we live
we
still
who you
were
when
you came
you
are
no
more
when you
go
away
come
back
one
single
spark
remained
of
all those
words
weariness
red
yellow
poppies
looking
down at
you
from
high up
come
nearer
come
to
mind
come
back
from
oblivion
some-
where
in some-
body
it
lives
comes
back
to
life
again
fire
flame
soul
and
LAULA LAULA PAPPI
SING SING PRIEST
MAGA MAGAMAS
SLEEP A SLEEP
SLEEP
ASLEEP
SLEEP
POEMS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
I remember it well:
it is one of these engravings. Perhaps
an Albrecht Dürer or Moritz Schwind
from a book I have looked for a hundred times
when I was sick and alone in our Tartu flat
with my temperature rising. The heavy book
was on my lap. I entered it
somewhere in the middle. I was close to a German town
at the riverside. The water was still, there was no wind:
the great glassy medieval silence filled me
with a strange feeling. There was no movement,
no time, no life. Or perhaps movement,
time and life were too slow for me to perceive,
as I wandered there under the voiceless walls,
windows and trees – no leaf trembled. A man,
barefooted, was sitting on the hill and reading a book.
I passed by, I went through many cities,
hills and landscapes. I arrived in the 20th century
where everything is moving so fast, where everybody
is so nervous, where the medieval stillness
is broken to pieces, shattered, become a whirl
of colours, lines, spots, sounds and shrieks.
I came out of the book at a picture by Edvard Munch,
full of the same fear and anguish as in the days
of my childhood, days and nights of fever.
It was long ago. I had nearly forgotten the book.
Now, forty years later I recalled what had happened.
I found the book. I found the engraving, a Dürer.
It was very much the same. Only when I put on my glasses
did I discover some very minute changes. Some leaves,
some hairs in St Anthony’s beard had moved.
He had bowed his head an inch lower than before.
I would like to know if he had turned the page of his book,
but I didn’t see the letters through the haze
that was rising from the river or from my own eyes.
*
Fatherland
homeland
words become meaningless
in the Western world
in modern poetry
Words losing their
(eco)logical niche as fish
as suffocating fish from some
used up lake
some waterless body of water
I am a fish too
a fish from a lake called
Estonia
perhaps you know where
it is – somewhere
not far from Thule
on the other side of
the Iron Curtain
somewhere in the colourless
voiceless void
far far from everything
civilised
Homeland
where our spirits
have been living for two
thousand years
on the same place
in the same tree
Could I have thought they
would drive them out
would chop me down
chop down my old
sacred home-tree
dry up my sacred home-lake
my roots, my old roots
lie naked in the
voiceless void left
of my homeland
home-wood
home-lake
I have little voice
little voice left
to talk in Polish
or in any
other foreign language
used up dried up
suffocating
in the bottom
of some foreign lake
some foreign city
they call Warszawa or Kraków
somewhere
beyond the edge of the world
full of elegant
multicoloured fish
poets artists
souvenir shop jewellers
and good Catholics
whom I never really met
They asked me
do I feel myself
at least a bit Polish
what could I answer them
what did I answer them
an Estonian non-Catholic
non-Protestant
a fish from a far-off lake
looking upon them
through these multicoloured
reefs and waves
what words have they
heard from my mouth
grown up in another language
in another world
Yes I think I talked with Tadeusz Różewicz
in a dream in a coffee-house
at the sea bottom
where there was a Mickiewicz
and many doves white gray and blue
he drank beer and probably
asked me about something
but I am sure he didn’t hear
what I was trying to answer
through the salty sparkling water
I a fish from Estonia
Of course I am not mute nor dumb
fishes have their speech
their languages
but to listen to them you must
have very expensive microphones and
tape recorders
and much patience
and it may take a long time to wait
for a fish to come out of water
and speak
Indo-European
to foreign writers and correspondents
His father was Polish indeed
dead in Russia long long ago
and his brothers and sisters have
become fish in an unknown sea
and are dead or gone or lost
In a midday dream I swam over the
sunlit warm bottom of the sea of Kraków
there were many nice colourful fish
with sparkling scales and voices
I tried to speak to them
It made no sense
they had beautiful voices
as they talked Indo-European
swimming over multicoloured corals
Then I awoke here
in a dried up ancient salt lake
called Tallinn
with some foreign books and papers in my hand
‘est-ce qu’il fait très froid
en Pologne…en Estonie?’
