JAAN KAPLINSKI
SELECTED POEMS
Translated by Jaan Kaplinski with Sam Hamill, Hildi Hawkins, Fiona Sampson and Riina Tamm
Estonia’s Jaan Kaplinski is one of Europe’s major poets, and one of his country’s best-known writers and cultural figures. He was a member of the new post-Revolution Estonian parliament in 1992-95 and his essays on cultural transition and the challenges of globalisation are published across the Baltic region.
This selection includes work previously unpublished in English as well as poems drawn from all four of his previous UK collections: The Same Sea in Us All, The Wandering Border, Through the Forest and Evening Brings Everything Back.
‘He is re-thinking Europe, revisioning history, in these poems of our times. Elegant, musing, relentless, inward, fresh. Poems of gentle politics and love that sometimes scare you’ – GARY SNYDER.
‘He is a rare mixture of intellect and real simplicity. Very conscious of the places words cannot reach, his poems create a space around them that is intensely good to be in’ – PHILIP GROSS, Poetry Review.
‘Hell and heaven are exhilaratingly interfused in these poems, and the poet’s scale is his own littleness in “this huge blind wind”. His poems loom and soar, veering from lines of one word to sweeping bravura meditations, and achieve a great beauty’
– ADAM THORPE, Observer.
Cover photograph by Jaan Kaplinski
Jaan Kaplinski
SELECTED POEMS
Translated by
JAAN KAPLINSKI
with
SAM HAMILL
HILDI HAWKINS
FIONA SAMPSON
RIINA TAMM
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This selection includes poems previously unpublished in English as well as work drawn from all four of Jaan Kaplinski’s previous collections of poems translated into English: The Same Sea in Us All (Breitenbush Books, USA, 1985; Collins Harvill, UK, 1990), The Wandering Border (Copper Canyon Press, USA, 1987; Harvill, UK, 1992), Through the Forest (The Harvill Press, UK, 1996), and Evening Brings Everything Back (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), which drew on three books, Evening brings everything back (1984), Ice and Heather (1989) and Summers and Springs (1995).
Through the Forest was published in Estonian as Tükk elatud elu by Eesti Kostabi Selts (Tartu) in 1991; Evening brings everything back as Õhtu toob tagasi kõik by Eesti Raamat (Tallinn) in 1984; Summers and Springs as Mitu suve ja kevadet by Vagabund (Tallinn) in 1995.
The Soul Returning is previously unpublished in English translation. Three translations originally published in The Wandering Border (‘No one can put me back together again’, ‘And when the sea retreats from here’, ‘Night comes and extinguishes the numbers’) are republished here as part of The Same Sea in Us All, where they belong. Three of the twelve poems in the section Poems Written in English (‘Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Karl Rahmer’, ‘Coming home’, ‘Om svabhavasuddhah sarva dharmah’) appeared in The Wandering Border; the other nine poems are previously unpublished.
Special thanks are due to Arts Council England for providing a translation grant for this book.
