The following text is copyright ©2001, 2003, 2004, 2006, by Vera Rich. This essay was originally presented as part of the Conference, " The Role of the Belarusian Diaspora in Preserving and Developing Belarusian Culture," Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library and Museum, London, 29-30 September, 2001. Part of the conference proceedings published in 2003 (Skaryna Library, London), pages 79-91, and in the version published in 2004 ("BelFrance", Minsk; ISBN: 985-6425-27-1), pp. 61-70.
Артыкул Веры Рыч – кароткі агляд паэзіі беларускае паваеннае эміграцыі. Аўтарка адзначае, што цягам дзесяцігодзьдзяў эмігранцкая паэзія не была часткай літаратурнага працэсу ў Беларусі. Калі творы беларускіх аўтараў траплялі да эмігрантаў, то адваротнага працэсу не было. Тэма тугі па радзіме і патрыятычны запал былі заўсёдным элемэнтам літаратурнага жыцьця на чужыне. Адначасна аўтараў вабіла імкненьне ствараць новыя формы й ідэі. В.Рыч спрабуе ўявіць, як паэзія беларускага замежжа будзе ўспрымацца праз сто гадоў. На ейную думку, шэраг паэтаў могуць стаць часткай канону – але не асобнай школы – беларускае літаратуры. Напрыканцы В.Рыч прапануе колькі перакладаў з паэзіі Натальлі Арсеньневай.
To deal adequately with the subject of Belarusian poetry in emigration, to consider the works of each poet, their mutual influences, and the relationships between their work and – on the one hand – their host culture, and on the other developments in the Belarusian homeland, would require long and detailed study. It would need not a brief conference presentation, but at least a whole conference to itself, maybe many conferences.
All that I can hope to do today is to present a few thoughts on how this emigre poetry fits into the whole development of Belarusian literature on the one hand, and, on the other, how it has been influenced by the specifics of this particular emigration – and, perhaps, to suggest some ideas which may give rise to more detailed research.
In 1992, only a few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tuha pa radzimie, an anthology of emigre poetry appeared in Belarus. This book had apparently been put together to take advantage of the glasnost-perestroika-demokratizatsiya concessions of Mikhail Gorbachev. It is a thick work, however – some 600 pages of poetry – and I cannot help wondering if someone (and not necessarily the named compiler Barys Sačanka) had in fact been quietly at work for some time before hand, discreetly assembling what he could of this 'missing' chapter of
This book – as I said – is a thick one. However, when one comes to examine it more closely, one finds that perhaps half the material involved was produced in the Belarusian homeland (whether under Soviet or Polish rule), before or during World War II. These poets' emigration not only deprived the Belarusians at home of access to their new work from – it also effectively deprived them of what those poets had written in the past.
There could be no ongoing literary dialogue between homeland and diaspora – the post-World War II exiles could, of course, (except in the very early, Stalin, years), read new works from Belarus; they might even be inspired to write an 'answer' to it – but that 'answer' would in most cases never be delivered. The flow of contact was, effectively, one way.
Another important point was that this was a relatively small and new emigration. Unlike, say, the Ukrainian emigres who found waiting for them a culturally-developed diaspora, with a well-established press and publishing houses, the Belarusian emigration had to build its cultural life from scratch. And those first years, while they were still in the DP camps, they made did so with remarkable results – consider such journals of that time as Sakavik and Sypshyna. The production methods and physical materials were necessarily modest – the literary content, however, was not.
However, publishing requires both resources and a potential readership... Time went on, and the emigres dispersed to whatever lands of settlement would take them. Hard work brought prosperity, and resources gradually became available for more substantial publications – physically speaking. But the relatively small size of the Belarusian diaspora and the dispersion of its literary intelligentsia was hardly conducive to the regular and on-going literary contacts which so often generate new and exciting developments in poetry. And, in those early days, contact between say, a poet in Australia and one in Venezuela could be only by letter – yet poetry is an art where the sound of the poet's voice is often even more stimulating that the written word. Likewise publications of a purely literary kind tended to be 'occasional' rather than regular... there was never a Belarusian literary monthly of the stature, say of the Polish Kultura or the Ukrainian Suchasnist'. On the other hand – the small and for the most part scattered diaspora meant that there were of necessity fewer patriotic gatherings and akademii, which in more populous emigre communities doubtless achieve their purpose of keeping patriotic memory alive, but also – all too often – generate a plethora of vers d 'occasion, impeccable in national ideology, but with poetic quality ranging from adequate down to... well, you name it.
