From the Current Pratik: American Poet and Translator Andrew Singer on Europe’s Cultural Compass

           

Culturally, Europe encompasses 47 countries in the Council of Europe, stretching from Iceland to Georgia. Turkey and Russia, both Council of Europe countries, are geographically about half in Asia, while three more Council of Europe countries – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia – are geographically nearly all in Asia, but are considered sufficiently European in culture to have joined Council of Europe. All of the EU is in this grouping, as well as Turkey and Ukraine, the whole Balkans and so on. In all, this cultural definition of Europe spans three-quarters of a billion people, speaking 225 native, living languages.

It often rests with Europe’s poets to explore and register meaningfully the scope, limitations, interactions and changes happening within and among these cultures – mediating between the local and the universal, finding what is beautiful in the melancholy, wisdom in injustice, and the wonder underlying the everyday, to which poets are uniquely attuned.

Aurėlia Lassaque, from around Toulouse, is equally at home in French and Occitan, the language of her forebears which was, for a time, the dominant cultural language of Europe. So a whole civilization’s knowledge is condensed in her now-tiny language grouping – recognizably “European”, yet at once also encoding something notably “other” from the European cultural history we think we know. It is the beauty of her poetry which bridges this divide.

Hungarian-Roma poet Lászlo Sárközi experiences a kind of cultural fault line running right through himself, which he acknowledges, frankly explores, and strives to unify in his verse. His stanzas presented here are part of a longer work, in form known as a sonnet wreath, which he came to master from a funded mentorship with former Hungarian enfant-terrible poet, György Faludi.

A conduit of delight, Latvian poet Edvīns Raups has a fully-formed style all his own. Romanian poet Adrian Oproiu has surfaced at a different point on the poetic intersection of delight and depth, peizings and stars to break through from specific myths to the all-in-all.

Swiss poet / fiction writer Leta Semadini plies the waters between her native German and Rhaeto-Romanic, writing poems always in one of these languages and translating into the other. Doing this, residues of things unseen seem to get snagged perpetually on small twigs; her poems are the record of this strange, local alchemy. Meanwhile, on another side of Swiss culture, Pierre Voėlin is a leading, living French-language poet from the Jura mountains; again we find a kindred spirit boiling down a whirlpool to leave us his intense residue of notes in poetry.

Four thousand kilometers away, Armenian poet Anahit Hayrapetyan holds open the intimate space of her pregnancy with a vulnerable sensuality, disarming the everyday. At the other end of the poetic spectrum, Italian poet Vincenzo Bagnoli gives us an almost forensic, tragic epic – from which we excerpt one striking Movement here.

Mandy Haggith lives on a croft in the Scottish highlands and educates on environmental concerns; her poems sometimes are like the very extension of nature herself. Here we present two of her “A-B-tree” poems, each based on a different tree in the Gallic tree alphabet.

Finally, İlhan Sami Çomak is a Turkish poet virtually unknown in English. Convicted as a young university student for ostensible separatism, he is now about 24 years into what is likely to be a 30-year total prison sentence. He writes poetry in both Turkish and his native Kurdish.

The poems in this focus run from formal to avant-garde, from many geographies, politics and original languages. Yet, is there something undefined which seems to place all these poets in a common cultural construct? If it is there, it will be easier to discern in English translation, where we can view all these works side by side.

Certainly, there is a cultural inheritance which all these poets share. Perhaps the very notion of setting up such a construct of European poetry, can nudge it toward greater meaning. In any case, there is quite a range of voices and experience in this small selection. We can celebrate this diversity, and at the same time recognize that a spirit of growing openness and interchange may indeed also be at play, toward a greater sense of belonging together in the very long term. If this is happening, it is certainly coming firstly in culture. In this sense, our poets may function not only as individual shining lights, but as members perhaps of an emerging culture, facing up to a new set of shared challenges over against all of us in this age.

Andrew Singer is a poet and fiction writer, translator and visual artist. He directs Trafika Europe showcasing new literature in English translation from across Europe. He mentored with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott and has taught Creative Writing, Literary Translation, and literature courses most recently at Penn State University, and across Europe. His work has appeared in World Literature Today, Fulcrum, Levure littéraire, and Open Letters Monthly.