Latvian Feature Comments on poetry by Māris Salējs EdvīnsRaups Knuts Skujenieks

To Be The Roots By J.C. Todd      A language dies as one might expect: theweak find they must speak to the strong in the language of the strong.According to linguist Michael Krauss, director of the Alaska NativeLanguage Center, as many as 3,000 languages will go silent in thiscentury. Three thousand languages, comprising half of all the words onearth, will slip from utility into coded secrets and then into disuse,languages such as Karo, spoken in Ethiopia, whose speakers numbered lessthan 200 in 2001, or the native Alaskan Eyak whose last speaker is 88years old, if she is still alive. When languages cease to be spoken,their embalmers often are the anthropologists and linguists who preparethem for burial in filing cabinets and audio libraries. They cease to bespoken when no one is listening.      But what of “little” languages,like Latvian, perhaps threatened but not on the verge of extinction,languages spoken by millions, rather than hundreds or thousands? Whatpreserves these languages, keeps humans listening, during times ofhostile occupation, so they continue, in the words of poet VizmaBelševica, “To be the roots. In subsoil where never aray/Descends.”      Saving alanguage sometimes requires war or uprising, sometimes nationalisticurges, and always a people’s resistance to hegemony and theirunrelenting desire that their language survive as a living tongue sentout to a living ear. Certainly that resistance and desire has driventhe people of Latvia as they have emerged from a half century of Sovietoccupation to re-establish Latvian as the language of the nation, thelanguage of government and the law. What a complex enterprise this is.Latvian re-emerged as a national language in 1990, squeezed between theglobal dominance of English and the imposed dominance of Russian. Thecurrent ethnic mix of the population is largely the result of massiveimmigration during the years when the Soviet occupation RussifiedLatvia. More than two hundred thousand Latvians were deported toRussia, thousands more emigrated to other countries, and hundreds ofthousands of Russians were relocated to Latvia. Education, governmentand legal proceedings were conducted in Russian as was some of thebusiness of daily life. Now, sixty-five years later, Latvians areoutnumbered by ethnic Russians and other minorities in some majorLatvian cities, including the capital, Riga. Whereas ethnic Latvianscomprised 77% of the population in the 1935 census, their share haddeclined to 52% in 1989 and today is 51%. Almost three generations havelived in a language whose world view does not fully express the land andthe culture to which they are born. For ethnic Latvians, to speakRussian risks erasing or obscuring their legends and myths, their folkwisdom, family stories, even the cycle of seasons, in short, everythingthat has engendered in the word a whole way of life.      But Latvians have had a millennium ofpractice in sustaining the repertoire of meanings embedded in theirlanguage when it has been forced underground. From the tenth century,AD, when Rune stones in the region of Courland document Viking attacks,until the twentieth century, Latvia struggled against repeated siegesand occupations by Danes, Germans, Russians, Tartars, Teutonic Knights,Poles and Swedes. In 1920, Russia and Latvia signed a peace treaty thatrelinquished all Soviet claim to Latvian territories in perpetuity, yetby 1940 the Soviet military had violated the treaty and occupied Latviaonce more, an occupation that continued until 1990-91 when, with thecollapse of the Soviet government, Latvia gained the independence itcurrently observes. During the centuries of occupations, Latviandainas (folk songs) have recorded, revealed and handed down notonly the cultural heritage but also the effects of oppression and moralresistance to it. When they were sung, and that was frequently, thelanguage emerged, alive with history yet imbued with the sense ofhereness that song in throat achieves. By the late 1930’s, over2,000,000 dainas had been collected in the Archives of Latvianfolklore in Riga. Collected, but not embalmed for the dainasform the core of a vast repertoire performed by Latvian choralsocieties. Folk fests and choral competitions have been part of thefabric of Latvian life for centuries, festivals in which the collectiveconsciousness of the nation is awakened in song. When the dainasare sung, the nation listens.      The submersion of the Latvian languageduring multiple occupations has not destroyed its roots. Instead it hascreated a contemporary poetry of displacement and psychic ruptureexpressed in fragmented images and narratives, a Baltic surreal thatemerges from multiple perspectives, blurred definitions of time andplace, neologisms and other linguistic innovations, andanti-authoritarian subjectivity. This is a thoroughly post-modern,post-colonial, post-traumatic poetry, as literary historian Karl Jirgenshas noted. Paradoxically, Latvia’s position as a “weaker,”occupied nation has been transformed into the strength of itsliterature.      