New European Poets

England - Funky Links

2009-04-27T00:39:00.002-05:00

Mimi Khalvati's website.

Bejamin Zephaniah's website.

Glyn Maxwell's website.

Simon Armitage's website.

(probably should have put the links on the word "website," but I'm not great with the internets.)

Simon Armitage reading (it's in English!).

Benjamin Zephaniah (awesome).

Here's to my last post of the semester! Love you, fellow Europo Students.

God Save the Queen

2009-04-27T00:20:00.003-05:00

England's poetic history is pretty familiar to me, as I'm sure it is to most others, so I'll be brief here. We have Beowulf, of course, estimated as being written between 600 and 1000 AD, before anyone could have dreamed of CGI or Angelina Jolie. Then some scatteredness through the early Middle Ages, followed by Chaucer. The Renaissance made way for Courtley and Elizabethan poetry and poets, such Edmund Spenser, Walter Raleigh, and Shakespeare, who brought verse to the theatre as well. We get the John's Donne and Milton in the 17th century (and in the Writing Center), then satirist poets, namely Jonathan Swift, in the 18th century. Women poets, such as Margaret Cavendish, also gained notability in the 1700s. The Romantics followed (Wordsworth, Coleridge and company), then Victorians (Lord Tennyson and the Brownings); and in the 20th century, poetry in England followed Modernist trends and was influenced by the first and second World Wars.

This appears to be England's poetry.com. It's called the Poetry Society, and has some interesting links. I liked the article in the Guardian about why Britain needs a black poet laureate (found on the right sidebar).

Wales

2009-04-26T13:22:00.002-05:00

Sheenagh Pugh's LiveJournal

Brief article and additional poems by Gwyneth Lewis

BBC interview with Gwyneth Lewis on depression

Republic of Ireland

2009-04-26T12:55:00.002-05:00

Interesting article on Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Three poems by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in the original Irish with translations by Paul Muldoon

There is an article from a 1995 issue of The New York Times Book Review by Ní Dhomhnaill called "Why I Choose To Write in Irish, The Corpse That Sits Up and Talks Back" but I can't find it. Maybe you can?

Vona Groarke addresses a North Carolinian audience by saying, "Y'all."

Additional poetry by Vona Groarke

An interview with Vona Groarke and Connor O'Callahan

Northern Ireland

2009-04-26T12:29:00.003-05:00

Ciarán Carson reading "Belfast Confetti"

Ciarán Carson playing in his band:

A Brief Interview with Medbh McGuckian

Addition Poems by Medbh McGuckian

Class Finale!

2009-04-22T08:36:00.002-05:00

The last NEP class will meet at the Bear Trap at 4:30pm April 28.

De laatste NEP klasse zal bij de Val van de Beer bij 4:30 p.m. 28 April samenkomen.

A última classe do NEP reunir-se-á na armadilha do urso 4:30 pm no 28 de abril.

Последний тип нэпа встречает на ловушке медведя на 4:30 pm 28-ое апреля.

La clase ultima del NEP se reunirá en el desvío del oso en 4:30 P.M. el 28 de abril.

Η τελευταία NEP κλάση θα συναντηθεί στην παγίδα αρκούδων στις 28 Απριλίου 4:30pm.

La dernière classe de NEP se réunira au piège d'ours à 16h30 au 28 avril.

The Netherlands

2009-04-20T23:42:00.004-05:00

The Dutch lit wiki (man, did you know this place was pillarised post-war?);

Google Books has some post-war stuff, but previews, only previews (I'll bring the whole thing tuh class);

r2c: New Dutch Poetry in Translation;

a large gob of Dutch poets (like Oosterhoff and Wijnberg) reading Dutch poems in Dutch (which terrified Kate);

what seems to be a band of Dutch hoodlum slam poets and skilled saxophone players;

a PDF chunk of a book out from Princeton Uni Press about modern Dutch poets (which I will bring to class in the flesh!);

wordsinhere, which is connected to Versal (which is out of Amsterdam), which is connected to such Bama personalities as Ted Worozbyt, Alissa Nutting, and B.J. Hollars;

Samuel Coleridge Taylor has something to say;

(hey, Zachary Karthoff, why don't you do everything for me?);

people do other things in the Netherlands, like make heartbreaking, horrifying films;

important, I think;

popular, I've heard;

impressive, I say (if you're hip to Google Earth);

hilarious, without translation;

tizight;

The Belgian Conundrum

2009-04-20T17:40:00.005-05:00

Belgium, which is the size of Maryland, is a complicated place.

Belgium has given the world Audrey Hepburn, René Magritte, the saxophone and deep-fried potato slices that are called French because of the style of cut. 10.4 million people live there, and Elaine Sciolino of the NYT is not far off when she refers to their bitter division as "a bad marriage writ large."

According to the NYT, radical Flemish separatists want to slice the country horizontally along ethnic and economic lines: to the north, their beloved Flanders — where Dutch (known locally as Flemish) is spoken and money is increasingly made — and to the south, French-speaking Wallonia, where a kind of provincial snobbery was once polished to a fine sheen and where today old factories dominate the gray landscape. Tensions run high between the French speakers and the Flemish speakers; speak French or Flemish in the wrong region and you're likely to be met with hostility.

This tension emerged in the 19th century, when it was necessary to speak French to belong to the governing upper class; those who could only speak Dutch were effectively second-class citizens. Late that century, and continuing into the 20th century, Flemish movements evolved to counter this situation. While the Walloons and most Brusselers adopted French as their first language, the Flemings refused to do so and succeeded progressively in imposing Dutch as Flanders' official language. Following World War II, Belgian politics became increasingly dominated by the autonomy of its two main language communities. Intercommunal tensions rose and the constitution was amended in order to minimize the conflict potentials.

A legal division between the French, Flemish/Dutch and German languages was established in 1963 under the Second Gilson Act. The act was instituted in order to reduce tensions between the different language-defined regions. A satisfactory explanation of this, with visuals, can be found here.

In 2007 and 2008, there was a major snafu with the "Belgian" government. Read here, here and here for interesting analysis.

All of this probably makes you wonder what's going on with the poetry in Belgium. Google "Belgian Poetry" and not much happens, but search "Flemish Poetry" or "French Poetry" and names start to pop up. I used the English, Dutch and French Wikipedias to research this week's authors, and discovered that William Cliff is a well-known French poet (wikis in English and French, but not Dutch); that Erik Spinoy only has a link in Dutch; that Stefan Hertmans has a link only in English and Dutch; and that Werner Lambersy is only available to us in French.

Enjoying this Wiki-Political tour, I decided to see how wacky the wikis for Belgian Literature could get. Check it out:

Dutch Literature
Flemish Literature
Belgian Literature
Belgian Poets in French
Walloon Writers
Flemish Writers

Wiki-Fail, or rather Belgium-Fail, right?

There isn't much out there on Belgian Poets (just let me categorize them that way, for brevity's sake) written in English. I wish there was, since the cultural turmoil interests me. Poetry International Web has some decent stuff, including some William Cliff sound clips, but there isn't much else to see.

What else there is:

A bit on Stefan Hertmans here,

and a bit on Werner Lambersy here.

Enjoy.

Austria/Lichtenstein!

2009-04-20T13:11:00.009-05:00

AUSTRIA!

Learn about Austria HERE
Some facts about Austria HERE
Timeline fun facts HERE
The Economist loves Austria
PARTY IN AUSTRIA, OMG!

LITERATURE IN AUSTRIA: HERE
More literature in Austria: HERE
Modern Austrian Literature: HERE

Map of Austria: HERE

LICHTENSTEIN!

Learn about Lichtenstein HERE

and HERE

HERE is an interactive MAP!

Fucking ain't just a village in Austria...

2009-04-19T19:40:00.003-05:00

Poets featured NEP for Austria / Liechtenstein:

Evelyn Schlag

Peter Waterhouse

Michael Donhauser (bio is at bottom of page)

Oswald Egger

Helwig Brunner

Raoul Schrott

Brief Comment on Some German Poems

2009-04-14T18:02:00.002-05:00

I, Alex, have tried multiple times now to post this in the comments section under Germany. I have failed. Thus you'll get my comment on the blog itself. Maybe that will encourage more responses to my questions and curiosities?

Three of the poems in the German section (those by Hahn ("Respectable Sonnet"), Falkner ("You sleep"), and Kolbe ("Never now anywhere")) rhyme, though the latter two somewhat loosely. I'm curious about the tradition in German poetry: has formal verse remained current longer than in English? I'm reminded of a Robert Hass essay where he discusses the challenges of translating contemporary poetry into English from a language where rhyming still sounds serious and fresh, something that's harder to achieve, I think we can all agree, in English today, though not by any means inconceivable (cf. Karen Volkman, for example). How do you translate the poem into a contemporary English that maintains both the rhymes and the serious (or whatever) tone of the original? Or is it even possible? Do you have to choose either the music or the meaning? Maybe so. But the three poems here are skillfully translated. The rhymes are subtle (in the latter two) but all three still sound interesting, not flat or sing-songy.

I agree with Daniela about the lack of translation static in the German section. I too wonder why.

Why don't more people write aphorisms? I have nothing German/European/cultural to say about those. Just that it looks like a cool project (see Tobias Gruterich, p. 282, a young poet who also came in second in the 2008 German Aphorism Contest from the World Aphorism Organization). I also liked the previous poem, by Daniel Falb, with his "tender adoration for juliette binoche the seasons pass by unnoticed / which is really terrible". Thanks, Germany!

Iceland and Denmark

2009-04-13T14:22:00.007-05:00

From the land of Bjork, Vikings, Jelling Stones, and Brennivin— poems from ICELAND and DENMARK!

I know we are not going to be spending a great deal of time on these countries in class, but in my explorations of the Northern European lands, I found a thing or two you might find exciting enough to dust off that Sugarcubes cd or your favorite Hans Christian Anderson tale.

Icelandic and Danish Language:

Medieval Icelandic and Danish are two dialectic stems of Old Norse (Northern Germanic), East and West. Old Scandinavian poetry was very meter-heavy (Beowulf?). Icelandic, particularly, has about 10 different metric-forms that I cannot begin to pronounce, yet have some interesting word play. Here’s one. Let’s break it down, Wiki-style:

Fornyrðislag—
Very close to Beowulf. Literally translates to "way of ancient words". This example is from the Waking of Angantyr:
Vaki, Angantýr! vekr þik Hervǫr,
eingadóttir ykkr Tófu!
Selðu ór haugi hvassan mæki
þann's Svafrlama slógu dvergar.

(Awaken, Angantyr! It is Hervor who awakens you, your only daughter by Tófa! Yield up from your grave the mighty sword that the dwarves forged for Svafrlami.")

Fornyrðislag has two lifts per half line, with two or three (sometimes one) unstressed syllables. At least two lifts, usually three, alliterate, always including the main stave (the first lift of the second half-line). It had a variant form called málaháttr ("speech meter"), which adds an unstressed syllable to each half-line, making six to eight (sometimes up to ten) unstressed syllables per line.

Iceland Poetry, Nowadays:

Today, most young poets like the ones we find in out anthology, tend to lean toward free verse, prose poetry, like "The Divorce Children" on page 262. Most of the poets I’m running across in my Google’n tend to “sporadically” write in more traditional Norse/Scandinavian forms.

I found a great interview (in English) with the first Icelandic poet in the anthology, Elísabet Jökulsdottír, discussing her work Football Stories. The interview starts with her explaining how she grew up loving football/soccer.

I loved this quote:
“Many people are very surprised… I forget myself when I watch it (football), and I sometimes have an argument with people because maybe if they are too intellectual, they are surprised, ‘why do you like football?’… to watch something I don’t fully understand, like the ocean. I don’t understand the ocean but I like to watch it. It gives me a lot.”

It’s a fantastic interview. Here’s where to check it out: http://bigcontact.com/theglobalgamewriters/interview-with-elisabet-jokulsdottir

The Icelandic poems seem to rely heavily on physical landscapes and weather to build metaphor. Also I see a theme of emotional connection, or the lack of connection, rather. Person-to-person understanding and the deadening of ego is something that is confronted in our poems. Jökulsdottír’s attitude struck me as refreshing and honest. She acknowledges that which she doesn’t understand without taking the “I’m just a little human in a big world” track, without being self-effacing, either. This seems to be a common trait in the Iceland poets.
Also check out Linda Vilhjálmsdóttir. She’s not in the anthology, but seems to be quite popular.

Denmark Poetry, Nowadays:

Did you know, according to the Corruption Perceptions Index, that Denmark was voted the Least Politically Corrupt Country in the World? Also, Copenhagen was voted the Most Livable City in the World in 2008? Oh yeah, and Denmark was also voted the “Happiest Place in the World” in some random survey? …sheesh Disneyland… AND the 2008 Global Peace Index survey ranks Denmark as the second most peaceful country in the world, after Iceland! (Wiki stats).

I don’t know how to handle this coming off of the Eastern Block countries.

The Danish poems are occupying themselves with other things, such as: art, dreams, and relationships (like Iceland). The subjects seem to be more exploratory, meditative. In the Tafdrup poem, “One of many or each single one—that makes all the difference,” seems to be echoing a common interest in the Icelandic poems, the interconnectedness of individuals.

I noticed the word “unpretentious” came up more than once in book reviews of Danish poets.

The Danish poets, especially in the past 2 or 3 years, seem to be interested in opening a dialogue with other art/literary forms, (see “In the Californian Back Yard” p. 267). Also, check out

contemporary Danish poets and how they sample different forms— Simon Grotrian (religion), Thomas Boberg (epistolary works), and Niels Lyngso (memoir-autobio). Allusions to other, familiar art forms seem to serve the reader as a vehicle for universal comprehension, putting aside experimentation.

Some quick German thoughts

2009-04-12T20:17:00.004-05:00

Hey All – In doing a little google-search into Gerhard Falkner I stumbled onto a more contemporary German poetry fad (more contemporary than the post-war poetry stuff at least). It seems in the 80’s German poetry rejected anything but formal experiments and ‘everyday poetry' and so, in the 90's/Oughts, Falkner wanted to change things up a bit. In order to break out, Falkner began combining “formal discipline with a opulent and direct sense of the present, thus preparing the ground, as one of the first of his generation, for a poetry alive with richness and sensuality as well as melancholy and pain. [Falkner’s poems also dealt with] the estrangement of the poet, the disappearance of the writer in the background noise of his text and of history.” In one of Falkner’s new-ish works, Kopfmusik’, he writes: “forgotten will our poems / be, - stay will solely / the headache / of those who did not keep them. To read another poem of his, go here. - they show it in English and German. I'll talk further on this in class on Tuesday.

I was also interested in Uljana Wolf who was recently in Shampoo magazine – an online lit mag based out of San Fran with a special German section in issue #35, which happens to be last month, March 2009. She has two poems from DICHTionary (A German-English dictionary of false friends, true cognates and other cousins) included – both in German and English. Go here to check it out.

Here’s another poem of hers I liked:

postscript to the kreisau dogs

who says that poems are like these dogs
surrounded by their own echo at the village core

their waiting and pawing at half moon
their stubborn marking of language terrains –

he knows you not, you frantic barkers
cassandras in wallachia’s sonic reverie

you bring what’s called and what’s calf
in a foolhardy bite from behind

together as if a leg were but a leaf
and the order of things a trade:

in one of my boots still the imprint
of your teeth, a gnarly four nips

that’s your reward for a pursuant verse
thus the world follows poetry at heel

She has some poems coming out in Chicago Review Press this year as well.

Germany

2009-04-12T20:00:00.011-05:00

Then

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Cristoph Friederich von Schiller

Heinrich Heine

Wiki's Guide to German Literature. A basic outline. Basic.

Now

Here is Ulf Stolterfoht's book translated by Rosmarie Waldrop:

Burning Deck Press

Stolterfoht in English:

(2)

whosever coat-tail after coat-tail your endeavor

to compose now so thicktitiously engenders

what fuel-fucking self-destructive higgledy-

piggery you so seriously unbody

or hardly blessed among root veggies

when smoked ham's in the half-left field

you cross your heart over hide's enticement

and all that cohabits genetically unknot

which you in heat and under oath endorse

knowing the ombudsman's enleathering

a breedin' shame like pidgin in Gdingen

as your be-true-to-me you endearingly unmarry

where for your burlap name you will be envied

hallowed be thy come forfeit engorged

deeply covetous how you and Gdansk

instinct and body tissue unself and unsex

And more Stolterfoht in English.

