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Andrey Gritsman
One of the great poets said: “A poet begins where a human being ends.” This concept is certainly open to interpretations. One of the important ones is that poetry uses special, almost a “non-human” language. Therefore, for poetry the process of merging, overlap, overshadowing, intermingling and entwining is characteristic. Mutual influence of smaller and bigger cultures of language and sensibilities serves as the source of energy, spiritual and cultural insemination of cultures. That relates also to the influx of the foreign born artists to the new cultural archipelago. Nobody doubts what a great influence on the world culture was made by Knut Hamsun, Napoleon Bonaparte (who spoke limited French in the beginning of his career) and many others, nowadays Milorad Pavic, Tomacz Salamun, Amos Oz. This influence on the culture occurs because a great artist carries this flickering light of reflected truth. Truth understood even in the religious sense. Therefore, despite some possible opaqueness of a non-native new language this light comes through in the works of such “poets with an accent” as Joseph Brodsky, Cheslov Milosh, Nina Cassian, Charles Simic and others. Living ones life in a strange metaphorical sphere of poetry implies certain degree of detachment, derangement and misfit. A native or non-native poet (DP, displaced person or soul) who lives and therefore creates in certain cultural space and time is always an outsider. “All poets are Yids!” (Jews, “Zhidy” in Russian) as Marina Tsvetaeva, a great Russian poet, raised in the very center of Russian intellectual elite, once said. This in a way, paradoxically, may pertain to such controversial figures as Gabriele D’Annunzio, Ezra Pound and already mentioned Knut Hamsun and Martin Heidegger. Only those writers or artists who are safely plugged into the outlet of familiar cultural process, into the system, feel comfortable. Such an organism may go silent, flat or altogether dead if there is a power failure or its energy system becomes obsolete. That is, to a certain degree, has been happening with parts of the American academic system (“creeping MFAism”) and with contemporary Russian new literary hierarchy with all its awards, handed around to each other, appointed gurus and geniuses etc. Czeslaw Milosz once said about some of contemporary American poetry: “They wrote as if history had little to do with them.” A hermetic literary culture, he would say, “is a cage in which one spends all of one’s time chasing one’s own tail.” A foreign artist brings new flow of artistic sensibility to a new culture and therefore becomes stranger at home. Foreign artist is not a poet of exile (as Joseph Brodsky was often called, I believe incorrectly), but rather a poet of alienation, or more exactly of not belonging. Alienation implies nostalgia for the past and for the future. And in poetry there is no – now. By the time a poem is written the moment is gone, but still lives in the poem, in its own time (“felt time” of a poem). “Oh, moment, stop! You are not as magnificent, as inimitable!” (J.Brodsky, Winter Evening in Yalta). Nostalgia, anyway, is the main topic of lyrical poetry. A poem is a personal communication in the language that is available, in the space where the author is operating currently. That is the language germane to the circumstances, landscape and to a poet’s life. Martin Heidegger wrote in 1954: “Man acts as if he were the shaper and master of language, while it is language which remains the mistress of man. When this relation of dominance is inverted, man succumbs to strange contrivances. Language then becomes a means of expression”. And poetry precisely is the art of strange contrivances. The word strange here is not incidental. It reflects the position of a poet, who is always a “stranger at home,” especially if he is a non-native artist. Andrei Codrescu says: “I walk the walk and talk the talk and the talk came to me from living Americans, not books, so that their hands and mugs and hips put the English on it.”. This is what justifies and gives the right to a non-native poet of a “smaller” culture or a foreign culture to become a stranger, but at home. A Filipino-American poet and writer Eric Gamalinda noted: “Therefore while poetry theoretically reaches more people than it previously could, it also creates a more severe division between poet and the dominant society. It becomes more and more the condition of the poet to feel, as never before, a sense of alienation, from the standards and the ideas of society, and the relentless materialism society exalts in – of being alone in a spiritual vacuum, of being “out of key among the cosmic harmonies”. And poetry is an act of defiance against the incommunicability of being. Who gives the right to a foreign poet to write in a non-native language? Knowledge of language is, of course, necessary, but not sufficient. This right is given by artist’s destiny. “Do not compare, the living is incomparable!” (Osip