Anthologist: Artis Ostups
Translation: Stergia Kavvalou
Preface: Anna Auziņa
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Jānis Vādons, Kārlis Vērdiņš, Arvis Viguls, Madara Gruntmane, Krišjānis Zeļģis, Agnese Krivade, Elīna Bākule-Veira, Ingmāra Balode, Ronalds Briedis, Artis Ostups, Marts Pujāts, Katrīna Rudzīte
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Most of the poets represented in this anthology were born in the last decade of the Soviet era. Their work was first published at the turn of the 21st century, and by then the meaning of poetry in Latvia had become substantially different in comparison to the Soviet times. On May 4, 1990 Latvia became an independent country once again. Through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s Latvian poetry had encapsulated a political protest and increased national consciousness, while in the 1990s it was more alienated from the reader. The young authors of the turn of the century turned what in many ways is a new leaf.
After the Second World War, literature in Soviet Latvia became ideologized and politicized. The authorities’ dictate strived to cut Latvian literature off from the earlier tradition, which nevertheless shone through in the writers’ work, contradicting the canons of socialist realism. But after Stalin’s death in 1953, the entire USSR saw the gradual arrival of a somewhat freer era. At the turn of the 50s and the 60s, literature became the central means of expressing free thought across the entire totalitarian USSR. A number of powerful authors, like Vizma Belševica, Ojārs Vācietis and others were first published at the time, and their poetry often became a political protest merely because of the artistic freedom they exercised; likewise, they often drew criticism and repressions from the authorities due to officially unacceptable interpretations of history as well as other rebellious characteristics. At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, many poets started raising the topic of national cultural heritage more and more, while the 1970s saw the increase of destructive and provocative trends. Monta Kroma was a distinct modernist writer of the time, while Uldis Bērziņš has been, since the 1970s, a prominent innovator of form. Likewise in the 1970s, Jānis Rokpelnis raised the stature of irony in serious verse to a new level; he was followed by a number of poets who debuted in the 1980s. Generally, from the 1960s through the 1980s poetry was usually taken to be a form of protest against the prevailing system. Even though censorship operated until the late 1980s, it was poetry which, thanks to subtexts, could express the feelings of the people. Poetry became wildly popular, with some collections enjoying print runs in the hundreds of thousands. At the time, poetry readings were crowded, and one of the reasons for that was that one could listen to poems in their as of yet uncensored versions.
However, in the 1990s, after the renewal of Latvian independence, interest in poetry dwindled. This was exacerbated by the economic crisis, which affected publishing. In addition, poetry lost its previous meaning of political protest. In the early-to-mid 90s, young authors eschewed openly describing public events as well as any sending any other message the reader could understand, instead experimenting with fragmentary forms and categories of the postmodern. An opposing trend nevertheless started in the mid-90s when the poets Jo, Inga Gaile and yours truly had their first books published, once again displaying a personal voice and colorful emotionality.
In the early 2000s a number of poets made their debut, their work characterized by sincerity, intimacy and irony, which however aren’t mutually exclusive. The role of the message conveyed increased as well. In 2000 Marts Pujāts’ first book appeared in print; Kārlis Vērdiņš’ followed in 2001 and Ingmāra Balode’s in 2007. These poets are represented in this anthology as well. By the end of the decade, people in Latvia were following poetry due to true aesthetic and intellectual interest, not just its sociopolitical functions. Seeing as under freedom of speech people can express their opinions in journalistic pieces, in addition to works of other character there’s still poetry that reflects public matters of the day, but the opinions expressed are not, by themselves, the reason why something becomes popular. At the same time, poetry as an art is not a timeless and abstract aesthetic phenomenon, and in the 21st century a poet still expresses the ethos of his nation and something substantial about his era in the world.
When Marts Pujāts’ (1982) collection Knock Knock for Myself was published in 2000, the author was eighteen and considered a wunderkind. In his first collection, rhymed stylizations, allusions and parodies were intermixed with distinctly personal, naive and clear intonations. In Pujāts’ second book, Our Song (2007), this freshness and sincerity gave way to alienated, intellectually shaped prose poems. This new way of writing was polished to perfection in Pujāts’ third book, The Lamp Itself Will Come to Light (2013). He works with language structures with which we as language users write, talk, and think. Some parts of his poems are often “meaningless” or rather hint at something fanciful. Pujāts’ poetic world is sometimes akin to an episode from a fantastic film that shows another world or the distant future: an episode that a powerful imagination has shaped from elements observed directly or indirectly; in Pujāts’ case these have usually been observed in language. The result is a surreal, carefully crafted aesthetic that approaches the exact sciences in its complexity and was highly regarded by critics. It may be hard to “understand” but it’s possible to enjoy it.
Kārlis Vērdiņš (1979) embarked on his poetic path in a similar fashion to M. Pujāts but went off in a completely different direction. Starting from his first collection, Icebreakers (2001), he has earned critical praise and readers’ love thanks to brilliant mastery of form and stylization skills, sharp wit as well as an irony that’s still full of love. Vērdiņš’ early poetry is mostly rhyming couplets, often including reminiscences of classic Latvian poetry, with Vērdiņš’ own voice surmisable only sporadically. But later works, which since his second collection, Cottage Cheese with Sour Cream (2004), mostly take the form of prose poems, cannot be mistaken for someone else’s. Cultural references are likewise a characteristic of his third collection, Me (2008). They gradually become more and more complex, and in his fourth and hitherto final collection, Adults (2015), cultural references are woven into ostentatiously simple verse in an almost imperceptible way, making the space of the poem deeper and more multi-layered. K. Vērdiņš’ poetry is important to the 21st-century Latvian reader, as it precisely illustrates a multiplicity of trends in the most manifold of social groups. Alongside lyric love poetry in which the speaker addresses another man, there are poems where the “I” is sidelined or speaks for others, often old men or children. Literary critics stress that Vērdiņš’ poems are not just ironic but self-ironic as well, and they are not derisive but rather empathic and humane. Vērdiņš’ Come to Me, included in this anthology, was listed alongside Margaret Atwood’s Variations on the Word Love and Ted Hughes’ Lovesong in The Guardian’s list of the greatest modern love poems curated by experts at the Southbank Centre.
Pujāts’ and Vērdiņš’ generation includes Ronalds Briedis and Ingmāra Balode as well. Among his contemporaries, Ronalds Briedis (1980) has the most pronounced use of syllabotonics and rhyme. R. Briedis’ approach to irony is, similarly, unique. As R. Briedis’ poetic voice seems to belong to a very distant era, critics have deemed him a François Villon incarnate.
In his first collection, Tear Gas (2004), R. Briedis plays with semi-historical, semi-archetypal images, such as princesses, kings, and executioners. Making the princess laugh is an important motif. The final poem of the book is titled, OROBORO, and an eponymous poem starts off Briedis’ second collection, Karaoke (2008). This palindrome is a symbol of eternity, a snake or, depending on the source, a dragon swallowing its own tail. But in the second collection the circle is regenerated in a new, deeper quality with more attention paid to modern man and the discontinuity of his relationship with God. In the third collection, Medicine Against Immortality (2016), there’s a denser collocation of the aforementioned Far Eastern motifs, with the writer seeking the cause of Buddha’s smile. Meanwhile irony, according to the author, gives way to post- or double irony, which results in a true, open intonation. The transformation of irony, in one way or another, seems characteristic to a number of authors of the second decade of the 21st century, particularly in the way they relate to the reader. Sometimes, an unaffected, direct way of expression can be taken to be a joke if the audience has gotten used to a jester poet, which seems to me to be the case of Kārlis Vērdiņš. R. Briedis’ strongest poems disarm the reader with their sincerity, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s due to post-irony or the lack of irony.
