Lyric Line

Want to hear what some of these poets reading poems in their original languages? Try Lyric Line. Martin Solotruk is on there, for example.

Slovakia

Slovakia is officially known as the Slovak Republic. It's people are Slovaks and its language is Slovak.  Slovakia.org has a fabulous Slovakian Republic FAQ section which begins with a quote from G.W. in which he confusies Slovakia and Slovenia.  The site also answers such pressing questions as the difference between Slovakia, Slovenia and Slavonia.

The Slovak Republic came into its own in 1993 when it peacefully separated from the Czech Republic. Throughout history Slovakia has been generally dominated by stronger political entities, however it has its own strong culture and national identity. Controlled in turn by the Hungarians, then the Ottoman Turks and most recently a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Slovakians fostered their national identity and began to politically ally with neighboring peoples. When Austro-Hungaria was disassembled after WWI Czechoslavakia was established, broken up by the Nazis and formed again by the Soviets.

In 1989, as you'll see if you've already read Lewis's wonderful post on the Czech Republic, communism fell and Czechoslavakia began the Velvety proceedings leading to their friendly separation in 1993. The Slovak Republic is now a Parliamentary Democracy, and in 2004 joined the EU and NATO.

Language and Literature:

In the late 18^th Century, Anton Bernolak was the first Slovak to create a literary language. The first Slovakian novel was written by Josef Ignc Bajza in 1783. Bajza's contemporary Jn Holl wrote epic poetry in alexandrine verse and also from that time is Jan Kollar, a poet who is considered one of the main representatives of Slovak classicism.

In the early 19^th Century, Ludovit Stur is credited with creating the modern Slovakian literary language. Mid-19^th Century Slovakians under Hungarian rule were stripped of their culture and did not produce much writing, but by the 1870s, poets like P.O. Hviezdoslav were back on the scene with Slovakian realism.

In the 20^th Century Ivan Krasko led the Slovakian modernists who wrote about defending their nation's right to exist and worried about their collective future. Between WWI and WWII two schools of poetry of note were surrealism and Catholic modernism. Poetry in Slovakia was used to address the experiences of WWII and Communist rule.

Slovak language info: here. Slovak National anthem: here. Another youtube montage, Slovak rap, and Slovak punk.

How foreign is the foreign?

C. K. Williams, in the March issue of Poetry, muses about the globalization of poetry as evidenced by, among other things, New European Poets.

Don Share, on Harriet, muses about Williams' musings.

Johannes Göransson weighs in on his blog.

Your thoughts?

Czech yourself; welcome to the world of bad puns

Why must everything in Prague be wax museums?

The Czech Republic is one of the richest (culturally) European nations. Prague has as much beauty as Paris, or Florence, or St. Petersburg (says me). Landlocked by Germany, Poland, Austria, and Slovakia, the Czech Republic has been called “the quintessential European city,” a characterization we must love if only for its silly meaninglessness.

Here are some everyday words and phrases in Czech:

Roll proud.

“Roll tide.”

A fazole, jednou prošla, je hrozná věc - na odpad!

“A kidney stone, once passed, is a terrible thing—to waste!”

and

Navratil

Masculine singular past tense of navrátit, which means “to return,” a nickname for someone who had returned [perhaps from Naperville, or Tuscaloosa] to his native community after a prolonged absence.

Getting up to speed on the Czech Republic

We’ve heard of Czechoslovakia. It was one of the countries formed by “mutual consent” in the wake of WWI, which means, essentially, people called Czech and people called Slovaks merged into a single nation. The name “Czechoslovakia,” hence, makes perfect sense.

In the late sixties, Czech politicians and intellectuals, living under Soviet influence, wanted to reform the civic structure and create what they called "socialism with a human face." That movement was put down by Warsaw Pact troops. Anti-Soviet protestations were common until 1989, when the USSR collapsed (which, as Americans, we know happened because Ronald Reagan was half-human, half-god who will one day return and rapture us all into jingoism heaven.)

The so-called "Velvet Revolution" led to the so-called “Velvet Divorce.” On January 1, 1993, the “Velvet Divorce” created two national components, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The Czech Republic jumped on the NATO bandwagon in 1999, and the European Union in 2004.

Czech their poetry out! (and other trite, wholly unimaginative homophones)

I’ve been able to locate this really good anthology of Modern Czech Poetry called Modern Czech Poetry, edited by someone named Paul Selver. Some really innovative and beautiful stuff is in this anthology, among them an introduction by Selver that at one point sums up Czech poetics with a credibility I could never have. He says

The Czechs are Slavs, and their poetry has all the impulsiveness, the music and the melancholy which are a common heritage of their stock. But the historical vicissitudes through which they have passed, together with the special influences to which they have been subjected as a result, have modified their national characteristics, just as their language is phonetically differentiated from that of kindred races. Thus, while their poetry is rich in the dreamy cadences and elegiac moods which are, so to speak, Pan-Slavonic manifestations, it also frequently sounds the notes of satire, defiance and rebellion. Again, the local conditions of life in Prague, with its sombre atmosphere of bygone glory, have produced a curious element of artificial romanticism, which finds its inspiration in the faded, the sinister and the aristocratic. These latter ingredients are to be met with especially in the verses of the Czech decadents, in striking contrast to the typical Moravian poets, whose fondness for bright colouring and quaint phraseology is due to the regional peculiarities of their native district.

By its geographical situation Bohemia has been more directly exposed to Western European influences than any other Slav country. In literature, and especially in poetry, the Czechs have shown a preference for French or Italian sources, and they have deliberately ignored the more immediate German models.

(Modern Czech Poetry, Paul Selver, ed. K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. UK:1920. ASIN: B0006DAL5A)

Some of the more unique characteristics of Czech literary culture

In the second half of the 20th century the only authors who could be published were those who were “vetted” by the government. This produced a vibrant underground, where the talented writers hung out, but that’s not to say quality work wasn’t widely published and widely acclaimed in Bohemia, often by coming right to the edge of the restrictions, which itself became an art.

There was something called “Samizdat,” which became extremely popular as “...the clandestine copying and distribution of government-suppressed literature or other media in Soviet-bloc countries. Copies were made a few at a time, and those who received a copy would be expected to make more copies. This was often done by handwriting or typing (Krugosvet Encyclopedia).

There seems to be a pleasant prevalance of women writers in modern and contemporary Czech literature, especially when compared to other nearby countries. 

Some cool places online

Czech Center in NYC

A bookstore I went to in Prague.

A smart site about Kafka

A tour of Slovenia

Slovenia has some beautiful alpine mountains and Slavoj Zizek. It’s a small country. 57% of the people there self-identify as Catholic, but, interestingly enough, 23% choose not to specify any particular religion, and 10% proudly identify as either atheist or “no religion at all.” The current president is Danilo Turk.

When WWI ended, so did the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Borders, famously, were redrawn. Some got what they hoped for. Others didn’t. The Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes, eventually, figured they would create the country of Yugoslavia, which they did in 1929.

Originally Slovenia was a republic of Yugoslavia. In 1991, the Slovenes won their independence from the Serbs. They did so violently, and the memory of the brief (10 days) war has not faded.

Today, the tone of Slovenia’s culture is characterized by a robust democracy that boasts a deeply engaged, well-informed electorate.

Slovenia has been a member state of both the European Union and NATO since late 2004.

France Prešeren and 18th and 19th century Slovenian literature—the patrimony of our anthologized poets

Still widely read and deeply influential to many contemporary Slovene poets are Josip Murn Aleksandrov (b.1879), Oton Župančič (b. 1878) and Alojz Gradnik (b. 1882).

Here's a more informed critical perspective.

France Prešeren, though, seems to be regarded as the greatest Slovene poet, or at least the most written about. Here’s a lecture by a literary historian who works at Zizek’s university in the Slovene capital. At the bottom there are links to poems by Preseren, who appears to be interesting indeed. Here’s a characteristic stanza

Live, oh live all nations,

Who long and work for that bright day,

When o'er earth's habitations

No war, no strife shall hold its sway;

Who long to see

That all men free,

No more shall foes, but neighbours be.

Modernism, or “Moderna”

Apparently what we call Modernism, the Slovenian critics call “Moderna,” and “the damned poets movement,” which seems to not be pajorative at all. Dragotin Kette (b. 1876) is a name that pops up quite a bit. 

Here one of our anthologized poets, Boris Novak, comments on the difficulties of translating Kette’s work. The essay also serves as a useful education in Slovene poetry.

Ana Božičević Weighs In On Croatia

I asked Ana Božičević, a Croatian poet who's been living in America since she was nineteen, to weigh in on our blog. Ana's first book, Stars of the Night Commute, will be published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in Fall 2009. For poems and everything else, visit her at nightcommute.org.

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Hola. Let me start with a brief caveat: I moved to the U.S. from Croatia at age 19, and had for a long while, probably through the offices of overwork and an exclusive focus on my new environment/language (and some sort of don't-turn-back-Orpheus complex) lost much of my grasp of contemporary Croatian poetry. Only in the past couple of years, thanks to the wonders of internet bookstores and web mags, and an editorial project I worked on for an international spinoff of S. Young/J. Spahr's "Numbers Trouble," have I reconnected with Croatian poetry and poets. Some knowledge was inevitably lost in the gap.

So here's my two cents, which on the other side of the coin might be two kunas, or euros -- you pick.

Your brief historical/linguistic overview of Croatia on the blog is quite sufficient for these purposes. The two things to 'get' in respect to Croatia is how much social/national turmoil it has been subjected to, well, always, and how inevitably this has reflected on its poets' national and linguistic identities -- which were often shaped by reactionary instincts. Still, there's a great deal of variety in Croatian poetry -- from vernacular poems of daily life and witness, to the (neo)avantgarde, postmodern, language, and surrealist poetries... all loose labels you're free to peel off as soon as they bore. Check Poetry International Web here and here for more on the history of modern Croatian poetry from wiser folk. http://croatia.poetryinternationalweb.org and the Croatian section of Transcript magazine offer a great supplementary array of poets and poems for anyone interested in exploring beyond the NEP anthology (a word of warning though -- the translations are uneven). The Croatian language, like the other languages of the region, is notoriously "difficult" (remember "Clinton deploys vowels to Bosnia"? {Ed: Yes!}), but I don't think this is anything a good translator would be phased by.

Igor Štiks's selections are very representative of contemporary Cro Po -- on the mark. Any omissions can realistically be blamed on a lack of space. I was surprised, though, not to see Dorta Jagić in this anthology. That's a little bit like excluding, say, Matthea Harvey from an anthology of new American poets. She's an extraordinary poet and my frustration with her unavailability in English has finally driven me to begin translating her. Look for her at a friendly magazine near you, sometime soon. The not-sufficiently-spoken secret of Croatian poetry today is the immensely vital mini-renaissance of women poets who are taking Croatian poetry in very necessary directions. To quote Darija Žilić, a wonderful poet and critic (doubtlessly better qualified to answer these questions -- Darija? -- her latest book of critical essays is "Writing in Milk"), who says, in response to Rade Jarak's question "Has the poetry written by women brought a new sensitivity, in the form of literary experience, to our everyday lives?":

"You put that very well – the need for a new “sensitivity.” Recently, Kemo Mujičić Artnam made an interesting comment in the magazine Tema. As he read an anthology of poetry from the former Yugoslavia in the Sarajevo Notebooks, he noticed that 70% of the poems spoke about blood, knife, nationhood. That tells us all we need to know about the current zeitgeist. I think women authors much more significantly undermine the national(ist) discourse, they are more sensitive to “difference,” and the themes they investigate are closer to the everyday – generally, they don’t crow about the spirit of the nation, writing instead about the body, motherhood, etc." (from Knjigomat)

She also points out that contemporary Croatian women poets "avoid politics, preferring to write about their “I” and about a somewhat autistic dream-world." This "dreamworld," the direct opposite of the dialectic of war, "blood, knife, and nationhood" -- the poetics of a different kind of witness -- speaks very much to "gurlesque" as discussed by Arielle Greenberg, Lara Glenum, and others. And contemporary Croatian women poets (more names, in addition to the above and the anthology: Aida Bagić, Vesna Biga, Olja Savičević Ivančević, Jasenka Kodrnja, Ljuba Lozančić, Sonja Manojlović, Irena Matijašević, Sibila Petlevski and many more!) as well as the male poets willing to transcend the above dialectic (see the NEP anthology) are, in my view, the key to making Croatian poetry new, newly Croatian, Croatian and universal in new ways. The selection in NEP is reflective, for me, of this hope. That I focus more on the women poets here is incidental to my interests and research and -- well, someone has to focus on them. They're so worth it. I'd love to see an anthology of New European Women Poets Who Kick Ass; I volunteer to translate all of the above for its pages.
Since I'm not viewing these poets, or Croatian and American poetry, from inside Croatia (except my inner Croatia), I fear that my answers to your last few questions would be inaccurate. Let's leave them below, though, and I'll invite some wise Croats to contribute to the comments section, if that's acceptable. A glimpse at the latest issues of the Croatian journal Poezija (Poetry) tells me that Croatian readers have been reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kim Addonzio, June Jordan, Charles Bukowski (ah, Bukowski), Billy Collins and Anne Carson. A medley. And a lot of European poets to boot. The variety of nationalities and schools found in this one journal make it rather more interesting than many American poetry mags. Just saying.

Also, write to me and feel free to contradict me on any and all points above. I want/need to learn more about Croatian poetry too. Help.

Thanks for the opportunity to share with you! Happy reading,

Ana

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Additional Qs "Leftover" by Ana:

How are the poets in this anthology (Branko Males, Anka Zagar, Branko Cegec, Delimir Resicki, Kresimir Bagic, Damir Sodan, Tatjana Gromaca) viewed in Croatia? Are these the most popular poets in Croatia? The most accessible to non-Croatian audiences?

Do you feel that Croatian poets are pressured (internally or externally) to write poems that are Croatian? Are poets concerned with being Croatian enough? Or, are poets concerned with seeming too Croatian? Is there pressure to write poems that are accessible to non-Croatian audiences?

