Stevie Smith and Maria Stepanova make an unlikely pair. The former is a twentieth-century English poet and novelist who lived with her aunt in the suburbs and worked as a secretary. Frivolous at first glance but just as caustic and macabre, she adorned her texts with stick figures and liked “singing [her] poems very much,” despite having, by her own admission, no “sense of pitch.”^[1] The latter is a contemporary essayist, journalist, and one of the leading poetic voices of the Russophone world. Her densely allusive, cerebral writing amalgamates oral histories and personal narratives, reverberating with the “repressed and forgotten violence coiled deep within” the Russian tongue.^[2]

Yet in her 2020 collection За Стиви Смит [Za Stivi Smit], or In Place of Stevie Smith, Stepanova steps beyond the confines of post-Soviet reality to half-translate, half-imitate her English precursor. This endeavor, I suggest, is a sustained experiment in miscommunication, resulting in a double-headed poetess—Smith-Stepanova, Stepanova-Smith—whose speech is inaccessible, cut off from the reader. In the collection’s afterword, to which I attend in this essay’s first section, Stepanova foregrounds the auditory quality of poetry, only to imply that this same quality becomes a nuisance in Smith’s case. The second section then examines two paradigmatic poems, revealing a speaker consistently emptied of meaningful sound. Emboldened by Smith’s structural oddities and attendant literary marginality, Stepanova, I propose, reimagines the poem as a space of uneasy negotiations between the private and the public, ultimately severing its ties with the audience.

 

1. The Sound of Poetry

 

The poem, so Stepanova explains in her afterword to За Стиви Смит, is an intricate “music box” whose obscured inner workings the translator aims to lay bare.^[3] Taking the textual instrument apart and piecing it back together in one adroit gesture, the translator seeks to answer “two questions at once: how it works, and how to make it work anew, in a different system and without the poet’s participation.”^[4] In this image of reverse engineering, translation is an exploratory and expository craft, unraveling the hidden mechanisms of poetic composition; and the translator, Stepanova continues, is equally “altruistic” and virtuosic, carefully attuned to the reader’s needs in her attempt to determine what makes the poem tick.^[5]

Stepanova, however, shies away from the heavy responsibility resting on the translator’s shoulders; she reiterates time and again that За Стиви Смит is guided by neither social nor pedagogical concerns. Instead, she admits to taking up Smith’s poems “almost accidentally—just to muffle somehow the English original spinning in [her] head.”^[6] Her project, if so, is a solipsistic venture, diametrically opposed to the “altruistic” purpose she assigns to translation. Driven by a self-serving impulse, she shuts the poem’s “music box” close, or else dissects and even guts it, as though in desperate need to stifle its annoyingly persistent, invasive melody.

Indeed, Smith is perfectly suited for this socially averse artistic praxis. Critics past and present describe her as eccentric, offbeat, a prolific writer cast out from the epicenter of the English literary scene. Her “position within the general cultural context,” Stepanova clarifies, is that of an “outlier,” for she “never became part of a movement, of a generation that recognized her as its own, and her work as necessary.”^[7] Despite the popularity she enjoyed towards the end of her career, the poet failed to gain literary prominence, her oeuvre apparently devoid of sociopolitical urgency. For the scholar Noreen Masud, Smith’s exclusion from the public sphere is in fact inextricable from her distinctly “aphoristic” form: defined by its structural “neatness,” “symmetry,” and compactness, Smith’s language paradoxically underscores “her own insignificance, her own humble relegation as a poet to society’s margins.”^[8] Smith’s characteristic conflation of the tragic and the absurd—the childlike naivete with which she offers up grave sentiments—enacts a “self-sabotaging withdrawal,” according to Masud, undercutting or outrightly erasing the bold statement she purports to make.^[9] In Masud’s persuasive reading, Smith is an awkward teen uncomfortably drawing attention to herself at a party, then hastening to leave—or else hanging back, torturously, long after others have gone home.

That Smith overstays her welcome is evident in Stepanova’s desire “to muffle somehow” the sound of her poems. These are “little, empty” things, the Russian writer adds, “that know how to get under the reader’s skin, so it is impossible to forget them.”^[10] Compelling, irritating, or disturbing even, Smith’s poems are unshakable precisely because of their aphoristic form, to return to Masud’s claim: each line is as pointed as a punchline, as tightly packed as an adage. Consistent with Stepanova’s bodily response is Sylvia Plath’s admission that she is “an addict…, a desperate Smith-addict,” consuming the poet’s work compulsively.^[11] In this vein, Masud depicts Smith’s most recognizable phrase, “not waving but drowning”—plucked out of a poem bearing the same title—as “startling” and “resistant,” a line that “survives, like a cockroach, after a cognitive apocalypse.”^[12] Their grip alarmingly, inexplicably firm, Smith’s words resurface of their own accord, or else insist that the reader return to them ad nauseam.