But in Ingmāra Balode’s (1981) poetry, irony is very subtle, barely perceptible. The chief feelings characterizing her diction are gentleness and sorrow. Balode’s first book, Hard Candy that Can Cut Your Tongue (2007), sees the use of capacious, symbolical images characteristic of classical modernism alongside concrete everyday details and cultural references interwoven with expressive utterances. The book’s heroine is a young woman in the city, while the author takes charge of sensory, emotional and intellectual experience, recreating it into a gentle poetic stream. Balode’s second book, alba (2012) has proportionally less direct experience and more knowledge, but the imagination of a well-read and well-traveled individual includes a great store of cultural material, which changes the image system, space-time and the way an experience is depicted. Identity as selfhood and belongingness is likewise made problematic. In Hard Candy the city can be identified as Rīga, while alba mentions other cities across the globe. Even though the author is changing, her excellent language command and idiosyncratic intonation of gentle sorrow remain.
2007 likewise saw the release of Agnese Krivade’s (1981) first and hitherto only collection of poems, titled Childhood. It is endowed with a distinct temperament and, as it seems, marks a new revolution in the tradition of emotionally expressive language. Right after the book’s release, the author came to be recognized as someone plain-spoken, and this happened again in fall 2015 when the matter of teaching students explicit poems at school was discussed in the Latvian public space. Anatomic images in Krivade’s work may reveal disharmony and inner turbulence, while the provocative language often serves as an instrument for criticizing the public or demonstrating the attitudes prevalent among different social classes. In one instance, she lists people she considers holy, making an impression that to her, socially marginal, probably poor and uneducated people are holy. She empathizes with them and uses explicit language to show their daily-use lexicon and make the poem’s sound more powerful. Like Allen Ginsberg at the conclusion of Howl, Krivade blesses the world in its manifold forms.
Since Arvis Viguls’ (1987) debut collection Room was released in 2009, one can speak about a new generation composed of poets born in the late 1980s. Alongside Artis Ostups, Arvis Viguls is considered one of the flagships of this generation and its most vivid example. After the previous decade’s wave of sincerity, emotionality and everyday lexicon, this generation seemingly returns to the refined ways of classical modernism. But despite following the best traditions of European and Russian poetry, the poems of these authors are, without a doubt, artworks of this day and age, of the kind that thanks to a number of concurrent circumstances are possible only here and now. A. Viguls’ Room has a skillfully crafted structure that consists of four letters of a young man dying in a decrepit room of a rental apartment complex. It also testifies to the life of Rīga’s young intelligentsia around 2008. In the collections 5:00 (2012) and Book (2018), Viguls illuminates the most different aspects of his contemporaries, and the close-ups in these poems, springing from close observation, are as timeless as they are modern.
In Artis Ostups’ (1988) debut collection, Comrade Snow (2010), the intonations of a mature poet are coupled with a youthful rowdiness, creating a fresh and captivating impression. After Ostups’ second book, Photography and Scissors (2013), was published, I was perplexed to see it attributed with alienation and depression. In this book, Ostups starts “dehumanizing” his poems, which he will do consistently in Gestures (2016). In the footsteps of modernist tradition, Ostups meditates on the process of writing and the relationship between language and reality, returning to the question whether language represents reality or creates it in itself. A part of the texts in Gestures are reminiscent of Arthur Rimbaud’s prose poetry not only for the allusions but also in that, while the words are linked in logical and aesthetically pleasing language structures, it nevertheless seems virtually impossible to deduce their “meaning”, making one tempted to doubt whether there had been any in the first place. In many of Ostups’ poems these complex theoretical problems are illuminated in a simple and beautiful way. The poem Summer by the Ravine includes a touching confession on the aforementioned subject of depersonalization. [I wish I could] write: “It was so hard without you,” and then, “Thank God, you came,” instead of: “You are standing in the window’s green rectangle; apples look like crystals.” That is to say, some texts are inspired by very simple emotions, which the poet must strive to express in a more tasteful manner.
Krišjānis Zeļģis (1985) is usually mentioned alongside Viguls and Ostups, though his poems stand out with brevity and an idiosyncrasy that’s difficult to define. Fragmentariness, paradoxes, puns and ambiguity as well as an open, original intonation are characteristic to both his first – All Those Things (2010) – and second collection, Beasts (2016). Whereas Viguls and Ostups ignore the Latvian tradition, using that of other nations, critics say that Zeļģis strives for an authentic experience free of any concrete cultural references.