What role does poetry play in the life of your average Croat? Are Croatian poets writing for "the masses?" Do Croatian poets feel compelled to write poems that are beneficial to "the people?"

Are there any American poets who are particularly popular among Croatian poets?

Book Recommendations

Before I forget, folks. Recommendations for those interested in learning more about the regions we've been discussing this week and last.

Balkan Ghosts, by Robert D. Kaplan

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, by Rebecca West

Montenegro

A big slice of Montenegrin culture is devoted to the ideal of Čojstvo i Junaštvo, roughly translated as "Humanity and Bravery". This stems from centuries of warrior history, chivalry. With that in mind:

Culture and History-

http://www.visit-montenegro.com/culture.htm

Literature (before 1918)-

http://www.montenet.org/culture/literatu.htm

Literature (themes overview)-

http://www.montenegro.org/lit_chal.html

Current Politic and Neat Neat Stuff-

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/70949.htm

Albania

Sex trafficking, blood feuds, repressive political systems and widespread poverty: a tour through the rugged mountains and pristine beaches of Albania is no Spring Break 2009. Following a long period of isolationism, we can finally enjoy the fruits of Albania’s hidden, poetic labor.


Some helpful country overviews:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/country_profiles/1004234.stm
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/al.html
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/altoc.html

Brief summaries of Albanian Literature:
http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/4615/Albanian-Poetry.html
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/12556/Albanian-literature

A note from our translator:
http://www.elsie.de/en/books/b41.html

And an Albanian-American literature journal:
http://www.albanianliterature.org/pena.htm


Signs that life is looking up in Albania:

*Squat toilets are no longer the norm
*Blood feuds are mostly contained in the Northern Frontier
*Homosexuality is now met with open hostility, as opposed to violence

And now for something completely different: A Local Albanian Gas Station

Serbia

The Republic of Serbia

FACTOIDS (according to Wiki)

Capital: Belgrade “City of the Future of South Europe”

Population: 7,395,000

Currency: Serbian dinar

Calling Code: 381

Serbia has 2,000km of navigable waterways

in an area just smaller than North Carolina

While so much of Serbian culture has been shaped and mis-shaped by War, I would like to focus primarily on literature, language and the arts. More specifically, here is a brief (-ish) overview of the morphing language and subsequent changing literature of Serbia. I am deeply interested in the poems themselves. For this blog, the poem (and its language) is the most important thing.

LANGUAGE

Serbo-Croatian (the Serbians call it Serbian, the Croats call it Croatian)

A Slavonic language, one of the 3 big guns along with Romance and Germanic, Serbian shares an alphabet with Bulgaria and Russia, and while the language of the peoples diverged slightly (i.e. pronunciation), the language of the liturgy and literature remained basically the same until... Eventually the difference in pronunciation expressed itself in Serbian writing. For example, certain vowels were replaced in spoken language, which eventually led to a congruent replacement in the written language. Church Slavonic was slipping into a street-version of itself that could better explain and characterize domestic ideas.

Today, the Serbian vocabulary is increasing due to word formation using mostly domestic Slavonic roots, and existing lexemes are gaining nuances of meaning. Not to mention the wide acceptance of loan words. FACT: Loan words do not gain interest over time.
For further linguistic reading.

SERBIAN LITERATURE (THE OLDIES)

Medieval Literature

The oldest manuscript book and a monument of Old-Serbian literacy is Miroslav’s Gospel (Serbian: Мирославово јеванђеље / Miroslavovo jevandjelje), a 362-page liturgic book written between 1180 and 1191 in a transitional form between Old Church Slavonic and Slavoserbian. It was written by two monk pupils Grigorije and probably Varsameleon, on a white parchment paper for Miroslav, the Duke of Zahumlje, brother of King Stefan Nemanja.
Miroslav's Gospel explains the origin of the Cyrillic script, the letters in it are a masterpiece of calligraphy and illustrations are daring and magnificent miniature and vignettes. For centuries Miroslav's Gospel has been kept in the Hilander monastery of the Serbian Orthodox Church, on Mount Athos, Greece. In 2005 Miroslav's Gospel was entered into UNESCO program Memory of the World. However, the most beautifully written and decorated manuscript remains Serbian Psalter of Munich, created in the last quarter of 14th century. The other monumental inscription from this same period is the Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja, dedicated to the Catholic coastal areas of Dioclea, that would later convert fully to Orthodox Christianity.


Serbian Epic Poetry

Cycles were composed by unknown authors between 14th and 19th centuries, and are mostly concerned with historical events and personages.

Structure contains a few repeating formulas: ("Dear God, a great miracle", "years of days",       "writes a tiny letter", "they have fought till summer day noon"). 

The number three is used to such extremes that, for example, if something breaks, it always “breaks into three halves”. Longer poems can have more than five hundred lines. Each line has exactly ten syllables and caesura after fourth syllable. Songs could be recited, but traditionally they are sung accompanied by a musical instrument called gusle.

Serbian Oral Tradition Link

The Battle of Kosovo Epic Poem Link


SERBIAN LITERATURE AFTER THE WAR (THE NEWBIES)

During the 1980’s, Serbian literature was described mostly as postmodern and focused mainly on literary themes such as the position of artists/literature, metafiction, and experimental form. In the 1990’s literature turned to 'realistic' and character-focused narratives that dealt with questions of war and its consequences, thus marking the change from postmodern style to "new realism". Even Hollywood took notice of the change in Serbia with the release of their movie “Savior” in 1998. So here are a few links providing examples of 'contemporary' Serbian poetry, as well as a few shoutouts to the poets in our Serbian selection.

Here’s a link to a blog, While Sleepwalking, that discusses Serbian literature

Orient Express (a literary journal featuring Marija Knezevic)

Radmila Lazic is the managing editor of ProFemina Link

Novia Tadic:

NIGHT SONNET
Great wise night
Under the city walls
You pull me out of
The monster's socket
Lead me crazed
Out on the empty square
So I may walk again
Around myself
And see once more
That I'm still
A living creature
Son of thunder and smoke
The lost son
The solitary, generously salted--Nobody
-from Nightmail: Selected Poems, translated by Charles Simic

Author photo with Charles Simic

Charles Simic has also edited an anthology of Serbian poets titled The Horse Has Six Legs. Graywolf, 1992.

Dragan Jovanovic Danilov

“On Sunday Afternoon, A Soul is A Fascinating Fascist”

-Golem: in Jewish legend, a human figure made of clay and supernaturally brought to life; an automaton, a robot
-Kremlin: Russian citadel or fortified enclosure, especially in Moscow
(OED online)

SERBIAN, CROATIAN AND BOSNIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Okay, almost done. This article may be of interest to anyone thinking about the translation (aren't we all?) of a "minor language" (their words) and its presence in collections translated into English.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Here are some quick links for some quick, useful info:

Quick History-http://www.worldinfozone.com/facts.php?country=BosniaHerzegovina

Language-
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=BA

(Also, not for the faint of heart or easily offended, but go Google "Swearsaurus: Bosnian" for some funny/brutal curses of the area. It's NOT a work safe site, in fact, it's actually a very seedy website with some XXX ads. But what do you expect, it is a website dedicated to the acrobatics of 4-letter words.)

