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"Under Empty Skies Falconers Weep" A Personal Survey of Modern Verse in Ex-Yugoslavia and Albania |
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I
will begin this highly selective and idiosyncratic discussion of modern
Slovene, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Albanian poetry with an anecdote.
While barely known in the West, this episode represents the first
penetration, in the form of an exclusively personal relationship, of the
heart of European modernism by a representative of the Balkan literary
world; that is, the first instance of a counter-trend to a series of
influences that had completely transformed the literatures and even the
broader society of the South Slavs and Albanians.
In
1903, Guillaume Apollinaire went to London, pursuing his great muse, a
governess named Annie Playden, with whom he had traveled in the Rhineland.
I say pursued, although in our less innocent age, Apollinaire’s
devotion to this young woman who claimed to have insistently rejected him
might, unfortunately, be described as “stalking.”
The pair had met as household servants.
The governess and the poet, whom she knew by the nickname “Kostro,”
from his born name Kostrowitsky, were employed by a German countess, the
English girl to teach the children her language, Apollinaire to instruct
them in French. