Eastern European Poetry in a Time of Trauma

I have been working in education for the last twenty-three years, and been publishing books as a writer over the last sixteen. I find disturbing the recent precipitous decline in reading and, consequent ignorance pervading contemporary culture. In response, in an effort to demonstrate its importance to my critical development, I would like to trace the build-up of my current library which I started developing in 1999. I should preface this by saying that before 1999, I had been living and working in France for the most part. So, when I returned to live in the Republic of Ireland, just before the millennium, I was really starting from scratch.

I should also mention, as it is extremely important, particularly in the context of tpoehe present discourse – primarily focused on both personal and professional growth – that I had just experienced a profound trauma at that time. In 2000, I lost someone very valuable to me, and not only that, but also by losing this person I lost a whole way of life. So, in many ways, when I started buying my first books they were, without a doubt, instrumental in helping me face the trauma on an daily basis.

So, what kind of books did I buy and read, twenty-five years ago? Looking at my library, which is comprised of around six hundred or so books, I know exactly which shelf – there are thirty-five in all – that I should start with. These are ones I began reading when I arrived here in Dublin; predominantly poetry books written by Eastern European authors that have been translated into English by some wonderful translators.

Why Eastern European poetry in English translation? I craved humour in my life, but not just of the glib and cynical Hollywood kind, which I was also relying on at other moments. You see life in Europe after World War II was not easy. Countries that had been torn apart by the most appalling violence were trying to put themselves back together. Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and Serbia were three of the main countries whose poets and poetry I was particularly attracted to. I will take each of these three countries in sequence and describe some of my poets I loved to read almost a quarter of a century ago. I will also try to identify the very specific humour that these poets displayed, and why this appealed to me at a time when I was trying to get over the traumatic event that had such a destabilizing effect on me.

Poland

Let’s start with Poland, as it is a country with which we Irish have a lot in common. Both of us experienced brutal colonial history amid violence, economic hardship and a profound engagement with the Roman Catholic church. I am going to describe very briefly the work of two Nobel Prize winning poets, Czelaw Milosz (1911-2004) and Nobel-laureate Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), both of whom I loved to read during that period. Undergoing a lot of emotional suffering, I appreciated in particular their wonderful sense of irony.

An experience of profound suffering can do many things to you depending on your personality type. Some people, for example, simply give up. Life loses all its spark, and you sleepwalk through it for the remainder of your life. This is not living, but merely existing, and it is not my approach. Of course, you don’t know how you are going to adapt to a personal crisis, particularly of the kind that I was facing.

Of course, when you are suffering, you become very poor company to others, as all you want to do is think about yourself. Self-pity, is a terribly egotistical response, but when you are genuinely suffering, you generally don’t have any time for other people and their particular problems. These two great poets, however, allowed me to empathise with others. By reading their work I began to take an interest in other people once again, as it was quite clear from reading their poetry, that they had themselves suffered enormously. For example, Milosz particularly in his early poetry, describes the Warsaw ghetto.

Wislawa Szymborska was of the same generation of poets such as Milosz and although her poetry is less explicit about her experience of the war. There is a steeliness of spirit, as in Milosz, behind the subtlety and irony which mask these experiences. This I found deeply inspiring. Indeed, when I think of Szymborska and her poetry, I think of three lines, which were translated beautifully by her translators, Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh.

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

The last line is particularly arresting, particularly in the context of today. Revenge is not exactly a motive for the majority of so-called poets writing in this country, or so you would imagine. We are so governed to restrain ourselves from such notions – formerly by the Catholic Church, forgiveness being key – and latterly by the all-pervasive ideology of political correctness embedded in institutional ideas such as DEI (Diversity, Equity and Integration). The bland platitudes that have become the calling card of spokespeople in corporate cultures and NGOs have obliterated such notions as Szymborska seems to be conveying in the lines above.