Music-

Here's a popular singer. Loved it because the audience can't decide if they want to clap or not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svx3yuOkflw&feature=related

Economy/Current Political-

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2868.htm

Crow-to-the-atia

Croatia is pretty:












And according to a 2008 copy of In-Style Magazine, Angelina Jolie thinks it’s the new hip spot to beach-vacation (she also set up a Croatian Food Festival for all her UNICEF cronies with the top ten Croatian chefs serving. 192 countries were represented).

And Andre Benjamin (aka Andre 3000 from Outcast), owns a tee-shirt with the Croatian flag (for an unknown reason):




As does Snoop Dogg:










Quick history:
There were tribes and kingdoms and stuff.

In 1102 the country united with Hungary, which lasted until 1918.

After the end of WWI, Croatia joined Serbia, and Yugoslavia was formed, until its demise in 1991.

The first Yugoslavia (1918-1941) was ruled by the Serbian royal family, Karadjordjevic, which naturally favored the Serbs and caused enormous resentment in Croatia. This figures in to their language A LOT.

The country was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1941, which gave Croatia independence under the fascist dictator Ante Pavelic. This regime was known for its harsh rule and for committing numerous atrocities, and therefore many Croats (over 200,000) actively joined the resistance movement under Tito which liberated the country in May 1945. (Winston Churchill was so impressed with the Croatian resistance that he sent his son Randolph and the writer Evelyn Waugh (whose novel, btw, became a movie a couple months ago – Brideshead Revisited – haven’t seen it) to Croatia as his personal emissaries.)

Croatia became one of the Yugoslav republics ruled by the communist government until 1991 when Croatia declared its independence, prompting Serbian invasion. Almost all Croats rose to defend their country under the leadership of its first president, the late Franjo Tudjman (who died in December 1999), and after five years the country was liberated. Croatia is now a member of the United Nations, and is also a candidate for membership of the European Union and a NATO acceding member. Croatia is expected to formally join NATO in April 2009, making it the second former Yugoslav nation to join the military alliance following Slovenia. In 2005, presidential elections were held. The incumbent, President Stipe Mesic, was re-elected to another five year term. Presidential powers in Croatia are limited, but he is still influential in making domestic and foreign policy issues.

Done and done.

Language:
As far as language is considered, Croatian is the official spoken word (written in the Latin alphabet with German, Hungarian, Italian and Turkish words), but it’s a long and complicated story of how it arrived there… which I’ll try and sum up (correctly, I hope):

In 1850 five “men of letters,” and three philologists got together and unified the Serbian language (which at the time was a mix of Church Slavonic and Russian-Slavonic) and the Croatian language, creating Serbo-Croatian. Now, this has a lot to do with the creation of Yugoslavia, which Croatia is formerly a part of, and where the government tried to “Serbianize” the national language. A lot of Croats had a problem with this. Writers and Universities got together and issued the "Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Standard Language," asking for four literary languages: Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, and Macedonian. They didn’t so much lose the argument as it just didn’t get resolved.

This dispute went on as long as communism did – and many writers’ writings were banned for using Croat language during this period. Then, with Croatia’s Independence in 1991, when all the political stress was taken off of Croats, many once Serbian-named descriptions were returned to their original Croatian. Now there’s a good mix of both. But it’s still confusing… there were never any standardized dictionaries, etc. made of Croatian and there still isn’t a regulatory body for the language. Furthermore, Serbo-Croatian has continued to have two different subtypes - the Eastern standardization (spread in Montenegro, Serbia and partly in Bosnia and Herzegovian), and Western-standard that is common in Croatia and partly in Bosnia and Herzegovia. Some characteristics of Western-standard are translating of foreign words (some poets refused to do this), as well as some morphological aspects such as the construction of future tense: radicu (Eastern-standard for "I shall work"), radit cu (Western-standard).

Make sense?

Literature:
Despite - or because of - repeated invasions over the centuries and amalgamation with other countries, Croatians have maintained a strong, distinctive culture. Croatians depict their daily life through folklore. Songs, dances and costumes exist for every occasion in all parts of the country. Soon after the printing press was invented, Croatian literature entered the European scene. The Croatian nobility was deeply involved in literature, leaving much by way of poetry and translations. The famous playwright Marin Drzic (1508-67) helped raise the language to a high literary level. The 20th century has seen a strengthening of Croatian writing.

In the opening years of the 20th century, poetry was the dominant genre, much of it influenced by the Aestheticism movement (definition coming below) and concerned with the inner struggle of modern humans with their world and the search for meaning in individual existence.

Here’s the definition of Aestheticism: followers maintain that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. They believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; it need only be beautiful. The Aesthetes developed the cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor in art. Life should copy Art, they asserted. They considered nature as crude and lacking in design when compared to art. The main characteristics of the movement were: suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, massive use of symbols, and synaesthetic effects—that is, correspondence between words, colors and music.

These common Western themes were modified by specifically Croatian concerns with the county's lack of development and political subjugation (to Hungary at this point). Between the wars, avant-garde poetry continued to be expressed in the verse of poets, invoking the horrors of war while retaining classical elegance. In the less-restrictive atmosphere that followed Yugoslavia's break with the Soviet Union (1948), topics began spreading and morphing, including more cosomopolitan themes, experimental autobiographies that played with the boundaries between autobiography and biography, feminism, and, always, folklore.

Famous writers in depth:
Mark Marulic – poet, died 1524, humanist/religious writer, wrote in Latin, Croatian and Italian (Croatia shares a border with Italy).

Marino Darza – 1508-1567, is considered the finest Croatian Renaissance playwright and prose writer. He was born rich, became a priest despite his family wishes, wasn’t good in school and started hanging out with some “outlaws” getting work where he could and traveling through Italy. He thought his home town was governed by "a small circle of elitist aristocracy bent to tyranny." His wors cover many field: lyric poetry, pastorals (still highly regarded), political letters and pamphlets, and comedies (rated some of the best in the European Renaissance). Since its independence, Croatia has awarded a "Marino Darza Award" for dramatic work. 2008 was also declared the Year of Marino Darza, for his 500th birthday.

Ivan Gundulic, 1589-1638, the most celebrated Baroque poet from Croatia. Religious poetry, dealt with vanity, etc. He also wrote "Dubravka" which is a major city in Croatia and whose first verse in the unofficial slogan for the city. See first stanza below in Croatian (without accents, sorry), and then English:

Olijepa, o draga, o slatka slobodo,
dar u kom sva blaga visa nji nam bog je do,
uzr oce istini od nase sve slave,
uresu jedini od ove Dubrave,
sva srebra, sva zlata, svi ljudcki zivoti
ne mogu bit plata tvsoj istoj lipoti.

O beautiful, o beloved, o sweet freedom,
God has given us all the treasures in you,
you are the true source of all our glory,
you are the only decoration of this Dubrave.
All silver, all gold, all human lives
cannot repay your pure beauty!

