Two Poems: Holy Winter by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale

Want to know how to build a house out of snow?
An igloo
A glass dome
An ice palace without walls or roofs?

The boy hid.
Dug out a burrow in the light snow
Climbed in and dragged his sled in after him
Began heaping up the entrance with handfuls of snow, higher
and higher.
Blue twilight spilled into his lair.

Can’t see you. Can’t see you.
The boy dreams
Of a cardboard box filled with dolls’ gloves
The parting in her tawny hair, head bent over the tablecloth
Grey eyes glancing reproachfully
Oval portraits of great-grandmother and great-grandfather.

If you squat down and grip your legs behind the knees
And then, with a sudden leap, stretch yourself tall, and lie flat
in the air
You can swim almost without paddling your hands
Over the leather sofa, the yellow carved sideboard
Into the summer quarters of the house.

But do you need to when you have a sled?

Darkness fell.
Snowflakes, flying strictly sideways, never downward
Angled themselves at the cathedral bell tower
And the rider in the handsome sleigh, in snow-white furs
Nodded and nodded at the little boy
Like a china dog.
The little boy had long since opened his hands and let go
But his little sled
Slid forward of its own accord, following the mysterious rider.
Behind them whirled tiny feathered white hens,
Brilliant lakes of snow lit their way
Wolves howled, the snow clouds bounded above.

So cold, so very cold and deserted!
One day she would kiss him.

Things always happen in winter
All roads lead to it.
A thirty-five-year-old Italian man
Lost in a dark wood
Meets a magic helper
As is customary in a fairy tale
But all the same he descends lower and lower
Soaking up all he sees like a sponge

Until he arrives in that place where everything freezes
Even the sponge.
A sharp-witted boy (we don’t know how old he is)
Way too smart for his own good
As is customary in puberty
Comes face to face with the fifth season—
A winter, without walls or a roof
Or any limit the mind can conceive of.
She has already kissed him once
And made him vast promises
A certain number of letters formed
Of ice, aqueous, glimmering,
A handful of congealed voices,
A good number of flattened histories.
If you can construct from them anything lasting even a while
As immunity against the flow of time
And the low temperatures
And the pestilence that whirls in the eastern winds,

Then
You will be master of your own fate
All the world will be yours
They shall bear thee up in their hands lest thou dash thy foot
against a stone.
And I will kiss you again.
I shall give you a pair of Norwegian ice skates.
As long as you do it nicely.

(And he forgot about Gerda and Grandmother and all at home
And sat on the ice examining his treasures)

Lower than the very depths
Lower than the deepest deep
At a point lower than human misery
The Italian saw a frozen lake
And those who were frozen within, like fish
Scaled with icy tears
Eyes that protruded sharp ice needles
And speech that could neither be gnawed at, nor thawed.
These are the traitors. They are beyond forgiveness.

Who have we betrayed so
That there can be no forgiveness for us?
There are no walls, no roof
Only the Northern Lights
And a few shared histories
Opened anew, like little doors.

* * *

MARIA STEPANOVA, born in Moscow in 1972, is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. She is an award-winning poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist. Stepanova’s works have been translated into many languages and published widely. She has received several literary awards, including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship. Her novel, In Memory of Memory, was a finalist for the 2021 International Booker Prize and has been translated into many languages. Stepanova founded and was editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru, which engaged with contemporary Russia’s cultural, social, and political reality until the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine when all dissenting media in Russia were forced to shut down. As a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, Stepanova had to leave Russia and is now living in exile in Berlin.

Photo of Maria Stepanova by Andrey Natotsinsky

SASHA DUGDALE is a poet and translator. She has published five collections of poetry with Carcanet (UK), the most recent, Deformations, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She is a translator of Russian drama and poetry, including work by Maria Stepanova, Elena Shvarts, and Marina Tsvetaeva, and former editor of the international magazine Modern Poetry in Translation.

* * *

To purchase a copy of Holy Winter from us or your favourite indie bookstore, click here.

For more from Two Poems, click here.