Like most people who suffer, I felt that I had been wronged, and, as a writer myself, what Szymborska had managed to do, in just three lines, was to give credence to a whole worldview, or artistic philosophy. She made me think of Dante and Joyce and other writers down through the ages, who all had the same belief. How did this translate to me? Use your suffering, but don’t be poisoned by it. Use it with some irony and wit!

You see, I was beginning to become more human. This is what reading such poets had done to me. They were achieving two results: teaching me to be a ‘mench’, and, at the same time, teaching me how to write.

Czechoslovakia

Again, in the former Czechoslovakia there was the poet and immunologist, Miroslav Holub ( 1923-1998). Holub became a hugely important writer to me during this early period what we affectionately now term as the ‘noughties’. I began with a wonderful collection published by Bloodaxe called Poems Before & After, referring to the period before the Soviet occupation and after. As with Milosz and Szymborska, Holub had this beautiful steely quality. All three poets were tough, resilient, and strong. They were not ‘woke’, for want of a better word. They were not full of bright, dewy-eyed idealism about the future having tasted the bitterness of Life, with a capital L,. Yet they managed to deal with it, on terms which they had made their own.

The Gift of Speech

He spoke:
his round mouth opened
and shut in the manner
of a fish’s song.
A bubbling hiss
could be heard
as the void
rushed in headlong
like marsh gas.

Sometimes the poems read almost like ‘nasty jokes’, as I came to describe them. I loved this quality the more and more I read Eastern European poetry. It was full of what you might plainly describe as ‘tough love’. This is exactly what I needed, right after getting my ass kicked by some girl. Such was my trauma! Here were poets, of such stature, writing about world war, relating directly some of their most apocalyptic experiences, Holub and Milosz particularly, and they were making light of it! What pain had I in comparison? It really helped put things into perspective. I was just a little bitch, in comparison, moaning about some girl! Jesus, I needed to Man Up!

Serbia

Finally, there were the two Serbian poets, Aleksander Ristović ( 1933-1994) and Vasko Popa (1922-1991), who brought the very self same qualities as Holub, Szymborska and Milosz: a steeliness which fortified them against ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. I discovered Ristović first in a beautiful little Faber edition that had a detail taken from ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, by Hieronymus Bosch, which had been one of my favourite paintings as a boy. The poems were translated by a fellow poet, Charles Simic, whom I later went on to read. This short collection, simply titled Devil’s Lunch, was a selection of the Serb poet’s work, and it was a delight that gave me hours of pleasure. Here is a taste.

The Glimmer of Gold

Nobody reads poetry anymore,
so who the hell are you
I see bent over this book?

I loved the directness of approach, the bookish and almost medieval humour. The poetry of Vasko Popa was very different. Again you found the steel, but, the humour was less present, more a kind of violence that lingered uneasily in the background. For this reason, I read less of him, but his enigmatic micro-constellations that inhabited defiantly every single page made me sit up. I came away from his poetry marvelling at the very distinct approach of these formidable writers.

Over a decade later, after first obtaining a degree in philosophy, I went on to complete a masters in comparative literature where I found myself translating the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. I would spend the next decade and a half translating his work, and I see the self-same qualities of steeliness and inimitable humour in Baudelaire. It is something that I find really lacking in contemporary life. There is a war going on in Eastern Europe yet again. I know that both Ukrainian and Russian poets are writing about this old theme, yet again. I see some of this work being posted thanks to poets like Nina Kossman, who is also an avid translator, particularly of the Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941).

Yet, when I look around here in Dublin – a city I have been quite active in over the years organizing festivals and readings – I very rarely find Irish writing with a similar vigour. You see it in poets like Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh, of course, both coming from farming backgrounds where the violent nature of life is a constant backdrop. Heaney’s first collection Death of a Naturalist (1966) was all over such themes, while Kavanagh’s ‘The Great Hunger’ (1942), is without a doubt one of the greatest long poems written in the English language in the last century. It is also extremely funny, confronting an eternal Irish problem, sexual repression.It also aligns with the stoic sense of detachment that all of the aforementioned Eastern masters brought to their work.

Feature Image: Prague from Powder Tower