Ivo Andric, 1892-1975, was a novelist, short story write and winer of the 1961 Nobel Peace Prize. His novels, e.g. "The Bridge on the Drina" and "Bosnian Chronicle" dealt with life in his native Bosnia under the Ottoman Empire. His works have recently resurfaced as a source of anti-Muslim prejudice.

Andric is claimed as a hero by the Croats, Serbs and Bosnians (he was born to a Bosnian Croat family, later identified himself with Serbs, and lived and wrote mainly about Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Miroslav Krleza, 1893-1981, ofren been proclaimed as the greatest Croatian writer of the 20th Century. His collected works number more than 50 volumes and cover all parts of imaginative literature: poetry, drama, short story, novels, essays, diaries, polemics and autobiographical prose.

Vladimir Nazor - 1876-1949, was the first President of the People's Republic of Croatia. He was also a famous writer, translator and communist politician. He wrote a lot of folk legends, he wrote over 500 sonnets. One of the poets we are reading this week, Delimir Resicki won the 2006 nation Vladimir Nazor award for best literary work.

I heart poetry,
Meg

Titos Patrikios (b. 1928)

Η ΠΥΛΗ ΤΩΝ ΛΕΟΝΤΩΝ

Τα λιοντάρια είχαν χαθεί από χρόνια
ούτε ένα δεν βρισκόταν σ’όλη την Ελλάδα
ή μάλλον ένα μοναχικό, κυνηγημένο
κάπου είχε κρυφτεί στην Πελοπόννησο
χωρίς ν’απειλεί πια κανέναν
ώσπου το σκότωσε κι αυτό ο Ηρακλής.
Ωστόσο η θύμηση των λιονταριών
ποτέ δεν έπαψε να τρομάζει
τρόμαζε η εικόνα τους σε θυρεούς και ασπίδες
τρόμαζε το ομοίωμά τους στα μνημεία των μαχών
τρόμαζε η ανάγλυφη μορφή τους
στο πέτρινο υπέρθυρο της πύλης.
Τρομάζει πάντα το βαρύ μας παρελθόν
τρομάζει η αφήγηση όσων έχουν συμβεί
καθώς τη χαράζει η γραφή στο υπέρθυρο
της πύλης που καθημερινά διαβαίνουμε.



The Lions’ Gate

The lions had already departed.
Not even one in all of Greece,
except for a rather solitary, evasive
lion hiding out somewhere on the Peleponnesus,
a threat to no one at all,
until it too was slaughtered by Hercules.
Still, our memories of lions
never stopped terrifying us:
their terrible images on coats of arms and shields,
their terrible figures on battle monuments,
that terrible relief carved
into a stone lintel over the gate.
Our past is forever full, terrible,
just as the story of what happened is terrible,
carved as it is now, written on the lintel
of the gate we pass through every day.

--Titos Patrikios

[from The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios. Truman State UP, 2007]

Patrikios, as I mentioned in one of the comments to a post below, is a member of that generation which comes after that of Seferis/Ritsos/Elytis and before the younger generation featured in the NEP anthology. I add this to the discussion since it seems to get at the complicated, ambivalent relationship a modern Greek poet (or any citizen of a place like Athens) has to history: namely, having to encounter (endure) daily contact with the Classical past while simultaneously recognizing the violence and chaos of the more recent past, not to mention the present.

May it thicken the soup just a little...in case you are all still actively processing the Balkan poets.

Christopher

A Couple Approaches

[& SORRY THIS POST IS SO HUGE!]



Hello Joel and others. And thanks for inviting me to participate in your blog. (And it’s very cool to see so much lively thinking about this project! The book was such an enormous task for Wayne and me and the many regional editors--so it’s especially gratifying to see it making its way in the world.)

Joel: I’m probably not the best person to answer your second question, which seems specific to translating. I’ve published only a few translations myself and, while I find the kinds of cultural questions you raise interesting, I’ll leave the answers to those who have spent more time wrestling with them.

But you also asked about how important it was that the selected poets be “representative of the current poetry scene” in each country vs. the value of including only poets we thought “most important.” That’s an interesting question—and it’s one I’ve wrestled with not only in this book, but in two other anthologies I’ve edited, as well. And recently, I had to write up some notes and ideas on this very subject for one of those AWP talks, so maybe I’ll flesh those out a bit here. [And looking back over it, I can't help thinking I've added maybe more flesh than you want!]

It seems to me that it might be useful to think about a couple approaches to editing any anthology that attempts to represent a large population of writers in a limited space.

The first approach might overtly acknowledge that any such project necessarily involves an imposition of strong editorial authority. The editor’s role here is to ask what the best of such-and-such poetry—younger poets, Latvian poets, etc.—might look like, to overlay one aesthetic, the editor’s, onto a multitude of poetries. This kind of activist approach, therefore, might imagine an idealized sort of canon within the limits of the anthology and advocate for it, the editor more-or-less explicitly saying, “here I am, the editorial ego. Hello!” This anthology sets forth a kind of editorial argument for one kind of poetry, or one so-called “important” poetry, against the mass of other poetry.

The second approach might also acknowledge this imposition, but then attempt, as much as possible, to subvert it. The second kind of anthologist sees editing as an active subversion of editorial ego in the service of a kind of generalized representation. I imagine this sort of anthologist suggests to the reader, “Here I am, but pay no attention to me,” as it tries to represent (albeit imperfectly) the writing of a population of writers. What are the many modes of writing that seem to be of interest to Lithuanian poets today? It asks not what, for instance, Irish poetry might ideally look like, but rather seeks to represent the many strands of what Irish poetry appears to be.

Of course, both approaches are troubling, and steering a middle course more often than not merely clouds the issue.

I’ve been both kinds of editor and made choices I regret. I’ve also seen anthologies that do the same kinds of work better than I have done.

About ten years ago, I edited a book called THE NEW YOUNG AMERICAN POETS—an anthology of poets in their twenties and thirties, actively writing in the United States in the late 1990s. I had a general sense of the kind of poetry I was going to select and, pretty self-consciously, decided to take the first approach—that is, to see in this anthology an early attempt to define for readers not just what poets of a certain age were writing—of course, there were thousands and thousands of them, and I could only include about 40—but also to suggest in my selection what I hoped American poetry might look like in years to come, what it might, in my fantasyland, become. At the time, I thought I’d favor a kind of poetry that was both formally innovative and, at the same time, suggestive of narrative. I was not that interested in Language poetry, poetry that owed too overt a debt to certain theoretical ideas I’d studied in school. I was not, I told myself, interested in winking irony. Nor was I terribly interested in poetry that seemed merely confessional. I imagined formal innovation with overt subject matter, poetry that, were it clearly about the self of the poet, challenged those notions at the same time. In short, I didn’t really know what I wanted, and this was the problem. I was young and I had not read enough in my life to be making the kinds of arguments I was trying to make. Also, I thought that, since I was OF that generation, I was in a kind of unique position to edit such a book. That’s a dangerous assumption.

