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These
are handsome books, somewhere between paperback and hardback with strikingly
bold and subtle covers. One is bilingual, the other not, one has brief and
the other relatively extensive introductory material.
Reviewing translated poets has, whether
accurately or not, given me what seems an instinct for voice. A trick of
sight and sound, of course, that I sense I am or I am not hearing the poet's
voice. It doesn't work if it seems I am hearing the translator, especially
not if the English is coming across as awkward poetry, notably when one is
being told the poet has a big reputation in their own country, has won
prizes.
Sirkka Turkka (b.1939), Finnish, reaches my ears - another curious idea, her voice
in English from the page - as 'real, 'alive'with language, and in her case as if
telling, as if she is present: there's a voice.
I never answer
letters, let alone start
an independent
correspponedence.
It's not worth the
bother, it just uses up energy.
Even an ordinary postcard
wilts in my hand like a begonia
leaf in its dry pot.
I take lines 4 and 5 here to be one line, if the book's page would accomodate
it, and the poem continues for a page and a little over. And it is worth
bringing in those last lines to see (hear) the shift in mood,
In the country, during hot
summers, the goats, in any case
lie on their ledges and
decisive me
on the grass, and further
away the horses turn their
round backsides to the
passer-by.
A contented solar system
on a sunny hill,
fully in myself, I am a
gulf about to implode.
I am Kleinod und Trost, a hand on which balcony
and railing lean,
dusty joy that
suffocates fatigue and
wind.
The poems are on a roll, some in this breathless free poem form, others
written as, mostly brief (variably up to - and a few over - about half a
page), prose. A reviewer becomes used to poems lacking all punctuation, or in
lower case throughout, but here the form in that sense is traditional, in the
tradition of talk.
Of these two books this is the one with the minimal - and helpful -
introduction, unsigned, plus from the translator no mote than a thankyou
note. No more seems required, these poems can speak for themselves. They are
not new, but come from collections or sequences, 1973 to 1993. The back cover
has what I take to the publisher's blurb, telling us that Sirkka Turkka's
'work .... is dottily profound: loopy, playful, mournful and piercing, all at
once.' I wonder which poet(s) writing in English would call forth this
flavour of acolade; I reckon, though,that the book is more interesting than
this, to do with the subjective within the objective, the self surprised by
the everydayness of wonder. And this toying with the mundane is riskier than,
say, deliberate raids on the profound. Not least pleasing is the line by line
fluency.
Not that all the poems here succeed equally - if I know what that means: one can imagine her
scribbling or typing these daily, six times a day even, it's a routine; but I
don't know that, and how many of us, anyway, do something as interesting as
that? Apart from the very earliest, the poems have no titles; this is a whole
prose poem:
In the end I fall for an
old trick, I grab the insect repellant
and begin spraying
haphazardly around me until my eyes
sting and my throat feels
rough. The evening's ruined, peace
of mind gone, useless to
carry on reading. The wisdom of
the East collapses, the
good old philosopher and his
teachings. And the
mosquito it just drifts, joyfully singing
the evening away.
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The
book of Ihor Pavlyuk's poems has a dedication 'to the authors and artists of
Ukraine's Execued Renaissance who died or were repressed by the Soviet
State'. This sets the scene for the poet's life while not, it seems, directly
for his poems, which one might better describe as personal and metaphysical.
Not that history is invisible: lines such as, 'For so much/ Slavonic blood
was spilled here./ Roksolana. The Stars. Cossacks.'
Biographical information is given as relevant: He was born in the Volyn
region of Ukraine in 1967. His mother died ten days after giving birth to
him. He was raised at the home of his grandfather and grandmother on his
motherÕs side - migrants from the Helm region. He
studied at the St. Petersbur Military University, which he left in order to
pursue his career as a writer. As a result he was sentenced to a period of
hard labour in the Taiga, working on what was a road to nowhere, but regained
his liberty in the chaos accompanying the fall of the Soviet Union. He lives now in Kiev.
The introduction by the translator sets out the translation process, the poet
having English, their collaboration being worked through then by S.J.Speight
'bringing her editorial skills and extensive knowledge of English
literature,...'
The additional essay by Dmytro Drozdovskyi, entitled 'The Fecundity of Spring
and Fire: Ihor Pavlyuk's Metamodernism,' seems to me, as this title may
suggest, to offer indigestable material of which the poems are not culpable.
The translator tells us Ukrainian is a highly complex language and that if
translated word for word the result would have been poems that would read 'as
if written by a Martian.' But how does this read? It is the opening of a poem
titled 'Springtime in Polissya',
As salt in the blood,
Young stars glitter
hazily,
Reflected sunlight
sleeps,
The lunar moon howls in
the deep
And solitary trees
Sprout with green flame
And gilded snow
Dies theatrically for the
spring.
I'm not sure the following has real voice in it either, and there is what
seems a forced rhyme (losing the rhythm in the process), but one can perhaps
see the different problems raised by introspection , less so by objective
description (from 'Overnight Trains'),
I have spent six years of
my life on the overnight train,
I even have my own place,
45, by the aisle,
The window where the
stars, the faces of ancient prophets, shine,
My legs lay in front of
me as I listen for a while.
Impossible for me to check the facing page original text, except that it has
four stanzas to the translation's five. And to give the poems a chance to
answer back, these final stanzas (of seven in translation from the original
eight), of 'Meditation',
Sugar or salt
In the waters of my
Clepsydra...
Either way
The silence of the
cemetery
Seethes
Soundlessly.
This sly, sweet death...
Eternity is just a
wingbeat.
All that I loved, kissed,
cherished,
I do not regret this
world
And wonder when it will
be?
When I am the guest
Beyond the blue enamel of
the sky?
(Dot-dot-dot as printed). Seems to me a draft still; other readers may
respond differently.
©David Hart 2014
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