I remember days, in 1978, when I was host in America to a circle of dancers, artists & writers from countries behind the Eastern Bloc.  I remember their faces.  Fresh and worn. Whispering their dreams & visions to me.  Glancing in starts to see who was listening, who would remember, who might betray them at any moment.  At that time I didn’t realize, as an American, what dangers they were facing at home.  In my cocoon I could not conceive of such conditions as the jailing of the mind.

Wislawa Szymborska has said in Harcourt Brace & Co’s, Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, “It looks as though poets will always have their work cut out for them.”  Today’s premiere voice of poetry comes from the newly formed world.  It comes strongly from the area of the world that an American president, in 1981, coined glibly as the “Evil Empire.” 

Once named the Eastern Bloc countries.  Now named for themselves as Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Poland, The Czech Republic, The Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus, Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Hungary, Slovakia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Moldovia.  Eastern Europe stands divided and undivided.  As the poet stands alone in a sea of politic unto himself.

The polish Szymborska repents, “I sometimes dream of situations that can’t possibly come true.  I audaciously imagine.”  Based on the imagination & the true harshness of life the poetry of this world offers hope, anguish, laughter & struggle.

Here’s where a new American press is making its surprising gains.  Ugly Duckling Presse is hosting The Eastern European Poets Series.  With new & premiere translations by its editor Matvei Yankelevich, and others including, Christopher Mattison, Phil Metres, Evgeny Pavlov & the poet, Joshua Beckman.  The series publishes works by émigré poets from Eastern Europe who write in a foreign english tongue , twentieth century authors of the avant-garde whose works have never before been widely available, and new, never before seen, translations of today’s premiere Eastern European poets.

Ugly Duckling’s new book, Poker, by Tomaz Salamun, orginally printed in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1966, unknown today to many American fans, has been translated in its entirety now by the award winning American poet, Joshua Beckman, in collaboration with the author. This edition is at its best worthy of great attention.  At its worst plain, honest and engaging.  Even the cover design is new and refreshingly un-American.  In it Salamun writes from his Slovenian roots,

 

Moses fell from diapers into history

and in gray socks waits for the West to collapse...

 

His words are immediate, unfrivolous, funny, honest, historic, buoyant.  In this new translation of the 1966 issue his dreams are laced with new borders.  In his poem, Things, Part VII, Salamun writes,

 

                I’ll draw a cross

 

                serpentines on my rocking chair

                how melancholy the shirt hangs

                when the body has left it

                but it’s still a shirt

                and here’s the crucial point of our defeat

                and a suitcase and a  t  rule

                did you ever see a chair

                running from the bathroom to the kitchen

                or the other way around, it doesn’t matter

                hysterically asking

                what will happen with my afterlife

                did you ever see a balcony railing

                saying                    I’ve had enough

                                                I’ve had enough

                                                I’ve had enough

                me too I love my little life

                me too I have to get something out of it

                and if you walked along Glagoljaska street

                and saw that between house number four

                and the well, an old boot was lying there

                from the year when the last night-time regattas

                happened and Mario won

                did the boat ask you

                hello excuse me

                for bothering you in the street this way

                doesn’t it seem to you

                doesn’t it seem to you

                doesn’t it seem to you

                inconceivable are things in their cunning

                unattainable to the rage of the living

                invulnerable in their perpetual flight

                you can’t catch up with them

                you can’t seize them

                motionless in their gaze

 

Second in the series for Ugly Ducking Press is Genya Turovskaya’s new book, Calendar.   Only from small press printings like this can we buy a book with such a hand made one-of-a-kind feel.  Instead of folding in, Calendar, folds its pages out to the reader to create a metaphor of doors and reaching hands.  Pages are named instead of numbered for each month of the year.  All to give the feel of time passing, memory and waiting,  Turovskaya, orginally from Kiev, Ukraine, has made her words float, as her poem for the month of June states, “in a suspension of disbelief.”   Her lines are viscous dreams gathered on the edge of some dark beauty and tumultuous night.  In her poem, June, Turovskaya writes,