The result, THE NEW YOUNG AMERICAN POETS, has some terrific poems in it, poems I return to with admiration. Other writers and readers have told me it was important to them, and I still think it’s an OK book. But it is a flawed book. The reason is that, while I imagined a ground breaking book, a sort of touchstone that would actively help define and influence American poetry, I had never really sat down and asked myself, what, exactly, am I trying to define here? What kinds of arguments is this book making? (And I recall that even as I edited the book, I imagined my editorial vision would be broad; nevertheless, the book, I’d hoped, would make a sort of implicit argument—though, in the final peer-review run, that argument got almost completely wiped out of the introduction. So I had a kind of problematic combination of both approaches, I suppose – editorial authority and editorial invisibility, never really doing a great job at either. )

(FYI: my late friend Reginald Shepherd put together a similar anthology in a more mature way. Not that I like his individual selections more; rather I think his overall project is more mature.)

Later, Wayne and I took what I think of as the other approach in NEW EUROPEAN POETS. We realized, first of all, that there was no editor alive capable of attempting to represent all of European poetry with any authority. To do so would require speaking every European language, being familiar with every European poetry, the history and nuances of language in every region of Europe….that is, the editor for such a book would have to be God. And even then, I wasn’t sure it could be done.

Wayne and I, therefore, decided that such a book, at least on our parts, would have to involve something closer to an exercise of editorial modesty. We’d see the project as more of an escape from the editorial self than an embracing of it. And, as you know, Wayne and I really selected almost none of the contents of the book (well, Wayne, a translator of Albanian, selected Albanian language poetry; my work with the tiny Icelandic section is more complicated. Glad to explain it, but not in print).

Instead, we brought into the fold those regional editors who have been commenting on your blog now and then. Our idea was that these would be people who would, first of all, have a deep interest in the poetry of their particular regions. And their project would be impossible; their allotment of the book’s total pages would be necessarily ridiculously small. Therefore, Alissa Valles would have 14 pages to represent all of Spanish poetry. Portugal would get 7 pages. And we’d instructed the editors to approach this impossible task with as little of their own baggage as possible. Represent not your own interests, we suggested; be as invisible as possible. Try to paint as quick a sketch of the poetry of your region, accepting all the while that the total project would suggest to readers the clamor of European poetry, the multitude of voices and, behind them, visions, histories, ethnicities, worldviews.

The readership, we figured, would be American, the reader an American who would smartly understand the impossibility of the project and, at the same time, appreciate the peek into the writing of other lands and languages, who might, afterwards, be inspired to read further, in other translated or untranslated works.

Of course, editorial invisibility was every bit as problematic as stated editorial/aesthetic authority, though it was, finally, a far more appealing approach to me. (And, of course, it was easier to accomplish when working on a book on a community of poets I wasn’t part of; what right had I, after all, to impose a vision for how I thought European poetry OUGHT to look.) And, since the project was flawed from the start, the acknowledgement of that flaw made the project exciting and strange, trusting both the knowledge of regional editors and the luck of what they’d haul in in their nets.

I’m not sure one approach is actually better than the other and, as I suggested, steering a middle course is difficult. One can’t both try to paint a picture of what you THINK poetry OUGHT TO BE and, at the same time, represent EVERYBODY, the total diversity of a population’s poetry.

The result of my approaches has been two anthologies that are flawed in every way that any anthology is flawed. What I learned, however, from doing this, is the importance of spelling out these problems ahead of time, of thinking about them and, better still, planning for them. If editorial invisibility is, somehow, the ideal, of knowing and stating clearly in the introduction that this is both the goal and, at the same time, impossible. There can be no perfect representation of any group but that the noise and orchestrated clamor of the anthology is as close as one can get.

(Or—and had I more foresight—in the case of the first anthology, spelling out exactly what my editorial intentions were, coming to a clear definition of them for myself before I imposed them on readers. Had I spelled those out, the discussion of the anthology might have had less to do with who was included and who, damn him, was cut, and more to do with the problems and viability of what the anthology was, overall, arguing for. Of course, this kind of anthology must exclude plenty of good writers, writers that don’t fit the argument. Mere “goodness,” whatever that is, is not, alone, enough.)

I guess in an abstract way, I’m suggesting that your question comes right to the heart of the problems I’ve always worried about when I’m editing a book. Obviously, there’s more at stake in this kind of project than an editor’s selecting 50 or 200 poems he likes, typing them up, and putting them between two covers. To do that is to either, 1) assume that people really care who Kevin’s 50 favorite writers are (as if editing were like making the ultimate mix-tape) or 2) to think that Kevin’s 50 favorite writers are in any way representative of the larger community outside Kevin’s imagination.

Strangely, last year the NEA asked me to put together a book called CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY to be published in Pakistan, in Urdu. Here, a whole new set of problems was raised: Upon completing a first draft—and I’d taken the approach of maximum editorial invisibility, an attempt to give Pakistani readers a sense of the many modes, styles, and aesthetics of contemporary American poetry—the book had to be vetted by a panel of government readers, many of whom were obviously must more sensitive to the expectations of the publishers and readers in Pakistan. When the manuscript was returned to me for a second draft, I learned that many of the poems I’d considered rather benign were much more complicated than I’d thought. The advance readers were nervous about what I’d considered mild profanity or sexual explicitness, arguing that these would be not translate well for their desired readers and would misrepresent, if not the literal words of American poetry, the experience of American poetry, or, more specifically, an American poetry not necessarily MEANT to shock or even disturb that, nevertheless, was overshadowed by those traits in translation. But that’s another story—one that, strangely, gets at the heart of the question I started this blog thinking I’d avoid.

On Editing Greece and Cyprus

Greetings, readers of the anthology!

I’m Christopher Bakken, regional editor for Greece and Cyprus, and co-editor of the section dedicated to Turkey. Joel just alerted me to the site earlier today, so I haven’t had a chance to scroll through everything—so if I’m redundant about certain things, forgive that. Joel also reports that you’re about to discuss those three countries in class tomorrow, so I thought I’d toss down a few notes to get the conversation rolling, in the hopes that you might fire specific questions my way, or fire ideas into the blog’s friendly ether, and I can cover whatever I haven’t more easily in subsequent responses.

Joel asked me:

As you were selecting poets for the sections of the anthology you edited, to what extent were your choices based on a desire for the selections to be representative of the current poetry scene in the country? On a desire to include the poets you thought most important, regardless of how representative? Or on other desires entirely?

I answer:

In case you don’t know, Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer, the anthology’s editors, divided our page limits according to each country’s population (so Cyprus gets two pages, and Greece six, and Turkey many more) and the instructions were simple: it was up to us to fill those pages as we saw fit, according to our own tastes and rules of literary logic. They just trusted us.

Since most of the regional editors were themselves poets, they did this knowing that we’d be idiosyncratic and personal in our choices, perhaps, rather than academically “responsible” or mathematically representative. Their aim, as I understood it as a regional editor, was to produce an anthology that re-awakened American poets to what was happening in European poetry: which is to say, the audience for the anthology was American poets, not Comparative Literature scholars (I’m guessing the Comp. Lit. folks would have produced a very different kind of anthology).

I dealt with each section differently, according to my understanding of each place and the situation of poetry within each place. I’ll try to confess what I was thinking with regards to each country, offering what amounts to a highly personal rationale for my editorial choices. I can only get to Greece and Cyprus tonight. Push me a little and I’ll promise to talk about Turkey (which I co-edited) in the near future.

