Moira

By Doris Kareva

1

Life is not a story,
life is creation.

Is it true that we are given
all that we wish for?

Is it true that we are given
all that we deserve?

Is it true that we are overtaken
by all that we avoid?

Time, you fleeting one,
raker of surprises --

life is not a story,
just hope and creation.


2

Every thought that is thought to the end
becomes a butterfly, freeing itself.

Like a breaker falling on the springtime.

This storm
that you breathe, heart from top to toe.


3

Of love and death,
of debts, karma and dharma
I thought that morning too,
in my breath
as I held your back, your shoulder,
your sleep and the pulsing hours
until the operation.


4

Remind me what life is like
without memory, without fire —
a cave in a grey dawn coma,
a wound that doesn't hurt
although it suppurates.
(An absurd moloch, yes,
but methodical.)

Remind me that life is an arc,
not logical.


5

I age into beauty,
free of the buckle of hope
that thrashed my youth
with disillusionment’s belt.

Pain is the fear of pain.
Fear is the fear of fear.
The base of all pyramids is
the moment.


6

As you lean into that awesome abyss
your word falls like a stone
from the hurting, juicy
throbbing heart of life's fruit.

The circles fade and grow weaker.
And from the truth-soil a tree will arise,
as a picture darkening amidst flames
may give birth to sparks.


7

“Beauty is bounty,
balance is wisdom,
thought is deed,
truth is power.”

Simpler polishing
on a hunchback stone
is made only by water's
wordless tomb.

The Greek word moira (μοῖρα) literally means a part or portion, and by extension one's portion in life or destiny.

translated from Estonian by David McDuff

Doris Kareva: "In dreams and poetry"

In 1989, as the Soviet Union was crumbling, a number of Estonian poets and prose authors issued an album of work entitled Wellesto. This 150-page album contained, among other things, the work of various Estonian authors who are now famous, but also, for instance, Märt Väljataga's translation of five poems by W.B. Yeats, and Mati Sirkel's translation of a Kafka text, and Kalju Soa's translation of Finnish poems by Ilpo Tiihonen. The imminent escape of Estonia from the Soviet Empire, and 1916 parallels in the case of Yeats, were not lost on Estonian readers. But there were also a couple of translations into foreign languages. One of these was a text, in Pia Tafdrup vein, about the essence of writing poetry by the accomplished Estonian poet Doris Kareva (born 1958) which was translated into both Finnish (Tapio Mäkeläinen) and English (Toomas Hendrik Ilves). Below, Ilves' translation of Kareva's text.

In dreams and poetry

A poem is like a dream – at once a memory and a fantasy; a genuineness that opens up not along the lines of life but the lines of fate; no, not the lot that befalls us, but an eternally present part of the world.

A distant song in the blood: a hymn, a humming, the heart’s rhythm, heard by the child eternally playing alone within us. He raises his head, listens – with the nearing song the ear even distinguishes words – but then it again descends into silence, again on the nether side of response and responsibility. A dream, forgotten before the avenging scourge of consciousness arrives; a letter written in the sand, washed away by the prohibiting tongue of the waves.

Like pearl a poem begins with a grain of sand; the force of inevitability concealed in its self-creation; in it an event no matter how trifling may metamorphose into meaning. The content of a poem is a secret and its form silence. A poem is woven from silence just as an air-thin scarf that effortlessly slips through a ring. A myriad of patterns, signs and ornaments will not change its being; inscrutable as a dream., it reveals only its infinite faces, yet it remains unknown, unfathomable. Yet still, it may strike a lightning-white bridge even between strangers – for often just those separated by gaping worlds hide the same being within.

A poem, a dream, a drug and forgetting still comprise a revelation, an unexpected genuineness, a flight over borders deemed to be real, a recognition, and awakening.

Never, no, never are we more ourselves, never so free and yet fathomlessly alone as in dreams and in poetry – except perhaps in love.
Translated from Estonian by Toomas Hendrik Ilves