Jaan Kaplinski wishes to thank Sam Hamill, Hildi Hawkins and Fiona Sampson for their work on the translations from Estonian, and Lawrence Kitching for editorial help with poems written in English.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements
FROM THE SAME SEA IN US ALL (1985)
Sails come sailing out
Our shadows are very long
Only to go along
You, you moon
White clover asks nothing
Who has who has ever
O distant sun
If you want to go
Every dying man
They are standing up to their knees in blood and mud
Everything is inside out, everything is different
Sleep covers us too much for one, too little for two
Non-being pervades everything and being is full of peace
No one can put me back together again
And when the sea retreats from here
Night comes and extinguishes the numbers
Once more spring pulls young leaves from buds
Light / reminds us
Oven / alone
What woke us
Night and earth
To be / Icarus
Honeybees
You / light-footed moss
Near / nearest
The same / sea
Big black hedgehog
A flying fish
Ant trail
Summer’s / last evening
So light / after all
Heart / of rain
Ashes / of one world
Painting / a boat
The late well-master
With a broken wing
Everything melts
A tit / upside down
Ink not yet / dried
Wiping away / dust
Swarms of daws
All in one
The white vase
Little by little / our dirty river
Little by little / a poem fades
An understanding
I am both / spider and fly
Dana paramita
There is nothing / between us
To wake / in the dead of night
FROM THE WANDERING BORDER (1987)
The East-West border is always wandering
The washing never gets done
We started home, my son and I
My little daughter
To write more
On the other side of the window
There is no Good
Four-and-a-half tons of Silesian coal
Once while carrying coal ash
People were coming from the market
Sometimes I see so clearly the openness of things
It gets cold in the evening
A piebald cat
The early autumn, a faded aquarelle
The crop is reaped
Poetry is verdant
Silence of night
We always live our childhood again
Dialectics is a dialogue
Destruktivität is das Ergebnis ungelebten Lebens
Elder trees that thrushes have sown
Once I got a postcard from the Fiji Islands
Potatoes are dug, ash trees yellow
FROM THROUGH THE FOREST (1991/1996)
There is so little that remains
To eat a pie and to have it
Lines do not perhaps exist
As the night begins, a forked birch captures
I begin to wash my son’s shirt
Think back to the vanished day
Once, at a meeting, I was asked
Death does not come from outside
The wind does not blow
You step into the morning
The ticking of the clock fills the room
A flock of jackdaws on the outskirts of the town
I do not write, do not make poetry
I never weary of looking at leafless trees
The most disconsolate of landscapes
Silence. Dust
The Forest Floor
Dust. I Myself
To fight for the rights and freedoms of the body
This autumn’s great big yellow chrysanthemum
Birch tops like brushes
The beginning of the year is like a white sheet of paper
Politics and politicians are gradually becoming streamlined
I ended up in literature
I came from the town
Autumn comes closer
I come up from the cellar
A bird in the air
In the room, a moth flies from
east to west
In the ventilation grating lives a tit
FROM EVENING BRINGS EVERYTHING BACK (1984/2004)
The snow’s melting
Through the cellar ceiling
White paper and time
For many years, always in March
It’s easy to say what’s become of the snow
I was coming from Tähtvere
Once again I think about what I’ve read
I don’t feel at home in this synthetic world
Spring has indeed come
The morning began with sunshine
I could say: I got out of the bus
Running for milk I saw wood sorrel in bloom
I write a poem every day
We walked the road to Kvissental
My aunt knew them well
The sky’s overcast
Silence is always here and everywhere
The other life begins in the evening
I don’t want to write courtly poetry any more
Only at dusk do eyes really begin to see
A last cloud moves across the sky
The rain stops
There are so many insects this summer
There are as many worlds as grains of sand
It makes little sense to talk about the subconscious
There is no God
The world doesn’t consist of matter or spirit
Late summer: a faded old watercolour
The full moon south-east above Piigaste forest
I told the students about the beginning of Greek culture
From stalks and curls of pine-bark
FROM SUMMERS AND SPRINGS (1995/2004)
In the morning I was presented to President Mitterand
The radio’s talking about the Tiananmen bloodbath
The sea doesn’t want to make waves
God has left us
The possibility of rain
A fit body doesn’t exist
The age-old dream of mankind
One day you will do everything for the last time
Evening’s coming
It’s raining again
The centre of the world is here
My poems often aren’t poems
Less and less space for flying
More and more empty words
I saw something white far away
The weather changed overnight
My eyesight’s weakening
The world is a single event
I opened the Russian-Chinese dictionary
I’ve thought that I thought about death
I don’t have a land or a sky of my own
THE SOUL RETURNING (1973-75)
The Soul Returning
POEMS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
I remember it well
Fatherland / homeland
I feel sorry for you white paper
A lullaby that never ends
After many bitterly cold days
God is smile
Something stirring
Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner
Coming home
Om svabhavasuddhah sarva dharmah
Wild geese flying overhead
About the Author
Copyright
from
THE SAME SEA IN US ALL
(1985)
translated by
JAAN KAPLINSKI
with SAM HAMILL
Sails come sailing out
from foreign pictures
sails on the Yangtze
sails on the River Li
Sun
golden fish swimming over green rocks
sky with birds
seen through falling petals
Look to the east the shadow
of a white cloud
slants over glittering water
on the horizon
emerging
white sails sails sails
*
Our shadows are very long
when we return at night from haying
but we ourselves are small
The camomile clasps its hands together
as if in prayer
A woman with a sickle creeps up the hill
as she did a thousand years ago
Beyond the courtyard
the heath
beyond the heath forest
Heather heather-coloured
whither dost thou fly little bee
that heaven
is so vast and void
once we will return
once we will all return.