Greece

This is the country I know the best, since I’ve lived there and visited there off and on for almost two decades. I speak the language and translate Greek poetry.

So it was easy for me to go there to do “research,” hanging out in Athens for several weeks, tapping into the very hierarchical and nepotistic literary scene there, and interviewing poets and editors regarding the “young poets” of Greece.

What I found out was rather astounding: the concept of the “young poet” doesn’t really exist in Greece. When I asked one famous editor who the crucial young poets were he said, “ask me again in twenty years…then we’ll know.” It’s rare for poets to publish much before their thirties and it’s rare for any poet to have a real reputation before their late forties. In short, there wasn’t much consensus about much before that.

So I went back to some simple criteria: I’d choose poets whose work I admired, whose translations seemed to “work” in English. And I decided early on to offer at least a few poems by each poet rather than just one poem by six or eight poets. That meant making choices that have no doubt perplexed and angered some of my Greek friends. Some have, no doubt, wondered what I was thinking.

Well, I knew that I wanted to dedicate at least half of my selection to women poets. Here’s a crucial subject for your blog: in many countries in Europe (Eastern Europe in particular), there’s barely a tradition for women poets. Greek women poets may reach way back to Sappho, but there’s not much between B.C. and the 20th century to hang on to with regards to a tradition. And feminism has come late to Greece as well, since it is an Orthodox Christian and openly patriarchal culture. But in the last two or three decades, women are beginning to find their voices in every sphere, and in poetry as well. One of the greatest living Greek poets is Kiki Dimoula. Another is Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke. They are passing the baton to a new generation of Greek women. I wanted my selections to represent this exciting development accordingly.

So two women poets have their say here: Liana Sakelliou (who spent a lot of time in the U.S., married an American, and who is deeply influenced by H.D., Plath, and the Midwestern American poets) and Marigo Alexopoulou, a very new arrival on the scene, who seems a little more firmly planted in her home country (even though she took her Ph.D. in England).

Of the male poets, Haris Vlavianos is perhaps the ultimate “establishment poet,” the editor of the most important poetry magazine in Greece, as well as the editor or the most important poetry publishing house in Greece. He’s the translator of Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Stevens, Poe, and many other American poets into Greek. I thought he’d give American readers some sense of the cosmopolitan nature of the Greek intellectual: Greece is a small country, but its intellectuals cast their glance very wide. His poems reflect that pretty openly, I think.

Giorgos Chouliaras, a kind of diplomat in the U.S., barely lives in Greece, which means many Greek poets have pretty much forgotten about him or written him off as an ex-pat (though he is very much Greek and his poems reflect that). You’ll feel the timbre of political poetry and a sense of exile in his work, reminiscent as it is of someone like Milosz, ready to do the work of witness. He is representative of the engaged poet in the generation following the junta and all the nastiness it represents. And, well, David Mason’s translations were just so damn good that it seemed right to throw caution to the wind and include him.

So, do you see how capricious and irresponsible I am?


Cyprus

I went to Cyprus about five years ago and spent several nights intentionally dining in excellent restaurants in Nicosia right next to the “Green Line,” the wall that separates the Greek and Turkish parts of the city. The Berlin Wall may have fallen but the wall in Cyprus has not. One feels the Cold War there, those tensions and violence we’d almost forgotten. So I’d sit in a fancy Greek place, eating octopus on white tablecloths listening to Vivaldi while, from just over the wall, I’d listen to some Turkish kids blasting Madonna from their car stereo, arguing about who knows what, all of this within the gaze of the heavily armed guards stationed at the check-point towers.

Somehow I wanted my selections in the anthology to reflect this uncanny edge and Babel.

The very week I visited Cyrpus, fat men from the U.N. were at a fancy hotel in the Alps trying to broker a deal to “re-unite” the island. Their plan failed. The Greeks of Cyprus wouldn’t agree (and it would take a long entry to explain why), it was clear.

Only two intellectuals on the whole island had spoken up IN FAVOR of the U.N. plan in the papers, and both were poets: Stephanos Stephanides (Greek) and Gur Genc (Turkish). These two poets had met in spite of the green line and had become friends, translating their poetry to one another, for one another. When I went with Stephanos to the Turkish side of the border and met Gur Genc, when I watched the two of them kiss, then argue about the things poets care about (what else: language, the truth, et al.), I knew that they truly represented the situation of Cypriot poetry. Given two pages, it was kind of a no-brainer.

I included the other poem by Lyssandros Pitharas because it was gorgeous. And because I knew a little of his story: Pitharas (a very promising young Cypriot-Greek, writing in English) had a Turkish lover and he died of AIDS. I’ll spare you my over-determined reading of the metaphor that represents and let his stunning posthumous poem speak for itself.

Kalinichta (that's Greek for "good night"),

Christopher Bakken

Greece's Modern Heavyweights

CP Cavafy, Alexandria c.1890




















George Seferis, London c.1920














Odysseus Elytis (out on the Aegean?)













Yiannis Ritsos

Greek Expectations

Things we might have expected to find, and did:
bread, olives, salt, islands, statues, ruins, references to dead poets (Borges, Pound, Hardy, Ritsos, Seferis)

Things we might have expected to find, and didn't:
references to Classical mythology (with the exception of Vlavianov's "Hotel Athena," which, interesting to note, is also the only poem written in English)

I was surprised to find that all of these poets have studied and/or lived in English speaking countries, and that the two who have translated have translated only American poets.

Are there any other ideas/observations?

We have been talking about varying levels of contemporaneity in the poets we've been reading, and I feel that these Greek poets have in common the intention of creating poetic spaces which somehow exist outside of the contemporary and/or time-bound . Sakelliou especially seems to rely on allegorical renderings of admittedly "timeless" themes.

Constantine Cavafy

Waiting for the Barbarians

By Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933), translated by Edmund Keeley

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Interview With Kristin Dimitrova

Do you feel that the poets representing Bulgaria in New European Poetry (Edvin Sugarev, Lyubomir Nikolov, Boiko Lambovski, Mirela Ivanova, Georgi Gospodinov, and yourself) are an accurate representation of What’s Going On in Bulgarian Poetry Today?


Everyone included cuts a fairly distinctive figure here, one way or another. But of course, there are other names as well. Rumen Leonidov, Georgi Borisov, Ekaterina Yosifova, Ivan Metodiev… The poets in New European Poetry make a representative sample, but it is still a sample. Imagine the following question: “Now that I’ve seen Chicago, do you think I’ve got an accurate picture of what’s going on in America?” There is no easy answer to this.




If you were editing the Bulgarian section, which poets would you have selected?


I wasn’t in charge of the Bulgarian section, so I’d rather respect the choice of the editors. When one compiles an anthology, one usually keeps to a chosen angle, so the whole book would have a message of its own, like “the new European poetry is pessimistic, or political, or preoccupied with cultural diversity, of metaphysical, or you name it.” An anthology is as much representative of its editors’ tastes as it is of the poetic trends of the period. (By the way, I haven’t seen the book so far. I just didn’t receive it.)