An interview with the man.

Here he is in Coconut Fourteen!

Hilda Magazine

Silke Scheuermann is a well-known German poet not recognized in New European Poets. And look! Both languages! (German & English)

Lyrikline is a really interesting site that offers poems translated into a buffet of languages.

Here is an article from the New York Times claiming to have found "Germany's poetry jet set" Ann Cotten. Born in Iowa, raised in Germany. And here is the original article.

A list of 50 Perfect Books of German Poetry. Compiled by Dialog International.

Andrew J. Shields' Blog mentions the Antioch Review (Winter 2009) which includes a couple of reviews of German poetry in translation.

For further reading of German poetry try The Poet's Role: Lyric Responses to German Unification by Poets from the GDR.

GDR

Norwegian Matters

2009-04-05T22:51:00.004-05:00

A brief history of poetry in Norway... more info can be found here. It's the official UK site devoted to Norway, so it has to be good.

Norwegian poetry began way back in the day, with the Skaldic verse of the 9th century. The middle ages produced the ballads, improvised verse, and folkloric traditions one would expect. Hymn writing also became an important mode of lyric expression, which grew more prolific with the spread of education.

It seems that Norway's more recent poets followed common worldwide trends: symbolism, modernism, lyricism, etc. The 1960s gave rise to more experimentalism, the 70s got political, and the 80s moved to a focus on aesthetics. As the site says, "these two trends were then consciously synthesized during the 1990s," which should bring us about up to date.

*

Some Important Norwegian Poets (click on title of poem for more by the writer):

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832-1910) - his poem Ja vi elsker dette landet ("Yes, We Love This Land") became the Norwegian national anthem.

The Tree

Ready with leaves and with buds stood the tree.
"Shall I take them?" the frost said, now puffing with glee.
"Oh my, no, let them stand,
Till flowers are at hand!"
All trembling from tree-top to root came the plea.

Flowers unfolding the birds gladly sung.
"Shall I take them?" the wind said and merrily swung.
"Oh my, no, let them stand,
Till cherries are at hand!"
Protested the tree, while it quivering hung.

The cherries came forth 'neath the sun's glowing eye.
"Shall I take them?" a rosy young girl's eager cry.
"Oh my, yes, you can take,
I've kept them for your sake!"
Low bending its branches, the tree brought them nigh.

Sigbjørn Obstfelder (1866-1900) - a symbolist, who became one Norway's foremost early modernist poets.

Go here for a poem, reading, and translation. It's a Christmas poem with a corpse in it. Great!

Rolf Jacobsen (1907-1994) - another important early modernist, still frequently read today.

Antenna-forest

Up on the city’s roofs there are large fields.
That’s where silence crept up to
when there was no room for it on the streets.
Now the forest comes in its turn.
It needs to be where silence lives.
Tree upon tree in strange groves.
They don’t do very well, because the floor is too hard.
So they make a sparse forest, one branch toward the east,
and one toward the west. Until it looks like crosses. A forest
of crosses. And the wind asks
—Who’s resting here
in these deep graves?

Olav H. Hauge (1908-1994) - a popular lyricist who frequently alludes to Homer and Chinese and Japanese poetry. Frequently translated by Robert Bly.

Midwinter. Snow.

Midwinter. Snow.
I gave the birds a piece of bread.
And it didn't affect my sleep.

Paal-Helge Haugen (1945-) - another popular anti-metaphorical lyricist. I had trouble finding full text of his work, but he has been translated often by Roger Greenwald, our main Norwegian guy.

*

And, Something Fun:

Finland: who's who

2009-04-05T20:16:00.002-05:00

It proved quite difficult to uncover much information about these writers but here we go...

Tua Forsström
*
The poet Ilpo Tiihonen (b. 1950) has been awarded numerous prizes for his works. He has published many poetry collections, theatre and television scripts, musicals, librettos and radio plays. In addition he has translated poems and children’s literature into Finnish.

one translation in English published: ‘Black and Red’
*

Bio for Leevi Lehto
*
Martin Enckell is especially difficult to research because there is an Antarctic explorer of the same name name.
*
Lauri Otonkoski’s books do not provide any biographical information -- there are no blurbs, no photographs of the author. The back cover of his latest book, Ahava (March Wind), tells me that it is his fifth published collection of poems, and that he is also the author of a children’s book titled Otto.

From the Finnish Writers’ Union’s directory I gather that he is forty years old and lives in Helsinki.
(from http://www.durationpress.com/authors/otonkoski/home.html)
*
Helena Sinervo
*
Anni Sumari has published nine books of short stories and poetry, as well as a travelogue about a writers' train that toured Europe in 2000 (Junanäytelmä, Train Play, 2001). In 1998 she was awarded Yleisradio's (the equivalent of the BBC) Tanssiva Karhu (Dancing Bear) Prize for the collection Mitta ja määrä (Measure and Degree, 1998). Her poems have been translated into Swedish, Russian, German, French, English, Spanish and Lithuanian.
(from http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=734)

Nordy Music

2009-04-05T19:34:00.008-05:00

Although I know very little about literature from Sweden, Norway and Finland, I do happen to be obsessed with a smattering of bands/sound artists and record labels based in these Nordic countries…here is some information (grouped by record label):

FYI – the easiest way to get a sampling of any of these bands/artists work is through their myspace pages

*Rune Grammofon is a Norwegian record label founded in 1998 by Rune Kristoffersen – the label was started with help from ECM (snooty, high end/high culture German label that would be comparable to a publisher like New Directions) but is now independent of their former parent.

RG specializes in new-classical/electronic/jazz/noise/grey-area – all of the music is Norwegian – and, all of the album covers feature the artwork of the amazing Kim Hiorthøy (see the big orange butt above; Arve Henrickson below). My favorite bands: Deathprod, Supersilent, Arve Henrickson, Alog, Svalastog, Biosphere, Phonophani, The Information, Skyphone, Maja Ratkje

*Hapna is a Swedish label about which I know very little (and about which there is very little information available) – what I do know is they have been one of my favorite labels for quite sometime...

Bands to check out: Tape (one of Jenny and my favorite, favorite, favorite bands; instrumental, off-kilter, folksy, hypnotic, hauntingly beautiful stuff with lots of samples and hiss…), Stephan Mathieu, Giuseppe Ielasi (he’s Italian although I highly recommend him and the Italian label new classical/prog-rock label “Die Schachtel” that he is associated with), ¾ Had Been Eliminated, A Taste of Ra, Anders Dahl, Tenniscoats, Anna Järvinen

* (from Fonal’s myspace site) Fonal Records is a Finnish independent label run by Sami Sänpäkkilä that began releasing mainly domestic music in 1995. Fonal has a catalogue of 40 experimental, folk, ambient and popular music releases and has organized concerts for its artists across Europe and North America.

Bands: CIRCLE, ES / SAMI SÄNPÄKKILÄ (my personal favorite), KEMIALLISET YSTÄVÄT, PAAVOHARJU (another favorite), SHOGUN KUNITOKI

(amazing ES album...)

*Kning Disk is another Swedish label. Here is what they have have to say about themselves on their website: Kning Disk presents first-rate, limited editions and various kinds of presentations where innovative composers of yesteryear shares space with the kindred spirits of the groundbreaking artists, designers and writers of tomorrow.

I find this label to be especially interesting because of the sample-based work they release (esp. Anders Dahl) and then the otherwise innovate, instrumental spicy music (Jerry Johansson, Jasper TX)

other bands/artists to check out: Steffen Basho-Junghans, BJNilsen, Alejandra Salinas

(Jerry Johansson, 'Book of Dreams')
(Anders Dahl, 'Habitat')

Sweden, for realz.

2009-04-05T15:53:00.002-05:00

Wikipedia says:

Swedish literature refers to literature written in the Swedish language or by writers from Sweden.^[1]

zOMG!

I'm listening to some sweet Swedish songs right now. See previous post if you're not!

Even though Sweden has a literary history that dates back to the Viking Age, it was not until 1541 that Swedish literature began to flourish; the translation of the Bible finally gave Sweden a uniform language. Around that time, the king wanted to censor many texts and often Catholic books were burned. The king also shut down the University, forcing Swedes to travel abroad for higher education.

By the 18th century, Swedish writers felt more comfortable writing secular literature.

Notable Swedish writers:

Selma Lagerlöf (Nobel laureate 1909)
Pär Lagerkvist (Nobel laureate 1951)
Henning Mankell (detective novelist)
Jan Guillou (spy-fiction writer)
Astrid Lindgren (author of Pippi Longstocking)
Hjalmar Gullberg (leading Modernist poet)
Gunnar Ekelöf (leading surrealist poet)
Tomas Tranströmer

Let's take a vacation together.

2009-04-05T14:51:00.006-05:00

Here are some Swedish noise rock bands:

Johan Zetterquist doesn't have any YouTube videos, but he sounds fun too!

Sápmi: The Coolest Place Samuel Gray Has Ever Been

2009-04-05T13:58:00.003-05:00

Since I know how difficult it is to click on a link, I've pasted some essential Sápmi facts from everyone's favorite fake encyclopedia:

Sápmi is the name of the cultural region traditionally inhabited by the Sámi people. Sápmi is located in Northern Europe and includes the northern parts of Fennoscandia. The region stretches over four countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Sápmi is the name in North Sámi, while the Julev Sámi name is Sábme and the South Sámi name is Saemie. In Norwegian and Swedish the term Sameland is often used.

With the fall of the Soviet Union and increasing internationalization, cross-border co-operation is becoming more important, and existing state borders less important both for the Sámi indigenous population and non-Sámi inhabitants—the latter constituting the majority population of the region. Russians and Norwegians are the most numerous groups, and the Sámi make up only a small minority of about 5%.^[1] No political organization advocates secession, though several groups desire more territorial autonomy and/or more self-determination for the region's indigenous population.

The region has its own football team, the Sámi Spábbáčiekčanlihttu, that plays in the NF-Board, won the 2006 Viva World Cup and hosted the 2008 event.

ROLL (SOCCER) TIDE!

Sápmi (and corresponding terms in other Sámi languages) refers to both the Sámi land and the Sámi people. In fact, the word "Sámi" is only the accusative-genitive form of the noun "Sápmi"--making the nation's name (Sámi olbmot) simply mean "people of Sápmi." The source of the word is speculated to be related to the Baltic word *žēmē that simply means "land".^[2]

In historical texts the Swedish names "Lappland" or Lappmarken may occur, and also the Norwegian name "Finnmark" or "Finnmork.".^[3] Originally these two names did refer to the entire Sápmi, but subsequently became applied to areas exclusively inhabited by the Sámi and today they are names of provinces that only constitute parts of Sápmi.

Language

Sami or Saami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. Sami is frequently (and erroneously) believed to be a single language. Several names are used for the Sami languages: Saami, Sámi, Samic, Saamic, Lappish and Lappic. The last two are, along with the term Lapp, are considered derogatory by some.^[1]

On the map [below] numbers indicate Sami Languages: 1. South (Åarjil) Sámi, 2. Ume (Upme) Sámi, 3. Pite (Bitthun) Sámi, 4. Lule (Julev) Sámi, 5. North (Davvi) Sámi, 6. Skolt Sámi, 7. Inari (Ánár) Sámi, 8. Kildin Sámi, 9. Ter Sámi. Of these languages the Northern one is the by far most vital; whereas Ume, Pite and Ter seem to be dying languages. Darkened areas represent municipalities that recognize Sami as an official language.

Written Languages

At present there are nine living Sami languages. The largest six of the languages have independent literary languages; the three others have no written standard, and there are only few, mainly elderly speakers left. The ISO 639-2 code for all Sami languages without its proper code is "smi". The six written languages are:

Northern Sami (Norway, Sweden, Finland): With an estimated 15,000 speakers, this accounts for probably more than 75% of all Sami speakers in 2002.^{[citation needed]} ISO 639-1/ISO 639-2: se/sme
Lule Sami (Norway, Sweden): The second largest group with an estimated 1,500 speakers.^{[citation needed]} ISO 639-2: smj
Southern Sami (Norway, Sweden): 500 speakers (estimated).^{[citation needed]} ISO 639-2: sma
Inari Sami (Enare Sami) (Inari, Finland): 500 speakers (estimated).^{[citation needed]} SIL code: LPI, ISO 639-2: smn
Skolt Sami (Näätämö and the Nellim-Keväjärvi districts, Inari municipality, Finland, also spoken in Russia, previously in Norway): 400 speakers (estimated).^{[citation needed]} SIL code: LPK, ISO 639-2: sms
Kildin Sami (Kola Peninsula, Russia): 650 speakers (estimated).^{[citation needed]} SIL code: LPD

The other Sami languages are moribund and have very few speakers left. Six speakers of Ter Sami were known to be alive in 2004,^[5] and Pite Sami and Ume Sami likely have under 20 speakers left.^{[citation needed]} The last speaker of Akkala Sami is known to have died in December 2003,^[6] and the eleventh attested variety Kemi Sami became extinct in the 19th century.

Official Language Status

Adopted in April 1988, Article 110a of the Norwegian Constitution states: "It is the responsibility of the authorities of the State to create conditions enabling the Sami people to preserve and develop its language, culture and way of life." The Sami Language Act went into effect in the 1990s. Sami is an official language of the municipalities of Kautokeino, Karasjok, Gáivuotna (Kåfjord), Nesseby, Porsanger, Tana, Tysfjord, and Snåsa.

A bilingual street sign in Enontekiö in both Finnish (top) and Northern Sámi

In Finland, the Sami language act of 1991 granted Sami people the right to use the Sami languages for all government services. The Sami language act of 2003 made Sami an official language in Enontekiö, Inari, Sodankylä and Utsjoki municipalities.

On April 1, 2002 Sami became one of five recognized minority languages in Sweden. It can be used in dealing with public authorities in the municipalities of Arjeplog, Gällivare, Jokkmokk and Kiruna.

See also: Sami parliaments of Finland, Norway, and Sweden

Population/Demography

The approximate number of people living in Sápmi is about 2 million, though it is difficult to give the precise number of inhabitants since certain counties and provinces only include parts of Sápmi. It is also quite difficult to account for the distribution of ethnic groups as many people have double or multiple ethnic identities - both seeing themselves as members of the majority population and being part of one or more minority group.

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Please enjoy these videos from everyone's favorite video-hosting site:

Transjoik (founded in Trondheim in 1992) is a Norwegian band that plays jazz and Sámi music, often characterised as an ambient electronic, techno and trance band, but with a dose of yoiking (traditional Sámi vocals), so it is often considered world music. This reminds me of Suicide's "Misery Train":

Translation Issue of Poetry magazine

2009-04-02T18:38:00.002-05:00

Esperanto, Eurotrash, Gastrocats, Iberia, and Stingrays:

The new issue of Poetry is the translation issue. Thought you might be interested in the poems, and also the fact that each translator provides a statement explaining their pains and pleasures.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/toc.html

Latvia

2009-03-30T15:01:00.002-05:00

There is not that much English info out there on Latvian poetry. Many of the linked articles I came across looked sketchy, even if they were just victims of poor translation. Here’s what I did find:

The Latvian Institute loves N.E.P.!

This site also has great info on Latvia in an all-around sense (History of Latvian Lit! Latvian Economics! Latvian Government and Politics!).

On nature in contemporary Latvian poetry, from Lituanus, Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences.

A feature on Latvian Poetry can be found in the Winter 2005 issue of Drunken Boat.

J.C. Todd, Margita Gailitis and Inara Cedrins, translators for the Latvia section in N.E.P., were also involved with the Drunken Boat feature (Gailitis and Todd, in fact, split editing duties for it).

Cedrins also wrote this book, published in 1984 and translated this blurb about Liana Langa.

The environment of Latvian poetry is an insular one. This is not surprising given the following:

*Latvian is an Indo-Baltic language that is closely related to Sanskrit; as a result it is linguistically complex and therefore infrequently translated.

*Latvian was suppressed as a national language for a half-century during the Soviet occupation. It reemerged as a recognized language in 1990, yet Latvians struggled to reestablish its relevance in a world relatively saturated by the geopolitical dominance of Russian and English.

*During the Soviet occupation, massive immigration occurred between Russia and Latvia. Sixty-five years later, Latvians are outnumbered by ethnic Russians in many major Latvian cities, including the capital, Riga.

However, as Todd states in her introduction to the feature at Drunken Boat:

“…Latvians have had a millennium of practice in sustaining the repertoire of meanings embedded in their language when it has been forced underground. From the tenth century, AD, when Rune stones in the region of Courland document Viking attacks, until the twentieth century, Latvia struggled against repeated sieges and occupations by Danes, Germans, Russians, Tartars, Teutonic Knights, Poles and Swedes. In 1920, Russia and Latvia signed a peace treaty that relinquished all Soviet claim to Latvian territories in perpetuity, yet by 1940 the Soviet military had violated the treaty and occupied Latvia once more, an occupation that continued until 1990-91 when, with the collapse of the Soviet government, Latvia gained the independence it currently observes. During the centuries of occupations, Latvian dainas (folk songs) have recorded, revealed and handed down not only the cultural heritage but also the effects of oppression and moral resistance to it. When they were sung, and that was frequently, the language emerged, alive with history yet imbued with the sense of hereness that song in throat achieves. By the late 1930's, over 2,000,000 dainas had been collected in the Archives of Latvian folklore in Riga. Collected, but not embalmed for the dainas form the core of a vast repertoire performed by Latvian choral societies. Folk fests and choral competitions have been part of the fabric of Latvian life for centuries, festivals in which the collective consciousness of the nation is awakened in song. When the dainas are sung, the nation listens.

The submersion of the Latvian language during multiple occupations has not destroyed its roots. Instead it has created a contemporary poetry of displacement and psychic rupture expressed in fragmented images and narratives, a Baltic surreal that emerges from multiple perspectives, blurred definitions of time and place, neologisms and other linguistic innovations, and anti-authoritarian subjectivity. This is a thoroughly post-modern, post-colonial, post-traumatic poetry, as literary historian Karl Jirgens has noted. Paradoxically, Latvia's position as a “weaker,” occupied nation has been transformed into the strength of its literature.”

Bravo!

Here’s an example of a Daina:

And in the spirit of a strong Latvia, here’s the national anthem:

Now that you’re jumpin’, here’s a Latvian Folk Dance:

Finally, burn one down with Ronalds Briedis:

LITHUMANIA!

2009-03-30T11:36:00.009-05:00

Lithupedia

Lithuture

The poets featured in NEP:

Gintaras Grajauskas (born in1966) is a poet, essayist, prose writer and a dramatist. He is considered to be the best author of ironic and prosaic poetry about contemporary life.

He studied at a music school and at the Jazz Department of the Klaipėda faculty of the Lithuanian Conservatory of Music. He worked for radio and TV editorial offices and since 1996 has been compiling the literary publication Gintaro lašai (Amber Drops). He sings and plays guitar in the band Rokfeleriai.

Grajauskas’ poetry tells seemingly irrelevant, even trivial stories about the present day and the mundane. However, the triviality in Grajauskas’ poetry is not easy to understand: irony and humour prevails over spiritual shallowness and ennui thus revealing a different perspective of the world. This ambivalence is one of the reasons why Grajauskas’ poetry is so popular. The life of an individual is ambiguous – tragic and comical, repulsive and attractive at the same time.

Aha!

Marius Burokas (b. 1977 in Vilnius) is a poet, translator, and literary critic. He matriculated at Vilnius University in 1995 to study Lithuanian language and literature

He has worked as a Lithuanian language teacher, has served as project editor for a public relations agency, and has coordinated literary programmes at the Eastern Lithuanian Cultural Centre. He has translated short stories and a novel by Charles Bukowski as well as poetry by Craig Czury. He currently works at an advertising agency.
Burokas made has debut with the poetry collection Ideograms (Ideogramos) in 1999. His second book of poetry, States of Being (Būsenos), appeared in 2005.
The writer lives and works in Vilnius.

from the horse's mouth:

Most often a single line appears in my head, and little by little it becomes a poem. When it's necessary to release these thoughts from my head, I have to run and write them down somewhere since, unlike some other poets, I don't have a notebook or even a pen.
I often write poems in strange places and under strange conditions. They often appear when I'm incredibly bored.

Daiva Čepauskaitė (born in 1967) is a poet and dramatist. Her works combine (auto) irony and the sharpness of the tongue with lyricism, and the merciless world of today is portrayed with humour.

Čepauskaitė has a medical doctor's diploma, but has never worked as a doctor. While a student of medicine, she also studied stage art at the Youth Musical Study. Since 1990 she has worked as an actress in the Kaunas Youth Chamber Theatre. In the Kaunas State Drama Theatre she has played a role in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. She has been writing since her early youth, so, according to herself, she came to poetry "unawares". In 2005 she was declared winner of the 41st "Spring of Poetry" festival.

Neringa Abrutytė (born in 1972) is a poet who introduced into Lithuanian poetry provocative subjects and styles of expressions characteristic of ingenious syntactic experiments that help create a unique rhythm, intonation and open several possibilities of interpreting the same text.

She studied Lithuanian language and literature at Vilnius University and has worked as editor and teacher. Currently she lives in Denmark.

In her poems Abrutytė openly speaks about the emotions of forbidden love for an older man, contempt to parents and her desire to reach the heights of poetry. Her poems seem as if they have been clipped out of a small girl's/woman's diary that is all about everyday experiences. Without exaggerated significance she describes her love or erotic experiences, childhood memories and the search for her proper place in European cities. The author imitates a teenage style of writing by using abbreviations usually found in students' notes, snippets of the jargon, plays with her name or biographic detail thus creating the impression of shocking sincerity. Everyday intonations reinforce the impression of intense, emotionally fragmented and therefore authentic speech.

Eugenijus Ališanka (b. 1960 in Barnaul, Russia) is a poet, essayist and translator. Following his graduation from Vilnius University with a degree in mathematics, he worked for the Culture and Art Institute of Lithuania and then, from 1994-2002, as a director of international programmes in the Lithuanian Writers' Union and a director of an international poetry festival 'Spring of Poetry'. Since 2003 he has been working as editor-in-chief of the magazine Vilnius, published in English as The Vilnius Review. Ališanka is a member of the Lithuanian Writers' Union's Board and of PEN.

here: have some more Alisanka poems! yum!

Laurynas Katkus (b. 1972 in Vilnius) is a poet and translator. He studied Lithuanian philology at Vilnius University and comparative literature at Vilnius and Leipzig Universities. He has worked in radio and publishing. He made his debut in 1998 with Voices and Notes (Balsai, rašteliai), a book of poetry.
Translations of his poetry have been published by American, German, Slovenian, Polish, and Latvian literary publishers; English and German translations of his book appeared in 2001 and 2003, respectively. His second Lithuanian-language book of poetry, Diving Lessons (Nardymo pamokos), appeared in 2003 and demonstrated the author's maturity. Katkus has translated works by Friedrich Hölderlin, Gottfried Benn, Walter Benjamin, Peter Handke, Susan Sontag, and other authors into Lithuanian.
He lives in Vilnius.

ESTONIA! Youtube!

2009-03-30T10:28:00.004-05:00

Asko Kunnap

Karl Martin Sinijarv

Elo Viiding

Россия представляет собой огромную массу земли.

2009-03-30T10:25:00.004-05:00

I'm no fool—y'all get links for this stuff:

A smattering of Russian poets, past;
a quick Wikipedia blurb on the golden age of Russian poetry;
the bawdy but ideologically correct chastushka (think Russian limerick);
another poorly written ("the Silver Age was a golden era") wiki about the silver age;
a charmingly-phrased site about the same thing;
the entry for Russian Futurism, which was kind of a thing;
Wikipedia's entry for Futurist bad-ass Vladmir Mayakovsky;
the school of imaginism, whose members were not down with the Futurists;
(by the way, why aren't we creating more schools of poetry like this?);
Vadim Shershenevich, one of the Imaginists;
Acmeist Osip Mandelstam, Ilya Kaminsky fave;
here's what the heck Acmeist poetry is;
Nobel-refusing (voluntarily, coughcough) Russian megapoet Pasternak;
mother of Russian poetry, Anna Akhmatova;
(see, she had kids);
and, okay, okay, the father too;
(he gave birth to a little guy named Onegin, and poetic forms);
again, read (almost) everybody's stuff;
oh yeah, some other people wrote stuff too;
lastly, if you could, thanks.

ESTONIA!

2009-03-30T09:45:00.015-05:00

Estonia + the internet = HERE.

For history, go here.

History of Estonian literature and poetry here.

And here's the dude that started it all (as far as Estonian poetry is concerned):

Kristjan Jaak Peterson.

HERE is the Estonian Literary Magazine, in which 2 of the 4 poets in the book are widely

discussed.

Throwback to Iberia

2009-03-24T16:03:00.002-05:00

As I think I mentioned last week, Florida Review has published Rosa Alice Branco in its new issue. They ran the poems in the original Portuguese as well as publishing the translations, which I think was a really nice choice. I wonder if both versions of the poem were sent as a package, or if FR received the translation and solicited the originals... anyone know how that usually works? We have the issue in the BWR office, if you are interested in borrowing it.

Also, we received a review copy of a book by Spain's Bernardo Atxaga, if anyone is interesting in perusing that. Much love from BWR to the Euro Poets.

Some Thoughts from Valzhyna Mort, Belarusian Poet, on Translation

2009-03-23T16:46:00.004-05:00

First, here's a poem of Valzhyna Mort in Poetry.

She has this to say about translation, which I think is a nice response to many of our questions this semester:

"I believe that a translation should be a new poem. My favorite saying about translation is that poetry translations are like men. When they are beautiful, they are unfaithful. You have to choose do you want beautiful poems or do you want faithful poems. And of course the best if you can merge beautiful and faithful as close, if you can, but if you cannot, it’s better to make it beautiful."

That comes from this interview (a video that includes her readings poems to a woman baking - it's hard to tell who looks more uncomfortable).

And here is another brief interview, which also touches on translation.

A very layman's version of Ukrainian history

2009-03-23T08:28:00.003-05:00

During the 10th and 11th centuries, much of what is now known as Ukraine was part of Kievan Rus, the most powerful and largest state in Europe and eventually laid the foundation for the national identity of Ukrainians and Russians. That time period saw the rise of Vladimir the Great, who helped steer the nation towards Byzantine Christianity, and the Yuroslav the Wise, whose tenure as the nation’s leader saw increased cultural and military development.

After the disintegration of the Kievan Rus state after the reign of Mstislav (1125-1132), foreign invasions and incursions plagued the land, including from Turkic tribes and Mongols (they decimated Kiev in 1240); the state was succeeded by Galicia-Volhynia, a merged state consisting of the principalities of Galich (Halych) and Volodymyr-Volynskyi.

In the time that followed, the Poland and Lithuania both ruled in Galicia-Volhynia, and then jointly (although the Polish Crown apparently ruled a lot more of the territory) after the 1569 Union of Lublin, which established the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Under Polish rule, and as a result of Polonisation of Rutheian nobility (yielding a blending, of sorts, between the two cultures), many Ukrainian commoners turned to the Cossacks for protection. Then, the Cossacks turned to Orthodox Russia for protection, forming an alliance that eventually lead to the downfall of the Polish-Lithuanian state.

Apparently there was a broken promise between the Russian Empire—which controlled a good chunk of eastern Ukraine (western Ukraine was under the rule of Austria after the Russo-Polish war)—and the Cossacks and Ukrainians, in which Russia renigged on Ukrainian independence as detailed in a treaty. Later, tsarist Russia supressed the Ukrainain language in print and public.

Then a bunch of time passes. Nearly 4 million Ukrainians fought in WWI (3.5 million under Russia, 250,000 under Austria) and, following the collapse of the two empires after the Great War, a pretty bitchin’ independence movement was started up. After some stuff, western Ukraine was incorporated into Poland and Poland recognized the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a founding member of the Soviet Union. The revolution left over 1 million Ukrainians dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. A devestating famine gave the Soviet Union reason to slacken the restrictive rules in regards to Ukrainian language in print and public, and that caused a resurrgence in Ukrainian culture. However, this was largely reversed by the mid-1930s under Stalin—whose political repression also resulted in the deaths of 80 percent of Ukrainian cultural elite.

During WWII, since Poland (which controlled the western part of the Ukraine) and the Soviet Union were fighting together, there was a reunification of Ukraine. This was apparently a watershed moment for the Ukraine. But not every Ukrainian was happy; apparently some, but not many, fought against the Soviet Union. Of 8.7 million Soviet felled in battle, 1.4 million were Ukrainian.

After Stalin’s death, Soviet-Ukrainian relations were less tense under Kruschev (he was apparently First Secretary of the Communist Part of Ukrainian SSR).

Of the 7 million people in the contaminated area of Chernobyl, 2.2 million were Ukrainian.

On August 24, 1991, the Ukrainian parliament adopted the Act of Independence and, less than three months later, there was a referendum and presidential election in which 90 percent of the people voted for the Act and Leonid Kravchuk to become the country’s first president.

I hope I got most of this right. Here is a link to the CIA's World Factbook on the Ukraine.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/up.html

Wikipedia Bits About Belarus...and Pictures

2009-03-22T18:16:00.002-05:00

Some general history here.
Some literary history here.

Daniel Craig and Liev Schriber as Belarusian Partisans

Soviet Partisans in Belarus

Belarusian Ballet
Belarusian Pipe-Player (from here)

Double pipes or "Parnyia dudki"
are also referred in Belarus as "Parniouka", "Parnyaty", "Dvojni", "Dvzajchatki", "Dudki", "Pasvisceli","Hoosli", "Dvajchatyia Hoosli". They are made of two pipes of different length. The upper end of each pipe is plugged by a circular insert, with 1/5 of it cut off - "cork" ("shpoont" or "sapoh"). The space between "cork" and the outside wall of pipe makes a narrow crack - "halasnik" for blowing air. There is an alongate whistle cut in the pipe's wall at it's upper end. The bottom end has three holes: 2 at the front - "perabirki" ("finger runs")for finger playing and one - "klapan" ("valve") - in the back. The bottom outlet holes are tied with rope, the tension of which allows to tune two pipes into harmony. Below is a military song suitable for double pipe:
Some Belorusian Folk Music

Preferably in a language I don't know: Poetry in the Ukraine

2009-03-22T12:59:00.004-05:00

An Abbreviated Online Encyclopedia's History of Ukrainian Poetry

The history of Ukrainian poetry can be divided into three major periods, made all the more distinct by sharp discontinuities between them. Underlying and producing these discontinuities are profound shifts in Ukrainian society; not only do basic political and social structures disappear, to be replaced by entirely new ones, but, at least until the modern period, Ukrainian literary and historical consciousness does not succeed in bridging these changes.

The first period, from the beginnings in the 10th-11th c. to roughly the 14th c., coincides largely with the lit. of Kievan Rus’, which by general consensus is taken as the common patrimony of the East Slavs—the Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and Russians. The second, middle period, from the late 16th to the late 18th cs., reflects primarily the poetics of the baroque and witnesses a flowering of U. lit. and culture, even though later the bookish and church-dominated character of this lit. came to be seen as a fatal flaw, given 19th-c. U. sociopolitical development, and the entire period underestimated or even dismissed from the canon. The third period, from the beginning of the 19th c. to the present, coincides with the birth of the modern U. nation and the emergence of contemp. literary U. based on the vernacular. Because of the strong populist current underlying this political and cultural revival, the idea and content of “U. lit.” was often identified, throughout the 19th and even into the 20th c., with this third period alone.

(Skip very, very far forward to the 19th c.)

Generally, poetry in the latter half of the 19th c was strained by the weight of perceived realist obligations and, more concretely, by official Rus. edicts of 1863 and 1876 banning the publication and importation of U. books...

The period of modernism, generally from the 1890s to World War I, witnessed the differentiation of the U. literary marketplace and the emergence of poetry for a more select public. One of the first to turn to European and universal historical and philosophical themes was Larysa Kosac-Kvitka (pen name, Lesja Ukrajinka; 1872–1913); her drama (much more than her lyric poetry) serves to establish these concerns in U. p. Her masterpiece, The Forest Song, draws its inspiration from folklore and psychological introspection.

On the eve of World War I there appeared the symbolist poetry of Oleksandr Oles’ (1878–1944), Mykola Voronyj (1871–1942), and Mykola Filjan-s’kyj (1873–1938), an anticipation of the outstanding poet of the 20th c—Pavlo Tychyna (1891–1967). At first a symbolist and spirited supporter of the U. national revolution, and at the end of his life an orthodox spokesman for the Soviet system, Tychyna underwent a complex evolution, but in his early and mature poetry, at least, remains the most innovative and influential poetic voice of his time.

In the 1920s, with the establishment of Soviet rule in Ukraine and esp. the official policy of “Ukrainization”, U. lit. for the first time since the 17th c enjoyed the support of a state; its growth and energy were spectacular, as manifested in the proliferation of separate movements, particularly the neoclassicists...; and the futurists... Adding to the variety, ferment, and sheer breadth of expression of U. p. in the 1920s and early ‘30s were the constructivists (e.g. Valerjan Polishchuk), neoro-mantics (e.g. Oleksa Vlyz’ko), and others who belonged to no formal organization or movement—such as Jevhen Pluzhnyk or esp. Volo-dymyr Svidzins’kyj (1885–1941), master of lyrical, almost mystical introspection.

But by the 1930s the Stalinist terror had crushed the national and cultural revival, and hundreds of writers perished in camps and purges. With Soviet U. p. reduced to silence or the empty rhet. of paeans to Stalin and the Party..., the poetic scene shifted to western Ukraine, then under Poland, or to Poland itself, and Czechoslovakia, where various poets and writers had emigrated, fleeing the Bolsheviks...

Immediately after World War II, U. p. had a short period of intense activity in the emigration, beginning with the Displaced Person camps in Germany, where long-repressed energies came to fruition in a multitude of publications. ...The highpoint of U. emigré poetry, however, was the informal “New York Group” that arose in the late 1950s and lasted to the early 1970s.

Most significantly, however, the liberalization of Soviet society then political collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s had a profound and positive effect on the general climate of U. p.—in its rehabilitation of victims of repression and of historical memory as such, in its galvanization of various established poets, in its reassertion of the social and historical role of U. p., and above all in its facilitation of the emergence of a new generation of poets in the U. republic.

Important Links:

A 4-year-old reads a very brief, very beautiful poem in Ukrainian.
Viktor Neborak reads in a very animated style his poetry at Penn State, which his translator then hilariously attempts to approximate while reading in English.
A large collection of Ukranian Poetica can be found on this online library.
Oksana Zabuzhko has her own fancy schmancy website, and she can write in all genres.
Oksana Zabuzko also gives a very helpful talk about the evolution of Ukrainian literature and her own book of prose, starting with pointing out the Ukraine on the map.

Points to Ponder for the Poems this Week:

Drinking seems to be a heavily recurring theme amongst the poems of the Ukraine ("Alcohaiku," "Jamaica the Cossack," "Alcohol"). In what ways might these poems be read as about intoxication? As ars poeticas (arses poetica?) on the intoxicating nature of writing poetry?
The Belarus and especially Ukrainian poetry seem particularly interested in poetry establishing place. Think of the wide range of settings occuring in the Ukrainian section alone (Hotel Central, Kreschchatyk Boulevard, Cafe Francois, subways, rivers). Some of these locations are literal, others may be read as figurative. As foreign readers, do these place names and location discussions help to ground us in the culture or distance us from our ability to read the poems as universal?
The body has always been a popular theme of poetry, and the Ukraine references blood, shit (no bloody bat shit, though), tears, drinking, spasms, death, laughter, vomit, birth and a flying severed head. How do we respond to these very human presentations of the body? Are they merely advancing the literary grotesque? Are we humbled or exhalted for these functions our bodies can perform? Is the body, in other words, being celebrated or critiqued?

Website

2009-03-16T18:58:00.001-05:00

Link.

My Poland Post, Part II

2009-03-10T00:30:00.005-05:00

ADAM WIEDEMANN

18 pages of poetry

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MARZANNA KIELAR

Here are several English translations.

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PIOTR SOMMER

Here are two poems and an interview with Pitor Sommer (Chicago Review).

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MARTIN ŚWIETLICKI

5 poems translated into English

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MIRON BIALOSZEWSKI

And Even, Even If They Take Away the Stove (My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy)

I have a stove
similar to a triumphal arch!

They take away my stove
similar to a triumphal arch!!

Give me back my stove
similar to a triumphal arch!!!

They took it away.
What remains is
a grey
naked
hole.

And this is enough for me;
grey naked hole
grey naked hole.
greynakedhole.

(translated by Czeslaw Milosz; Postwar Polish Poetry)

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Mark Tardi is a Polish-American poet currently living in (the Polish city of) Łódź, where he is a Fulbright Lecturer. His book of poetry is called Euclid Shudders. Mark is currently working on translating Miron Bialoszewski (see Alissa Valles' post below) into English. He has graciously agreed to answer my questions about contemporary Polish poetry.

Which non-Polish poets are Polish poets reading these days?

O'Hara is really big here. He informs people like Sommer and Świetlicki obviously. Ashbery has also had influence. And Creeley. There's a kind of interest in voice & address that they pick up from O'Hara & Creeley (not so much Ashbery, who offers more in terms of the plasticity of language). There are different pockets of readers here.

Are there any specific trends you are seeing in Contemporary Polish Poetry (for the purposes of our class, we are defining contemporary as “written by a poet born after 1950.”)?

Trends. Yeah, sure. Poland is a country that is changing rapidly. Most of my students now never suffered Communism; the professors did. So this reflects in the writing: some want to grab onto tradition; others are diving into the new, playing with form. Wiedemann is a good example I think, though Bialoszewski opened a lot of doors.

Do you feel that the New European Poets selection is an accurate representation of What Is Happening in Polish Poetry Right Now? If you had been asked to edit this selection, who would you have picked?

The anthology has most of the people. I'd add some poets, but I don't know the landscape of Polish poetry exhaustively, so I wouldn't want to edit an anthology like that.

Anything else you think us punks in Tuscaloosa should know about Poland, Polish poetry, European poetry-in-general?

Poland...hmm. It's a wonderful place which I love deeply?

I simply can't imagine a Pole referring to her or himself as a "punk." Just not the same kind of generosity of humor or self-deprecation. With the language, Polish poetry has a lot more room for nuance. Being a case-based language, when you have 35 ways to say "my," context is more minute, wiry. There's a lot more nuts & bolts & hinges. And there's something I always notice about hearing it: how its so much in the front of the mouth, as if a language built on whispers and "psst." It communicates a different kind of emotional register.

P.S. One more thing. I've noticed in book stores that there are a lot of Murakami books. Like WAY more than you'd see in a typical American bookstore.

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A Shamefully Wiki-Style History of Poland

2009-03-09T18:58:00.004-05:00

Poland's earliest form as a state was around 966, under the Piast dynasty. My various internet sources point to the conversion of Miezko I to Christianity as the founding moment of Poland, although it was his son Boleslaw who was the first officially crowned King of Poland, approved by the Pope. Fragmentation stemming from Boleslaw III in the 1100's eventually led to the Union of Krewa in 1385, between Poland and Lithuania. Although Poland and Lithuania remained separate states ruled by separate kings, essentially the kings were Lithuanian. The first Lithuanian King of Poland was Ladislaw II, Grand Duke of Lithuania who married the rightful Queen of Poland and converted to Christianity. Poland became a constitutional monarchy in which the succession of throne must be approved by consensus of Nobility, Lithuania became Christian.

In 1569, yet another union with Lithuania led to the the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Poland became an elected monarchy under which the nobility enjoyed Golden Freedom. The nobility legislated laws and elected the monarch as well as enjoying religious tolerance unheard of elsewhere in that era. At this point Poland was home to the largest population of European Jews (and had been for almost 2 centuries). Unfortunately the lesser nobility were not afforded the same rights as the land-holding nobility, which combined with a series of wars (with Russia, Ukraine, Sweden) in the 1600s weakened the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and marked the decline of the Polish Golden Age.

Although Poland fought to maintain independance in the late 1700s the country was partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria. In 1807, Napoleon defeated Prussia and set up a Polish state, the Duchy of Warsaw, under French rule, adding to it's mass two years later when he defeated Austria. After Napolean was defeated the Duchy of Warsaw was renamed the Kingdom of Poland under the Russian Czar before finally being incorporated into Russia.

After WWI, Poland declared independance in 1918, which was followed rather quickly by the Polish victory in the Polish-Soviet War in 1919. Joseph Pilsudski led Poland in stability until the late 1930s, when the Great Depression and WWII took their toll. In 1939 Poland entered full military alliance with Britain and France. Later that year in alliance with Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union invaded Poland. In 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union and took complete control of Poland, although a Polish government in exhile remained which controlled Polish armed forces operating outside of Poland alongside the Red Army of the Soviet Union. During the war the Polish people continually to resisted the Nazi government. In 1944 the Soviet army entered Poland and defeated the Germans.

In 1945 an independant Polish state was formed. The Communist Party controlled the elections of 1947, however, and so a communist regime was established. In the early 1980s, a Solidarity movement began which was the first non-communist trade union under a communist regime. The government attempted to destroy the union by declaring martial law, but ultimately had to negotiate with the union. These negotiations eventually led to semi-free elections in 1989 and ultimately the end of communism in Poland. Poland's first free parliamentary elections were held in 1991 and in 1993 the remnants of the Soviet army finally left Poland.

Editor Alissa Valles Speaks

2009-03-09T05:46:00.004-05:00

Team NEP: The below just in from translator, editor, and poet Alissa Valles. And here's an interview with her about her work as a translator. JB

Hello: I’m Alissa Valles – I edited the Polish, Spanish, Dutch and Flemish sections of the NEP anthology. Joel asked me a few things related to translation and cultural context that I’d like to respond to here. My own relationship to each of the above countries and cultures is very different, so first a word on that, because it may be relevant to some of the issues of cultural resonance Joel raised. I have ancestry and family history in Spain (my parents lived there before I was born, my brother was born there) but have never lived there. I was born in Amsterdam and raised there and in the US, multilingually; I’ve always felt more comfortable in English than in Dutch, and although I’ve translated into Dutch, all of my own writing is in English. I studied Polish in England (alongside Russian) and later lived, studied and worked in Poland for years, and now spend part of each year in Warsaw.

Here are Joel’s questions:

- Obviously, when we read a poem in translation, we apprehend a different object than the original in terms of language. But what about in terms of culture? Reading the poems in the anthology, my students have consistently expressed anxiety over the idea that even when they're enjoying a given poem, they may be enjoying it for the "wrong reasons," because they don't have an understanding of the cultural context in which the poem was born. How necessary would you say it is for American readers of these poems to acquaint themselves with the contemporary political/cultural/economic/ religious contexts of the countries represented? How much of the poetry is "lost" to us if we don't understand those contexts?

Obviously a great deal of the context for a poem is embedded in its linguistic choices and texture, but there is also context that can be learned – though the meaning it adds is still not even near what is available to a native speaker. One helpful analogy for reading poetry in translation may be reading poetry in English from a time or place remote from our own. To read Shakespeare, it obviously helps to learn something about his world. But in fact, readers of the NEP anthology may know (or intuit) more about the contemporary European world to which the anthology is related, than about Elizabethan England or colonial America. I’m not convinced a set of footnotes or a program of research is necessary to an enjoyment and immediate basic grasp of the poems in NEP (anymore than they are for Shakespeare). It’s a bit like meeting a bunch of new people at a party – you may not get all of their references, but you can have fun getting to know them. There is always room for a deepening of the response, if you decide you want to spend more time with these people, and history, politics, art, gender relations, religious tradition, anything you can learn about the culture will add interest and perhaps understanding. The untranslatable meanings embodied in language and social context of which a reader is acutely or vaguely aware should not preclude exploration and engagement with what is open. I feel poets in particular have a licence, and perhaps even a cultural duty, to guess and glean. Even misreadings, if we believe Harold Bloom, can be fertile. If the translator has done his or her job properly, the reader will be given a rich and suggestive poem that remains as faithful to the original in form and meaning as an English poem can. It is an impure, hybrid process – both for translator and reader - that should enrich poetry in English with new forms and meanings.

As for ‘wrong reasons’ for enjoying a poem in translation, what would be an example? There may be obstacles and misreadings, but perhaps there are no ‘wrong reasons’; just reasons, or readings, that are more or less profound. There may be a hierarchy of readings from shallow to deep, but I’m reluctant to be the arbiter of that hierarchy, or to dismiss a surface impression which may in fact lead to something important in the poem that isn’t so obvious. Being too much on top of a culture (as you often are if you’re immersed in a particular translation project) can also blind you (me) to potential meanings. So a widening of the readership only helps.

Generally speaking, I suspect that some knowledge of the culture is more important in reading the Polish section of the anthology than in reading the Dutch, Flemish or Spanish sections, and this is in itself interesting. For obvious political and historical reasons, Poland has undergone a radical transformation in the last thirty years, which is roughly the span of the anthology. In that period, Dutch and Spanish society have been relatively stable – despite their own at times explosive problems with immigration or separatism. (The Dutch section should really have some of the poetry written by the young poets writing in Dutch but intimately tied to the culture of Turkey or Morocco or Bosnia – all I can plead is lack of space, and a tentative sense that a great talent has yet to make its appearance among that group.) I think it’s fair to say – though I don’t know if the other regional editors would agree – there is not the same kind of generational revolution in poetry in Western Europe that you see in Poland. The younger Polish poets are often reacting against the politically engaged and often moralizing poetry of their predecessors who found themselves, in a variety of ways, opposing themselves to an authoritarian regime. In a more general way, the younger poets are trying to topple (or enrich, depending on your point of view) the canon of Polish poetry presented by Czeslaw Milosz. Sometimes polemically, sometimes by simply turning to relatively unexplored territory, particularly life in a new and very raw consumer society.

As I look at ‘my’ sections now, it seems to me that the Dutch and Spanish poets write with virtually no explicit references to their national culture, no geographical or linguistic markers. The Poles do it (perhaps only a bit) more. One should ask why this is. Have poets become more cosmopolitan, less connected to a particular culture and place? Certainly the NEP poets may be to an extent self-selecting, in that poems that translate well tend to be poems that forgo emphasis on local detail, slang, etc. In reading the whole anthology, I was struck by how many of the poets were themselves already tuned in to American (or English-language) poetry, spoke fluent Ashbery, had spent time in America or England, and so on. I made a conscious effort in working on my sections not to yield to that bias, and not to settle for any bland internationalism, but I did want to include poems that ‘worked’ in English. It’s very frustrating, and you see the phenomenon in the earlier generations of Polish poets as well: terrific poets whose language is rooted in slang, etymology, bent syntax, local references, are harder to transport – I’m thinking of Miron Bialoszewski, Krystyna Milobedzka, there are others. This is the real loss – or lack – which is a challenge to translators, but it remains in a sense invisible to a reader without knowledge of the particular foreign language and poetry. Some of the best wines don’t travel.

A side note: Another thing invisible to readers of translations is the involvement or non-involvement of the poet in the translation, and the arguments that may have gone on between translator and poet or translator and editor or editor and poet. Although the translation may be given as the work of a translator with the author, there are smaller but not insignificant interactions – a kind of back-stage life – which are another kind of context for the poem. Some poets don’t care if very place- or culture-specific references are preserved and would just as soon see some sort of English or American equivalent, others are terrified of losing them. Some translators avoid contact with the poet they are translating, some want to vet every detail.

One example of a poem for which some context may be essential is ‘Good Later’ by Marcin Sendecki. For a Polish reader, the poem takes place in the context of a certain polemic about and ‘incomprehensible poetry’. Sendecki inserts a particular Polish critic-poet’s text (published in a periodical) into the poem – everything in italics is an extended quote. In the background of the polemic is Czeslaw Milosz’s essay “On Incomprehensible Poetry” (cf. Milosz’s essays To Begin Where I Am, FSG 2001). Sendecki’s tactic for responding to the accusation (often leveled at him) is framing it in mundane, tacky, vital details of everyday life, as if tuning into it and out of it as if it were a radio broadcast, or a voice heard in passing. The title itself is a colloquial contraction of ‘good morning’ and ‘see you later’. I included the poem because it seems to me a kind of ars poetica poem (and because the Sendecki poem I wanted to include was too long for the section).

This is what I have time to write today, but I’d be happy to comment more on specific poets or sections, if questions come up in your reading.

