Jaan Kaplinski (1941–2021)

123/2020. For me, these translations have too much word salad and too much prose but when they find a sweet spot in between then they're worth reading.

This is heartbreaking, from the book Evening Brings Everything Back and available free on Jaan Kaplinski's website:

"My aunt knew them well, I know of them
only 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 letters.
But those my aunt met on the streets of German-occupied Tartu,
with a yellow star sewn to their clothes, and to whom
she even dared to speak to the horror of her friends:
they are not here, they are scattered
into nameless graves, ditches and pits
in many places, many countries, homeless in death
as in life. Maybe some of them are hovering
in the air as a particles of ash, and have not yet
descended to earth. I've thought
that if I were a physicist I would like to study dust,
everything that is hovering in the air, dancing in sunlight,
getting into eyes and mouth, into the ice of Greenland
or between books on the shelf. Maybe one day
I would have met you,
Isaac, Mordechai, Sarah, Esther, Sulamith,
and whoever you were. Maybe even today I breathed in
something of you with this intoxicating spring air;
maybe a flake of you fell today on the white white
apple blossom in my grandfather's garden
or on my grey hair."

I'm not going to type all of this poem out but there's also humour, from the book Through the Forest:
"Politics and politicians are gradually becoming streamlined,
[...]
like the newest cars,
[...]
Their wind resistance is always decreasing;
[...]
[...] race through the community, whose resistance and turbulence have been thoroughly examined on the test circuit."… (altro)

Reread of an old favourite.

I remember the first Kaplinski translations by Sam Hamill (incl. the earlier "The Same Sea in Us All") as being particularly significant as they were the first English language editions of Estonian writing in the Western world. There were Soviet editions that were earlier, such as the first translation of Tammsaare's "Misadventures Of The New Satan" (1978) and the anthology "Estonian Short Stories" (1981), but these were enormously difficult to find in North America.

I also seem to remember that my friend Karan found this UK edition for me when she was living in London, England. I had given my earlier American edition away as a gift, likely to my friend Harri Mürk with whom I regularly traded Estonian originals and translations in those years. All fond memories.… (altro)

This anthology collection of selected English translations of the Estonian poetry of Jaan Kaplinski looked like it would be a winner but several aspects of it were disappointing for me.

It is handy to have a good majority of the poems from "The Same Sea In Us All", "The Wandering Border", "Evening Brings Everything Back" and "Through the Forest" collected in one volume. I do wish that several typos* had been repaired though (I'm not sure if these are new or carried forward from the first English editions) and it would have been so much more terrific if a bilingual edition had presented the original Estonian poems as well, as the original Estonian editions are completely impossible to find these days.

Personally, the omission of "Vercingetorix ütles" (Vercingetorix said), which I'm fairly certain is Kaplinski's most famous poem, is the greatest disappointment of all. Fortunately you can find the original on the web at http://presskann.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/vercingetorix-utles/ and also Sam Hamill's translation should show up somewhere if you google enough of the opening phrase: "Vercingetorix said: Caesar, you can take the land where we live away from us, but you cannot take the land from us where we have died."

*I didn't mark all of these, but some from towards the end of the book are "everyhting" (should be "everything") on pg. 215 and "Lembity" (should be "Lembitu") on pg. 233.… (altro)