asked Wisława Szymborska
or someone else
Light comes in through windows
cyclones come across Scandinavia
fish we buy and cook are caught somewhere
very far from here in the Antarctic seas.
*
I feel sorry for you white paper.
I feel sorry for you white snow.
I feel sorry for you white clouds.
I feel sorry for you white sky.
I feel sorry for you white earth.
I feel sorry for you white people.
I feel sorry for you white birds.
I feel sorry for you white fish.
I feel sorry for you white grass.
I feel sorry for you white colour
a relic, a memory of a past pure world
we have taken from the children of our children
and thrown away.
*
A lullaby that never ends,
your lullaby red sandstone,
your lullaby river,
your lullaby distant highway
your lullaby Good Night.
*
After many bitterly cold days
in mid-January I stood at the window,
and then, suddenly, I saw them again:
light bluish shadows on fresh-fallen snow,
shadows of young pine-trees, of children’s castles,
of a broken ski of a lost mitten,
and shadows of snow itself, myriads
of living and playing shadows, everything
suddenly alive, full of colour and meaning,
and of reminders that I should be
not here but somewhere else,
perhaps in my country home where shadows are more blue
and snow more white with tiny strips of stray birch bark,
trembling in gusts of wind which comes
from far away over open fields and barren groves,
and brings to my ears the faint sound of rolling crumbs of snow
and some distant calls of chickadees.
*
God is smile. When I met him
for the last time I didn’t understand it
although I knew something
about the blue flower. Buddha
showed Kasyapa and Kasyapa’s smile.
God is but a Buddha’s smile, Buddha’s
not taking seriously not forgetting
us lost children in a lost world.
Blue flower, blaue Blume.
I was twenty-two sitting on a wood block
in melting snow. The sun was shining.
It was March. Then it happened.
It lasted for two days. I understood
everything I had the time to think of.
There were no barriers, no stops, no thoughts,
only a clear flow of understanding, of knowing
everything and beyond and through that
His blue clear smile
penetrating everywhere, present everywhere
so fully, so absolutely that I do not know
where his smile ended and he himself began
or if there was any difference at all
between the smile and the one who smiles
and the blue flower that is dropping
one after one, year after year,
its petals that vanish
in the sky that is as blue and has
the same pure odour of springwind and melting snow.
*
Something stirring,
some deep pain waking up
in the left side of my breast.
I know, I know well,
I have overcome, transcended
the repressive monotheism
and naïve ethnocentricity.
I have learned from you as everybody else.
But why then this something,
this movement, this urge when I hear
your voice Israel calling home
your lost sheep, your lost genes,
your lost ashes
from all the four winds of the world?
A pain, an urge, a something
rising from the left side of my breast,
becoming a poem, an answer.
O yes, O yes
Rabbi Baal Shem Tobh.
O yes
Rabbi Nachman of Braclaw.
O yes
Rabbi Martin Buber of Vienna.
We all are lost in the matter, lost in the darkness, lost
in the world, in ourselves, in our thoughts and dreams,
lost even in our longing for the lost home, lost in the
call that calls us, lost in the names of things and
persons, lost in the name of God himself, lost in the tears
wept for your sake Jerusalem.
*
Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner.
Some more immortals with two-thousand-year-old peaches
and volumes of collected works
somewhere on the Western Mountains.
