Maria Stepanova

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interview published in Modern Poetry in Translation (Autumn 2016), translated by Don Mee Choi:

We know that resistance is not outside of power, don’t we? Every time a terrible incident happens, we who have grown to be adults know in our bodies that we can’t run from power, that power has no outside, don’t we? We have shamefully stayed alive, and, submerged in the sorrow of complicity, we weep and are enraged, aren’t we? Inside the terrible incidents, we speak and write adequately enough, not realising that each one of us has become Pontius Pilate. Despite all that, for me, poetry is a machine that doesn’t dissipate into history. For me, poetry is the machine that has to stand up infinitely, within the hours that fracture infinitely.

‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ are both poems that stand up infinitely within the infinitely fracturing hours. They were published in Russian in 2015 as a single collection called Spolia. ‘Spolia’ is the Latin word for ‘spoils’, as in ‘the spoils of war’. The term was introduced at the turn of the 16th century to describe the ancient marble ornaments and dressed stone embedded in medieval settings. It enfolds the principle and theme of Maria Stepanova’s long works: that language and culture are translated and transported as fragments and re-used in new settings and to new ends. So fragments of classical poetry, prose, war films, soldiers’ songs are prominent in these densely populated and highly allusive poems. All these fragments, when placed side by side, illuminate the development of a culture