It is to distance herself from Smith’s hypnotic presence that Stepanova translates her poetry; and it is for this same reason that translation soon warps into “imitation,” as she calls it.^[13] Stepanova attests that she follows in Smith’s footsteps yet allows herself some leeway, careful not to tread on the poet’s toes. This imitative process she defines as a sequence of “deliberate shift[s],” as though steering off center, zigzagging out and back into the route the poet has established.^[14] Accuracy is not Stepanova’s primary concern; it is but one of the countless options available to her. She cites the Russian poet and translator Grigori Dashevsky, who portrays the poem as a “constellation” of “elemental units,” their “unique” arrangement dictated by the poem’s inherent, idiosyncratic logic.^[15] Dashevsky compares these “elemental units” to “situation[s] in real life”: “when entering your home,” for instance, “you might greet someone in ten different ways—the key is to recognize that this is a moment for a greeting.”^[16] Once the translator grasps the function of each constituent in the textual “constellation,” then, she is free to choose its expression, to swing perhaps from the original “I’m home!” to “Is anybody home?”

For Stepanova, Dashevsky’s approach to the text as a cluster of “elemental units” is “terribly liberating” since it applies to the practice of poetic creation as well.^[17] In fact, Smith’s own mode of artistic composition, so Stepanova argues, is similarly mimetic and paraphrastic. Her point of departure may be Catullus’ ancient lyrics or Gerard Manley Hopkins’ so-called “terrible sonnets”; and as Smith adheres to these canonical prototypes, she just as easily bends the paths they prescribe, swerving away, forcing a “verbal turn” in “an unexpected direction.”^[18] Stepanova’s interpretation of Smith’s methods skews the line between the original text and its translation—or between “allusion” and “imitation”—placing both along a single axis, a poetic lineage that stretches across language and time.^[19]

 

2. The Unheard Muse

 

In his introduction to Smith’s complete collection of poetry, the scholar Will May emphasizes her “polyphony” and impressive “musical range.”^[20] Smith swings from “stoic dialogues” to “choruses,” he writes, from “self-penned drones” to rhythms that evoke Beethoven and Bizet.^[21] Still, “like [her] singing voice, the exchanges between Smith’s speakers are uneven and off-kilter,” May adds: “Her poems are full of committed conversations, but often ones that turn on difference or mishearing.”^[22] Rooted in the poem’s musical potentiality, the correspondence Smith prioritizes is garbled, confusingly and frustratingly so. Masud similarly maintains that as the poet “dulls the impact of her own texts”—declaring “painful feelings around despair, escape, and self-criticism” with an air of feigned nonchalance—her rhetoric “becomes indifferent to its own hearing,” even “diffuses its own hearability.”^[23] Smith, in other words, is uninterested in reaching out towards the receiving end, in ensuring that she is understood.

To continue May’s and Masud’s line of inquiry, I would like to take a close look at—or perhaps lend an ear to—“My Muse,” a poem in which the speaker’s contact with the titular deity is not only “uneven and off-kilter” but secretive, occurring behind the scenes or away from the page. Below I quote the poem in its entirety:

My Muse sits forlorn
She wishes she had not been born
She sits in the cold
No word she says is ever told.

Why does my Muse only speak when she is unhappy?
She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy
When I am happy I live and despise writing
For my Muse this cannot but be dispiriting.^[24]

Its simple rhyme and meter quickly derailed by the speaker’s worrying mind, “My Muse” is a characteristic blend of levity and hardship. After all, the lines the Muse sings are destined to be recorded and passed on, the poet serving as their mouthpiece. Yet instead, Smith and her Muse are hopelessly mismatched: when one speaks, the other falls silent; when one is “unhappy,” the other is satisfied. Their incompatibility creates a ripple effect, for the text is in conflict with itself, its two halves structurally asymmetric. Indeed, if the Muse is the exclusive source of the poet’s creativity, this text—composed without her participation—is an ontological impossibility, a non-poem; and because the reader is not privy to the Muse’s monologues, whose content regrettably goes to waste, it is only this incongruent, illegitimate non-poem that we finally receive.