*
Only to go along, only to go along,
always there is spring somewhere,
there is rain somewhere.
Only to go along, only to go hand in hand with spring
where there was a desert yesterday, where he who goes
was himself a desert yesterday, full of mirages and memories
where red and yellow poppies like armies
rise from the dead;
only to go and see with one’s own eyes there’s no need to stay,
no need to finish anything before going on, no need to guard the grave
on this morning of the resurrection of the yellow poppies.
Only to go along, no need to take a thing,
no need to return, no need to return from that
third morning of desert flowers
to oneself, to one’s headache, angina pectoris, white bedsheets,
the place of one’s grave:
only to see, only to be with him,
to be with poppies, cacti, amaryllises, mesembryanthemums.
Let him who believes in duty fold the sheets,
let someone advertise a free gravesite in the papers.
One who was sick, one who had been buried, was lost without a trace
on the third day.
Two days ago, the thunderbird broke its shell
and they all heard it: lilies, amaryllises, poppies, the hedgehog heads of cacti,
and the mesembryanthemums in their stony sleep.
Yesterday the grass burned on the savannah, the dry blades of grass.
and today they are all here, only you have to come to see –
only to come and look, catch him and follow him,
follow the spring that walks somewhere over the listening earth:
he is always somewhere, he is always everywhere.
*
You, you moon – in whose laps did you place darkness
before there was night?
Do you remember, the day stood before the new pages
and didn’t dare come in.
March waited at the head of the bed blowing her fists,
April emerged from the sea-foam.
Everything else was just the wind whistling,
burnt books flying overhead.
Do you remember the resurrection, have you forgotten the life?
After all, you know where we were buried. Put
your ear to the ground and listen:
a train faraway? No! No armour, no pneumatic hammer, no –
air rustling in the pits of lungs, pulse beating.
The light brings back the white butterfly from beyond Pluto’s orbit.
*
White clover asks nothing
but when they ask in whose name
I will reply in the name of white clover
only bones and tin buckles remain after soldiers
resin has eaten the crosses from the pines
white white white clover
one stalk three leaves: Father Son Holy Spirit
dark needles bark fluttering in the wind
crimson was the question green is the answer
*
Who has who has ever
rowed across the river
to other shore
is always
across the river
here and there
the same yellow buttercups
are burning into ashes
<
br /> *
O distant sun
faceless nameless
silvering light
flashing on fish
lake blooming its blooming
bird
calls to bird
from dusk to dawn
sleeping rustling rushes
_______
word only words
empty vessels in empty space
everything else
is one and the same – a world
which never was
and never will be
nobody is and cannot
be anything – what
does this solitude mean
_______
Blue – too blue
high swing above the shore
strange sun and wind
ants
scattered over bare sand
carnations rise from the earth
the land
belongs to us to me to no one
*
If you want to go
do not remain if only for our sake
because we do not understand – thirty years
forty years of thirst of sunsets and sunrises in dusty windows
who then can say to us whither and how long yet
who then will answer us if you
take your hand
from your mother’s hand
from your father’s hand
and the wind takes your hand and you go
on aspen leaves
the tiny feet of the sun walk
into evening
today always and for a long time yet
we are given too much and we are
very poor
we are taught too much and we know
nothing
but we too we do not want
to inhabit the same world
as an Oliver Cromwell or a Josef Stalin
but we must remain – wagons
athwart, sideways on the road
we have no speech and no voice if you go
look back once more wait
Selected Poems Page 1
