The Voice Over: Poems and Essays

Russian Library

by Maria Stepanova, Irina Shevelenko (Editor)

Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. Her verse blends formal mastery with a keen ear for the evolution of spoken language. As Russia’s political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country’s past and present. Some of her most remarkable recent work as a poet and essayist considers the conflict in Ukraine and the debasement of language that has always accompanied war.

The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution. Stepanova’s poetic voice constantly sets out in search of new bodies to inhabit, taking established forms and styles and rendering them into something unexpected and strange. Recognizable patterns of ballads, elegies, and war songs are transposed into a new key, infused with foreign strains, and juxtaposed with unlikely neighbors. As an essayist, Stepanova engages deeply with writers who bore witness to devastation and dramatic social change, as seen in searching pieces on W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Susan Sontag. Including contributions from ten translators, The Voice Over shows English-speaking readers why Stepanova is one of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary writers.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Russian Literature, Nonfiction, Russia, Literary Criticism

360 pages, Paperback

Published May 18, 2021

About the author

Maria Mikhailovna Stepanova is a Russian poet, novelist, and journalist. She is the current editor of Colta.ru, an online publication specializing in arts and culture. In 2005, she won the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize for poetry.

Reviews

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I admit I did not expect to strike out with Stepanova's poetry, especially since she's more known as a poet, but translated verse is a strange thing & has often enough not worked for me. Moreover, Stepanova mostly works with lyrical poetry that tilts towards the conventional, even archaic. It's poetry that has never appealed to me and even though she clearly twists forms & reworks them in interesting ways, it remains remote and distant. She has a considerable body of work; the pieces collected here are but a small sample & I prefer the more recent material. Shevelenko has talked about the difficulty of translating Stepanova when it comes to poetry & I can clearly see why. Spolia was particularly impressive.

Coming to the essays, which sadly make up less than half of the book, I was impressed beyond belief. Here was the brilliant mind that deeply fascinated me with In Memory of Memory again producing brilliant insights. While Shaporina and Poret were new names to me, the ones on Sontag and Sebald gave me much to think about and ponder and were exceptional. The Sebald one and allowed me to see him in a different light. I got the distinct feeling that she understood him to the core. Tsvetaeva's piece makes me more eager to read her. The essays not centred on writers, talking about the changes in poetry or the state of writing in Russia, were illuminating too. I want to read more of her critical writing.

This collection features translations by Alexandra Berlina, Sasha Dugdale, Sibelan Forrester, Amelia Glaser, Zachary Murphy King, Dmitry Manin, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Andrew Reynolds, and Maria Vassileva. There id also an Introduction by the editor, Irina Shevelenko. I can see myself dipping in and out of this collection over the years and coming back.




(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

[Sookie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maria Stepanova has a particular style of writing her prose that is abstract and also abrupt, its liquid and volcanic in its structure with fluidity and the sheer power it exudes. However there is so much nuance stuffed in half a dozen lines that I probably have misinterpreted them. Within half a volume, a poet generally shows their hand but Stepanova remained and still remains elusive.
This wasn't a particularly enjoyable collection or it is perhaps my limitation to the style and the obfuscation the prose binds itself with that I pretty much gave up after a while and ploughed through the volume.

Thank you to Netgalley and Columbia University Press for providing me with a free copy of this e-book in exchange for an honest review.

[Sanaa Hyder · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at ~27%

Got this ARC from Netgalley.

The introduction of this book gives an exhaustive background about Stepanova, the significance of her work and the translators' efforts. I enjoyed it in parts — learning about Stepanova's stylistic evolution and her poetic constructions.

However, when I got to the sections with the actual poems, I got lost several times and had trouble appreciating the imagery and symbolism. This book might be more suitable for an academic audience or for those with some knowledge of Russia's political history. But even so, I think some poems lost their charm or meaning in the English translation; they were awkward even when read out loud.

Or may be this book is for a niche group of poetry lovers? I also kind of did not get the random erotica bits, but I think that was inevitable given the cultural backdrop of the writer.