Jānis Vādons (1979) entered Latvian poetry in a different way from his contemporaries. His first collection, Rope, was published in 2011. His poetic style is subjectively associative and full of complex metaphors; therefore he can be counted among those continuing the tradition of classical modernism. He captures and passes on not just experience but also cultural knowledge, doing so emotionally but not conventionally. His second collection, For the Moment my Breathing Hurts (2014), and the texts that have been published since express the worldview of his lyrical hero, a sensitive man, in a way that’s easier to understand.
Elīna Bākule-Veira (1981) and Madara Gruntmane (1981) likewise made their debut apart from their own generation. Bākule-Veira’s book The Elephant Ocean (2015) is a collection of experimental texts that once again tackles the question of whether language reflects, destroys or creates reality, and there’s no doubt that in the case of Bākule-Veira the latter two are the most important. If one looks for specific motifs understandable to other people than the author, the themes of children and childhood can be discerned. This links the otherwise wildly different poetic worlds of Bākule-Veira and Madara Gruntmane, who is, at that, often considered unpoetic. Gruntmane reflects upon traumatic experiences as witnessed by a girl and a woman. I would suppose that her first book, published 2015, is titled Narcoses because it’s sometimes impossible to talk about this kind of pain without undergoing general anesthesia. The weight of trauma likewise is palpable in Gruntmane’s second book, Drinking Maid (2018), though it is not as evident as concerns some of her poems. Her oeuvre is to be seen as a whole, and, as opposed to Bākule’s output, her poetry seems socially charged.
Katrīna Rudzīte’s (1991) first collection, Blur of the Sun (2014), develops the conflict between imagination and reality employing meandering labyrinths and associative improvisations. Of the opposite pairing between darkness and light, preference seems to be given to the first. Light-related images bring about chilling realizations, while death is named the “blur of the sun”. The almost irreconcilable attitude towards reality and the sad turn towards the inner world makes one link Rudzīte’s poetry with romanticism, but there’s also some motion towards clearer poetic thought, which is more characteristic to the poet’s later works, written after the publication of the first collection. Thus the poem, Twilight of Language, published in this anthology, has obviously been written in Rudzīte’s sensitively improvisational style, but with different meanings given to light and darkness; and furthermore there’s a clear-cut and concrete thought about the subject’s interaction with language. Expressed in original images, it continues and develops Rudzīte’s characteristic oscillation between the subjective and the abstract, between alienation and hope.
The relationship between reality and language will always be important when reading poetry. Since Novalis accepted the possibility that language doesn’t serve an exclusively communicative purpose, and since Arthur Rimbaud gave himself up to the elemental nature of language and shocked his contemporaries by problematizing the loss of meaning, poets of different nations have discovered, at different levels, the fluctuation between representation and language concerned only with itself. As very different countries, Latvia and Greece have many differing historical, social and political factors, which can interfere with understanding poetry on the level of meaning. At the same time, there are shared experiences that allow grasping or at least surmising this meaning. The anthology includes poems where the message is the most important component, as well as ones in which the message doesn’t even have to be understood, and lastly those where the message can be perceived in the supposed lack thereof. Some of the poems seem to be concerned with telling what 21st-century Latvians are like, but it’s likewise true of the poems where it’s difficult to even grasp the basic theme, because these reveal the ways Latvians create texts and the ideas they are familiar with.
In Artis Ostups’ poem After Regaining Independence, a moment important to Latvia is revealed from the viewpoint of a child, but in the next sentence an already grown-up voice asks: Did the far-off clicks – from the railway and the highway – give hope for a different, more vast landscape? There’s no doubt that translations are actually independent works of art that don’t completely overlap with the initial poem, and that in most cases four poems aren’t enough to represent the author’s oeuvre. But I hope that, with the publication of this anthology, the landscape shared by Latvians and Greeks will have become a little more vast.
Anna Auziņa