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.
