Selected Poems: Jaan Kaplinksi

By Jaan Kaplinski

Estonia’s Jaan Kaplinski is one of Europe’s major poets, and one of his country’s best-known writers and cultural figures. He was a member of the new post-Revolution Estonian parliament in 1992-95 and his essays on cultural transition and the challenges of globalisation are published across the Baltic region.

This selection includes work previously unpublished in English as well as poems drawn from all four of his previous UK collections:The Same Sea in Us All, The Wandering Border, Through the ForestandEvening Brings Everything Back.

‘He is re-thinking Europe, revisioning history, in these poems of our times. Elegant, musing, relentless, inward, fresh. Poems of gentle politi and love that sometimes scare you’ - Gary Snyder.

‘He is a rare mixture of intellect and real simplicity. Very conscious of the places words cannot reach, his poems create a space around them that is intensely good to be in’ - Philip Gross,Poetry Review.

‘Hell and heaven are exhilaratingly interfused in these poems, and the poet’s scale is his own littleness in “this huge blind wind”. His poems loom and soar, veering from lines of one word to sweeping bravura meditations, and achieve a great beauty’ - Adam Thorpe,Observer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780371436

Book preview

JAAN KAPLINSKI

SELECTED POEMS

Translated by Jaan Kaplinski with Sam Hamill, Hildi Hawkins, Fiona Sampson and Riina Tamm

Estonia’s Jaan Kaplinski is one of Europe’s major poets, and one of his country’s best-known writers and cultural figures. He was a member of the new post-Revolution Estonian parliament in 1992-95 and his essays on cultural transition and the challenges of globalisation are published across the Baltic region.

This selection includes work previously unpublished in English as well as poems drawn from all four of his previous UK collections: The Same Sea in Us All, The Wandering Border, Through the Forest and Evening Brings Everything Back.

‘He is re-thinking Europe, revisioning history, in these poems of our times. Elegant, musing, relentless, inward, fresh. Poems of gentle politics and love that sometimes scare you’ –

GARY SNYDER.

‘He is a rare mixture of intellect and real simplicity. Very conscious of the places words cannot reach, his poems create a space around them that is intensely good to be in’ –

PHILIP GROSS

, Poetry Review.

‘Hell and heaven are exhilaratingly interfused in these poems, and the poet’s scale is his own littleness in this huge blind wind. His poems loom and soar, veering from lines of one word to sweeping bravura meditations, and achieve a great beauty’

–

ADAM THORPE

, Observer.

Cover photograph by Jaan Kaplinski

Jaan Kaplinski

SELECTED POEMS

Translated by

JAAN KAPLINSKI

with

SAM HAMILL

HILDI HAWKINS

FIONA SAMPSON

RIINA TAMM

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This selection includes poems previously unpublished in English as well as work drawn from all four of Jaan Kaplinski’s previous collections of poems translated into English: The Same Sea in Us All (Breitenbush Books, USA, 1985; Collins Harvill, UK, 1990), The Wandering Border (Copper Canyon Press, USA, 1987; Harvill, UK, 1992), Through the Forest (The Harvill Press, UK, 1996), and Evening Brings Everything Back (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), which drew on three books, Evening brings everything back (1984), Ice and Heather (1989) and Summers and Springs (1995).

Through the Forest was published in Estonian as Tükk elatud elu by Eesti Kostabi Selts (Tartu) in 1991; Evening brings everything back as Õhtu toob tagasi kõik by Eesti Raamat (Tallinn) in 1984; Summers and Springs as Mitu suve ja kevadet by Vagabund (Tallinn) in 1995.

The Soul Returning is previously unpublished in English translation. Three translations originally published in The Wandering Border (‘No one can put me back together again’, ‘And when the sea retreats from here’, ‘Night comes and extinguishes the numbers’) are republished here as part of The Same Sea in Us All, where they belong. Three of the twelve poems in the section Poems Written in English (‘Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Karl Rahmer’, ‘Coming home’, ‘Om svabhavasuddhah sarva dharmah’) appeared in The Wandering Border; the other nine poems are previously unpublished.

Special thanks are due to Arts Council England for providing a translation grant for this book.

Jaan Kaplinski wishes to thank Sam Hamill, Hildi Hawkins and Fiona Sampson for their work on the translations from Estonian, and Lawrence Kitching for editorial help with poems written in English.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

FROM

THE SAME SEA IN US ALL(1985)

Sails come sailing out

Our shadows are very long

Only to go along

You, you moon

White clover asks nothing

Who has who has ever

O distant sun

If you want to go

Every dying man

They are standing up to their knees in blood and mud

Everything is inside out, everything is different

Sleep covers us too much for one, too little for two

Non-being pervades everything and being is full of peace

No one can put me back together again

And when the sea retreats from here

Night comes and extinguishes the numbers

Once more spring pulls young leaves from buds

Light / reminds us

Oven / alone

What woke us

Night and earth

To be / Icarus

Honeybees

You / light-footed moss

Near / nearest

The same / sea

Big black hedgehog

A flying fish

Ant trail

Summer’s / last evening

So light / after all

Heart / of rain

Ashes / of one world

Painting / a boat

The late well-master

With a broken wing

Everything melts

A tit / upside down

Ink not yet / dried

Wiping away / dust

Swarms of daws

All in one

The white vase

Little by little / our dirty river

Little by little / a poem fades

An understanding

I am both / spider and fly

Dana paramita

There is nothing / between us

To wake / in the dead of night

FROM

THE WANDERING BORDER(1987)