[Bagus · Rating 3 out of 5]

I happened to read this volume at the same time as my reading of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Other Essays. What I noticed from Stepanova’s essays is her unique interpretation of Russian literature which frequently interplays with other happenings such as Soviet history of the 20th century and the works of other Russian poets. As said in the introduction, Stepanova is keen to reestablish essay as an important form of creative discourse, both as a work of art and an intellectual statement, that gains momentum in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union that gives more freedom for writers to express their thoughts in many subjects, from political happenings, the works of previously inaccessible authors, and also to expand their vocabularies of knowledge to what their counterparts have been producing in the west.

This volume offers an introduction to Maria Stepanova’s body of works, mainly her poems and essays which were produced between 1996 and 2016. I could not comment positively about the structure of this volume, which was intended to introduce Anglophone readers to the works of Stepanova in the span of 20 years but ended up creating information gaps especially with regards to her poems. I feel like there are a lot of things missing to understand Stepanova’s poems, which I consider are complex and include a lot of literary references only understandable by Russian audiences, for instance, any reference to Pushkin or Mandelstam that might require longer footnotes.

This blunder is exacerbated by the nature of the translated works in this volume, as each poem and essay is translated by different translators who might approach the texts differently and have their own trademarks. This does not seem to be a barrier for translating Stepanova’s essays, as there are more ways to improvise with essays and Stepanova frequently takes references in her essays from English source’s texts as is the case in her essays about Susan Sontag and W.G. Sebald. However, this has made the poem feels to me a bit like “lost-in-translation”. In some poems, the translator includes a brief explanation about the nature of Stepanova’s poems in the original Russian and their methods of approaching the texts to make them accessible to English-speaking audiences. But it has not always been the case as some poems are left without Translator Notes to help the readers understand the contexts.

Stepanova’s essays are thought-provoking. They could range from criticizing the previous generation of Russian poets to leading the readers into metaphysical journeys. I have not yet read Stepanova’s critically-acclaimed In Memory of Memory, but her essays are pretty self-explanatory in describing the modern phenomenon of what she terms as the “new sensibility”, the kind of longing to the past age that is long gone. In one of her essays, she describes this “new sensibility” by taking the example of Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”, in which she argues that the keyword in that slogan is not great but again. She attempts to voice out that people are scared of what the future offers. After decades of achievements in the 20th century to send humans to space, people were finally wary of the development of technology. In short: The future is worse than the present.

It’s been a while since I read anything so mentally stimulating from a Russian author, and it seems undeniable that Stepanova is one of the most prominent writers in post-Soviet Russia with her “new sensibility” and her courage to touch upon many subjects, ranging from poems, essays, to her recently translated into English In Memory of Memory. I have been wondering if the only solution to the overproduction of information as Stepanova warns us in her essays is through going into atavism as suggested in Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog. But it seems too early to pass any judgment on that.

[Theediscerning]

The fullest of admiration for the creators of this book, working with the author herself on building a definitive English-language sampler of her work, in the light of her first novel imminently getting translated too. I have long known these publishers for providing quality works for the academic reader, and this is both way out of their remit and par for the course for them. I say it's par for the course for they always seem to have intelligent translators, considered essays and introductions, all provided by the right people for the job. I say beyond their remit for this author is very much alive-alive-o, being born in the same year as me, and generally (beyond some contemporary theatrical pieces I remember) they deal with bringing us the works of Russians who are quite firmly dead. Still, bringing Stepanova herself on board to vet translations and to help compile the piece marks this with all the prestige you would want.

… If that is, you like the idea of reading contemporary literary Russian poetry, and have that either as a peculiar hobby or as a job. In marking this book from the only point of view I can offer – a Mr Average, dipping his toe into the more high-falutin' to try and be erudite for once – this book fails. Yes, the author herself may well be a genius, or a rarity in Russia, but these works are not very readable. We learn here that one of her early career stages was to reject the old Soviet Author system, where any half-legible, State-pleasing work meant a fixed, stipendiary career as an author, which was an idea soon to disappear in the immediate return to capitalism at the fall of the Soviet Union. The introduction tells us she's a marvel at looking back as well as looking around herself and forward, which is why her works concern building and understanding family histories, and react to the Putin years (with its recapture of the Crimea and the criminal invasion of parts of Ukraine), and suchlike. This is all well and good but this is not fodder for the general reader – far from it.

