Mats Traat - poems, months and Tobias

What's in a month? In the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic around two decades ago the mere mention of February or March set off coded signals. February 24th is the Estonian National Day, whose celebration had been suppressed for half a century by the Soviet occupier. March 9th 1944 was the day when a squadron of Soviet bomber pilots, said to be women and led by a Canadian Communist, demolished several streets in the centre of Tallinn, the Estonian capital. So when Mats Traat published his collection Ajalaulud - luulet 1986-1989 (Songs of the Epoch - poems 1986-1989) in 1990, the casual mention of February or March was no doubt a deliberate act. When Traat was writing this collection, no one yet knew if the Baltic countries would be liberated, or whether there would be a repeat, Baltic style, of the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968.

Rudolf Tobias (1873-1918) was an Estonian composer who wrote an oratorio about Jonah escaping the belly of the whale. And there are, of course, parallels between the collapse of the Assyrian Empire and its capital Nineveh and that of the Soviet Union, with Estonia escaping from the maw of that latter empire.

DAY OF REMEMBRANCE


Flowers for those who died on the long road,
in the steppe, the forest, the frost.
Flowers for those that died from hard labour,
hardship, sorrow, hunger,
whose graves have vanished, razed to the ground,
deemed not to exist.


Harsh LP music does not recognise mourning.
Tammsaare keeps silent along with his people.


If you feel humiliation, you are still alive.


We, a people used to hell,
why don’t you get used
to the vale of hell?


Low is the threshold of juniper bushes,
death mows down someone
who never became a socialist hero
far from home, in the deserts of Afghanistan.


Who will count your tears,
who will write down your wounds,
Estonia?

***



IN THE MARCH SUNSHINE



Startled
at the bleakness of the age,
the cracked record of memory.

Thinking vague
waves of incredulity
riding high.


Every question seems childish,
the answers predictable:
together, like one man, jointly.


State monopoly of belief, queue at the vodka shop:
fifty-one people,
six of them women.


A really bad tooth
won’t tolerate cold or heat,
flowers noses can only smell one.


You have been brought out of the earth,
you won’t be going
back in.

***



ADDED INFORMATION ABOUT THE MARCH MISTS



The state where I was born
was soon destroyed,
the house where I first saw the light of day,
burnt down in a battle.
Omnipresent, omnipotent cancer
divide et impere.
Beyond the shield of mist a black figure
loveless, merciless.
Death is freedom. Montaigne
thought that each moment of his life.
And there was light.

***


ON A FEBRUARY NIGHT



Daytime and nighttime flags
fly jumbled together
the stars go out but the sword remains
He wields it in pitch darkness
mercilessly
May God have mercy on those that get in the way
the stars fall the sword remains

***



TOBIAS’ ORATORIO


Stay calm: the thought will not hold sway
whose traces are clotted with blood.
We go to a concert. A rainy evening
May the sounds uplift, the last night is a long way off.
Great is the hunger for light
and the thirst for freedom; raindrops
sparkle on your eyelashes. Stay calm:
Jonah is announcing
the destruction of Nineveh
in Estonia.

*******

Translated from Estonian by Eric Dickens

Mats Traat - an introduction to a poet

Mats Traat (born 1936) has written a long cycle of novels depicting life in the Estonian countryside during Czarist times, Independence, and the Soviet occupation. The farm of Palanumäe stands central in this suite of books. But Traat is also an observant social poet, again focusing on rural life. Critic Janika Kronberg has described Traat's poetry as follows:

"Traat made his début in 1962 with a collection of poetry considered to be close to the soil, and has to date published around twenty collections of poetry and three voluminous selections. With regard to his poetry, the term poetry of social comment has often been employed and this reflects the keenness in the 1960s on science and the technical revolution, plus the exploration of the cosmos, the scepticism of the following decades, and the joys and pains involved in the restoration of the Estonian Republic at the end of the 20th century.

Traat has remained himself. The core of his work involves an ethical pathos and a belief in the retreat of evil before good. His poetry contains a personal lyricism as well as sensitive nature portraits and sharp observations of society, but Traat never makes a cult of form or æstheticism for æstheticism's sake. And when the author, who comes from the south of Estonia, gave his cycle of dialect poems the title I Flee Into the Languages of Tartu then this does not mean that he has turned his back on the world, but that he is deriving strength from ancient expressions and values. Especially significant for Estonian poetry has been Histories From Harala (Harala elulood) which Traat has been adding to for four decades and whose first poems already appeared when Traat first started publishing. It is a collection of epitaphs in the style of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology and where the author uses concision to sketch the lives of a couple of hundred inhabitants of the village of Harala. The author acts as a chronicler, revealing history by way of the biographies, also the hidden tragedy at the departure of human life, a gentle nostalgia and humour and where it is shown that every mortal has a life worth recording for posterity."

Mats Traat is relatively unknown outside of Estonia, compared with people who have also been both prose authors and poets, such as Jaan Kross and Jaan Kaplinski. But you can read more about this author here. This is where I brought together two short essays about him on the World Literature Forum, one by the above critic Janika Kronberg, the other by Livia Viitol.

Over time, I shall be translating poetry by Mats Traat on this blog. Various of his poems are scattered through anthologies, and I translated six of them for the anthology The Baltic Quintet. But not a great deal of his work has appeared in English. I shall not be tackling the dialect poems; in the spirit of "first things first" I shall translate poems written in standard Estonian. But apart from representing rural values, Traat also examines life in southern Estonia, around the university city of Tartu. Three of his poems here, from 1968, as a sampler:

NAÏVE POEM

If I were a weaver,
I'd thread sunrays into a veil
around each grain of sand.

If I were a weaver,
I'd thread a carpet out of rainbows
to cover each park bench.

If I were a weaver,
I'd thread a shawl from lark's songs
and wrap it around my darling.

But I am not a weaver.

***

I draw your portrait in the sand, on pine bark, in myself.
I draw the plan and it is electric.
Then I go and look for a current, to bring the picture to life.

When I finally find you and return,
the wind has trampled the plan, the waters have washed away the portrait.
A toeprint adorns the place where your eye should have been.

***

TOYS

The toy cat has serious claws
the toy dog black fangs
the toy tiger has frightening whiskers

The tin soldier has but a heart of tin
it melts when he sees the princess
the princess utters not a word
a hole melts in the soldier
he is taken to be melted down
the cats dogs tigers laugh
their painted laugh.

*******

This seemingly naïve love poet is the same person who, as a novelist later in life, wrote about the War of Estonian Independence, Russification during various periods, the Forest Brethren guerrilla movement, and the trauma of the kolkhoz system.

Translated from Estonian by Eric Dickens