My One Turkish Friend Adds a Few Words on Turkish Poetry

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

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

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

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

(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

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

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

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

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.

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.”

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

The Dish on Anedda, Buffoni and Cavalli

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

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

*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

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

What do you want to ask the editors of this anthology?

Post your questions in the comment field, and I'll forward the queries along to Wayne and Kevin.

Abdelwahab Meddeb

In France, poets go on talk shows and argue about politics, and then people who disagree with them go to the trouble of making derisive YouTube montages of their comments.

This link is of interest too. Are there American poets who maintain this level of socio-political engagement? Why not?