Sasha Dugdale is the author of The Strongbox and a further five award-winning collections of poetry. Her long poem Joy won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem; among her other prizes are the Cholmondeley Award and shortlistings for the International Booker and US National Book Award. One of the UK’s leading translators of Russian, her work includes the plays of Chekhov and the verse of Pasternak, but her key interest is in the translation of contemporary female authors: the exiled dissident poet Maria Stepanova, the Ukrainian playwright Natalya Vorozhbit. Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2012 to 2017, she spoke with our editor, James Appleby.
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I wanted to ask first about the variety of your work. This year you’ve published an original collection in The Strongbox and a translated collection in Maria Stepanova’s Holy Winter 20/21; previously you’ve translated the prose of In Memory of Memory and authored many plays. Is there any difference in your practice across these areas of writing?
Translation and original writing require different mental states. They’re very different in terms of pacing and the balance of impulses that you bring to the work. In fact, when I was thinking about the recent debate on whether the translator’s name should be on the front cover of a book alongside the name of its author, I imagined a situation where you only had the translator’s name on the front cover: it was their book in that language. And that was so horrifying, so viscerally horrifying, because it really isn’t my work. I wouldn’t want to answer for the work in that way. It’s not that I’m saying that the translator should be invisible – I don’t believe that for a moment. But in my translations of Pasternak, you’re reading Pasternak; I don’t write myself like Pasternak, and there is a difference.
That said, there’s definitely a continuum across all my practices, although I can’t say exactly what that is. Perhaps it’s as basic as the fact that it’s one self, working through. One literary self that unites them.
The Strongbox is a book-length poem always playing with Greek myth quotation, and in Part Eight you say: “Dawn has no memory / whereas dusk Remembers everything—” In our own culture of hyper-remembrance, why do Greek myths maintain their relevance? Why do we keep coming back to the classics?
Our culture is drenched in ideas derived from Classical and Archaic Greece. Archaic ideas are more interesting to me at the moment: our understanding of the biggest issues of our day is often filtered through the literature and rhetoric of the Archaic: the ur-myths and ur-philosophies from which so many others are derived. One of the particular areas that I focus on is the relationship with war and conflict. To prepare for The Strongbox I read Pindar and Heraclitus obsessively, to find a way of channelling what initially appeared to be quite foreign and peculiar ideas of victory and combat and strength – but I began to see very quickly that we, I mean our culture, has grown out of these now strange cosmologies. To understand what we are living with and how we perceive it, we have to go back to the source – to shine a light on it, and to consider other ways of viewing the world.
In The Strongbox you’re repeatedly combining the classical with the contemporary: Baucis and Philemon, airplanes, petrol, strigils. What is it about this combination that you find effective?
I wanted to think about Greek myth in a different way, and the best parallel – the one I kept in my head – was aerial archaeology. Until recently, you know, we had such a tiny amount of excavated material, and it’s really impossible to do much more by simply digging trenches. But aerial archaeology has radically changed how we see the prehistoric landscape, and yet you don’t disturb the soil. Sometimes I find updated versions of Greek myths so incredibly invasive, like trenches cut through a dig site. That was not my impulse: I hope that, in my own work, modern ‘technology’ is used in non-invasive ways. I want a purer understanding of the motivation of a text.
And speaking of the motivation behind texts, there’s also your work with Russian. Three Russophone Ukrainian authors are featured in this issue, and I know you’ve worked with Ukrainian playwright Natalya Vorozhbit, who says, “Damn it, Russian is my language, too. Why should I have to give it up? I love it. Protest against myself? I won't do that.” All the same, has the intensification of the Russian War of Aggression in Ukraine complicated your relationship with the language?
Without a doubt. If you ask any Slavists of long standing, they’ll say the same thing. It’s a split that isn’t outside me but inside: it’s not a case of me standing on the sidelines and judging Russian literature, but wondering instead, as a person who is part of Russian culture in the wider sense, well, what brought this about? You catch yourself looking at every piece of writing – every text you’ve known – and asking, is there in it some kind of drive towards the world as it is now? It’s very clear to many Ukrainians and Russians that Russian culture is entirely complicit in what has happened in Russia, and this will take generations to resolve. And we have parallels of course in Britain, so I don’t think there’s any moral high ground for us here. To what extent British culture was complicit in the drive for British imperialism is a question we all need to ask ourselves. But ideas of complicity and guilt become very difficult. Particularly when you’re wrestling within yourself.
There’s no doubt that British and Russian culture have been utilised for imperialist ends, but is it fair to talk about the complicity of individual poets, especially if they themselves fought against the state? It’s not my area and it is yours, so I say this with a little trepidation, but take a poet like Anna Akhmatova. It’s difficult to say that she is complicit in her writing, isn’t it?
These are such hard questions because we’re thinking about these things as they’re happening. And of course you think about yourself in these situations. I think of myself as a practising poet, I am going to leave a legacy of work, and, you know, I hope for good faith in my readers. I bring good faith to Akhmatova when I read her work, and I love her work. She as an individual is clearly not to blame for Russian and Soviet politics, but she grew up in a structure that was imperialist, she didn’t write in a vacuum – none of us do.
There’s a lot of talk, in this magazine and elsewhere, about the social importance of writing in translation: pushing forward intercultural dialogue, improving things in some small way. But I also wanted to bring up the slight ambiguities of The Strongbox and its section in the voice of Cassandra:
The stories were too real. There was no craft—
all of it could easily have come about.
No room was left for the imagination.
It wasn’t so much art as social project.
Whenever you saw her you felt guilty.
Is it possible for someone with your interest in the former Soviet Union to believe entirely in art as social project?
I always used to say that translation is a duty – and I do feel it is a duty, I do feel that it’s my obligation to translate, to bring two worlds of different cultures closer, towards some point of proximity – primarily, really, to enrich the English language. To bring something to us that we didn’t have before, so that we can widen our empathies. The idea of social and political engagement is rooted in what I do: I’ve always wanted to translate Russian women poets, for example, who haven’t received the attention they deserve.
But I don’t think, if I’m honest, I would do my work if it wasn’t also a pleasure – if I didn’t derive something from it very strongly for myself: the regenerative force of translation. When I began working in Russia in the ‘90s, there was a strong drive towards art for art’s sake, real pushback against that kind of Soviet socialist-realist moral-obligation stuff. You said before we started recording that you felt the pleasure could be at the root of the potential for social change, and yes, I think that’s right.
To finish – and in the knowledge that you’ve just published two books – could you tell me what you’re working on at the moment?
I’m doing a few translations of prose, a play by Natalya Vorozhbit about the ecological disaster of amber mining – written before the war, in fact, but she’s only just completed it – a new novel by Maria Stepanova. And I’m writing some prose of my own. I’ve got this lifelong desire to write about John Keats. I’m a bit obsessive, so I sort of sit there with my stack of books – as tall as Keats, probably. With all these notes, I think, I’ve got to write something – only I haven’t managed to yet.
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To find out more about Sasha Dugdale and her work, including The Strongbox, you can visit her page on the Carcanet website; for her translations of Maria Stepanova, including Holy Winter 20/21, please see Bloodaxe Books (UK) and New Directions (US).
Photo courtesy of the poet
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