Ann Kjellberg, founding editor of Little Star, an annual journal of poetry and prose, and Little Star Weekly, its mobile app version, will be offering a poem every Sunday this spring. This is her seventh post.
Maria Stepanova (b. 1972) would be read and remembered in her native Russia as a superior poet, had she not also distinguished herself in other spheres. It is impossible not to mention that she is also the founding editor of Colta.ru, the crowd-sourced independent online magazine of culture and the arts, with a readership now in the hundreds of thousands, that has persistently eluded the Russian state’s oft-remarked monopolism of ideas. Stepanova’s own poetry is not overtly political, but, as novelist Mikhail Shishkin observed last year in The New Republic, in Russia poetry has since its birth offered an alternative to absolute power and proposed with its very existence a notion of the individual never fully subdued by state control. We hear a lot in America about the submissiveness of the Russian citizenry to contemporary political propaganda, but we don’t seem to look very hard at the lives and work of those who do struggle, like Stepanova, to persevere on their own terms.
Stepanova’s narrative poem “Fish” appears in the current issue of Little Star in a translation by Modern Poetry in Translation editor Sasha Dugdale. It is a kind of modern riff or romance based on the Soviet iconography of the polar explorer (Brodsky wrote one too). Stepanova’s variant introduces a female consciousness to this usually all-male preserve, in the form of a mermaid. The reader experiences the mermaid, as the the arctic team that fishes her up does, through an almost impenetrable veil of watery, fishy strangeness. Her good nature peeks through the purposefully clinical annotations recorded by her bemused hosts. Their world is not hospitable to her though; in the end she escapes their company in a flourish of freedom and autonomy, bearing her own mysterious scars.
When we Anglophones hear contemporary Russian poets, even of the most avant-garde variety, read their poems aloud we are often startled by the strong undertow that their intense history of formal invention still pulls in their verse. Dugdale preserves this admirably; we feel the poem’s rhythms emerge from the initial, no-nonsense note-taking of the speaker as he puzzles, relevantly, over the mermaid’s language, and in it we feel some of the rhythms of the sea that are the only real home for the mercurial consciousness that is our fish. The lines’ mesmeric rhythms and the memory of the fish seem to draw the speaker of the second half of the poem toward madness—the fragmenting influence of a wilderness that is beyond the scrutiny of his instruments and their pragmatic, conquesting spirit.
The poem is romantic within its pastiche of romanticism. Russia’s renewed conquest of the Arctic reframes the mermaid’s assertion of autonomy—both female and artistic—from its grainy, black-and-white Soviet mise-en-scène.
Maria Stepanova is the author of ten books of poems and the editor-in-chief of Colta.ru. She was a 2010 Joseph Brodsky Fellowship Fund Fellow in Rome. Read her essay about Roman cemeteries here. Read a recent interview here. Read the Russian original of this poem here.
Fish
In a tin bath, a tin bath she lay
We poured water in, and mixed in some salt
One man got drunk, another repaired the transmitter,
A fourth man wandered the shore in lament:
What would he tell his grandchildren, but I digress:
Speaks no English, has not expressed hunger,
Still one should do something—cook, or offer something raw.
This cannot be, it simply cannot be.
Eyes—hungry, wide-lipped, hair
Like wet hay, pale as ice and smelling of vodka;
If it turns on its side even slightly, a line
Of vertebrae knots the length of the back, like on yours.
Not a word of Russian, most likely Finno-Ugric
But sadly no experts were at hand
When the nets were cast in hope that morning
And the beast smiled and beat its tail in greeting.
Twilight, tins were opened, lamps brought in.
Cards and a chessboard appeared without undue haste.
I try debating with our mechanic, but he won’t take the bait.
A quick check-over (Witnessed by. Sign on dotted.)—
Not long enough. Only first observations,
Weight: sixty. Length of tail: ninety.
Jagged wounds in the abdominal area
Mostly likely caused by a sharp object.
Not long enough. Only early theories,
There is no time. The reestablishing of radio contact
Keeping the hut warm, catching fish.
Eats the fish with us all, very neat and tidy
Can’t stand coffee, refuses to wear clothes;
Measured the diameter of nipple; change tub water
Morning and evening; the thing sleeps hugging tail.
Can’t tell faces apart. Doesn’t remember names.
Not long enough, just come from the radio engineer
Have suspicions someone sabotaging radio
And emergency generator, work out why
No point in working out why, still I do believe we will meet.
Better to put the notes into code, put all notes into code,
At eighteen hundred last night another helicopter over the pines
Rapid pulse, slight nausea
Splashing and laughter from behind the calico curtain.
Yesterday and today let fish out for a swim.
I stood guard with a pike, Petrov had a carbine.
Didn’t attempt to slip away, only splashed around;
Water temperature; body temperature;
Possible uses for the purpose of fishing.
I ran along the shore, pretending to be a hunter.
It dived in and out gently, to no good purpose,
Wet, white-toothed and gleaming.
Only now: is it happening, I can’t tell
Two hours of pointless conversation
In the cold about the radio and the spares,
A sprint back to the hut. Silence behind the curtain.
And no one there, behind the curtain. The tub upturned.
Smoke in the mess room, I step in a puddle
And there, to the soothing hiss of the radio
The fish and the mechanic are playing snap.
Not long enough, not up to it, the thing is sick
And smells less like vodka, more like moonshine
Distended pupil, sweats, palpitations,
Listless, lethargic, no appetite,
No communications, no photographic equipment
Filth, fishscales amongst the medical instruments
Dreamt of God again, the rotating propeller
The pines bending, and the noise of the rotor.
It’s Petrov again: doctor, he says, doctor…
It’s quiet behind the curtain. The tub is empty.
The mechanic had a flask of spirits, a secret.
I don’t object, let the fish swim. On the floor
A wet scarf, fish likes to keep its throat covered
Although what use a scarf is to it, I don’t know.
From the window astoundingly clear on the bay’s shining
Surface, the head of a swimmer moving forever beyond range.
•
Must concentrate on essentials: we are flying away.
Despite the care I took in sabotaging the transmitter
It was put to rights painstakingly, more than once
And then there was no reason to put it off waiting
For the helicopter, for the helicopter waiting, waiting.
Everything is packed and the crates stowed,
All reckonings completed, all logbooks closed,
Blinds drawn, flags lowered, I am asleep.
My dearest, I went out late in the evening
To look at you in photographs taken at college,
I haven’t seen her for so long, she hasn’t changed
My Dearest I hoped I would never have to tell you,
My Dearest, I hoped to conceal it
My Dearest, I hoped I wouldn’t live long enough
To meet with, the coming together of two halves,
The full combination of classical attributes.
Addressed to the President of the Academy, Professor Nikitin
A copy to the Kremlin, the original for my widow.
Research notes. A diary with his observations.
Height, weight, estimated age.
Those characteristic scars in the abdominal area—
There, submerged in water, last-century surgery
Operations without anaesthetic on the seabed
Changes in pressure, fibroids, scars
Giving birth is hard; bringing up the child is hard
And marriage is a near impossibility.
And such yearning, such yearning, although on dry land.
…But most of all: I love you, your very own.
But most of all: forgive me, this is not goodbye
But last of all, and first of all,
And Christ! All in all: fare you well.
And if this place is the far edge of the earth,
It is not the furthest edge of the earth.
—Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale
Photo E. Nechaeva
Comments