My Poland Post

2009-03-08T23:34:00.006-05:00

I have no idea what I should be telling you guys about Poland. Or, I have some ideas, but their scope is so opus-scale that I'm a little bit paralyzed. I feel that there are roughly five hundred names, dates, and places that you must know in order to have even the beginnings of an understanding of Polish poetry. But, even if I imparted 500 plus Facts About Poland into your brains, I still worry that there's something fundamentally Polish about Polish poetry that makes the gap un-closeable.

My national pride makes me want to believe that this complicated-ness is a condition unique to Polish people (we are beautifully and terminally unique...). But, my (kind of failed) attempts at writing up blog posts to explain a (for me) non-foreign country has made me question our class' habit of reading these poems in the context of their country of origin's Wikipedia page. Think of it this way - How much light does this shed on this?

That said, I can't think of any other way to go about reading these poets. Ideally, everyone would learn Polish, move to Poland, spend the next ten years translating Polish poetry into English (and vice versa), and then come back to Tuscaloosa prepared to have a "real" conversation about Polish poetry. However, most of you seemed resistant to this plan when I brought it up the other night. So, here are some precursors to the poets in the Polish section of New European Poets:

Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855)

Polish literature was invented by Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855). Mickiewicz was born in Nowogródek. Nowogródek used to be part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; at the time of Mickiewicz's birth, the town was ruled by Russia. Nowogródek is currently part of Belarus.

Mickiewicz is most famous for his epic poem, Pan Tadeusz, czyli Ostatni zajazd na Litwie. Historia szlachecka z roku 1811 i 1812 we dwunastu księgach wierszem (English: Mister Thaddeus, or the Last Foray in Lithuania: a History of the Nobility in the Years 1811 and 1812 in Twelve Books of Verse). All Polish people are required by law to love this poem. Here is an average-to-good English translation.

Some people claim that Mickiewicz is Lithuanian because he spent the majority of his early life in what is now Lithuania proper. However, Mickiewicz considered himself a Polish nationalist, wrote all of his poems in the Polish language, and is buried in Wawel Cathedral (So, suck it, Lithuania.).

Juliusz Słowacki (1809-1849)

Słowacki's popularity really picked up after his death. He is regarded as a national prophet, especially in light of his poem "The Slavic Pope" (written in 1848). Go here for more information and sample poems. Here is a longer biography.

Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004)

Won the Nobel Prize in 1980. By far the most famous Polish poet (in America). Most of you seem to already be pretty familiar with his work. Miłosz's legacy in Poland is complicated by his having cooperated with the Russian government and by his defection to America.

A Poet Worthy of Protest

The Doubter and the Saint

Tadeusz Różewicz (1921 - )

My personal favorite. Miłosz summed him up thusly: "Różewicz is a poet of chaos with a nostalgia for order."

Profile by Adam Mickiewicz Institute

David Orr's Review of New Poems

University of Buffalo's Links to Poems in English

Wisława Szymborska (1923- )

Token female Polish poet. Won the Nobel Prize in 1996. I wish I could talk about her work outside of the context of Sexism in Poland. I bet she wishes that too. My affection for her is tempered by her early sympathy for communism.

Szymborska's "How to (and how not to) write poetry

some links to English translations

Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998)

The Solidarity Poet. My Dad forced me to read a lot of Herbert while I was growing up; I haven't decided if I'm grateful for it or not. Alissa Valles (the editor of the Polish section) translated and edited Herbert's Collected Poems 1956-1998.

Profile by Adam Mickiewicz Institute

Poetry Foundation's Herbert Page

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Here is Michael Braziller and Edward Hirch's informative (but kind of toothless) lecture about Post-War Polish Poets.

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Further Reading

Altered State: The New Polish Poetry

Ambers Aglow: An Anthology of Contemporary Polish Women's Poetry

Carnivorous Boy, Carnivorous Bird (anthology that includes a lot of the poets in New European Poets)

Chicago Review's New Polish Writing (some online content)

Jacket Magazine's Poland section (scroll down)

Polish Poets on Writing - edited by Adam Zagajewski

Postwar Polish Poetry

Twisted Spoon Press - a Czech press that publishes a lot of newer work by Polish poets

Hungary

2009-03-01T19:10:00.005-06:00

Following a Celtic (after c. 450 BC) and a Roman (9 BC – c. 4th century) period, the foundation of Hungary was laid in the late Ninth Century by the Magyar chieftain Árpád, whose great grandson Stephen I of Hungary ascended to the throne with a crown sent from Rome in 1000. The Kingdom of Hungary existed with interruptions for 946 years, and at various points was regarded as one of the cultural centers of the Western world. A significant power until the 1910s, Hungary lost over two-thirds of its territory (along with 3.3 million ethnic Hungarians) due to the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, the terms of which have been considered harsh, and even humiliating by Hungarians. The kingdom was succeeded by a Communist era (1947–1989) during which Hungary gained widespread international attention regarding the Revolution of 1956 and the seminal move of opening its border with Austria in 1989, thus accelerating the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. The present form of government is parliamentary republic (since 1989). (via Wikipedia)

Hungary is surrounded by Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria. According to the CIA World Factbook, Hungary is "slightly smaller than Indiana." It might be useful to consider the possible effects of so many linguistically-diverse neighbors on such a "small" country.

According to the 2001 census, 92.3% of people living in Hungary identify as Hungarians, 1.9% as Roma, and 5.8% listed themselves as Other or Unknown. Also, 51.9% of people living in Hungary identify as Roman Catholic, 15.9% as Calvinist, 3% as Lutheran, 2.6% as Greek Catholic, 1% as Other Christian, 11.1% as Other or Unspecified, and 14.5% as Unaffiliated. Those of you who have been paying attention to the ethnic and religious breakdowns of the other countries we've studied will note that Hungary is diverse by Central/Eastern European standards. There are 9.96 million people in Hungary (There are 6.35 million people in the state of Indiana).

As you may have heard, Hungary is currently having some financial troubles.

Things Hungarians have invented include the Rubik's cube (Ernő Rubik), the hydrogen bomb (Edward Teller), the ballpoint pen (László József Bíró), and the noiseless match (János Irinyi).

Radio Free Lincoln - an Op-Edby Gabor Boritt about Abraham Lincoln and Hungarian freedom

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Some Hungarian Poetry Links

Hungarian Literature Online

Greatest Hungarian Poets

excerpts from Contemporary Hungarian Poetry

some Hungarian poetry translated into English

POETRY: Hungarian poetry truly "Lost in Translation"

Lyric Line

2009-02-28T17:06:00.002-06:00

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

2009-02-28T14:16:00.005-06:00

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?

2009-02-28T13:32:00.005-06:00

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

2009-02-27T17:08:00.007-06:00

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

2009-02-27T16:51:00.002-06:00

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

2009-02-26T22:30:00.006-06:00

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

*************************************************

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

2009-02-24T18:53:00.004-06:00

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

2009-02-23T21:29:00.003-06:00

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

2009-02-22T21:55:00.003-06:00

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

2009-02-22T21:22:00.010-06:00

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

2009-02-22T20:55:00.006-06:00

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

2009-02-22T15:34:00.007-06:00

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

2009-02-19T07:37:00.003-06:00

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

2009-02-18T00:23:00.002-06:00

[& 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

2009-02-16T22:29:00.004-06:00

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

2009-02-16T20:25:00.003-06:00

CP Cavafy, Alexandria c.1890

George Seferis, London c.1920

Odysseus Elytis (out on the Aegean?)

Yiannis Ritsos

Greek Expectations

2009-02-16T13:14:00.002-06:00

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

2009-02-16T08:32:00.002-06:00

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

2009-02-15T11:06:00.007-06:00

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.

My One Turkish Friend Adds a Few Words on Turkish Poetry

2009-02-15T10:36:00.002-06:00

With a few contextualizing comments by me, Alex, in italics.

There are lots of things you can say about Turkish poetry. There is traditional folk poetry, goes back to more than thousand years and mostly anonymous. Also after Islam, there is divan literature affected (Arabic and Persian ... Read MoreCulture) poetry and again there is folk poetry. Each divides into several groups and these poetry have rules (like first two lines rhyme [I imagine this refers to the gazel/ghazal, which Wikipedia said was the primary form of much Turkish divan poetry through the ages.] , etc - Also there are types of rhymes in Turkish poetry which I don't remember right now.)

There is western poetry (which became free poetry after).
There is also modern poetry.
There are some famous poets.
Yunus Emre
Nedim
Can Yücel
Nazım Hikmet Ran
Baki (Baqi)
Attilâ İlhan

This website has links to side-by-side translations of poems by the above poets.

This website gives information about poetry at Ottoman Empire.
Scroll down to the second poem for the first appearance (here, at least) of the symbolically-essential nightingale. Scroll down farther for myriad gazels - translated with the last word of each couplet rhyming with the first, but not actually the same word. A slightly different form than the way we learn them in contemporary American poetry.

Here's a nice comment from Murat Nemet-Nejat, who translated most of the Turkish poems in our anthology, on "accented writing". It gives some insight into my question about fragmentation, etc., in my first post.

"What is, then, writing which has an accent? It is a writing which does not completely identify with the power, authority of the language it uses; but confronts, without glossing over, the gap between the user and the language. Such writing reveals an ambiguity towards power: the writer chooses to embrace a language (because of its pervasive centrality) which he/she knows is not quite his/her own, is sufficient for his/her inner purposes. Accent in writing has little to do with explicit theme or semantic context: it rather has to do with texture, structure, the scratches, distortions, painful gaps (in rhythms, syntax, diction, etc.) caused by the alien relationship between the writer and his/her adopted language. Accent is cracks (many unconcious, the way a speaker is unaware of his or her accent when speaking, does not have to create it) on the transparent surface."

I got to that comment through this website, which has lots more Turkish poetry in translation.

Here is a webpage on Nemet-Nejat himself.

I should not forget Orhan Veli Kanık

Not poetry but epics.

There is a table on the right side of the page says Turkish literature. You can find some information on this page also.

Macedonia: Reversed to a Stammer

2009-02-14T19:12:00.009-06:00

Macedonia & The Politics of Language Ownership:

Many of their websites begin "Macedonia for the Macedonians!"

There are longstanding struggles for Macedonians, especially in terms of the political autonomy of their language and land. If you read into the politics of Wikipedia labeling alone, you find that Macedonia is listed first as a region ("a wide historic region spanning through several states in southeast Europe"), then as just a region of Greece, then as a Republic ("formerly part of Yugoslavia"). Being historically, geographically, and culturally unlearned, I find it difficult to piece out exactly what the distinctions are here.

I do know that everyone, but everyone, has tried to claim the Macedonian language for their own. According to Wikipedia, "Macedonian ( македонски јазик) is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia and is a part of the Eastern group of South Slavic languages. Macedonian is closely related to and shares a high degree of mutual intelligibility with the Bulgarian and Serbian languages. The Macedonian language is the object of some controversy with its neighbours: Greeks challenge the legitimacy of its name, while Bulgarians deny its separateness from Bulgarian." Talk about being "reversed to a stammer."

Modern Macedonians poets have done their best to leap into this fray and create their own culturalinguistic (I'm aware that's most likely not a word) identity by returning to the past. According to Georgi Stardelov:

"Since 1945, Macedonian literature...has plunged into the deep well of our ancient language preserved in the hagiographies and apocrypha books, also in the poems, stories, legends from the rich folklore creation, discovering its poetic force and raising it to a fundamental principle in the creation of the new Macedonian literature."

In turning to the folklore and mythology of the area, poets have also narrowed in on particular types of symbolism, including and especially Biblical motifs and the predominant cultural symbology of the colors red and black (we see red twice in Zoran Ancevski's "What's Slouching" and black in Kulavkova's "Bronchitis (a psychopoem)" Coincidence?)

Stardelov, discussing the language politics further, says that in turning to the past to create the poetry of the present, "The authentic Macedonian words instantly settled the poems, stories, novels and plays of the Macedonian authors, turning the Macedonian language not only into a poetic organon of our literature, but also into one of the most powerful means of our people in its spiritual self-realization. It is the Macedonian literature that takes the greatest credit for the fact that in these five decades the Macedonian language has gained all the dignity of a literary emancipated European language with great poetic expressiveness which reflects the creative treasure of our literature and conveys almost the whole most famous world literary classics; and that language, forbidden and denied for centuries, has reached in that short time the treasure of the developed European languages."

Blaze Koneski, one of Macedonia's most distinguished poets, continued this line of argument: "Macedonians, listen to this - he wrote - for us much more than for many other people in the world the language, with everything created in it as oral or written text, represents the closest approach to the ideal fatherland. In fact, it is our only fatherland".

The Poets for This Week:

Kata Kulakova

As you can see from Kata Kulavkova's impressive online credentials, many of Macedonia's poets are not just casual verse-slingers but are actively engaged in raising awareness of Macedonian literature. Kulakova herself was the Secretary (1990-1996), president (1996-2000) and actually honorary vice-president of the Macedonian P.E.N. Centre; a Member of the Macedonian Writer's Association; a Member of the Macedonian Comparative Association; a Member of the National Committee for UNESCO (Macedonia); and a Member of the Publishing Board for Open Institute of Macedonia, amongst various other memberships and titles she holds.

Zoran Ancevski

Ancevski's professional credentials were harder to find online, but I think his article "The Birth of the Terrible Beauty" may be way more fascinating, and telling of who he is as a poet. He recounts a traumatic event from a high school literature class: His teacher attempted to define what "beauty" was for the class by first describing in horrific and excruciating detail a scene of the birthing process, and then describing with acute precision the beauty of a room covered in flowers...in the center of which lay a corpse. Since that moment, Ancevski says, birth and death have existed as the extreme poles of how he defines "beauty" in art and poetry. It's definitely an article worth reading. As an incentive, he drops the word "wankers."

Lidija Dimkovska

Dimkovska herself is haunted, both by her own presence and by the word/idea of "meta" (evidenced in part by her writing a collection of poems entitled Meta Hanging on a Meta Lime Tree). She, too, frequently pulls from folklore in her writing and is described as composing in a style which is "post-modern, or even...post-poetry." These comments are made in respect to her frequently deviating from the line into prosier style poetry. She is a fairly wild poet, often tackling issues of feminism/womanhood, and writing poems in which Joseph Brodsky is forced to wander around Michigan (in response to Marina Tsvetayeva saying that all poets are either Jews or displaced persons).

Here are several almost disembodied heads of Dimkovska reading the poem "Aloe Vera" in rounds with one another.

The Poems for this Week:

I'm interested in the economic politics in "Decent Girl" for this week, especially in light of the fact that, as of 2005, Macedonia's unemployment rate was 37.2%, and as of 2006, its poverty rate was 22%. What do you make of lines "I took my perspective of the future to a thrift store / but nobody would buy it..." or "Alas, what a multitude of words! Dictionaries are a lucrative job."? Is economy being critiqued or is language? Or is poetry as a saleable commodity?

Illness also pervades the poems for this week, with bronchitis and ambulances and the eye clinic. According to Macedonia.org, "Only fifty years ago, Macedonia was a region with widespread epidemics of many contagious diseases. Each year, more than 300,000 people suffered from malaria alone. Today this disease has been completely eradicated. In 1939, Macedonia had only 9 hospitals with a total of 868 beds. As many as 154 of 1,000 newly-born died. At the end of the Second World War, Macedonia had only 123 medical doctors and dentists." This is no longer the case. It is interesting to note that now Macedonia is described as a land of too many hospitals, being that when it became its own republic, many of the old medical facilities of Yugoslavia remained and are now under-used and under-cared-for. There's a question in here somewhere, but I'm not sure how to ask it.

What is a psychopoem? Kulakova gives this description to her poem "Bronchitis." Is this merely indicating her interest in therapy (an interest mirrored in the Freudian complexes of Ancevski's "What's Slouching")? What do we make of this particular interest?

Lastly, there is a political preoccupation with the female body, from Kulakova's "psychoclitoris" to Dimkovska's "bodiless woman" or "non-woman." What do we make of this?

Adam J. Sorkin on Romanian Poetry PART TWO

2009-02-14T18:58:00.002-06:00

Joel:

Thanks so much for your comments.I'll venture two more questions, which you should feel free to skip if you haven't the time or inclination to reply.

- We noted in the poems in the anthology a number of poems dealing
with women's issues, a number dealing with the church, and a few, most
intriguingly, which seem to deal with both at the same time, e.g.
Stanescu's "The Infanta Augustina," which seems to have something to
say about violence against women as well as something to say about the
(mis)uses of religious iconography. Could you comment on the currency
of these topics in Romanian poetry?

- And on another note, not so much regarding poetry translation per
se, but rather its promulgation in anthologies. On the one hand, our
class is consistently finding itself wishing that each section of the
anthology had a prefatory essay, even a brief one, giving some
cultural/political/historical context for the poems. How, for example,
are we to understand the nationalist (or anti-nationalist?) sentiments
in Vakulovski's poems if we have no clue about the history of
Bessarabia? On the other hand, we understand full well that this is a
poetry anthology, not a history book, and there's no way short
headnotes could ever really give us the degree of context we wish we
had. You've contributed to many, many anthologies; I'm guessing you'll
have some thoughts on this question.

Dr. Sorkin:

Romania remains an Orthodox country and religion is a powerful force. That
Communism discredited and opposed (rather, in a sense, co-opted religion)
makes the free choice of being religious more compelling, even to the
younger generations.Feminism actually has been a kind of force since the late 70s with a group of strong women voices, Ana Blandiana, for instance, Denisa Comanescu,
Daniela Crasnaru, Ioana Ieronim, Ileana Malancioiu, Angela Marinescu, Grete
Tartler, Liliana Ursu. Mariana Marin, too, who cites Anne Sexton and Elsa
Lasker-Schuler in her poems, but there's the Plath example, too. Many of
these poets were far more resistant to communism than male poets, at least
in their terms of being a bit challenging to the censors. The younger women
are more outspoken, but while domestic and other violence might well be of
note, in a male-macho kind of society, I wouldn't say violence is a major
theme these days.

If you look at the history of Moldavia, become Bessarabia (the SSR of...,
indeed given over to Russia with the secret protocols of the
Molotov Ribbentrop Pact [non-aggression pact, between Hitler & USSR --
didn't last long, did it?], then become the Republic of Moldova after 1989,
with a retrieval of Romanian-ness, you can understand that
politics/nationalism is important. I do think the poet implies his own
situation, including reasons to leave (a poor, poor country) and a kind of
patriotism side by side with it.

I admire Graywolf for this book, as well as the editors, Kevin and Wayne,
for their thankless task of keeping things to a publishable size and dealing
with such courtesy and restraint with what could have been a herd of
rampaging translators. Remember, the press has to control the pages, even
distribute book space carefully, for pages add up to expenses, as well as
the amount of space for intros, etc. So it is not meant to be critical, but
I would agree with you. On the other hand, make the book bigger, add to its
cost, what do you do to the market? Clearly the decision was made to be as
inclusive of poets and poetry. Hard to fault that. All the production values
were topnotch, as one would express of a press of this stature.

Context helps, and poems help define contexts... it goes both ways, doesn't
it?

Adam J. Sorkin on Romanian Poetry PART ONE

2009-02-14T18:53:00.001-06:00

JOEL:

Dear Dr. Sorkin,

My students are delighting in your translations from the Romanian in
the New European Poets anthology, and are bringing up some interesting
questions about them, particularly regarding the challenges you must
have faced when dealing with idioms. The conversation is ongoing on
our blog at

http://neweuropeanpoets.blogspot.com/2009/02/romanian-literature-not-as-intimidating.html

If you have any time or inclination to comment on the comments posted
there, we'd be tremendously grateful to hear from you.

DR. SORKIN:

Choices in diction are always choices. Some of the ones brought up were done
in conjunction with Romanian poets who did know English. I didn't go back to
the originals to check, but Radu Andiescu was playing with language and
establishing tone of voice, and I don't really think there is particular
reason that an idiom has to be up-to-date according to any time period's
narrow definition of with-it-ness, anyway (which would mean that five
minutes, months, or years from now, it will sound as old-fashioned as some
think this is). (I probably had running in my head a smile at Ronald
Reagan's use of "keister," which really would have sounded really out of
date; it surely added a private glee to the verbal energy the phrase should
have.) I recall that Radu used the usual Romanian idiom for a fist in the
muzzle/poke in the nose/punch in the face, but idioms get slithery, language
to language, and we wanted something vivid. So, a foot instead of a fist. I
sometimes feel it's freer when I can agree on things with the author.
Anyway, why not use what's at your disposal, that works in context and has a
corresponding effect? I notice that no one so far has so far remarked on the
use of "bloody" with "bad shit," which ("bloody") is clearly the British
locution. Saviana Stanescu's poem had typographical voice-echoes, but it
hardly matters given that she has the right to change her poem, anyway, to
what she feels (what we agree on) that she wanted in the English; if you
read her plays, done in English, or her poems written in English now, oh
yes, she does those things.

As to my own intent, at least, I always try to get something vernacular for
something vernacular, a corresponding register of diction. Recent Romanian
poetry is full of the demotic, the idiomatic, the slangy and the off-color,
and in the last decade, since poetry had been prohibited such diction and
references (communism was very prurient about language and about sexual
terms, a long story), the downright vulgar. Particularly from the 80s on,
with the influence of the American Beats (Ginsberg, some O'Hara) on the
so-called blue-jeans generation, the self-consciously postmodern generation
(e.g., Mircea Cartarescu, but very differently, Magda Carneci, a feminist
and more than a bit mystic, religious poet, developing the same freedoms
differently, or a third to note, not really influenced by these American
styles, the Serbian-born Ioan Flora, whose poems are, like most of these
writers, dyed-in-the-wool ironic and chock-full of detail and surrealism) --
you see the same kind of postmodernism-cum-religion in a number of the
writers in the Romanian/Moldovan sections, e.f., Galaicu-Paun, whose
references and energy can be quite wild, or similarly, Galatanu ---you can't
get a full sense of this from the various shorter poems, and an anthology
requires hard choices.

Anyway, postmodernism had rather a different, less esoteric/esthetic set of
connotations there under communism, since it meant working the way Western
writers worked, and had implications, then, about content. Irony was a way
of life, a state of the spirit, and continued to be after the Dec. 1989 fall
of communism. A native source for some of this kind of writing (I'm just
finishing a book of a selection of his poems for British publication) is
Mircea Ivanescu, who used no capital letters in his poems (yes, e.e.
cummings influence, but he isn't otherwise similar), whose broken syntax,
full of parentheses, asides, disconnects, makes for a kind of discursive
(well, a kind of "inward conversation," a phrase from one of the poems) and
less immediately poetic surface, anti-lyrical. Very unlike Mariana Marin,
poor woman, who gets mentioned in the comments, whose poems I sometimes
found editors in the U.S. rejecting for being -- as one commented -- too
neurotic. I took it as a compliment for the translation and kept on sending
her poems out and finally did place a book (the Ugly Duckling Presse book,
Paper Children).

This is all background to the poets in New European Poets, what they
develop, what they react to, what they sidestep as too immediately
influential. Post-communist poets are rarely political, tend to movements
such as "biographism" (until 1989, there was only one biography worth
writing, in official terms -- the dictator's -- but biography, remember,
opens up individualism and what were the forbidden "psy" disciplines,
contraband ways of thinking -- not that the younger poets really ever
accepted the official line) -- anyway, and what is often called
"miserabilism" (Sociu, more in slightly later poems, fits this well, though
he has now developed beyond that mode, as I think he'd agree -- which is not
to put down down-and-out sensibilities).

One thing a translator has to know is that there's always another way to do
it, another style, another perspective, another variation on the original,
foreign-language theme, another improvisation. I consciously try to keep
rather close to the originals, that is, not to make Sorkinesque poems out of
So-and-So's; in contradiction to this, if I have to err, I'd rather err on
the side of making poetry than of literal accuracy. The old conundrum,
often expressed as faithful dullness vs. faithless beauty. A poem that
doesn't come across as a poem in what is usually called the target language
(English, in this case) might as well be accused of targeting the source
poem with the gun-barrel of verbal violence. I do recognize, anyway, that
I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth here.

I notice what I take to be some dismay that line lengths and breaks don't
quite follow American practice. That is quite true. One older-generation
poet I worked with, the late Mihai Ursachi, the rival of Nichita Stanescu
(at least that's what he himself said, and in ways, there is much more truth
to that than Sorescu, who is mentioned -- what Ursachi called, "ontological"
reasons, speaking with me) -- anyway, Ursachi said that Romanian critics
sometimes complained that he didn't have a good sense of line. I myself find
a sometimes anti-poetic use of line more and more in recent times, and
usually I keep it the way it was. If you concoct and all-American smoothie
out of everything, you blend away whatever makes this poetry different from
that poetry, and the differences from American poetry practice and
poetry-writing-class advice.

Formal poetry didn't get in the anthology, but it is still pursued, I'll
add. It was a matter of whom I judged most representative. And not just me
-- I asked many for advice. Anthologies have a canonic effect, but I think
they are more like snapshots. Limited. Ad-hoc. Continent.

By the way, those who liked Radu Andriescu's poetry might want to look (I'll
give it a plug, why not, though operators are not standing by at any
900-number) for a book just being published in Prague, from Twisted Spoon
Press: *Memory Glyphs* -- a book of three Romanian prose poets, Cristian
Popescu, Iustin Panta, and Radu Andriescu.

Enough, I'll close, but I'll sign off not in my own voice but with a poem
that always keeps me humble as a translator:

Translation by Marin Sorescu

I was taking a test
In a dead language.
I had to translate myself
From man into ape.

I started indirectly, at arm¹s length,
First tackling the translation of a text
From a forest.

The translation became
A lot trickier, however,
The closer I got to myself.
Still, with a little effort,
I found satisfactory equivalents
For toenails and leg-hair.

Around the knees
I began jabbering wild guesses.

Right before the heart, my hand jerked
And I put a blotch across the sun.

I tried to repair it
With the hair on my chest.
But I tripped up for good
At the soul.

translated by Adam J. Sorkin

Turkey: Its Geography, Its Literature, Its Recently-Anthologized Poets

2009-02-14T16:42:00.004-06:00

(most of this post courtesy of Wikipedia)

Geography

The 8 countries that border Turkey are, clockwise: Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The bodies of water, also clockwise, starting to the south, are: the Mediterranean, the Aegean, and the Black Seas. The big West Asian peninsula that comprises most of Turkey is the Anatolian Peninsula. The small southeastern European peninsula with Istanbul at its tip is part of ancient Thrace. Because of its location at the border of two continents, Turkey touches on a wide variety of cultures, including Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Russia. More broadly, it has had a history of blending Eastern and Western cultrues. Turkey is a democratic, secular, unitary, constitutional republic whose political system was established in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I. Politically, Turkey is becoming increasingly Westernized, being a member of NATO and lots of other Western-sounding acronymically-designated organizations, and since 2005 it's been in negotiations for full membership in the EU.

Some scholars have proposed Anatolia as the hypothetical center from which Indo-European languages originated, as it's one of the oldest continually-inhabited regions in the world, having been settled ever since the Neolithic.

There was serious political instability in the 1960s and '80s, with military coup d'etats in 1960, 1971, and 1980, and a postmodern coup d'etat in 1997 in which the Turkish military convinced Necmettin Erbakan to step down nonviolently.

Literature

The literature was until the 19th century divided into two traditions, folk and written, which had little influence on each other. Folk poetry was closely related to folk songs, so the histories of folk music and literature are closely linked. Written literature tended to be very influenced by Persian and Arabic literature. In both traditions, poetry was the dominant form. We can't blame them. Because the written poetry took on the meters of Persian poetry, it ended up taking on a lot of Persian words, too, since Turkish words didn't work as well in the adopted meters, and this led to the Ottoman Turkish language, which was distinct from standard Turkish. The poetry in this language came to be called divan poetry, "divan" being the word for a poet's collected works.

Islam came to be very influential in Turkish folk literature, unsurprisingly, especially the mystically-oriented Sufi and Shi'a varieties.

Divan poetry was highly ritualized and symbolic. The apparently most significant symbolic dichotomy is:

the nightingale : the rose

representing, respectively, both

the fervent lover : the inconstant beloved and

the individual Sufi practitioner (often characterized in Sufi as a lover) : God.

Another dichotomy is the world : the rose garden, for the physical world : paradise.

Skipping way ahead, Nazim Hikmet (1901-1963) became the foremost modern Turkish poet, moving beyond traditional syllabics and forms to free verse. Here's a website about him, with examples of his poems.

Then, in reaction to the poetry of Hikmet and the Garip Movement, the "Second New" poetry sprang up in the 1950s, using techniques of abstraction and fragmentation that Wikipedia says are associated with the postmodern but seem to me equally derived from the Modernism of Surrealism and Dada, which Wikipedia says was a major influence on the "Second New."

Recently-Anthologized Poets

Lale Muldur: "Mimesis is out." She's a teleological Marxist influenced by Brecht and Benjamin, but she says sound is very important too, because (she says) she writes from "total spontaneity." She's one of the most widely read Turkish poets today. Here's an interview.

Enis Batur: Poet, essayist, novelist, editor. Another leading figure in contemporary Turkish literature. Here are a couple of his poems.

Here's Kucuk Iskender's flashy website, which even in Turkish is sort of interesting.

Ooh, and here's a different translation of Didem Madak's poem in our anthology, "Sir, I Want to Write Poems with Flowers," along with two others.

Two and a Half Questions

1. What do we make of the use of the rose and flowers in general in these poems? I would posit that it's pretty much impossible to write a poem in English where a rose is anything but a symbol of symbols themselves (right?). So what's the degree of irony in the Turkish poems we're reading that use roses/flowers, especially considering the traditional importance of those as broader symbols.

1a. Do we have symbols that function in the same way, where they were used traditionally in such complex and central ways that we still use them, doing new things with their old baggage?

2. What do you think about the use of fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax (to quote Juliana Spahr's description of avant-garde practices) in the Turkish poems? Might there be reasons, beyond our catch-all explanation of regional-editorship, that the Turkish poems have more of that going on?

Here's some cursory information on Cyprus

2009-02-14T08:32:00.002-06:00

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CYPRUS (A CONDENSED WIKIPEDIA VERSION)

The island nation in the Mediterranean Sea has, alternately for centuries at a time, starting in 395, been under the control of Byzantines, Arabs, British, Venice, and the Ottomans, the last of which yielded the administration of the island, but not sovereignty, to the British after the decade-long Russo-Turkish War in 1878.

The rule of the Ottomans is particularly important because their rule brought ethnic and cultural change to the population of Cyprus, which was of Greek origin. This would have implications for the Republic of Cyprus well into the 20th Century.

Under British rule, many Greek Cypriots fought for the British army in both world wars under the wrongful impression that the British would allow the country to reunite with Greece. When that didn’t happen, in 1950, a referendum seeking union with Greece—known as enosis—was spearheaded by the Greek Orthodox Church (obviously poo-pooed by Turkish Cypriots). The measure still passed with 90 percent of the vote; the British proposed limited autonomy, which apparently the people in turn poo-pooed.

The EOKA (National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters, in English) was formed in 1955 to struggle for independence and union with Greece; the TKA (Turkish Resistance Organization, in English) was subsequently formed so they could get their battle on. The TKA advocated a partition in the northern part of Cyprus.

Independence wasn’t granted until 1960 when Archbishop Makarios III (a Greek Cypriot) and Dr. Fazıl Küçük (a Turkish Cypriot) struck up a deal in the Zürich and London Agreement with the UK, Greece, and Turkey. But by the time 1974 rolled around, the Greek military government that was in power in Athens was displeased with the progress on enosis and organized a coup d’etat that instated Nikos Sampson.

Today, a UN buffer zone remains in place between the northern third of Cyprus (which Turkish Cypriots call the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, although the only country in the world to recognize it is—you guessed it—Turkey). The government is headed by a Greek Cypriot president, a Turkish Cypriot vice president, and a 80-person legislature.

The 25 seats constitutionally-reserved for Turkish Cypriots (one for vice-president and 24 legislative seats) remain vacant in what is apparently became one of only three countries in the world to have a democratically-elected communist government with the election of Dimitris Christofias of the Progressive Party of Working People in 2008. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus maintains its own government, though, again, it is recognized internationally only by Turkey.

According to the CIA, the United Nations was spurred in 2008 by Christofias's election to encourage Greek and Turkish Cypriot governments to restart efforts at unification.

Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots removing barricades in Cyprus (YouTube)

Photographic slideshow of northern Cyprus (YouTube)

HERE ARE SOME LINKS TO MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE ANTHOLOGIZED CYPRIOTS AND/OR OTHER INTERESTING INFORMATION I COULD FIND:

Lysandros Pitharas
Stephanos Stephanides

Cypriot poetry treasure trove

Being a Poet in Cyprus: The Deprived Land by Mustafa Gokceoglu

I'll have some more stuff for y'allz later on today.

A few Wikipedia-ish Facts About Bulgaria

2009-02-08T21:43:00.003-06:00

A Brief History of Bulgaria

The first Bulgarian kingdoms on European soil date back to the early Middle Ages.

The First Bulgarian Empire (632-1018) covered most of the Balkans and spread its alphabet, literature and culture among the Slavic and other peoples of Eastern Europe.

Around 1422, Bulgaria came under the rule of the Ottoman Empire.

In 1877/78, there was a war called The Russo-Turkish War. This somehow resulted in Bulgaria becoming established as a constitutional monarchy.

In 1945, Bulgaria became part of the Soviet Eastern Bloc.

In 1989, after the (appropriately named) Revolutions of 1989, the Communist party gave up its monopoly on power and Bulgaria transitioned into a democratic free-market capitalist system (at least in theory).

In 2007, Bulgaria became a member state of the EU.

***********

7,640,238 people live in Bulgaria (This makes Bulgaria the 94th most populous country in the world.).

Bulgaria’s ethnic breakdown goes like this:
84% Bulgarians
9% Turkish
5% Roma
2% “Other”

The official language of Bulgaria is (shockingly) Bulgarian. Bulgarian is a Southern Slavic language. It was the first Slavic language to be written down. Bulgarian uses a Cyrillic script. Here is the Bulgarian alphabet. According to Wikipedia:

Bulgarian demonstrates several linguistic innovations that set it apart from all other Slavic languages except Macedonian, such as the elimination of case declension, the development of a suffixed definite article, the lack of a verb infinitive, and the retention and further development of the proto-Slavic verb system. Various verb forms exist to express unwitnessed, retold, and doubtful action.

Bulgarians drive on the right side of the road.

82.6% of Bulgarians belong to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

Countries Bulgaria is bordered by: Romania (to the north), Serbia and the Republic of Macedonia (to the west), and Greece and Turkey (to the south).

In recent years, Bulgaria has experience rapid economic growth; but it is still the second-poorest member state of the EU.

*********

OBLIGATORY TRANSLATIONS:

My eel is like a tiny hovercraft:

Моят змиорка е като една малка кораб на въздушна възглавница.

A rose is a rose is a rose.

Роза е роза е роза.

This is an excellent blog:

Това е една отлична блог.

Kristin Dimitrova

2009-02-08T01:04:00.003-06:00

Kristin Dimitrova was born in 1963 in Sofia. She has a degree in English and American Studies from the University of Sofia. She has published a collection of her translations of John Donne.

In addition to publishing eight books of poetry, Dimitrova has published a novel (Sabazuis), a short story collection (Life and Death under the Crooked Pear Trees), and two screenplays (Billy-goat and Etienne).

Those of you who are particularly quick have already noticed that Dimitrova is the translator of Boiko Lambovski’s “The Clay Man.”

Dimitrova used to be an editor for Art Trud, a weekly “arts and culture” supplement for the Trud Daily. She has also worked as a columnist for Klasa Daily.

According to Marlene Smits, Dimitrova sits timidly and has a girlish habit of moving around in her chair.

Here is an English translation of Dimitrova’s poem “The Strong Skins of Memory.”

Here is a video of Kristin Dimitrova reading/performing (or maybe just speaking):

Edvin Sugarev

2009-02-07T22:21:00.009-06:00

Edvin Sugarev was born in 1953 in Sofia. He graduated from Sofia University in 1979 and worked in the Institute of Literature of the Bulgarian Academy of Science. His dissertation was called “Bulgarian Literature after the First World War and German Expressionism."

In 1991, Sugarev was elected in to the Bulgarian Parliament. (I think it's safe to call him a Politically-Engaged Poet.)

Sugarev was a member of the Great National Assembly; this means that he helped write the current Constitution of Bulgaria. (Think about that for a second. A poet helped write the Bulgarian constitution.)

Sugarev used to serve as the Bulgarian ambassador to Mongolia and India. He resigned in 2002 to protest the election of Georgi Parvanov (a former member of the Bulgarian Communist Party) to the Bulgarian presidency.

He also has some strong feelings about Bulgaria’s lack of official position on the matter of Kosovo’s independence.

From Verve Magazine :

Sugarev’s poems carry the sarcastic spirit of the disappointed former political activist, but the very word “politics” is absent. His characters are animals, plants, and rarely people. The homeland is compared simultaneously with “fate,” an “ax,” and a “mother’s lap.” Sugarev’s sharp tongue makes the dark tone of his poems stronger, and he reads his work with an underlying passion.

When asked about his political career, Sugarev said, “I am one of the last active social figures from the beginning of the nineties who withdrew from politics. I did it late and it is at my account. I do not regret anything I have done. […] The mistake of all democratically thinking people [in Bulgaria] was that they made way too many compromises.”

Ivy Press Princeton is selling a bilingual edition of Edvin Sugarev's work. (Click on the link that says "Sample Poems" to see "Liminal Moments" in Bulgarian.)

Romanian literature: not as intimidating as it looks at first glance.

2009-02-06T20:10:00.002-06:00

The history of Romania is pretty unique in that it has Roman/Dacian influence as well as some Slavic influences. The earliest known piece of writing in Romanian is a letter written to a mayor in 1521. Early literature was mainly influenced by the Eastern Orthodox Church, and seems somewhat limited to translations of psalms and the bible. Later, in the 17^th Century, European humanism made its way into Romania. At this time Miron Costin and Demetrius Cantemir wrote historical chronicles of Romania.

In the 18^th century when Romania was under Ottoman rule, Romania was influenced by Greek culture. Poet Alecu Vacarescu wrote Greek-influenced love poems and his son Iancu was considered the greatest poet of his time. So far as I can tell, nothing from this period is widely available in English. Here is what I think might be a poem by Iancu Vacarescu in Romanian.

In the late 18^th Century the Transylvanian School or Şcoala Ardeleană broke out as a cultural response to Romanian nationals in Transylvania being treated as “tolerated citizens” by the ruling class. This school called for a return to the Latin roots of Romania. They began using the latin-based alphabet which eventually supplanted the Cyrillic alphabet in Romania. In the mid-1800s Ion Heliade Radulescu founded the first Romanian- language journal. Also in the second half of that century Vasile Alescsandr was writing. Although he is considered one of the most important writers of that time, I couldn't find any translations. You will have to make do with some of his poems in Romanian. Much more accessible to us English-speakers is Mihai Eminescu. Eminescu is considered the most important and influential Romanian poet. Ever. Also from that period are Alexandru Macedonski and George Cosbuck.

Romania had its own Golden Age around 1918 when it was finally unified. Nationalism and politics influenced such writers as Liviu Rebreanu, Hortensia Papadat Bengescu, Camil Petrescu, George Calinescu and Mihail Adoveanu. Tudor Arghezi was popular at that time, and is considered the first poet to revolutionize poetry since Emanescu. Another poet who was writing at that time is George Bacovia. Also, Ion Barbu. (Note the commentary along with the Barbu translations on the act of translation. It seems to be a theme that Romanian translations are difficult because of the complexities in the way Romanian poets work their language. This is also discussed in this review of a book of Romanian poetry in translation.) Also from this era is Tristan Tzara who left for France and help found Dada. Some other names in Romanian avante garde are Ion Minulescu, Grigore Cugler, Geo Bogza, Barbu Fundoianu, Gellu Naum, Ilarie Voronca and Ion Vinea.

After WWII came communism with its inforced censorship. The Soviets used cultural expression to try and create a new national identity for Romania based on socialist realism. Art went in one of two directions, either glorifying the communist regime or trying to avoid censorship. Out of that second direction came poets Nichita Stanescu (he gets two links) and Morin Sorescu. There was a rift between genuine culture where outstanding works were perceived as moral truths and the culture imposed by the government which spread simplistic views and psuedotruths. Because different ranks in society accepted the official culture more readily than others there still exists some tension within Romanian society.

After the fall of communism in 1989, Romanian culture began to boom. Books that were once censored began to be printed again and many talented writers emerged. Because of economic difficulties often young writers found they couldn't get financial backing for publication unless they were already well known and popular. Nonetheless there are many talented contemporary poets in Romania, some of whom are Mircea Cărtărescu (who also gets two links) Traian Cosovei (who I believe Radu Andriescu references in Bloody Bad Shit, p75 in the anthology), Mariana Marin (also referenced in our anthology, this time by Simone Popescu who wrote a whole poem for her), Florin Iaru, Gheorghe Craciun, Magda Carneci, and Dimitru Ifrim. From our anthology poets, here is another prose poem by Radu Andriescu. Others by Ruxana Cesereanu, Simona Popescu and Saviana Stanescu.

If you want even more Romanian poetry, here's some, and since I've already posted several links to this site, go back for much more Romanian writing in translation, and some English translated into Romanian. And finally if you care, Romania's literature museum.

I don't know about you but the first thing I think when I hear the Carpathian Mountains mentioned is “vampire.”

2009-02-06T19:06:00.006-06:00

Romania is a mountainous, riversome and forested country in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Black Sea into which the Danube River flows. The Carpathian Mountains, aka the Transylvanian alps, take up about a third of the country. It's also full of castles. Romania is a country rich in folk tradition and culture.

Romania's history dates back to Roman times when it was known as the kingdom of Dacia. Since then it has divided into three principalities: Transylvania, Moldavia and Wallachia. Throughout history Romania's three provinces have been under the rule of, and therefore influenced by, the Romans, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Byzantines, Ottomans, Austrians and Russians. Around the 17^th Century all three provinces were united briefly under the rule of one Prince Michael the Brave but then later that century the country found themselves under the rule of the Turks. About a century later Transylvania became part of the Austrian empire and as a result Transylvania's culture is somewhat different than the rest of the country. Transylvania did not reunite with the rest of Romania until the early 1900s.

In the 1800s Romania struggled for independence, which it got in 1878. It began to really develop as a country in the early 1900s, trying to unify with territories that identified as Romanian but were still under foreign rule. Romania briefly joined Germany in WWII in an attempt to get some land back from Russia. They eventually changed their minds and joined the allies. Romania was then occupied by the Russians and was a communist republic from 1947 until 1989 when the last communist ruler was overthrown.

For a more complete and accurate “Concise history of the Romanian people” click here and for a nice timeline of influences in Romania click here. For somewhat better documentation of the more recent political history of Romania click here.

The vast majority of Romanian people are ethnically Romanian, with Hungarian a far, far second. The rest of the population includes Roma (Gypsy), Turkish, Armenian, German and a few other peoples.

The Romanian language is Latin-based, continuing from the ancient times of Dacia, and up until the 1800s used the Cyrillic alphabet. Here are some more detailed linguistics, with a not-so-exciting recording.If you are interested in hearing more spoken Romanian, here is a video of a woman reciting Emanescu. Ethnic minorities do speak their own languages (Hungarian, German, Romany) but Romanian is the only official language in Romania.

Translated phrases, for unknown reasons without the accents that make written Romanian look so pretty:

My hovercraft is tired of all these eels. = Aeroglisoarelor meu s-a plictisit de toate aceste lance.

I want to suck your blood. = Vreau sa-l suga singele tau.

Real vampires do not sparkle in sunlight. = Adevarata vampirii nu dadeau stralucire in lumina soarelui.

Some famous Romanians you might have heard of: Eugen Ionesco, Nadia Comaneci, Angela Georgehiu and Constantin Brancusi. Also, I clearly tried to suppress it, but I can't discuss Romania without drawing your attention to Romanian actor Bela Lugosi. who played Dracula, a vampire who may or may not have been based on Romania's Vlad the Impaler of Wallachia and Transylvania.

I'll spare you the Bauhaus video.

THE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA

2009-02-05T16:47:00.004-06:00

M.D.B.

(MOLDOVAN DAILY BRIEFING)

MOLDOVA: THE RANDOM BUT INTERESTING

I missed the episode of “Travels in Europe” when Rick Steves visits Moldova. But my research shows the following:

Moldova: it’s kind of like Romania—but way smaller. Proportionally, it’s what the Ukraine is to Russia.

Over 90% of the people who live there are ethnically Moldovan, which is almost like Romanian. But don’t call a Moldovan a Romanian. They don’t like that, but they might be too polite to tell you they don’t like that because Moldovans have a reputation for politeness (call it a Slavic/Eastern European version of “Minnesota nice”).

Moldova has 99% literacy in a population of extremely zealous wine aficionados.

For those interested in comparative jurisprudential matters: the Moldovans love their unicameral legislature of 101 seats and their constitutional court, just like our supreme court, decides whether laws passed are constitutional, but what they call their “supreme court” is simply the final appellate court for civil suits. Our American supreme court, conversely, functions both as the terminal appellate branch and performs judicial review to ensure constitutionality (or in recent years, "ensure" constitutionality).

98% of the people in Moldova who self-identify as religious are Eastern Orthodox, which is just like Russian Orthodox except with smaller hats for the clergy (please excuse the oversimplification, but it’s hard to focus on anything besides those remarkable hats.

The 2008 GDP of Moldova was $10.76 billion, so you might say it’s a small country (our bailout of AIG last fall was $85 billion, just to offer a sense of scale).

Everybody speaks Romanian, except for some troublemakers (between 5% and 10%) who insist on speaking Ukrainian or Russian: happily, all three are recognized regional languages by the government.

On the down side, according to the C.I.A. (and you know they never get anything wrong),

“Moldova is a major source and, to a lesser extent, a transit country for women and girls trafficked for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation; Moldovan women are trafficked to the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe; girls and young women are trafficked within the country from rural areas to Chisinau; children are also trafficked to neighboring countries for forced labor and begging; labor trafficking of men to work in the construction, agriculture, and service sectors of Russia is increasingly a problem.”

and

“Moldova does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so; the government failed to follow-up on allegations of officials complicit in trafficking cited in the 2007 Report, and it did not demonstrate proactive efforts to identify trafficking victims (2008)”

Also, in 2008, Moldova was the EU’s poorest member (measured according to GDP).

Are you interested yet?

MOLDOVAN HISTORY, AT-A-GLANCE

*Moldova officially became Moldova for the first time in 1917, when it broke away from the Russian Empire.

*After becoming part of the USSR amid the tumult of WWII, The Republic of Moldova declared its autonomy in 1991.

*Would you believe Moldova’s constitution was ratified as recently in 1994!

MOLDOVA’S LITERARY ARTS

Does the name, Mihai Eminescu, sound familiar? He was a romantic poet, and so deeply influential is his work in the region that both Romania and Moldova claim him as their “national poet.” He was born in Moldova, but lived a long time in Romania—which explains the conflict.

What about this: is there an American poet currently working that could draw over 7000 ordinary citizens to her funeral? Well, Grigore Vieru just did. His funeral, just this past January, preempted popular television shows, and president Voronin ordered all state flags flown at half-mast. They care about poetry and poets, huh?. (Lookie: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/01/20/europe/EU-Moldova-Poets-Burial.php)

The Moldovan literati love them some Alexandr Pushkin, as he is apparently much beloved by all Slavic countries, not just Russia.

AND AS FOR OUR POETS IN THE PRUFER/MILLER ANTHOLOGY?

Emilian Galaicu-Paun

Born in 1964 in Unchitesi, Moldova, Paun attended the Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow. He was awarded a PhD from that institution in 1989.

Paun is currently the Editor-in-chief of Editura Cartier, a Moldovan publishing house.

Paun has written six books of mostly verse from what I can determine, but also some non-fiction prose in the form of criticism and literary theory.

