in which mirrors make themselves transparent, traversable as rooms
in which bricks become mirrors in which you see
the moth’s shadow on your face,
which looks, like the god Janus, at once to east and west, forward and back, and sees the orange-pip at once falling and rising.
*
In the ventilation grating lives a tit.
Couperin lives at this moment on the gramophone.
Tadpoles are already living in the pond.
Above the pond, at evening, is a mist, and in the mist live nightingales.
As long as they are there, as they come back in springtime,
there is still order and hope in the world, there are still the frail threads of migration paths
that connect us with Egypt, Sudan, the Congo, and Cape Province.
The world is still in place, like a map-mosaic, a children’s puzzle, a jigsaw,
that is so hard to put together and so easy to break up.
My greatest fear is, indeed, perhaps that the time will come when some of the pieces of the mosaic will disappear:
the nightingales will not come, the dung-beetle will not fly, and it will no longer be possible to put the world together again.
It will remain a confused, half-finished ecological puzzle:
a solitary tit will sing, but will not find a mate.
In the ocean the male blue whale will no longer find his partner.
The continents will break up into islets, skerries, stones surrounded by water.
Mankind will break up into parties, classes, principles, homos and sapiens,
naked apes which fear serpents, the dark, knowledge and other such things
and cower each by his own swaying coconut palm, trying to piece together his own map of the stars,
which scatters into the mist like everything else.
The tit came back again. The nightingale is singing.
*
from
EVENING BRINGS
EVERYTHING BACK
(1984/2004)
translated by
JAAN KAPLINSKI
with FIONA SAMPSON
Hespere panta fereis hosa fainolis eskedas auos
fereis oin fereis aiga fereis apy materi paida
Evening, you bring back everything the bright dawn scattered:
bring back the ewe, bring back the kid, bring the child back to its mother.
SAPPHO
Ehatähte, hella tähte,
see viib värvud välla pealta,
aab haned aruninasta,
vanad vaipa ju vautab,
noored nurka uinutelleb.
Koidutähte, kurja tähte,
see viib värvud välla peale,
vanad vaibast erutab,
noored nurgast kergitelleb.
Evening star, tender star,
takes the little birds from the field,
takes the geese from the meadow,
puts the old under a blanket,
the young to sleep in the corner.
Morning star, cruel star,
chases the little birds to the field,
gets the old out of bed
raises the young from the corner.
ESTONIAN FOLK SONG
The snow’s melting. Water’s dripping.
The wind’s blowing, gently.
Boughs sway. There’s a fire in the stove.
The radiators are warm.
Anu is doing exercises on the piano.
Ott and Tambet are making a snowman.
Maarja’s preparing lunch.
The wooden horse is looking in at the window.
I am looking out of the window.
I am writing a poem.
I’m writing that today is Sunday.
That the snow’s melting. That water’s dripping.
That the wind’s blowing, et cetera, et cetera.
*
Zwei Dinge erfüllen das Gemüt mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je öfter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit beschäftigt: der gestirnte Himmel über, und das moralische Gesetz in mir.*
KANT
Through the cellar ceiling
I hear the shouts of children,
their feet trampling, sometimes
a building block falling and sometimes
their mother’s nagging voice.
Above these voices there are
more ceilings,
the roof with chimneys and aerials,
and heaven actually begins
here at this very place
beside us, around us
and reaches up to those
awe-inspiring stars.
We too are heaven-dwellers,
the contemplative philosopher
as well as a child throwing its wood blocks onto the floor
and the writer who doesn’t know
whether he feels more awe
for the stars in heaven, castles built of wood blocks,
or the heavenly sandstone
outside the cellar walls and below its floor.
*
* ‘Two things fill the spirit with renewed and ever greater admiration and awe the more often and the more sustainedly we reflect upon them. They are: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.’
– KANT (trs. David Constantine)
White paper and time: I’m filling one,
the other fills itself.
Both so similar. In front of both
I am shy and full of awe.
The poem is like a sheep
in a dark shed with a high threshold.
I feel uneasy when I approach it.
Sight stays outside. Here you can move
only with the help of your hands.
White paper. White wool. In the dark
both simply something not dark. Time
both invisible and visible
as it is outside in broad daylight
where you left your eyesight.