Scholars, if they've got through my verbiage this far, will need to click 'purchase'. Nobody else should ever dare.

[Mandy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much of this volume of poems and essays from acclaimed Russian writer Maria Stepanova unfortunately went above my head. I really don’t think I’m equipped to rate and review it objectively. It’s a tough read, even with the excellent introduction. I understand that Stepanova is an important critical voice in Russia, and as a poet is considered as the conscience of the people, Russian literature’s moral authority. I read that somewhere, but can’t judge for myself. She is now beginning to receive more attention outside Russia, with recent translations of 3 of her works, and I look forward to reading more about and by her, but I can’t say I enjoyed this book very much, especially the poetry which I found opaque, and full of allusions and quotations which escaped me. I’m sorry I can’t rate it higher than I have, but all I can do is express my own personal response.

[Ed Kazyanskaya · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had heard so much about Maria Stepanova's poetry and the incredible introduction psyched me up even further, and yet all that good will was squandered when I read them. There are some haunting and powerful lines and images buried amongst obscurant verses that dull their power. The introduction constantly reminds us of how allusive her poetry is, yet no notes are offered for the poems to elucidate and enumerate any of the allusions, which are lost on anyone not exceedingly well-versed in Russian literature. The essays are mostly intelligible but still retain enough traces of literary theory navel-gazing to deter the casual reader.

[Alexia Cambaling · Rating 3 out of 5]

The next collection I read is called The Voice Over: Poems and Essays by Maria Stepanova. I got this as an e-arc from Columbia University Press and Netgalley. The Voice Over contains translations of Stepanova’s poetry from the original Russian and while I enjoyed them, I can’t help but think of what was lost in translation. Some of the notes included regarding the translation contributed to this, althoughthe notes which explain the context of the references were very much appreciated. The poetry were about life, folklore, Russian history, and I found them interesting, but I enjoyed the essays more. The essays were about culture, literature, and politics and even in her essays, the author conveys a certain poetic sensibility which I liked.

[Isolde · Rating 3 out of 5]

the essays were brilliant - solid 4, maybe even a little above
I wish I had a more comprehensive understanding of her poetry bc even with extensive background research I felt like I was completely making up my own conclusions without any real idea of her possible intent - but I think that I could only ever understand her work by reading it in Russian
I didn't like her poetry much at the beginning (hence the lower rating) but the more I annotated it the more I began to really appreciate it

[Kattiah Claire · Rating 1 out of 5]

{DNF}
What can I say? I didn't like this one. It was hard to read and confusing and not at all what I thought it would be! Part of that is on me, but part of that is on the writing.

[Jack McClelland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I could give this five stars, and would've if it weren't for the overbearing weight of academia suffocating this book. (I'm certain it's the publisher's, and not Stepanova's, fault.)

The whole package is a strange kind of compilation--a somewhat illogical mixture of poetry and essays by a writer who is equally and uniquely skilled in both mediums. Columbia University Press seems to have wanted to present all of Stepanova's greatness behind one cover, and present it in a neat package to the English-language audience. The introduction is an exhaustive background of Stepanova, one of the most prolific and relevant literary voices in Russia today. As a (humble brag) recent graduate with an M.A. in Russian, this is interesting to me. But to all the non-navel-gazing-Russian-literature-nerds out there it is wholly unreadable. Where is the 5,000 word (New Yorker toned) profile, written by someone located outside of the ivory tower, a writer who actually knows how to create interest in an author with this space, rather than bury them in biography?

It's disappointing that Stepanova is presented this poorly, because at the heart of this book are two brilliant collections. The poetry translations are a bit dodgy at times, but the essays will surprise a non-naval-gazing-Russian-literature-nerd as accessible and even profound. Buying this book is worth it for the essays (a form in which she is a pioneering champion in Russia), and then maybe dipping your toes into the poetry and lastly the introduction if you want to make sense of the occasionally-baffling verse and also get some tips on how to read Stepanova's other major translated book, In Memory of Memory.

It's an overwhelming collection, and might do well with time and a patient reader. I think this publishing project would have been much more successful had they released two books: one of the poetry and one compiling the essays (and perhaps more). There is too much packed in here, without enough room for the true beauty of her craft to shine.