In The Well Wrought Urn, a field-defining New Critical study, Cleanth Brooks asserts: “the poet is a maker, not a communicator.”^[25] Drawing perhaps on the etymology of “poetry”—derived from the Greek root poiein, “to make”—Brooks clarifies that the poet “explores, consolidates, and ‘forms’ the total experience that is the poem.”^[26] This statement is aligned with Stepanova’s “music box” metaphor, both sensitive to the palpable craft of poetic composition. For Smith, the construction of a “total experience” in fact hampers, even actively precludes, communication: the poet refuses to listen to her Muse and, by extension, fails to reproduce her speech, standing between the endless poetic repository the Muse embodies and its intended, eager audience. “No word she says is ever told,” the poet writes in the passive voice, as though not personally obligated to repeat the Muse’s words.

It is with a translation of this poem that Stepanova chooses to open За Стиви Смит, setting a discordant tone for the rest of the collection. Here is the poem in Russian, accompanied by a translation back into English, on which I will comment shortly:

Музочка моя сидит в печали.
Жалеет, что ее вообще зачали.
Одинешенька сидит на сквозняке.
Все, что ею подсказано, так и не сказано на моем языке.

Почему почему моя муза говорит, лишь когда в печали?
Нет, это я ее слушаю, лишь когда я в печали.
А когда я счастлива, я живу и плюю на процесс письма.
Музу это должно демора-лизовывать весьма.^[27]

My little muse sits wrapped in gloom.
She regrets ever leaving the womb.
She sits all alone in the draft.
Her words in my tongue have never been cast.

Why oh why does my Muse only speak when she is low?
No, it is me who listens only when I am low.
When I am happy, I live and scorn the writing process.
For my Muse this must be demora-lizing, I guess.

In Stepanova’s rendition, the fourth line retains its passive voice, though in place of unaccountability it stresses more sharply the sense of irrevocable loss permeating the text: what the Muse has whispered in the poet’s ear, this version of the fourth line reads, whatever she has advised, has never been uttered in the poet’s language. It is curious that Stepanova adds in—rather than lifting—a language barrier, intimating that the Muse’s speech might be readily available in Smith’s English. With this linguistic obstacle in place, Stepanova’s speaker assumes the role of an inadequate translator, fumbling helplessly for the right words; and in doing so, she inevitably alienates the Russian reader, or even the Russian literary sphere at large, who is left in the dark, twice removed—by the uncooperative speaker-translator-poet, by one’s own inability to access the language of the Muses—from poetry itself.

Retranslating this poem, I too have fumbled for words. With “the English original spinning in my head,” it felt impossible to distance my efforts from Smith’s formulations, impossible not to revert to her words. As a Muse, Smith is voluble and difficult to ignore. If the poem is a “constellation” of “elemental units,” language becomes secondary, allowing for endless rewritings in any tongue. This is, of course, easier said than done. I was torn between faithfulness to content and adherence to form: a literal translation, albeit crude, is useful for my explanatory purposes; and by contrast, a translation that preserves Stepanova’s rhyme scheme, which she has in turn inherited from Smith, is integral to the “aphoristic” technique that makes the latter unyielding and unforgettable. When I reached a breaking point, I resorted to AI—another imitative, paraphrastic tool—to generate rhymes: among countless inane suggestions, it has produced “wrapped in gloom” and “left the womb,” or “sitting there in sorrow” and “never saw tomorrow,” or else “sorrowful and low” and “ever came to grow.” My experiment with AI is equally shameful and entertaining: here is a fountainhead whose output is limitless, whose adaptations of the text are, at least potentially, infinitely variable, moving in a series of “deliberate shift[s]” away from its point of departure.

Taking on multiple shapes, “My Muse” perpetuates flawed, missing speech. Its speaker continuously turns her back on the public that has gathered around her, ears open. It is no wonder, then, that Stepanova concludes the poem by awkwardly splitting the word “demoralizing” into two, centering the fractured interaction between speaker, Muse, and reader. Smith’s “The Songster” is similarly stubborn in its unwillingness to communicate with the audience. This quatrain, too, is anxiously self-aware, though now, supplanting the unheard Muse is the unheard poet:

Miss Pauncefort sang at the top of her voice
(Sing tirry-lirry-lirry down the lane)
And nobody knew what she sang about
(Sing tirry-lirry-lirry all the same).^[28]

The titular songster is a thinly veiled version of Smith, her voice distinctly off-pitch; thus the third line builds toward a rhyme but ends on a disappointing flat note. Smith/Miss Pauncefort, however, is crucially not the poem’s speaker. Rather, she is observed from a safe distance, a spinsterish figure who does not quite fit in with the local community. While her actual performance takes place beyond textual bounds—once again, out of the reader’s earshot—the poem is merely a drained iteration of it.