Time: a white wet towel. Poetry trickling out
when you twist it.
The towel drying on a warm pipe
in a dark bathroom.
*
For many years, always in March,
I’ve felt sorry for these quiet
days and cloudy skies. The arrival
of the real spring has something
frightening in it. Everything
is suddenly new and strange: the doormat, unwashed windows,
willow buds, tufts of grass sticking up through the snow,
the starlings and the moon above the floodplain.
Everything is like a call, everything’s tempting and luring you
out of the room, out of home, out of yourself, out of mind;
to flow over land and water, to go somewhere else,
to be somewhere else, somebody else;
and if you cannot then at least
to shout, to dance, to write,
to sing stupid spring songs
in order to soothe this urge.
I can’t understand whether it’s in the blood or the mind
or somewhere else. Maybe it’s the cellular memory
of my ancestors – fish, birds or peasants –
the memory of previous lives awakening in me
an urge to swim to flooded meadows to spawn
to look for a partner and a nesting place
to feel with a hand whether the soil is warm enough;
or something even more mysterious and archaic:
the understanding of a seed that it’s time to sprout,
the thrill and fear of yet another death and birth.
*
It’s easy to say what’s become of the snow
where we went skiing only two weeks ago,
upstream, past the ruins of Jänese tavern and the railway bridge
where on both sides
there’s only forest: alder and birch
slanting towards th
e water, earthworks on both banks
probably left by dredging.
I could say: the snow’s gone, melted, flowed
into Peipsi lake and further away, evaporated, soaked into soil.
But I still think of those ski tracks,
of our traces on the snowy river ice…
What have they become? Do such traces
vanish completely, without leaving any traces? And are we
like that snow or those ski tracks?
Or like neither of them? Something different, something else?
*
I was coming from Tähtvere. It was Sunday evening.
I was the only fare to the final stop.
I stepped out. The road was silent: not a single car.
The wind had fallen silent. Only the stars
and the sickle of the new moon shone above the river.
I felt sorry I had to keep going. I’d have liked to step
off the path onto the wasteland and to stop
to look at that moon, those constellations – several of which
I’d forgotten again during the winter – but most of all
at the sky itself, the blue of the sky that was nearly
as deep and strange as once long ago,
twenty years ago, when we sat and drank wine
around a campfire in the nearby forest, and I came
back to Tartu on a village road with a girl,
arms around each other’s necks.
The blue is much easier to remember
than names, titles or faces,
even the faces of those you once loved.
*
Once again I think about what I’ve read: that light and darkness,
good and evil, truth and lies, are mixed up in this world. Certainly
for those who thought like that the world really was alive: everything
was black or white, God’s or the Devil’s own.
But what will remain of this world split into two camps
if everything becomes infinitely divisible, crumbles
into a whirlwind of particles, flickering of fields?
Will every particle contain some dark and light,
will the opposites be there even in the tiniest of them,
even in zero itself, splitting what is closer and closer
to non-existence? Will the strange
replace the horrible? Will it be easier
to exist?
*
I don’t feel at home in this synthetic world
where the good old varnish smell is replaced
by the whiff of acrylic and glyphtal paints
I find it hard, sometimes impossible, to get accustomed to;
where shelves and tables are made of sawdust
and you can play the Ode to Joy on a plastic flute
or listen to it in a recording
by some long-dead conductor. Your environment
consists of dead things, people and voices. Life withdraws
in front of us, until there’s only wilderness to retreat to.
Or it survives in hideouts beside us:
in flower-pot, aquarium, wall crack, dustbin.
A student awake late at night
puts the book aside and kills some bedbugs
which, as always, leave their holes at a certain hour
and creep into the bed.
*
Spring has indeed come: the willows are in blossom and queen bumblebees
are looking for nesting places; fruit flies circle
over the bowl of sour milk; on the kitchen curtain
a big moth’s sleeping exactly on a red spot.
A mosquito flies into the cellar room and buzzes around my head.
For some time, sitting at the desk, I’ve been hearing
a strange noise from a plastic sachet hanging on the wall.
Finally I take it down and have a look: a spider
has fallen into it and is making desperate attempts to get out.