The poets of the Belarusian emigration did, of course, address patriotic themes, and, over the years, many of these works have, indeed, been used in patriotic celebrations – but their works bring new insights to those themes, as well as a considerable degree of technical skill. Thus Sałaviej's Nad Słuckam dnieje not only reveal what may be called the poet's inner vision – the image of the undying warrior knight – but also skill in using the chosen sonnet form (note the 'natural break' between octave and sestet, where the poet moves from contemplating the vision of the knight to direct invocation of the Ahni žyvyja, iskry listapadu).
This matter of what I have termed 'academia verse' is an aspect of the centuries-long debate over the poet's role in society. Is he, as Aristotle's Poetics would imply, a kind of civic therapist, providing a purgative for emotions that otherwise might threaten public order? Or is he – as Romanticism would have it, a lone, misunderstood figure – writing for to vent his own, unbearably intense, emotions. The truth, of course, lies somewhere between – but in considering the work and role of the emigre poet one needs to pay heed to both polarities.
The equivalent 'civic' role of a poet in emigre conditions can be viewed in a number of ways – to inspire and hearten his fellow-emigres, and to keep alive and embody the traditions on national culture now proscribed in the homeland. The conditions of the Belarusian emigration entailed, as I have said, relatively little pressure on the poets to produce 'academia-patriotic verse'. This left them free to write about Belarus at the level of their own longing and yearning (the title of the 1992 anthology is – we may recall – Tuha pa radzimie; the sense of loss, and the contrast between the new landscapes and their vanished homeland. This is, not surprisingly, particularly evident in the early years
О, Афрыка! Крывіцкай была б ты,
Каб Нёманам быў твой паўнаводны Ніл…wrote Sałaviej in 1949 in Pierad Viasnoj, and again, in Za Port Said, written presumably on the same voyage, he speaks of his "Biazdomny slach biaźlitasny i žorstki." The poems in the diaspora-published anthology La čužych bieraho, (1955) are rich in such geographical and topographical allusions – the Alps, the Statue of Liberty...
But always, openly or as subtext, the message is that these wonders are not, cannot, ever be anything but second best.
О, Новы Край,
як гулі
спыніўшы, хваля нас да порту прыжане,
будзь нам прытулкам цёплым і утульным,
але ня Бацькаўшчынай,
не!wrote Arsieńnieva in Kab sercy Vikinhaŭ my mieli.
The yearning did not, of course, decrease with the years. In his collection Darohi, published in 1974, Krušyna refers to numerous travels, many of which – like a tourist trip to the Holy Land – clearly do not date from the journey into exile. Yet the yearning remains.
Я сёньня ў Мадрыдзе, а заўтра ў Нью-Ёрку.
Пакіну пачуцьці па добрых краінах.
Ёсьць песьні на ўзмор'і, узьлесьсі, узгорку,
Гучаць на пяскох, на сьсівелых руінах.
А ўсё ж наймілейшая песьня, што зроду
Я чуў ад бацькоў, і ў тым прызнаюся:
Яна ня сьціхае на вуснах народу
Маёй сэрцагрэйнай жывой Беларусі.Krušyna, however, was not prepared simply to yearn for Belarus. He wanted, albeit in exile, to enrich Belarusian literature, to add to it poems in classical forms never used in it before.
In the preface to his collection Sny i mary (1975), Krušyna pays homage to his predecessors in this field: Bahdanovič, Duboŭka, Pušča, and, in emigration, Michaś Kavyl and Aleś Sałaviej who produced examples of the sequence known as a 'crown of sonnets'. However, he points out, many classical forms had never been tackled in Belarusian: including the Villanelle, the sestina – and the palindrome (in which each line can be read either backwards or forwards – a form which he himself had earlier assayed in the collection Chvilina rozdumu. One has to point out, however, that some of his pioneering versions do not always fulfil the accepted rules – his Sestina, for example, brilliantly manages the permutations of the six key-words through the six full stanzas; he also adds the additional refinement of rhyme, which is – at least in English – not normally considered obligatory for this verse-form, but which adds a wonderful mathematical music, reminiscent of 'changes' rung on a peal of bells: the first stanza rhyming ababab, and then, after the permutations baabba, abbaba aabbab baaabb resolving to the satisfying conclusion aaabbb. Should one really carp therefore over the fact that he has omitted the usual three-line closing stanza of this form? Likewise, his 'Haiku' are – strictly speaking – not haiku at all. He reproduces the seventeen syllable/three lines pattern of the Japanese form correctly, but not the content – the encapsulation of a single mood and moment, with an obligatory 'seasonal reference'. A poem like
Месяц, чуеш ты,
Чый праходзіш цьвёрды крок?
Чалавек – твой госьць.(which I would render:
Moon, do you hear it,
Someone walks with heavy step?
It is man – your guest.)is, properly speaking, a Senryu – a Japanese verse-form which is identical in its externals with the Haiku, but without the latter's constraints of subject-matter. (In fairness to Krušyna, however, I must point out that since the form first achieved world-wide popularity in the early 1960s, the pages of poetry magazines have abounded in soi-disant Haiku that are Senryu – to say nothing of the tens of thousands of pseudo-Japanese three-liners which do not even keep the syllable count at all.)
Krušyna's efforts to extend the repertoire of forms in Belarusian poetry raise another interesting question: does émigré literature, in the long run, form part of the literature of the homeland? In other words, looking forward, say, to the year 2101, with Belarus a prosperous, happy and sovereign member of whatever supranational order then prevails in Europe – will poets like Krušyna and Sałaviej be studied as an integral part of Belarusian literature – or will they be hived off into an optional course on the '20th century émigrés?
Will the average 22nd-century school-child – or even undergraduate – perceive any obvious difference between the fables of Vincuk Advažny or those of, say, Kandrat Krapiva? Will the poems Maciej Siadnioŭ datelined Glen Cove seem very different from those of Piatro Broŭka's from Oyster Bayl (Broŭka's Footpath near New York is, after all, redolent with the nostalgia of the exile for the homeland – even though his 'exile' was only the temporary one of a diplomatic posting.) In the anthologies of that future era, will it be possible – without recourse to 'notes at the back' – to see who was, and who was not, an émigré?
There will, of course, be certain 'internal' clues from subject and approach which point to an émigré provenance: Siadnioŭ's Malitva, for example, could hardly be attributed to a Soviet milieu. But the very factors which have vitiated against the formation of émigré literary clubs and circles have meant that the poets of the Belarusian emigration have worked and developed as individuals. The New York Ukrainian émigré poets of the 1960s will doubtless remain forever the 'Suchasnist group' – contemporary to, but separate from – the 'Shisty- desyatnyky' in the homeland. But Belarusian émigré poets, if they achieve a lasting place in canons of Belarusian literature, will surely do so as part of the mainstream.
And who will go into that canon? Surely all those assembled by Sačanka to fill the holes torn in the Belarusian literary tapestry. Zołak, Zmahar, Smaleniec, Siadnioŭ, Sałaviej, Kavyl, Advažny, Kliševič, Dudzicki, Krušyna, Iljaševič, Jasień, Biarozka... And, of course, the doyenne of them all – Natalia Arsieńnieva, whose work – pre-émigré and émigré – occupies no less than one-quarter of Tuhapa radzimie.
To give, in the brief time at my disposal, even the most superficial treatment of the work of this fine poet is impossible. The richness of her language, the subtleties of her use of rhythm, her blending of what might be called 'standard' patriotic motifs with her own personal insight... Rather than discuss her work, I should like to use the time remaining to me to present to you a few of my English versions of her work – drawn not only from her émigré writings — but from her whole long literary career.
My Native Land
My native land lies in the south,
Yet that land is unknown to me,
And only in my thoughts can I
Wing to the far shores of that sea.
