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Maria Stepanova 
War of the Beasts and the Animals 

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Cover of Maria Stepanova: War of the Beasts and the Animals (ePUB)

War of the Beasts and the Animals is Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s first full English-language collection. Stepanova is one of Russia’s most innovative and exciting poets and thinkers, and founding editor of Colta.ru, an online independent site which has been compared to Huffington Post in its status and importance. Immensely high-profile in Russia, her reputation has lagged behind in the West, but with the 2021 Fitzcarraldo publication of her prize-winning documentary novel In Memory of Memory and her new poetry collection from Bloodaxe this is sure to change. War of the Beasts and the Animals includes her recent long poems of conflict ‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and Animals’, written during the Donbas conflict, as well as a third long poem ‘The Body Returns’, commissioned by Hay International Festival in 2018 to commemorate the Centenary of the First World War. In all three long poems Stepanova’s assured and experimental use of form, her modernist appropriation of poetic texts from around the world and her constant consideration of the way that culture, memory and contemporary life are interwoven make her work both pleasurable and deeply necessary. This collection also includes two sequences of poems from her 2015 collection Kireevsky: sequences of ‘weird’ ballads and songs, subtly changed folk and popular songs and poems which combine historical lyricism and a contemporary understanding of the effects of conflict and trauma. Stepanova uses the ready forms of ballads and songs, but alters them, so they almost appear to be refracted in moonlit water. The forms seem recognisable, but the words are oddly fragmented and suggestive, they weave together well-known refrains of songs, apparently familiar images, subtle half-nods to films and music. Poetry Book Society Translation Choice.

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About the author

Sasha Dugdale was editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2013 to 2017, and is co-editor of the anthology Centres of Cataclysm: Celebrating Fifty Years of Modern Poetry in Translation (Bloodaxe Books/MPT, 2016). She has translated many works of Russian poetry, prose and drama, including Tatiana Shcherbina’s Life Without: Selected Poetry & Prose 1992-2003 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), Elena Shvarts’s Birdsong on the Seabed (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (BBC Radio 3, 2008), and the short story collection Moscow Tales (Oxford University Press, 2013), and has published five poetry collections with Oxford/Carcanet, The Estate (2007), Notebook (2003), Red House (2011), Joy (2017), and Deformations (2020), which is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her translation of Elena Shvarts’ Birdsong on the Seabed was shortlisted for both the Rossica Translation Prize and the Corneliu M. Popescu Award for European Poetry in Translation. She won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016, and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2017. Her translation of Maria Stepanova’s War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe Books, 2021) is a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice. Her translation of Stepanova’s documentary novel In Memory of Memory is also published in 2021 – from Fitzcarraldo in the UK and New Directions in the US. She has also worked as a consultant for the Royal Court Theatre and other companies in addition to writing her own plays, and from 1995 to 2000 worked for the British Council in Russia. She is joint artistic director of Winchester Poetry Festival with Keiren Phelan, and lives in Sussex.
Language English ● Format EPUB ● Pages 115 ● ISBN 9781780375359 ● File size 0.3 MB ● Translator Dugdale Sasha ● Publisher Bloodaxe Books ● Published 2021 ● Downloadable 24 months ● Currency EUR ● ID 7737231 ● Copy protection Adobe DRM
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