Of Snow, Of Soul

By Jüri Talvet

Of Snow, of Soul offers a substantial selection from each of Talvet’s three most recent poetry books, Kas sul viinamarju ka on? (Do You Also Have Grapes?, 2001), Unest, lumest (Of Dreams, of Snow, 2005) and Silmad peksavad une seinu (Eyes Beat the Walls of Sleep, 2008). {Guernica Editions}

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Jan 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781550715422

Jüri Talvet

Born in 1945 in Pärnu, Estonia, Jüri Talvet exemplifies the international public intellectual. His poetry and essays have been translated into numerous languages. In 1997 he was awarded Estonia’s highest poetry honor, the Juhan Liiv Prize, and in 2009 he was invited to be one of the 54 poets to compose “The European Constitution in Verse.”

Book preview

Jüri Talvet

Of Snow, Of Soul

New Selected Poems

Translated From The Estonian By H.L. Hix

 Essential Poets Series 176

Guernica

Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.)

2010  

Contents

Introduction by H. L. Hix 

                         From DO YOU ALSO HAVE GRAPES?

 Where Memory Dwells 

A Dream Could Have Continued Say Like This 

Visa Freedom 

How They Are 

Reality 

Note to Álvaro de Campos 

1953 

Look at Me 

Do You Also Have Grapes? 

Again with Hamlet 

I Don’t Know How Else to Love You 

Eugenio 

How to End a Century with Dignity 

Underwater Vilnius 

Literature Conference on the Hot Continent 

A Brief Biography 

T. S. Alighieri 

Report on a Colloquy… 

                    from MEMORIES OF LEIDEN 

A Lowland Meditation 

Stanza 

You Can Doubt What You Don’t Believe In 

Final Ending 

Voices in Snow 

A Fin-de-siècle Sonnet 

To a Naturalistic Writer 

                     From OF DREAMS, OF SNOW 

Entering Summer 

Exiting Summer 

The World Meets 

Not Egypt 

Under the Beautiful Clouds of Estonia 

A Wandering Rainbow 

You’ll Return Tomorrow, Won’t You? 

Trains 

Written While Barefoot 

Still I Cannot Get Accustomed 55 

You suddenly… 

Fifty Years Ago We Attended Koidula School 

How Was It? 

At a Pub Called Blond Lives Here You See… 

Before Captious Cyrillic Curves We Once Met 

For Many Long Hours 

Dictated by a Dream 

Good-bye! 

It Flies to the Hive 

On 3 April 2004 In Barcelona… 

You Are a Finch… 

Of Dreams, of Snow 

I Woke When You Touched Me 

Red Wine 

In the Constellation of the Pentagon 

Gare d’Austerlitz 

Never Again Will I Be Obstinate 

To a Nameless Cat 

Deutsche Philosophie 

Mist Swims Over the Land 

Germania, 2002 

We Sent Gypsies Back Across the Border 

The Way, the Way! 

A Christmas Carol 

Behind the Lens What Feels Like an Eye… 

Letters from Morocco

Otto, Hörst du Mich? 

In the Great World Theater… 

China Flows Below 

                         From EYES BEAT THE WALLS OF SLEEP

We are from the third world... 

That night we are 

On Sunday morning Lithuanians... 

I shake Woland’s lapels 

From 5216 Bur Oak Circle  

To the café ‘A Brasileira’ 

Like a big german wolfhound 

Berlin 

The wind tugs my sleeve 

On the second day of Christmas 

She sleeps she sleeps she sleeps 

It grows so empty so empty 

Outside snow melts... 

It was something about dogs... 

Notes 

Biographical Note 

Introduction

This is where the translator attempts to excuse his failures, insisting that they occurred not from lack of noble intentions or earnest effort, but from cruel necessity. One example: In the poem Ma ei tea, kuidas sind veel rohkem armastada, I have translated the title I Don’t Know How Else to Love You, even though the Estonian makes explicit that the desire is to love better, something the English leaves implicit, stating explicitly only the desire to love otherwise. The choice arose from an external consideration that would impose itself only on a reader from an English-speaking country but not on a reader of Estonian: the unfortunate echo, from Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical Jesus Christ, Superstar, of the song I Don’t Know How to Love Him, a song that in its bathos out-broadways Broadway. Within the poem, the line has this context: Kuid õues püsib talv. / Ma ei tea, kuidas sind veel rohkem armastada. I have translated those lines as: But in the street winter persists. / I don’t know how else to love you.