ESTONIAN ELEGY
SELECTED POEMS

Essential Poets Series 161

 

TRANSLATED BY H.L. HIX

 

Guernica

Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.) 2008  

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on the Translation

Believe What Signs You Like

Estonian Elegy

New Travel

Today I Planned to Rest

What Appears, Appears

Debt

Raven’s Ontology

Opus Nigrum

Carousel and Gioconda

The Soul’s Progress

Sweet Pea’s Smell Above the Wanderer

Bridges, Roads

Surprises of Climate

Sunday Morning

On Losing a Passport

When Asked How We Defend It

Intimate Knowledge

Naked, Halfway

Godspeed

The Human Forest

A Dream of Germany, 1988

Suppose Dust Belonged Only to the Beyond.

Spring and Powder

La Fontaine’s Admonition

Blasphemous

Thus, Liberty

On Consecrating the Flag

Yesterday I Was an Andalusian Dog

All Had to Be Simple

My Life with Noise

Do You Know How to Peep Through Curtains?

The Case of Marc

Intimate Discourse

From Santiago’s Road

Ossian’s Songs

Synergetic

21st Baltic Elegy

Love

Afterword by H.L. Hix

Acknowledgments

The author and translator thank the Northwest Review and its editor John Witte for the first publication of “From Santiago’s Road,” The Review and its editor Raúl Peschiera for the first publication of “La Fontaine’s Admonition,” “On Losing a Passport,” “Believe What Signs You Like,” “Ossian’s Songs,” “The Raven’s Ontology,” and “Surprises of Climate,” and Rampike and its editor Karl E. Jirgens for “Estonian Elegy.”

We also extend our deepest thanks to the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) for a grant that, after a year of our working by mail across an ocean and eight time zones, enabled us to work for a week in the same room.

We thank Eesti Kultuurkapital (Traducta) for its kind support.

We are thankful to R. W. Stedingh, poet, scholar and translator, whose suggestions helped polish the manuscript.

A Note on the Translation

Custom dictates that translators lament the travails and impossibilities of translation. I want instead to report on its joys. Because this project opened a door for me into a new language, I felt none of the loss of meaning that poems inevitably endure going from one language to another, only the gain of meaning I experienced by participating in them. “Translation” after all is a serious distortion of my part of the process, since I knew no Estonian when we started.

Our procedure was simple. Mr. Talvet, who is fluent in Estonian, Russian, Spanish, and English, sent “literal” translations, in response to which (after looking up each of the words of the original in my Estonian dictionary) I produced a “poetic” translation, to which he suggested changes on the occasions when the license I had taken resulted in significant inaccuracies. After having produced in this way a complete draft of the manuscript, we spent a week together in Boston revising the draft into a more polished book.

My previous experiences learning languages began with the skeleton or the clothing: the skeleton in the case of Latin and Greek, where I was taught declensions and conjugations first, with the result that I can still say “hic haec hoc” all the way through but can no longer read Horace, and the clothing in the case of German and French, with the result that I can still greet the conductor at the Hauptbahnhof with “Guten Morgen!” or “Guten Abend!” according to the time of day but not ask directions to the youth hostel. But because it started with these poems, my Estonian, still fragmentary though it is and no doubt always will be, at least began at the heart: the first words I learned were armastus (love) and surm (death). That symbolizes for me what makes Jüri Talvet’s work a paradigm of the possibilities of poetry: it starts at the heart of human experience, love and death, and culminates in a vision of a new Europe, indeed a new world, vivified by that experience.

H. L. H.

University of Wyoming