Mandelstam). Arthur Schopenhauer formulated a double-aspect theory to the understanding of reality, that of the world existing simultaneously but separately as will and representation. Real poets exercise the will, cultural bystanders – representation. According to Nietzsche someone who independently forms his own moral system or who composes a musical composition (or a poem!) pleasing to himself, would be exercising free will. People know and understand the world and reality by naming it; thus through language. Therefore, a foreign artist feels the new world and gives new names in his/her new language, stained with his/her accent and indelible mark of destiny. A poem is a composition on a free theme. First of all, it is not a culture (sic-language is secondary, forgive me this sacrilege). Art exists first of all in the artist, and only secondary in society. Not vice versa. You do not speak with lines of verse, no matter how professional they could be. You speak a poem with your own direct speech, with a rhythm of your inner breathing. Joseph Brodsky wrote “literature is in the first place a translation of a metaphysical truth into any given vernacular". One can continue that poetry is probably a translation of a metaphysical truth on almost a subconscious level, on the level of “universal grammar” by Noam Chomsky. And that is why poetry is the city of Babylon, where nobody can repeat or translate somebody else’s words, but everyone understands each other. That is why in today’s New York City Russian, Romanian, Hispanic, Polish etc. poets let their souls tell its story in English and can understand each other deeply despite the fact that they do it in an accented American English. Their tell their stories about how the soul learns to walk new ground, to breath, to smoke, to speak and to scream and it is fresh, cheerful and sad. And it does not matter that they may be talking about the same “routine” habitual things: Fall, winter, love, death. It really does not matter much what a poem is about, it matters how the verse is said, but most importantly who is talking! As I mentioned before, Brodsky was rather a poet of alienation, or more exactly, of not belonging. To a certain degree, his artistic position was similar to that of Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan, but not entirely. Celan obviously was another displaced person, poet in the intercultural space. For Celan the magic crystal was his enigmatic inner frozen crystal, a primordial language – breath unit, which is an idea by itself, or rather in itself, a soul diluted in the body and revealing itself by breathing. For Brodsky, the idea of soul is more Donne-like – a metaphorical contemplative soul-idea, soaring above the world and choosing “any given vernacular” to express itself. Kafka developed an obsessive awareness of the opaqueness of language. His work can be construed as a continuous parable on the impossibility of genuine human communication.” I would say, hence an acute necessity to use an indirect metaphorical poetic language. As Kafka put it to Max Broad in 1921: “the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing differently.” One could add a fourth impossibility: the impossibility of writing. Therefore – silence, a powerful tool of poetry. Hence the attempts by some artists to burn, destroy their own writings in order to achieve a great silence after incredibly important things were said: Gogol and his great “longer poem” Dead Souls, Kafka (instructions to Max Broad), Paul Celan etc. Nina Berbrova writes in The Italics Are Mine: "Nabokov is the only Russian author (both in Russia and in emigration), that belongs to the whole Russian world (or to the world in general), and not only to Russia. For an artist of his nature the fact of belonging to one certain nationality or to one certain language doesn't play the significant role any longer. For Kafka, Joyce, Ionesko, Beckett, Jorge Borges, and Nabokov language ceased to be as it was in the narrow national sense 80 or 100 years ago." Poetry is a form of art that remains the most closed. A poet’s sensibilities respond to a new milieu or culture; to a cultural idiom, a poetic tension remains tightly linked with a poet’s native language. It seems to me that the most successful poems in two languages created on the same emotional wave (topic) are best written separately as two individual poems in two different languages. A poetic translation as creative process works best as the re-creation of the original poem, mainly its spirit and sound, and the one that closely reflects an author’s sensibility and is expressed by the most adequate words but in a different language. In our era of globalization and frequent movements of people, perhaps the only way of direct communication between the poets from different cultures and countries is coexistence in one of the major languages, which have become lingua franca of culture: English, French or Spanish, and in large parts of the world Russian, Chinese, Arabic, etc. Poetry is a form