In her analysis of this text, Masud rightfully observes that the singing resounding through the poem is deceptive: it seems to be Miss Pauncefort’s at first, yet “by the time we reach the fourth line, it becomes clear that it is instead singing from elsewhere which she is lip-syncing. The singing masquerades as hers, ultimately overrides her, urges us to sing along ‘all the same.’”^[29] Whereas Masud identifies the singing as emanating “from elsewhere,” I suspect that its source is none other than the speaker: enclosed in parentheses like an aside, the second and fourth lines mock Miss Pauncefort. If so, these lines trick the reader first into believing that the songster is quoted directly—and then into joining in the cruel joke.

Stepanova’s rendition of the poem reverses its casual cruelty. In Russian, Miss Pauncefort morphs into a collective:

Они пели и пели на верхней ноте
Трала-ла-ла и парам-пам-пам
И никто не спросит, о чем поете
(Трала-ла-ла-ла все равно).^[30]

They sang and sang on a high note
Tra-la-la-la and param-pam-pam
And no one would ask, what are you singing about
(Tra-la-la-la it’s all just the same).

Stepanova injects the question “no one would ask” into the body of the text, direct speech—i.e., “what are you singing about,” and not “what they were singing about”—displacing Smith’s resignation. In reporting a question no one dares, cares, or thinks to ask aloud, this text temporarily forces its reader into the songster’s precarious position, “they” shapeshifting into “you” before the speaker finally concludes that the song’s subject matter is insignificant. In this, Stepanova pushes the reader into the publicly ridiculed role previously occupied by Smith herself. If Smith is an “outlier,” Stepanova appears to imply, then so are we—emulating the silent poetess, timidly eternalizing her “little, empty poems.”

In Stepanova’s hands, the translated text is decidedly not a bridge between the Russian consumer and the English literary world; it is rather a game of telephone gone awry, affirming the refusal to communicate, to move beyond one’s internal world, as the poem’s defining feature. The nineteenth-century English critic John Stuart Mill has famously declared that “poetry is overheard,” that it is “feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude.”^[31] In Mill’s image, the reader is a transgressor, accidentally stumbling into the poet’s private realm; there emotion resides, detached and autonomous, absorbed by its own rambling intensity. For Smith, though, poetry is not spoken in hushed tones; loud and cacophonous, it lures the reader in only to retreat soon thereafter. It is these maddening—and maddeningly hollow—sounds that Stepanova reproduces in Russian, ensuring that she is never caught off-guard, never “overheard.”

 

 

---

^[1] Stevie Smith, interview by Kay Dick, Ivy & Stevie. Ivy Compton-Burnett and Stevie Smith: Conversations and Reflections (London: Allison & Busby, 1983), 70.

^[2] Maria Stepanova, “Writing from the Ghosthouse: Maria Stepanova on Postmemory and the Russian Skaz,” interview by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Asymptote, August 16, 2023.

^[3] Maria Stepanova, За Стиви Смит [Za Stivi Smit] (Moscow: Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2020), 47. All translations of Stepanova are my own unless stated otherwise.

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Ibid., 48.

^[7] Ibid., 58, 57-58.

^[8] Noreen Masud, Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 2, 12.

^[9] Ibid., 24.

^[10] Stepanova, За Стиви Смит, 59.

^[11] Sylvia Plath to Stevie Smith, November 19, 1962, quoted in Stevie Smith, Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith (London: Virago, 1981), 6.

^[12] Masud, Stevie Smith and the Aphorism, 1.

^[13] Stepanova, За Стиви Смит, 48.

^[14] Ibid.

^[15] Grigori Dashevsky quoted in Stepanova, За Стиви Смит, 52.

^[16] Ibid.

^[17] Stepanova, За Стиви Смит, 52.

^[18] Ibid., 59.

^[19] Ibid., 55.

^[20] Will May, Introduction to All the Poems: Stevie Smith (New York, NY: New Directions, 2015), xxix.

^[21] Ibid.

^[22] Ibid.

^[23] Masud, Stevie Smith and the Aphorism, 20, 23.

^[24] Stevie Smith, “My Muse,” in All the Poems: Stevie Smith (New York, NY: New Directions, 2015), 468.

^[25] Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (London: Dobson Books, 1960), 69.

^[26] Ibid.

^[27] Stepanova, За Стиви Смит, 7.

^[28] Stevie Smith, “The Songster,” in All the Poems, 20.

^[29] Masud, Stevie Smith and the Aphorism, 168.

^[30] Stepanova, За Стиви Смит, 8.

^[31] John Stuart Mill, “What Is Poetry?,” in The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), 1216; emphasis in original.