Alexandru Vakulovski

Vakulovski is somewhat harder to run down, at least on the web. He wrote a book in 1978 called Fucked Up, which might tell us more than anything. It looks wild. (excerpted here: http://www.plural-magazine.com/article_fucked_up.html)

SOME QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER REGARDING THE MOLDOVAN POEMS IN THE ANTHOLOGY

Just using our raw instincts, what does our collective gut tell us about the nature of the work selected to represent Moldova? It’s impossible to judge poets according to one or two poems—but, if we had to, we might determine that the two Moldovan poets don’t seem very different in terms of voice, rhetorical posture, even form. Is it possible that all Moldovan poets are this somber? Since this is the Internet, I’ll ask, “WTF”

The first poem, “Pieta,” seems the most intricate and, arguably, the most compelling. The exact dramatic situation is somewhat slippery, but the imagery allows the reader to piece together what she can. So what is going on, and what’s the point, anyway? And, by the way (btw), does it seem characteristically (or stereotypically) Eastern European?—not just the imagery and setting, but also the voice, the detached stiff-upper-lipped speaker?

“Bessarabia go home” appears to allude to the ethnic and territorial tensions between the melange of people who make up Moldova and the surrounding territories: “Bessarabia(n)” is an epithet. What can we deduce from the poem about what the nature of those tensions might be vis-à-vis the speaker and the speaker’s inner life and interpersonal life?

SOME PHRASES IN THE ROMANCE LANGUAGE OF ROMANIAN, THE MOST COMMONLY SPOKEN LANGUAGE IN MOLDOVA

Do you serve alcohol?

"Serviti alcool?

Is there table service?

"Este serviciu la masa?"

Two beers, please.

"Doua beri va rog."

More to come in class discussion.

Test of Excellence/Non-Excellence Plus New Rule

2009-02-04T16:26:00.003-06:00

Hello, if you're reading this and you're in this class, then you are doing what you're supposed to be doing, i.e., reading this blog. Please leave a comment on this post describing your excellence in a sentence or two.

If you're not reading this and you're in this class, then you are not doing etc., and you won't know to leave a comment in response to this post, and I'll know by your absence from the comment field just how un-excellent you are. Very embarrassing for you.

Plus: New rule. People besides me and Lewis have to leave comments on posts on the blog. Like, everyone should say something smart in response to a post at least once a week.

Eugenio Montale

2009-02-03T20:06:00.001-06:00

The Lemon Trees

Hear me a moment. Laureate poets
seem to wander among plants
no one knows: boxwood, acanthus,
where nothing is alive to touch.
I prefer small streets that falter
into grassy ditches where a boy,
searching in the sinking puddles,
might capture a struggling eel.
The little path that winds down
along the slope plunges through cane-tufts
and opens suddenly into the orchard
among the moss-green trunks
of the lemon trees.

Perhaps it is better
if the jubilee of small birds
dies down, swallowed in the sky,
yet more real to one who listens,
the murmur of tender leaves
in a breathless, unmoving air.
The senses are graced with an odor
filled with the earth.
It is like rain in a troubled breast,
sweet as an air that arrives
too suddenly and vanishes.
A miracle is hushed; all passions
are swept aside. Even the poor
know that richness,
the fragrance of the lemon trees.

You realize that in silences
things yield and almost betray
their ultimate secrets.
At times, one half expects
to discover an error in Nature,
the still point of reality,
the missing link that will not hold,
the thread we cannot untangle
in order to get at the truth.

You look around. Your mind seeks,
makes harmonies, falls apart
in the perfume, expands
when the day wearies away.
There are silences in which one watches
in every fading human shadow
something divine let go.

The illusion wanes, and in time we return
to our noisy cities where the blue
appears only in fragments
high up among the towering shapes.
Then rain leaching the earth.
Tedious, winter burdens the roofs,
and light is a miser, the soul bitter.
Yet, one day through an open gate,
among the green luxuriance of a yard,
the yellow lemons fire
and the heart melts,
and golden songs pour
into the breast
from the raised cornets of the sun.

by Eugenio Montale
Translated by Lee Gerlach

Buffoni's guide to Italian poetry moderna

2009-02-03T16:15:00.001-06:00

In order to propose an outline of the major schools or tendencies in Italian poetry of the last few decades, one could empirically indicate six different spheres: Post Neo-avant-garde; Neo-Orphic and/or Neo-Hermetic; Civil Poetry; Mannerisms; Heirs of the Lombard line; Dialect Poetry.

The requisite translated phrases.

2009-02-02T00:01:00.004-06:00

Italian

Tutti i vostri hovercraft sono appartengono a noi.
All your hovercraft are belong to us.

Sono in forma di boot-paese, la lettura di tutta la tua poesia.
I is in yr bute-shapped contry, readin all yr poetrees.

Maltese

Skoprejt sallur tiegħek fuq l-art, li jmutu.
I found your eel on the ground, dying.

Din traduttur ikun miksur. Huwa me dice tinsab.
This translator is broken. It tells me lies.

Italian literature, then and then and then and then and now.

2009-02-01T23:52:00.002-06:00

Check out Virtual Italia's series, A Quick History of Italian Literature, starting with Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, moving into the Renaissance, becoming Enlightened, getting decadent, and then shooting into the future. Quick indeed, and dirty.

Maltese literature, then and now.

2009-02-01T23:35:00.005-06:00

A thorough introduction to Maltese poetry by Adrian Grima, as well as essays by Bernard Micallef and Maria Grech Ganado, in addition to poems by a pretty healthy cross-section of Maltese poets (plus a chapbook by our boy Mifsud) can be found in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of The Drunken Boat.

Immanuel Mifsud in the house.

2009-02-01T23:06:00.003-06:00

Get to know your Maltese poet:

A silly myspace-style interview, in which the poet reveals he cannot ride a bike;

A more serious (and somewhat quirkily translated) interview in which the poet discusses connections between Italy and Malta and gives a quick summation of the country's literary presence (and also refers to the Maltese as "not a thinking people");

An interview in which the interviewer asks very pertinent questions ("What is the role of translation nowadays?") and overwhelmingly naive ones ("What are your poems about?");

An interview in which the poet deems the future of Maltese poetry "bright" and discusses exposure outside of the island;

His blog (defunct since '05) which illustrates the poet's interests in international violence and Jefferson Airplane;

Some more poetry;

His site;

He.

For You Italophones...

2009-02-01T21:00:00.001-06:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogMW6p662m4

The Dish on Anedda, Buffoni and Cavalli

2009-02-01T20:20:00.003-06:00

ANTONELLA ANEDDA was born in 1955 in Rome to a family of Sardinian heritage. Most of her time is now spent between Rome and the Sardinian island of La Maddalena. She has a degree in Art History (with a focus on modern art) and currently works at the University of Lugano in Switzerland, mostly as a long-distance collaborator. She also taught at French the University of Siena-Arezzo in Italy and worked for various Italian magazines and newspapers. In addition to four books of poetry and two books of essays and journalism, she has published acclaimed translations of Ovid and the Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet. Her next book, soon to be published, is on contemporary artists.

Anedda on her own poetry: "This is my understanding of writing: to write in order to disappear, so that life is revealed to me, without me, my face at last more blurred than the whiteness of the paper, bereft of reflection. A world where one can forget oneself. Not a mirror, but a stone." (From Poetry International Web)

On Anedda as a polyglot (From an interview with Jamie McKendrick):
"Apart from Italian, the languages [Anedda] was brought up hearing were Logudorese, Catalan from Alghero, and Corsican French mixed with the dialect of La Maddalena... Her four books of poetry so far [published between 1992 and 2007] are written in Italian, though in a recent interview she has remarked of her Italian: "I could say that I write in a foreign language which I lose and rediscover at each new occasion."
Her writing in Sardinian is of relatively recent date (see the section "Limba" in the recent book "Dal balcone del corpo", 2007). "It began after an operation...I can only say that at a certain time the sounds that rose in my memory were these harsh ones of a pre-scholastic language, thick with consonants and shorn of adjectives. And I understood my own Italian in the light of those sounds. When I translated (these poems) from Sardinian to Italian I saw that one language steered or guided the other and that most likely I had always 'translated' into Italian from that language.
"I don't know if I will write other poems in 'Limba logudorese' ( the language considered the most pure – that is spoken and written in central Sardinia), but this experience has involved a descent into "una lingua non bassa ma profonda" (a language not low, or vernacular, but deep") which Luigi Meneghello speaks of."
I think that also for the reader these new poems in Sardinian shed light on her earlier poems in Italian. From her first book with its insistently Russian subjects and atmosphere, a sense of otherness and estrangement has been a marked feature of her work which has a slow, resistant, compactness of phrase - a poetry in which nouns are given great weight and essentiality, a quality of 'thingishness', or dinglichkeit. What's most unusual in her work is the combination of a severe distance of perspective and an abrupt, sometimes searing intimacy of tone. In the light of these new poems in Sardinian, it now becomes apparent that both that distance and intimacy may also involve an encounter between two distinct languages."

To see some of McKendrick's translation of Anedda from the Sardinian, go here.

Anedda also has a Facebook page for those of you who enjoy that kind of intensity.

More of Anedda's poems can be found here:
At Poetry Foundation
At Lyrikline
At rizomatic.wordpress.com
At Poetry Society UK

(compiled by Jenny Gropp Hess)

FRANCO BUFFONI
(Italy, 1948)

Michael Palma on Buffoni (From Poetry International Web):

Born in Gallarate (Varese) in 1948, Franco Buffoni teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Cassino. A poet and translator, Buffoni has published several collections of poems, and from 1989 onwards he has directed the journal of theory and practice of poetic translation Testo a Fronte. In 1999, he published a large collection of translations of English poetry entitled Songs of Spring. Buffoni has been published in several anthologies of contemporary Italian poetry, and is the recipient of various literary prizes, among which the Premio Sandro Penna (1991), Premio Montale (1997), and the Premio Mondello (1999). His poems have been translated into Dutch, English, French, German, and Spanish.
Over the past two decades, Franco Buffoni has become one of the best-known and most highly regarded contemporary Italian poets. Ranging from four lines to four pages, from lyrical tenderness to caustic wit, combining traditional poetic values with striking originality, his sober, measured and conversational poems will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers

Autobiography has been increasingly emphasized as he has moved from book to book, to the point where his latest – and largest – collection, Il profilo del Rosa, gathers over one hundred personal lyrics into six thematically unified groupings, thus creating a volume even more reminiscent of Whitman than was Adidas. But in Buffoni's poetry this foregrounding of the self is not so solipsistic an enterprise as it is in the work of many other writers, since the self presented in his work is one char-acterized by cultural and historical curiosity, by political and moral consciousness, and by an individual and often quirky sensibility that is fueled by a rich appreciation of the labyrinths of human personality.

Buffoni's stance is often that of an outsider, an outlook inten-sified by his sense of being marginalized because of his sexual identity. Unsurprisingly, he has waged an ongoing battle with the Catholic Church, as can be seen in such poems as "Antiquated Abstinence," "Lafcadio," and the extremely popular "Carmelite Sister". In the last of these, however, we see that as he grows more at ease with himself, the forces oppressing him diminish in size and strength, and there is less need to lash out: "I don't lie now about myself, I sit and listen." Despite the increased air of self-con-fidence, he retains a satirical edge that is displayed to particularly good effect in the dry and biting "If you don't know what it means in English to maroon." And it should also be noted that, in contrast to the lugubrious self-importance of far too many poets, Buffoni can be amusing and even hilarious, as he is in "Hayseed Airbase," a poem which, unfortunately for those who are concerned about such things, will do absolutely nothing to dispel the stereotype of Italians as militarily hopeless.

Buffoni on poetry (from here):

Poetry as privilege. I do not at all believe in the
commonplace which portrays poetry as a spontaneous
expression brought about by an "inspiration."
At most, this could be true for the first line. (As
Valéry used to say, the gods can certainly give the
first verse; the rest is the work of the burin.) Poetry
requires time, patience, skill, and techniques that
must be improved and exercised continually. The
privilege which I enjoy is being able to dedicate my
self to the art of poetry, both as a writer of verse my
self and as a professor and translator as well. By
profession, therefore, thus maintaining the fundamental
faculties of the poiein in constant practice.

Buffoni on himself (From Poetry International Web):

"I can empirically subdivide all of my poems into four principal groups:

− texts of loose stratification;
− texts of association;
− gifts from the gods;
− tales in verse.

By texts of loose stratification, which were especially numerous in my second collection, I mean compositions that have loosely structured themselves around an idea-pivot: an idea that I could – possibly – have developed in prose, but which, since I am a poet, I found it just as natural to set forth in verse.

The poem 'Like a Polyptych', for example, which appeared in The Three Desires, was born out of the awareness I have come to of no longer being able to comprehend all at once (in one single recollection, in one single grand image as happens with boys) the whole of my existence."

Some classy Italopoetry:
CARMELITE SISTER
GREATER GERMANY
IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS IN ...
I'D LIKE YOUR WORLD OF PAINTED PUPP...
LAFCADIO
LIKE A POLYPTYCH
OF POETRY
TECHNIQUES OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION
THE PERGUSA SPEEDWAY

Franco Buffoni's super-official website is here.

(Compiled by Eric Carpenter)

PATRIZIA CAVALLI (the poet) was born in 1947 in Todi, a town in the province of Perugia (Umbria) in central Italy. In 1968, she moved to Rome where she studied philosophy, “graduating with a dissertation on the aesthetics of music,” and she has written many books of poetry (published by Einaudi (Giulio Einaudi Editore), one of the most important publishing houses in Italy), several plays and also translates Shakespeare, Moliere and Wilde.

Patrizia Cavalli (the porn star) http://ondemandvideo.tlavideo.com/patriziacavalli/index.html

Cavalli’s poetry:

Cavalli’s poetry is characterized by musicality and the artful intertwining of contrasts, alongside a manner of expression that is both reserved and strongly subjective. In the opening poem of her first volume which gives its name to the title “Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo” (1974; t: My poems will not change the world) she deals with her role as a poet in a way that is at once self-conscious, defiant and ironic. The lyrical subject formulates inner perspectives and worlds of feeling through clear language often with epigamic brevity, using intertextual references, classical poetic forms and colloquial set phrases, which captivate by combining passion and coolness. Stylistic devices such as rhyme, internal rhyme and enjambment ensure a melodic quality achieved through sound and rhythm. (http://www.literaturfestival.com/bios1_3_6_1227.html)

“The poetry of Italian author Patrizia Cavalli transgresses conventions of lyric discourse, resulting in self-annihilation rather than the traditional construction of a persona. Ironically, the first-person voice is dominant in Cavalli's poetry, despite her self-effacement. Cavalli expresses an estrangement of the self from the world, with a predominance of themes such as illness and fatigue, wasted vitality, and an undoing of the self.”—Robert Rodini

"This poet disenchanted and almost prehistoric unparalleled master of worms and internal rhyme (...) managed to regain the unity of speech and way of life that the Ancients called" muse "and wrote poetry most intensely "ethics" of Italian literature of the twentieth century.”

“A prosody that is incredibly rich in caesuras and staccato effects, a resolutely hypostatical structuring of discourse is expressed – one knows not how – in the most fluent, seamless and colloquial language in Italian poetry of the 20th century”--Giorgio Agamben

Where you can find Cavalli’s poetry:

In The New Yorker
At Poetry Foundation
At Google Books

(Compiled by Katie Jean Shinkle)

Italian Poetry, As It Lurks on the Internet and in Small Presses

2009-02-01T15:53:00.004-06:00

*Several of the poets from this week are being translated into English by Italica Press (based in New York).

*The University of Delaware Press published this collection of Contemporary Italian Poetry in 2007 (not much detailed info out there on it).

*Linh Dinh presents Seven Contemporary Italian Poets (very recent feature from January 2009). In addition to poems in translation, the profile also includes an interview with poet Gherardo Bortolotti that I thought was worth reading. It touches on how American culture influences Italian writing (he also mentions American writers who are held in high regard there) and on current literary movements in Italy (appropriately, the American movement of Flarf/sought poetry has made its way over there via the internet... thanks, K. Silem Mohammad).

*Italian Poetry Today: New Ways to Break the Line, by Gianluigi Simonetti

*Some Recent Italian Poems, by Geoffrey Brock

*Here's a good selection of bios of contemporary Italian poets.

*Finally, I think this is a pretty awesome resource for all of us - it's a database of poetry in translation. In addition to reading the poetry in English, it's interesting to see who's being translated where, and how widely.

Translation and its Discontents

2009-01-30T14:56:00.005-06:00

I know we agreed to just deal with the poems as is (as are?), but I thought that this article (and its comments thread) might be of interest to some of you.

- Daniela