Modern Poetry In Translation

Russian poet 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, an Old Russian epic poem ‘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