Not Adjument with wild-grown roses,
Nor the mountains, mist-veiled, proud,
Nor the sea's eternal singing,
That lures to its blue space profound —
No, of these matters I know nothing,
Another land have I loved long,
No seas nor mountains to adorn it,
But there I learned of grief and mourning,
And there it was my soul grew strong.[1920]
HAPPINESS
Happiness is like the sun.
Gently gliding,
A little cloud into the bright sky will come,
And the sun shines at once dimly, unbrightly,
Swiftly the sunlight is gone.
Happiness is like the spring cherry-flowers.
And the wind blows and the spring starts to mourn,
Down to the mud petals fall in snow showers.
Swiftly the blossoms are gone.
Happiness is like our fair and bright daydreams,
And a harsh word comes, a comment, just one,
And straightway into a fire they are blazing,
Swiftly the daydreams are gone.[1923, Слонім]
IF WE HAD THE HEART OF VIKINGS...
Today the sea is of the self-same colour
Which sometimes the green ice at Candlemas may wear.
And seeking for a path, rending it dully.
The ship strikes, and the "ice" —
it tinkles, tinkles there...
But why?
Of what are its green bells, like heralds, speaking?
Why do we listen to them, whither sail we on?
What have we left behind? What today are we seeking,
Speeding after the sun?
For a new world unknown?
Of old, straining their muscles and the canvas
Of eager, hungry sails, speeding like us, there broke
Into the distance — Vikings!..
And with them sped valour
And thurst for mysteries, and transient glory's smoke.
If, bell-like, Viking hearts in us were also beating,
Straightway we would reverse the sails, reset them,
eastward-bound,
To where their tears, their soul, our people, grieving
Have wept away their grief and mould-covered despond.
Alas, we are no Vikings!..
O New World,
when waves shall
Ceasing their merriment, bear us upon their flow
To port, be thou a warm and cosy haven,
But the land of our fathers —
No![1950-52]
UNDER THE BLUE SKY
From woe's grim songs, unlovely measures,
From nightmares of this earth of grey,
To the sky's ocean, the sky's azure,
Lift now your seeking eyes, straightway
In the blue sky is no despair, to
Quench all things slowly with dull might,
Under the blue sky all seems fairer,
And life, as if in dreams, is shines bright.
Life is a strange and wondrous flying,
An inspiration, without tears.
In the sky's azure, never-dying,
In endless festal flow the years.
Then to the sky's unshadowed kingdom,
From grimness to life soaring high,
On the white plumes of daydreams winging,
Bard, to seek the word's wonder — fly![1920]
TO YOUNG POETS
You have cast off humility, patience and God,
Stretch no hand to your future with a beggar's yearning.
Your verse strikes at people as with whip or rod,
And with lightning fires it sets the conscience burning.
I should like to blaze like you, to strive and fight,
At your side to forge the long-awaited dawning.
But these days of mine posses far different rights,
With the linden's drifting gold, attracting, drawing.
My days flower like mist above fields shorn of grain,
Sail into the distance of the cobwebs' silver,
Chime with the tin-bright notes of autumnal rain,
In the copper heather of the woods, grow chilly.
Like the golden autumn, above life I stand,
Gazing down on it. Though straggle round me wars now,
My verse drifts across the marshes' drowsy span,
Like grisaille of mist upon an autumn morning.[1936, Ravič]
IF I HAD WINGS
The sun in a net is imprisoned,
A net that the rainclouds have spun,
If wings of a hawk I were given,
Then cloudwards my path I'd have striven.
To unbearable heat of the sun.
Let my eyes grow dim and sightless,
Let my singing forever be dumb,
Let people hate and deride me,
If my spirit has winged to the sun![1922, Хэлмна]
The preceding text is copyright ©2001, 2003, 2004, 2006, by Vera Rich. This essay was originally presented as part of the Conference, " The Role of the Belarusian Diaspora in Preserving and Developing Belarusian Culture," Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library and Museum, London, 29-30 September, 2001. Part of the conference proceedings published in 2003 (Skaryna Library, London), pages 79-91, and in the version published in 2004 ("BelFrance", Minsk; ISBN: 985-6425-27-1), pp. 61-70.
To see side-by-side versions of the previous English language poetry translations and others with the Belarusian language originals, refer to the list included on the English language translations Web page that is part of this Web site.
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