This issue of TheDrunken Boat features a sampling of the poetry of contemporaryLatvia. Linguistically complex (closely related to Sanskrit) andinfrequently translated, it is a poetry too little known beyond Latviaand its diaspora; readers outside Scandinavia and the Baltics have onlyrecently become aware of the power and vitality of Latvian poetry, andreaders in English-speaking countries are for the most part unaware.Translations of Latvian poems rarely appear in U. S. literary journals,with two recent exceptions: the entire issue of Descant: 124(35:1, Spring 2004) and a selection in the on-line journal Omega(Spring 2005). Perhaps more emblematic of the low visibility of Latvianpoetry is the fact that, with the exception of Belševica,Astrīde Ivaska and Imants Ziedonis, none of the Latvian poetspublished here is referenced in The New Princeton Encyclopedia ofPoetry and Poetics published in 1993. Many of the poets in thisfeature were born after the Soviet occupation of 1940; a few born in theearly twentieth century are included: Ziedonis, who was a statesman andscholar as well as a poet; Belševica, whose livelihood andpublications were severely circumscribed by Soviet authorities; KnutsSkujenieks, who was sentenced to a hard labor camp in Siberia foranti-Soviet agitation; Pēteris Zirnītis, who until his deathin 2001 was a publisher as well as a poet; and Ivaska, who lived inexile in the United States for many years. Providing a framework forthem and for the poets born during the Soviet era is an excerpt fromMāris Salējs’ excellent essay, “The Butterfly’s Apology,” whichoffers a chronology and critical commentary. Providing a comparativecontext for the Latvian poetry is work from other former Sovietrepublics (Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Ukrainia) and from Russia as well.The Ukrainian Dovzhenko was born in 1894, the Hungarian Csoóri is ofBelševica’s generation, while the Russian Lisnyanskaya is from thegeneration of Uldis Bērziņš and the Slovenian poet LucijaStupica and the Romanians are of the generations of Jānis Elsbergsand Kārlis Vērdiņš.      In addition to the traditionally acceptedlimitations of translation, of poetry especially, we were sensitive tothe particular risks inherent in translating from a “little”language into a dominant language. Primary is the necessity tocircumvent the monocultural assumptions embedded in a lingua franca,assumptions that might limit articulation or distort tone, diction orsyntactical intention.. In translating the literature of EasternEuropean and Baltic languages, there is an additional necessity tocircumvent the American tendency to concentrate on the Jewish experienceof the Holocaust, and thereby to (perhaps unwittingly) undervalue theextraordinary suffering of all civilian populations. Separation offamilies, starvation, epidemic disease (cholera, measles, pneumonia,diptheria, dysentery), debilitating injury, death, deportation,diasporic displacement—these were European traumas duringWorld War II and its aftermath of displaced persons, shifting bordersand new nations cobbled together by the power-brokering and diplomatictrade-offs at war’s end. Since the defeat of Wales in the thirteenthcentury (or earlier by the reckoning of some historians), English hasbeen the language of the conquerer. How is it to translate the languageof the often-conquered? Or perhaps the question is more clearlyarticulated this way: whose English will translate the Latvian, whosecan articulate the root?      Forthis issue, all but one of the translators are rooted in Latvia, eitherby birth or lineage. Some, for instance, Ieva Lešinska, were bornin Latvia and lived in the United States during their formative years.Others, for instance, my co-editor Margita Gailitis, were born inLatvian emigré families living in Canada or the United States, thechildren of the twentieth century’s diaspora. Not only are theybilingual, but during childhood, they were immersed in Latvian cultureat home and through attendance at Saturday language schools and summercamps. Some, such as Gailitis and Inara Cedrins have relocated toLatvia; others, such as Ilze Klavina-Mueller remain in the UnitedStates. I am the exception; I have no Latvian lineage or language andso I worked closely with Amanda Aizpuriete on her poems and with trotssupplied by Belševica’s son, Jānis Elsbergs, on hers. As forthe translators of the non-Latvian poets, two are notable. DzviniaOrlowsky is a well-known Ukrainian translator living in the UnitedStates. This excerpt is from her translation of Dovzhenko’s memoir,The Enchanted Desna. Len Roberts is a former Fulbright scholar toHungary and translator of two volumes of Csoóri’s poetry; we arefortunate to publish these new translations.      