Theology never dies. Blue smoke thickens
into new ghosts, letters, books, commentaries,
snails, seaweed, sponges. Hour by hour
thickens the half-living crust
on the oaken board-planks
and the cheeks of the sails get wrinkled and sooty,
longing for open seas and fresh winds,
smells and colours of foreign lands:
cedar of Lebanon, balm of Gilead,
silk of China and girls of the South, singing
in strange tongues and looking strangely
without fear and shame into your eyes, through your eyes,
through ourselves. Foreign girls
with light steps and tiny silver bells
on their hips and sleeves.
But if I had no love I would be a
kymbalon alalazon
alalazon
alala
lala
la
*
Coming home.
Three kilometres along the bank of the frozen river.
Only some open spots left.
Dozens of ducks quacking, swimming, splashing,
diving their heads into the icy water
and shaking them.
Some people standing on the bridge,
throwing them crumbs of bread.
Some lanterns in the dusk
and snow falling falling
silently, softly, and in this silence
suddenly a voice calling us,
reminding us there is something that is
more even than life. Silence. Beauty.
Falling snow. Perfect crystals. Flakes.
Harmony. Beauty. To kalon.
Snowflakes become drops of water
on my face. In my beard.
Sound of water buried, shut
in the silence of snow. Voice
of God. More even than God.
Snowflakes. Voice of Water. Mizu no oto.
Vox aquae. Vox Dei.
*
Om svabhavasuddah sarva dharmah. No selfhood.
Everything without own-being, without selfhood.
No self. No own. No hood.
No ness. No ism. No tion. No thing.
All melting away, water trickling
from the roof, from the icicles.
Water drip-dropping. Winter’s heart broken.
Winter’s eyes wet. Some mountains
are mountains again. Some rivers are rivers again.
Some universals are real. Universalia sunt realia.
Some are not. Realia non sunt realia.
Icicles melting. Water dripping. You can
take one of them and put it in your mouth.
No smell. No taste. No colour. Pure ice
melting into pure water.
One into another. One into itself.
No self. No own. No ness. No thing.
One in one. One in all. All in one.
Spring sky in a falling drop.
Li Po in a Seteria grain. Universe in a grain of sand.
All in all. River river a
gain.
No self. Water again water. Drip. Drop.
*
Wild geese flying overhead
from NE to SW,
flock after flock.
Yellow and red leaves
falling
on already fallen leaves
with a strange sound.
It is so still. No wind.
Smoke rising vertically.
Silence. Suddenly I hear it:
there are
no more grasshoppers left.
They have died,
killed by night frosts
or endless rain that has changed
our roads into muddy strips of earth.
And I do not know if I would have liked
to go South with you wild geese
or fall silent with you
summer grasshoppers,
lying dead in the withered grass.
*
About the Author
Jaan Kaplinski is one of Estonia’s best-known writers and cultural figures. He was born in Tartu in 1941, shortly after the Soviet annexation of Estonia. His mother was Estonian, and his Polish father died in a labour camp in northern Russia when Jaan was still a child. ‘My childhood,’ he has said, ‘passed in Tartu, a war-devastated university town. It was a time of repression, fear and poverty.’
Jaan Kaplinski studied Romance Language and Linguistics at Tartu University and has worked as a researcher in linguistics, as a sociologist, ecologist and translator. He has lectured on the History of Western Civilisation at Tartu University and has been a student of Mahayana Buddhism and philosophies of the Far East. He has published several books of poetry and essays in Estonian, Finnish and English, and his work has been translated into many languages.
After publishing translations of three collections with Harvill in Britain, one of these from Breitenbush and one from Copper Canyon in the US, Kaplinski published Evening Brings Everything Back with Bloodaxe Books in 2004, a book combining work from three earlier titles published in Estonia, Evening brings everything back (1984), Ice and Heather (1989) and Summers and Springs (1995). His semi-autobiographical novel, The Same River, translated by Susan Wilson, was published by Peter Owen in 2009.
His Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) 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 (1985/1990), The Wandering Border (1987/1992), Through the Forest (1991/1996) and Evening Brings Everything Back (2004).
Selected Poems Page 14