*
The morning began with sunshine – we brought the rugs out
to be aired, sent the children to the sand pit
and ourselves went to the garden where
the dandelions and couch grass were already rampant, the strawberry bed
full of flowering corn mint buzzing with bumblebees.
We had to clear everything up, dig the whole patch,
tear out couch grass, horsetail and bindweed root by root.
It took a lot of time. Surely later on
it will be nice to think that we’ve gone through every bit of soil
with our fingers. In the early afternoon
it was so hot that I even took my shirt off, digging. In the west
clouds were gathering already, and in late afternoon,
when the first beds were ready, it began to rain.
I sowed carrots and turnips
when it was already raining, with my black waterproof on.
At night, before falling asleep, I saw
only earth and roots, roots, roots.
*
I could say: I got out of the bus,
stepping onto the dusty verge where
a young maple and a wild rose grow.
In reality, I jumped into silence
and there was no ground to step on.
The silence closed over my head like water:
I barely noticed the bus leaving
and as I sank deeper and deeper
I heard only my own heartbeats,
seeing the way home glide past
in its own rhythm: lilies of the valley sprouting,
wood sorrel already nearly in blossom,
the anthill covered as if by a brownish quivering veil –
the ants themselves. The Big Pine. The Big Spruce.
Drying hurdles. Sand pit. Traces of a fire.
White birch trunks. The Big Boulder.
And many memories. Silence, the inland sea,
nameless background of all these names,
of all our names.
*
Running for milk I saw wood sorrel in bloom
to the left of the path, and my mind became restless,
feeling its helplessness in front of something primeval and strange
that occasionally – but furtively, evasively –
touches you. In a forest in spring
I feel like a prisoner who has nothing more
than the walls of his cell, scribbled full of words and names,
and memories of free space, landscapes, women
and thirst for all of them. What is there
between me and the forest, between me and the world?
Where is the wall that keeps me apart
from what everything in me thirsts for, the wall
that separates me from this wood sorrel,
these horsetails, cow wheat, wintergreens, from this sprouting
that I must always walk past, that I can never
really touch…? But still – this time
a new thought woke in my besieged mind –
maybe all the time I’ve sought and longed for
a reality behind this reality; trying to get closer
I’ve gone further away. For the first time
I understood that transparency itself is nothing less
than what you see through it: the evening sun
shining through petals of wood sorrel.
*
I write a poem every day,
although I’m not quite sure if these texts
should be called poems at all.
It’s not difficult, especially now
when it’s spring in Tartu, and everything is changing its form:
parks, lawns, branches, buds and clouds
above the town, even the sky and stars.
If only I had enough eyes, ears and time
for this beauty that sucks us in like a whirlpool
covering every
thing with a poetic veil of hopes
where only one thing sticks out unnaturally:
the half-witted man sitting at the bus stop
taking boots from his dirty maimed feet,
his stick and his woollen cap lying beside him;
the same cap that was on his head
when you saw him that day standing
at the same stop at three in the morning
as the taxi drove you past him and the driver
said, ‘That idiot’s got hold of some booze again.’
*
We walked the road to Kvissental,
blooming bird cherries on both sides
white clouds of blossom in the midst of a willow thicket.
I broke off a twig of blossom for my son
and showed him the willows: one had vivid green,
the other greyish leaves. ‘But why do the willows exist?’
he asked, and it was difficult to find an answer.
I told him the trees simply exist without knowing
or thinking anything. He probably didn’t understand
my idea. But how can I speak
for trees? We reached the river.
We went to the old jetty that was swaying
in waves from passing motor boats;
we sat on an old beam, seeing how glittering blue
this river was, which in the north passes through forest;
seeing how dandelions, buttercups and ash
were germinating in the dirt between the pier planks.
We caught some caddis worms and put them back in the river;
we washed our sweaty and dusty faces
in the greenish flowing water, and began our trip back home.
*
My aunt knew them well. I know
only their names and what other people have told me:
tinkers, haberdashers, attorneys, doctors,
Genss, Michelson, Itzkowitsch, Gulkowitsch…
Where are they now? Some of them were lucky enough
to be buried in this cemetery under a slab with Hebrew lettering.
Selected Poems Page 8