 

a woman opens her blouse to reveal

a city

a blouse opens to reveal

a woman

 

                                against the sea

 

the exposed breast is the harpoon’s

white accuracy

 

the compass needle points

toward the sky

 

                                we could move

                                forward

and back

 

this equilibrium of scales

musical notation of the siren’s song

 

~

 

in the laboratory

gloved hands

pour

and stir

 

something grows

through the white milk

diagram of a mine field

a man’s lonliness

 

the envelope is a rumor

 

~

 

burying a boat

my shovel hits the water table

now we can sail

our armada

underneath the ground

 

~

 

beyond the sand

                dunes

the overlap of breath

                through sleep

speech

 

the suspension of disbelief

 

~

 

                and then

someone sends word for you to come

 

you begin folding

your paper boat

 

In a recent interview with Ugly Duckling Press editor, Matvei Yankelevich, I had the opportunity to ask him only a few short questions.  The frustrating life of a small press editor is never easy. But it is full of its own secret rewards. Today Yankelevich is editing and translating new work steadily.  His mission to spread the canon of Eastern European language adds strongly to America’s growing interest in EU’s best poetry.

 

Anzia:   Matvei, how do you choose your poets for UDP’s Eastern European Series?

 

Yankelevich:   Some of these projects have been long in the making. Ilya Bernstein put together a book of poems a few years ago and we at Ugly Duckling Press wanted to publish it, both because he was a friend of ours and because we laughed reading the poems and thought they were good and so very different from the "experimental" poetry scene that UDP has been aligned with. I had also wanted to publish Vvedensky and Kharms, whom I translate, and we had published Prigov and Rubinstein in our poetry magazine, 6x6. And there were other poets around, mostly Russian emigres, like Genya Turovskaya whom we published in 6x6, too. But there was no Eastern European Poets Series, nor even an idea of it back then. The idea came when we were writing a grant proposal. And it clicked. We wanted to do a bunch of these sorts of books anyway, so why not - I thought - make it a series. It worked. We got a small grant and we did Ilya's book. While we were working on that, Genya came to us with a chapbook that she wanted to publish and there was a show that would exhibit the book if we made it. So we did that as part of the series. We innaugurated the series with a very limited edition of Vvedensky's Gray Notebook - simply because I had recently finished the translation and I was involved in an event at the Bowery Poetry Club that featured translations of Vvedensky and Kharms and the whole Oberiu group of 1920s & 30s Leningrad. Then people started getting in touch about manuscripts. Phil Metres was first: out of the blue he sent me his Rubinstein translation and it was clear that it was the perfect match. We got in touch with Cris Mattison about doing a book of all of Prigov's "50 Drops Of Blood" which we had excerpted in 6x6. Then Joshua Beckman talked to me about the full manuscript of Salamun's Poker -- we had published a poem of his in Joshua's translation in 6x6, and Greg - one of our editors - is crazy about Salamun. It seemed perfect, and hard to turn down, even though it cost us a pretty penny to do that book, as it will the others that are coming up. The grant would hardly cover two books. And then Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (who we'd also had in 6x6). I had met and befriended him in Petersburg. His book, Chinese Sun, was declined by New Directions, and I promised him we'd do it -- and we will, probably after this spring. New projects are coming up, many of them proposed to us by colleagues and poets. Joshua Beckman is searching out more Eastern European poets from Romania and Poland. We're trying to connect with people who know Albanian poetry and Hungarian poetry. Genya Turovskaya is now on board as Associate Editor of the series. An intern, David Paige, who knows Czech, is helping us with a project to publish a collection of Ivan Blatny's poems. There's no real process by which we decide. Mostly there hasn't been a need to make decisions, the perfect books have just come our way -- books that in the back of my head I wished we could some day publish, and now that we have a series, it just makes sense to do just that.

What interests me as far as emigre poetry goes is the bilingual aspect of writing English language poetry while feeding also off Russian and other Eastern European languages and all those traditions. Bernstein and Turovskaya are radically different. But their different approaches to English in many ways stem from their relationship to Russian poetry and the sound of that language. I like inter-linguistic poetry, or at least poetry that doesn't discuss the emigre's situation outright, but has that duality in the seed of its speech patterns.

 

Anzia:  Could you tell me a little bit about your opinion.... What direction do you see today's poets from Eastern Europe taking in the face of this generation?

 

Yankelevich:  I honestly don't know. I can say with certainty of the 60s and 70s poets from Moscow - like Rubinstein and Prigov - they were influenced by the Oberiu (the one real alternative writing tradition in the early Soviet period). Certainly the new poets of Slovenia and former Yugoslavia in general are influenced by Salamun, and thereby through him, by the New York School and other American poetics. The new generation in Moscow is leaning back toward traditional verse more often than not. I don't think there's a cohesion in the new writing from Eastern Europe, just like there's no cohesion here. The American mainstream makes it look like there's cohesion, though if you lift the curtain just a little bit, you see that it's not so. Everybody's going in different directions, picking up on this or that aspect of the past. And so it is in Eastern Europe, though I think, even more so, because there isn't as much of a mainstream, no hegemony of style or content. At least now that the Soviet Union is gone. They've been translating and reading the postmodern thinkers, catching up to France, and the rest of the world, now that all of that is allowed. Because of that, now the "alternative" writing styles and groupings, like the "Oberiu", probably don't seem as strange or radical.

 

Anzia:  How does this compare to EU poets from the past? From the early part of the century?

 

Yankelevich:  Well, on the whole, the EU poets of the past were constrained by Soviet indoctrination and outright censorship and oppression. That's true if we speak of the majority of poets, poets who were being published under the shado of the iron curtain. There was the official culture and there was the underground - and people chose sides, and so did the poets. So, of course, that having changed, it's no longer clear what to write about - or against (like Prigov, Rubinstein, et al, did in the 60s, 70s, and 80s). So it's a free for all. And unfortunately, this has led to the proliferation of writing only about the self (in Russia, at least) now that that's allowed -- and being political in one's poetry (even subtly as the Moscow Conceptualists and Soc.Art. people did) is pretty out of fashion.

Probably something similar is true in the rest of Eastern Europe, but I can't really speculate. Also, new themes - like homosexuality (Slava Mogutin), and sex in general (Vera Pavlova) - have become popular because they were taboo and severely dangerous in Soviet times. It's hard to say really what is different about the new poets of Eastern Europe. I think there must be a lot of small localized poetry scenes, milieus, circles, groups, sort of like in the US. And often times it's hard to know what the new trends are, or even if there are any trends. Poetry, in a way, not really a public discourse anymore for the majority of readers and writers (unlike in the Soviet hey-day of folks like Mayakovsky and later Yevtushenko), so I think the trends are local and hidden.

 

Today it is known that the poetry of Eastern Europe is here, trends or no trends, landing firmly in America without apology or metaphor.  Tied closely in its development to the European Futurist/Dadaist movement in the early twentieth century, these poets express themselves as they are in funny plain strong sometimes stark and tragic language. With grace and honesty Ugly Duckling Press has now made it available for all of us to see and absorb the true spirit of this world.

 

Ugly Duckling Press and its editor, Matvei Yakelevitch, can be contacted directly for more information about this continuing series or for other books at:  70 Washington St., Ground Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201 or via the web at  udp_mailbox@yahoo.com .

 

Lys Anzia is a poet and playwright.  Her latest play, JACKS, made its debut in 2003 at seven theatre locations across America.  Currently she is working on one book of non-fiction and two other American historical stageplays, Honor Among Thieves & Goodnight, Darling. 

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