even more red When the blood of our commander drips down on their head My voice makes a hole in the comfort Of the car like an out-of-nowhere shiv Everyone starts feeling downcast And takes turns beating me by the toilet

An honest song has such outrage in it The heart cannot stomach the shame The passengers keep their defenses up Like a tear in the middle of a face

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The Voice Over

Ordnance was weeping in the open For the hero’s open wound There he lay, his breast thrown open halfway In anticipation of the end Battle-prattle rattled in the eardrums Tattled, sent regrets for plodding hammers Female installation the Katyusha Fed with kasha the whole panorama And, while she was pounding close-in targets As she polished off the riverbanks For the one she was in love with For the one she could not save Raining dust and down off his service coat Tensing infantile wings to fly The heir of the gray eagle of the steppes Kept watch over his parent from the sky

The A went past, Tram-Traum It’s given lifts to you and me Some mademoiselle will now Open a fashion boutique Lay out the blacks and whites Wipe the empty mirrors Look up at the unplugged Displays from the corner Which don’t reflect the Friday hour Not the shopping people Not a few summer dresses But something else entirely In everyday hustle and bustle The gait of grandpa’s spring You by the bakery With a net bag of national air The past is waterborne A tear washes away Its look of reproach And falls to disappear in the display We open up like faucets This way and that, this way and that Boutique security Never give us a second look

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The Voice Over

Well I don’t sing Kupitye papirosn And I don’t hazard games of chance I resolve issues of high priority On the guesstimate that I won’t die today The postal carriage is coming down the rails The iron horse is steaming at the bit You let it go after an hour or so That you are not entirely ready for it Into whichever of our young republics I’ll carry off my empty head That heart’s a bagel, it costs only a ruble Get it before it’s cold

PR A I S E F O R T H E VO I C E OV E R “A volume of Maria Stepanova’s work in English translation is long overdue, but this one, rendered by a dream team of the best translators and poets working today, has been worth the wait.

The Voice Over offers a worthy tribute to Stepanova’s multiple achievements: a rich selection of texts from Stepanova’s poetry and translations of Stepanova’s essays, both illuminated by Irina Shevelenko’s expert introduction and commentary, framing Stepanova’s writing with sophistication and insight.”

—KEVIN M. F. PLATT, founder of Your Language My Ear translation symposium

Columbia University Press New York cup.columbia.edu Printed in the

“Maria Stepanova’s voice is a multipotent anthology of epic, lyric, and pure spell. She turns myth back into memory, heroes into humans, and her country’s rush from one catastrophe to another into language.

No translator who reads Stepanova’s work thinks, ‘I can do this.’ This is a book prepared by people who believed in a poetic miracle, and this miracle happened—to the English language above all.” —VALZHYNA MORT, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected

ISBN: 978-0-231-19616-1

U.S.A. Cover designed

by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich