Seed in Snow
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Angela Bonazinga & Catherine Lewis
Boo Poulin
Latvian text copyright © 2002, 2003 by Knuts Skujenieks
Introduction and English translations copyright © 2016 by Bitite Vinklers
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Cover Design: Sandy Knight
Cover Art: Evening Tree (detail) by Daina Dagnija
Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[Names: Skujenieks, Knuts, author. | Vinklers, Bitite, translator.
Title: Seed in snow / Knuts Skujenieks; translated by Bitite Vinklers.
Description: Rochester, NY: BOA Editions Ltd., 2016. | Originally published in Latvian as Seekla sniegea (Reiga: Liesma, 1990).
Identifiers: LCCN 2016021780 (print) | LCCN 2016029111 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942683223 (paperback) | ISBN 9781942683230 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Skujenieks, Knuts, author--Translations into English. | Liberty—Poetry. | BISAC: POETRY / Continental European. | POETRY / Russian & Former Soviet Union. | HISTORY / Europe / Baltic States. | HISTORY / Europe / Former Soviet Republics.
Classification: LCC PG9049.29.K34 A2 2016 (print) | LCC PG9049.29.K34 (ebook) | DDC 891/.9313—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021780
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
I
Pasaules malā
At the Edge of the World
Karls Marija Vēbers, “Aicinājums uz deju”
Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to the Dance
Komentārs
Commentary
Es dzirdu
I Hear
“pār galvu kūko debesis”
“the sky cuckoos”
II
No slimnīcas zonas
from From the Hospital Zone
III
Klauvē
The Seed Is Knocking
Vasaras sākumā
At the Beginning of Summer
“nesaki neviena vārda”
“don’t say a word”
Uzrakstīts augustā
Written in August
Zem pēdējās augusta ziemeļzvaigznes
Beneath the Polestar in August
Kāpnes
Stairs
“akmen vai tu spēj padzīt no sevis ceļinieku?”
“stone, can you thrust aside a wayfarer?”
To es saprotu
I Understand
Ziemas vakars
Winter Evening
Pielabināšanās dziesma ziemai
Song: Cajoling Winter
Pārsliņa sīkā balstiņā
The Voice of a Snowflake
IV
Par kādu leksikas slāni
A Lexicon
Lanterna magica
Lanterna Magica
Vēl trīsreiz uzlēks saule
The Sun Will Rise Again Three Times
Tā pasaules godība
Worldly Glory
Balsis
Voices
Sēsars Vaļjeho
César Vallejo
“sen pāri pusnaktij”
“it’s long past midnight”
Avetiks Isahakjans
Avetik Isahakyan
Par palikšanu
About Remaining
Prātā jukušais un mutes harmonika
A Demented Man with a Harmonica
“un kad tev acis piesviestas ar sniegu”
“and when snow is thrown into your eyes”
Pie septītajiem vārtiem
At the Seventh Gate
Cogito, Ergo Sum
Cogito, Ergo Sum
“Saule sen jau purva sūnājos”
“The sun has descended”
Pienenei kas uzziedējusi novembrī
To a Dandelion Blooming in November
Nejaušs, bet likumsakarīgs dzejolis
Unexpected
Mīlestības dzejolis
A Love Poem
Konstanti Ildefonss Galčiņskis
Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński
“pie maniem miljoniem gadu”
“to my millions of years”
Starplaukā
No-Man’s-Land
Ģitāras pavadījumā
To the Accompaniment of a Guitar
V
Septiņas pirmā sniega elēģijas un divas elēģijas par pērno sniegu
from Elegies on Snow
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Translator
Introduction
About his life’s work, Knuts Skujenieks has written, “Since the time I chose to study literature outside of Latvia, I have spent the larger part of my life in exile—there were the studies in Moscow, the gulag in Mordovia, and the discrimination, whether harsh or mild, throughout the Soviet period.”
Ironically, in the Mordovia labor camp where Skujenieks was a political prisoner, on trumped-up charges, from 1963 to 1969, he found a sense of creative freedom. In an early letter to his wife he wrote, “One advantage of my life in gulag circumstances—here I have greater freedom to create than outside. That may sound paradoxical, but it’s true. I’m not hindered by any regulations, literary groups, discussions, approval or disapproval. . . . One drawback is that my arc of observation is rather circumscribed. But that too has its benefits—it develops the imagination.” Characterizing the poetry written in the camp, at the 1996 PEN conference in Prague on “The Prison in Literature and Literature in Prison,” Skujenieks said, “I have maintained, and maintain, that my poetry of that time is not ‘gulag poetry’ but poetry written in the gulag. I tried to neutralize the elemental imprisonment existence, universalize it, include it in a broader historical context . . . not let the situation guide my mind and hand. I can’t say I was always successful, yet readers later, expecting traditional prison themes and moods, received something slightly different. The initial shock and protest gradually changed into a fight against prison within myself.”
Skujenieks read and wrote intensively in the camp. Allowed to send two letters a month, he included several hundred poems in letters to his wife in Latvia, where they were circulated and read
by his colleagues. The poems were published in their entirety in 2002, as a collection titled Sēkla sniegā (Seed in Snow).
Although Skujenieks’s poetry has been translated into more than thirty languages, this is the first collection in English. The selection is centered on the work of the years in Mordovia. In Skujenieks’s own words, “The spiritual and moral climate of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev era gulag didn’t differ from that established in Stalin’s time. Only physical survival was relatively easier. . . . I had to preserve my balance and inner freedom—poetry enabled me to do that. Writing was my way of life. I didn’t feel like a slave; I was a captive.” In the gulag Skujenieks’s writing developed: “It made me a better writer. At first, like my contemporaries, I still had a tendency to try to solve all the world’s problems. Then gradually, like little animals, lyrical poems emerged. In the last years, I wrote every day, and my work became more concentrated and precise.”
The Mordovia poems are highly diverse in style, tone, and motif, but throughout, despite a sometimes dark worldview, Skujenieks’s irrepressible spirit keeps breaking through. There are, however, relatively few personal poems about his life in the camp. Instead, he shows emotion, and man’s engagement with others and with the world around him, in voices other than his own, both human and taken from nature: voices as varied as those of the biblical Jacob, the poet Vallejo, a road, and a snowflake. He also creates a sense of universality by conflating eras and events; in the poem “Lanterna Magica,” the Normans, Saint Francis, Prometheus, Sisyphus, and contemporary persons coexist—“all of them synchronous.”
A characteristically Latvian dimension is the portrayal of nature, often animated, and of an intimate human interaction with nature that is rooted in the worldview in the traditional Latvian folk songs known as the dainas, which Skujenieks is deeply familiar with and has written about extensively. Also prominent in the dainas is the depiction of the power of words. To this Skujenieks adds thought, in unexpected images. Thought is compared to armor, it is carefully held by the hand like a child, it is caught sight of at the top of long stairs.
Throughout are poems of journeys, though few are geographical. They are highly imaginative, and many are vertical, upward. One of the most striking appears in the poem “the sky cuckoos,” where the speaker is a pine tree, addressed by a road and taken on a journey:
I have stood on the earth only as long as a pine,
but the road, like a snake, coils around me and pulls
me out of the ground: you, an outsider, will be worthless
as lumber, you might as well come dance with me—
over thrice-nine lands, through farmyards and towns,
through thick and thin, with pine cones, pitch, and resin,
with woodpeckers and squirrels; let witchgrass
sprout from your pallet, let war be hatched by ants,
you and I will dance to the rim of the sun,
wish it good-day, and rise to the stars: our woodpeckers
will hammer gold, and blue goblets will ring,
and you won’t have to stand on an open plain
another crippled lifetime
A different upward journey occurs in “Stairs,” where a person is repeatedly urged up “one more spiral,” until he can “catch sight of thought.” Still, this is not the final goal—“the journey has just begun.”
An especially frequent image is the sun, usually a rising sun. It is not surprising, then, that when an interviewer once asked Skujenieks if he would like to see the camp in Mordovia again, he replied, “I would like to get inside the zone, and through the fence watch the sun rising above the spruces. There I physically felt how the earth turns. After work I was often the last one in the assembly plant, and for weeks I observed how the sun’s position in the sky changed. That was my real calendar. At the time I was reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, but I read it very slowly, to savor every page, every experience. In imprisonment, a person doesn’t age, because time seems to have stopped.”
—Bitite Vinklers
2016
Sēkla sniegā
Seed in Snow
I
Pasaules malā
Il n’y a plus rien de commun entre moi
Et ceux qui craignent les brulûres . . .
Man nav nekā kopīga
Ar tiem, kas baidās no apdegumiem . . .
(Gijoms Apolinērs)
Šī ir pēdējā barikāde, uguns līnija, sarkanā svītra,
Pāri tai
Mēs vairs nesadosimies rokās.
Ne draugi, ne parlamentārieši, pat ne pudelesbrāļi.
Pēdējā diena, pēdējais teikums, pēdējā šanse.
Uz robežas sadegs vārds mēs.
Cauri ugunij netiks vārds jūs.
Paliks vienīgi viņi.
Šovakar pasēdēsim uz mūsu saprāta čemodāniem,
Uz mūsu goda jūtu mugursomām
Un saskaitīsim mūsu mūža sīknaudu
Turp—vai atpakaļceļam.
Pasēdēsim līdz rītam.
At the Edge of the World
I have nothing in common with those
Who are afraid of burns
—Apollinaire
This is the last barricade, firebreak, red line.
Across it,
We will no longer shake hands
As friends, politicians, or drinking buddies.
The final day, the last sentence, the last chance.
At the border the word we will go up in flames.
The word you won’t make it through the fire.
Only they will remain.
Tonight let’s sit awhile on our suitcases filled with reason,
Our backpacks bulging with feelings of honor,
And count a lifetime’s worth of pocket change
For the road ahead, or back.
Let us sit until the morning.
Karls Marija Vēbers, “Aicinājums uz deju”
Man vajadzēja šeit nonākt.
Man vajadzēja šo pekles universitāti,
kurā dzīves gudrību pasniedz
konvoja suņi.
Paldies!
Te es sapratu “Aicinājumu uz deju”
tā,
kā to nesaprastu desmit Vēberu,
šo opusu sacerēdami.
Stāvēt salā slapjām kājām zem reproduktora,—
to latviski sauc par vieglprātību.
Dīvaini,
tomēr loģiski,
ka sirdi,
apslēptu nospeķotā bušlatā,
visnegantāk skrāpē
visvisādi baroko un rokoko.
Stilizētā, galantā žestā
es sajūtu roku,
kas ne tik daudz aicina dejot,
cik iespiež man delnā
pusi no pusdienas maizes.
Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to the Dance
I needed to come here.
I needed this infernal university
where wisdom is taught by
convoy dogs.
Thanks!
Here I understood Invitation to the Dance
in ways
a dozen Webers, composing this opus,
could never have imagined.
To stand listening under the loudspeaker
in freezing weather, with wet feet—
that, in plain language, would be called stupidity.
Strange
and yet logical
that the heart,
hidden under a stained smock,
is clawed the most cruelly
by all kinds of baroque and rococo.
I feel a hand,
extended in a stylized, gallant gesture,
not so much requesting a dance
as pressing into my palm
half the midday ration of bread.
Komentārs
Viņš pret mani cēlis un ap mani stādījis
žulti un rūgtumu,
Tumsā viņš mani licis, it kā tos, kas
sen miruši.
Viņš mani aizmūrējis, ka es nevaru iziet,
Viņš mani licis grūtos pinekļos . . .
(Jeremijas raudu dziesmas 3, 5, 6, 7)
Viss ir tieši tā kā tu raudāji Jeremija
Es varu to apliecināt pat zem kaitētas dzelzs
Cilvēks ir tikai cilvēks
Tikai cilvēks Jeremija
Tikai cilvēks
Vispirms viņam sāp nazis iedurts viņam pašam starp pleciem
Un tikai pēc tam tas nazis ko viņš iedūris otram
Cilvēks ir tikai cilvēks
Tikai cilvēks Jeremija
Tikai cilvēks
Vispirms viņš jūk prātā no tumsas no mūra bedres
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