of direct speech reflecting real (and virtual, inner) life of movement, displacement and inhabitation of the new territory. A poem actually represents that direct speech, personal communication, although in a metaphorical form. Penetration into other cultures, finding a common language of poetry, which by definition is an indirect, metaphorical language allows achieving this mutual understanding between artists who create in different geographic, social and linguistic conditions. An American poet is the same type of a mercurial moody creature as a Russian, Italian or Romanian poet. It depends on the special ability of a creative person to feel and hear the world and this may not necessarily depend on that person’s native language. Poetry is an autonomous process and uses an obligatory emotional conflict of a poet with the surrounding world as a nutrient to crystallize that special “overheard” sound. The stimulus for the creation of a poetic text is pre-existent sound (i.e. condensed emotion-thought) that is overheard by the author. This is why the sounds of real life outside the window or on a train, on a street corner, are the most important ones for a poet who overhears and metaphorically transforms life into his or her being and into pulsating verse. It is overheard only because the power field or sound field exists in the air, which is the breathing air for an artist. The sound “from above” coincides for some moment (this desirable fleeting moment!) with an inner emotional readiness and maturity of the author for a new creation. This sound may be incidental, such as the clattering of a train, the voice of a hotdog man, pause-silence that unexpectedly occurs in street noise. Outside his native culture a poet creates a new type of “hybrid sensibility.” Such authors are able to create their own cultural, spiritual and even linguistic universe, which makes an imprint on a native and newly acquired culture alike. This pertains also to fact that smaller “cultures” can make an imprint on a bigger culture when a major, great artist serves as a medium or a messenger of smaller culture. One can expand on the theme of a contemporary American culture being, if not a melting pot, but a mosaic (in metaphorical and biblical sense) of the variety of cultures. A “displaced person” (DP) from another culture begins to express his confused soul under the influence of the surrounding life in a different newly acquired language, in my case in English. The sensibility travels in time and space following the body, after which a transition of a soul occurs with some delay. Displacement of soul and homing of the new habitat follows the displacement of a person. This movement goes more in the direction to intercultural space rather than to the confines of other cultural domain. It is in this space that we find ourselves connected, entangled in the web of the Internet and transatlantic electromagnetic lines. And in any language the main criterion of poetry is a live pulse of a poem, the rest is secondary. Is this subjective? Yes. But when we talk about poems everything is subjective and intuitive, provided that the grammar and syntax are correct. As Nina Cassian said: “Poetry is a quicksand!” For many foreign artists nowadays emigration is not a temporary, forced situation. From the writings of the poets and writers of that generation it is clear that the main longing, the nostalgic chord is related to the nostalgia for childhood and for the bygone time, but not specifically for a life that could have gone the other way back home. The children are growing up here and becoming completely assimilated into the contemporary American culture. The people inhabitate their territory when they “plant” graves of their close ones on the new land. That is the real "green card," green hills and lawns of the orderly American memorial gardens. A certain cultural group achieves its critical mass in terms of population and creative activity and in about twenty five years becomes not a marginal exile phenomenon but a cultural group unique in its complex sensibilities with language derived from the land of origin, albeit reflecting a new acquired “alien” sensibility. Who can judge this most subjective form of arts - poetry? The only measure is biblical. It happened in the Garden of Eden and after this moment of sweet seduction humankind intuitively knows the difference between a good poem and a noise. A real poem is sounding crystal, echo of the soul. It is opposite to cultural “representation,” or else imitation, regardless whether it is produced by a perfect cerebral-verbal apparatus of a native speaker or by a market oriented moving and shaking newcomer who exploits his accent as a tool to attract attention. The problem is that lay audience is utterly disinterested and their route is not from birth through love to death, but from Home Depot to IKEA while self-perpetuating literati are running in their virtual world on the quadruple decaff. frappuccino.
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