Throughout the four years ofpoem-gathering and study that culminated in this feature, JānisElsbergs has been a faithful guide; his wise, if quiet influence hasunderpinned our efforts. Our special thanks to him. The idea for thefeature was sparked in 2001 over baked salmon and quail eggs with afinalé of Black Balsam liqueor in the Riga flat of Gunilla Forsen,then the Swedish Embassy’s cultural attaché to the Baltic states.There I met Knuts Skujenieks and Pēteris Zirnītis, both ofwhom suggested that I could best engage with Latvian poetry bypublishing it in translation. Gunilla also arranged introductions withJānis, Amanada Aizpuriete, Uldis Bērziņš, and thefirst directors of the Latvian Literature Centre, Liāna Langa andPēteris Draguns, who were enormously helpful in the initialplanning. It was not until Jānis introduced me to MargitaGailitis, however, that the feature developed a sustaining force. Inaddition to translating, Margita coordinated the project in Latvia. Through her, we gained further support from the Latvian LiteratureCentre (under its second director, Marta Dziluma) and the LatvianCulture Capital Foundation, and we received scholarships to the BalticCentre for Writers and Translators in Visby, Sweden, whose director,Lena Pasternak, was helpful in many ways. Others in Latvia offeredassistance: As editor of Kultūras Forums, Edvīns Raups announcedThe Drunken Boat publication to literary Latvia; and authorMāris Salējs and translator Inara Cedrins gave permission toreprint an excerpt from “The Butterfly’sApology.” In the United States, support for my travel toLatvia and Sweden came from the Leeway Foundation and the PennsylvaniaCouncil on the Arts. Of course, none of this would have been possiblewithout the vision and effort of Editor and Publisher, Rebecca Seiferle,and the generosity, goodwill and artistry of the poets and translators. Our gratitude and appreciation go to all who gave counsel and support.Our intention has been to be true to the roots.      We hope the poems open the reader to the power and humility ofLatvian poetry, a poetry whose power is, as Ziedonis writes,“uncountable,” and as Raups writes, “heartclean.”Whose humility shows itself in plurality, in the equal worth of themany, as Bērziņš writes, “It’s me here; it’s him, it’syou,” and in a sense of scale, albeit ironic, as Aizpurite writes, “At the end it becomes simple: to write letters to gods/ wheneveryone else has changed their address,” and in a tolerance forinstability, as Zālīte writes, “You disappear without atrace.” This is a poetry in which, as Skujenieks writes: my bones aren’t worth a penny because I have words andthey’re not jānis’ peter’s or knuts skujenieks words theseWORDS are human . . . even the most vulgar word the mostbitter word is human not for me to know nor you where these wordscome from or where they go to and our lack of knowledge keeps usalive indebted to death our being so listen hear beside me root and you shall not be conquered A poetry rooted in thehuman, listening. —J. C. Todd      Riga,Latvia, October, 2005      Philadephia,Pennsylvania, USA, December, 2005 Sources Berelis, Guntis. “Latvian Poetry During the Post-PropheticEra.” All Birds      Know This.Talpas (2001): 5-11. Jirgins, Karl. “A KaleidoscopicPerspective of Latvian Culture.”Descant       124 35:1 (2004):67-90. ___. “Carnival of Death: Writing in Latvia SinceIndependence.” World      Literature Today 72:2 (1998):269-281. Melngaile, Valda. “Nature in Contemporary LatvianPoetry: A Changing Vision.”      Lituanus: Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences 17:1(1971) Shorris, Earl.“The Last Word.” Harpers (August 2000):35-43. Silenieks, Juris. “Latvian Poetry.” The New PrincetonEncyclopedia of      Poetry andPoetics. Ed. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan. Princeton UniversityPress (1993): 685-6. Steiner, George. “Topologies ofCulture.” After Babel: Aspects ofLanguage      and Translation. ThirdEdition. Oxford University Press (1998): 436-95. Selected Recommended Reading in English: While our feature anthologizes the poetry of ethnic Latvians living inLatvia,      Latvian emigré poetryalso is included in some of the following texts. For      an overview of the Orbita group,ethnic Russian poets living in Latvia      and writing in Russian, see Latvian Literature #3. SelectAnthologies: All Birds Know This: Selected ContemporaryLatvian Poetry. Eds. Astrīde      Ivaska and Māra Rūmniece. Tapals: Riga, Latvia 2001. “The Butterfly’s Apology,” OMEGA: 3. Eds. MārisSalējs and      Inara Cedrins. (amini- anthology) Contemporary Latvian Poetry. Ed. Inara Cedrins. Iowa UniversityPress, 1984. “In Latvia, Observed/Abroad/In Memory.”Descant 124 (35:1 Spring 2005)      Ed. Larissa Kostoff. (The entire issue is an anthology of contemporary      Latvian poetry, prose and criticalcommentary.) Select Journals/ Poetry and Criticism: The Journal of BalticStudies. Association for the Advancement ofBaltic      Studies. Occasional criticalcommentary on Latvian culture Latvian Literature. Ed. Pauls Bankovskis. Contemporary Latvian poetry      and prosein English translation. Published quarterly by the Latvian      Literature Centre. Selections of someissues available on-line. Email:      [email protected]. WorldLiterature Today. Oklahoma University. Occasional sourceof      contemporary Latvian poetry, proseand critical commentary.