Do you identify as a Bulgarian Poet (as opposed to a poet who happens to be Bulgarian)?


Maybe the second way of thinking feels closer to what I am. I happen to be a woman, I happen to be born in Bulgaria, I happen to have brown eyes, to go to bed late and to love cats. It’s an illusion to think that everything is a matter of choice. A lot of things just happen to us, but they define us nevertheless. I don’t feel like a spokesman for my country, if that’s what you mean. I feel like a person talking to other persons. As a child I decided to prepare a speech in case I get abducted by Martians. Soon I found out I could say very little on behalf of the Earth inhabitants in general. This seems like an early problem of representation.




Do you ever feel pressured to write more “globally?” What I mean is, do you ever feel pressured to make your work accessible to non-Bulgarians?


Living in Bulgaria and writing in Bulgarian, I’ve always seen Bulgarians as my immediate audience. However, the pressure you are asking about is already in the air and is becoming a very important factor in whatever is written and published at home. Perhaps this is only logical for a culture, shared by eight million people, a million of them abroad. This pressure comes both from the outside and from the inside:

• There are very few non-Bulgarian specialists, translating from Bulgarian, so whatever happens in Bulgaria tends to stay in Bulgaria (just what they say about Vegas). I imagine that these rare people are a target of all kinds of lobbying pressure coming from home, where it is very easy to cheerlead enthusiasm for a book nobody cares to read.

• There are some set expectations abroad concerning life on the Balkans, which are as enduring as the news of violence, mafia and corruption (not that we don’t have them) in the newspapers. I’ll try to give and example. The Vikings did a lot of trouble to Europe between 800-1100, but they are unflaggingly depicted as cool and romantic in books and movies. Even I am a victim of this ravishing image of huge swordsmen with blond plaits, you can’t help liking them. On the other hand khan Krum, who ruled between 802-814, stretched Bulgarian borders to the Frankish empire. In those days Bulgaria was a neighbor of what was to become later France and Germany. Attacked by the Byzantines, Krum summoned an army which included women as well, defeated the invaders and killed their emperor. Have you seen any Antonio Banderas films about this? No matter what happened in the past, we are forever held hostages by our recent histories. What is commonly expected from Bulgarian art nowadays – this, of course, is as inaccurate as all generalizations – is this sort of passionate, love-hate, song and tears, grotesque, absurd and exotic picture of a periphery, preferably trimmed with folk songs and national costumes. Nobody expects national costumes from the Italians.

• So far I’ve been arguing that there aren’t many differences between us and the rest of the world. Now I’ll say something in the opposite direction. There are social facts nobody cares to know about us, but still they are part of our lives. Like, for instance, doctors are generally poor and underpaid in Bulgaria; writers used to be very important people during socialism; getting rich overnight is usually connected to politics and not to business or industry; party affiliations play very important roles for all kinds of careers, etc. One usually finds all these peculiarities after deciding to translate a short story into another language. Consciously or not, this has resulted in a long list of novels and films depicting a foreigner, coming to Bulgaria, and what happens to him or her. The eyes of the foreigner are a sort of an excuse for the additional explanations a native reader might find boring; they are a kind of interpreting tool. Novels appear, which are written by Bulgarian authors, but are not about Bulgaria at all. It is like: “So if you want something recognizable, something you already know a lot about, there you are!” The intertext between Bulgarian sources is lost in translation and is practically useless abroad. Hidden quotations, stylistic clashes, historical references: they all go.

• Each language has its phraseological shortcuts. They are a great source of puns; they open the door to a kind of literary playfulness I enjoy so much. They are a big problem in translation, however. The title of my collection of short stories – Life and Death under the Crooked Pear Trees – proved to be such a problem. “Under the crooked pear tree” is a set phrase in Bulgarian, meaning “right in the middle of nowhere”, most often used to denote a lack of progress. Like for example: “How is your PhD going?” Answer: “Ah, it’s right under the crooked pear tree”. So this is all lost and the title of my book looks a bit crazy. Otherwise, the short story with this title is perfectly translatable. But the problem with rhymes in poetry is much, much, much more insurmountable. Let’s say challenging.

Strangely enough, I’ve never felt this kind of pressure when I write poetry. But I have already faced the problem in prose. It’s like you are under siege. You never know what will be interpreted in what way, extolled or ignored for the same reason. My antidote is to keep to what I know and say what I want to say. Then maybe somebody else, miles away, would recognize the experience. The closer I come to what I see as the truth, the better I feel. The rest is a side effect.




The Bulgarian poetry in New European Poetry seems very politically charged. Do you consider yourself a “political” poet? Do you feel a duty/desire to write political or historical-minded poetry?


No, I don’t think I do. Out of seven books published in Bulgaria, I think I have only one true-blue political poem. It is translated by British poets Andy Croft and Mark Robinson and very easy to quote in full:

Cold War Memoirs

We were told
there were two worlds at war
when there was really only one.

We were
the other.

Otherwise, like all devoted readers of newspapers, I am interested in politics too. Nobody wants to be lied to. But poetry for me is a room, reserved for my deepest, most important and sometimes most bizarre impressions of life, and politics very rarely finds its way to it.
Of course, if we are talking on this “personal is political” level, then we are all into politics.




Is poetry “popular” in Bulgaria? Does the general Bulgarian public read poetry?


Poetry is becoming less and less popular among the general readership in Bulgaria, but it has devoted fans among those who write or intend to start writing it. Other people have taken the lead. Television, not the book, is everyone’s media. Politicians get the best part of the public attention, because they are the ones who crack the important news. Then come talk-show hosts, singers, journalists, actors, sociologists, sport-stars, models and tycoons. I don’t really see the place of a poet here. Poetry used to mean a lot during socialism, when everybody’s ears were attuned to catch the faintest sound of criticism or unrest. Now it means a lot to readers only, and I think that’s fair enough.




Could you describe your poetry education? Did you study poetry in school?


I had classes in literature at school, mostly covering poetry from the first part of the XX c. Then came my university education in English and American studies, although poetry wasn’t exactly a priority. Then all the books I read. Then the poems we keep reading to each other at home with my husband, literary critic Vladimir Trendafilov. He translated selections of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and William Butler Yeats into Bulgarian, I translated John Donne. This is something we did as part of the “sharing” thing. There is no money in that. A lot of people are doing the same, from many languages. I think this last kind of school is my best one.




Are there any American/English poets you are fond of? Are there any American poets that are particularly popular among Bulgarian poets-in-general?


All the above mentioned and Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Edwin Morgan, Stevie Smith, e.e. cummings, R. S. Thomas, G. M. Hopkins. I am the editor of the two selections of Mark Strand’s poetry into Bulgarian, translated by Katia Mitova, and this says well enough how I feel about him. Wendy Barker, W. N. Herbert, Andy Croft, Linda France and Mark Robinson are all friends of mine and I admire them both as poets and people. Whatever I say, the list will be incomplete. E. A. Poe, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Elizabeth Bishop, Raymond Carver. Very often the issue is who gets translated and is lucky enough to get a good translation.




Lastly, what projects are you currently working on?


I work, that’s for sure. But I’d rather not talk about the future.