The East-West border is always wandering

The washing never gets done

We started home, my son and I

My little daughter

To write more

On the other side of the window

There is no Good

Four-and-a-half tons of Silesian coal

Once while carrying coal ash

People were coming from the market

Sometimes I see so clearly the openness of things

It gets cold in the evening

A piebald cat

The early autumn, a faded aquarelle

The crop is reaped

Poetry is verdant

Silence of night

We always live our childhood again

Dialectics is a dialogue

Destruktivität is das Ergebnis ungelebten Lebens

Elder trees that thrushes have sown

Once I got a postcard from the Fiji Islands

Potatoes are dug, ash trees yellow

FROM

THROUGH THE FOREST(1991/1996)

There is so little that remains

To eat a pie and to have it

Lines do not perhaps exist

As the night begins, a forked birch captures

I begin to wash my son’s shirt

Think back to the vanished day

Once, at a meeting, I was asked

Death does not come from outside

The wind does not blow

You step into the morning

The ticking of the clock fills the room

A flock of jackdaws on the outskirts of the town

I do not write, do not make poetry

I never weary of looking at leafless trees

The most disconsolate of landscapes

Silence. Dust

The Forest Floor

Dust. I Myself

To fight for the rights and freedoms of the body

This autumn’s great big yellow chrysanthemum

Birch tops like brushes

The beginning of the year is like a white sheet of paper

Politics and politicians are gradually becoming streamlined

I ended up in literature

I came from the town

Autumn comes closer

I come up from the cellar

A bird in the air

In the room, a moth flies from east to west

In the ventilation grating lives a tit

FROM

EVENING BRINGS EVERYTHING BACK(1984/2004)

The snow’s melting

Through the cellar ceiling

White paper and time

For many years, always in March

It’s easy to say what’s become of the snow

I was coming from Tähtvere

Once again I think about what I’ve read

I don’t feel at home in this synthetic world

Spring has indeed come

The morning began with sunshine

I could say: I got out of the bus

Running for milk I saw wood sorrel in bloom

I write a poem every day

We walked the road to Kvissental

My aunt knew them well

The sky’s overcast

Silence is always here and everywhere

The other life begins in the evening

I don’t want to write courtly poetry any more

Only at dusk do eyes really begin to see

A last cloud moves across the sky

The rain stops

There are so many insects this summer

There are as many worlds as grains of sand

It makes little sense to talk about the subconscious

There is no God

The world doesn’t consist of matter or spirit

Late summer: a faded old watercolour

The full moon south-east above Piigaste forest

I told the students about the beginning of Greek culture

From stalks and curls of pine-bark

FROM

SUMMERS AND SPRINGS(1995/2004)

In the morning I was presented to President Mitterand

The radio’s talking about the Tiananmen bloodbath

The sea doesn’t want to make waves

God has left us

The possibility of rain

A fit body doesn’t exist

The age-old dream of mankind

One day you will do everything for the last time

Evening’s coming

It’s raining again

The centre of the world is here

My poems often aren’t poems

Less and less space for flying

More and more empty words

I saw something white far away

The weather changed overnight

My eyesight’s weakening

The world is a single event

I opened the Russian-Chinese dictionary

I’ve thought that I thought about death

I don’t have a land or a sky of my own

THE SOUL RETURNING(1973-75)

The Soul Returning

POEMS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH

I remember it well

Fatherland / homeland

I feel sorry for you white paper

A lullaby that never ends

After many bitterly cold days

God is smile

Something stirring

Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner

Coming home

Om svabhavasuddhah sarva dharmah

Wild geese flying overhead

About the Author

Copyright

from

THE SAME SEA IN US ALL

(1985)

translated by

JAAN KAPLINSKI

with

SAM HAMILL

Sails come sailing out

from foreign pictures

sails on the Yangtze

sails on the River Li

Sun

golden fish swimming over green rocks

sky with birds

seen through falling petals

Look to the east the shadow

of a white cloud

slants over glittering water

on the horizon

emerging

white sails     sails     sails

    *

Our shadows are very long

when we return at night from haying

but we ourselves are small

The camomile clasps its hands together

as if in prayer

A woman with a sickle creeps up the hill

as she did a thousand years ago

Beyond the courtyard

the heath

beyond the heath forest

Heather heather-coloured

whither dost thou fly little bee

that heaven

is so vast and void

once we will return

once we will all return.

    *

Only to go along, only to go along,

always there is spring somewhere,

there is rain somewhere.

Only to go along, only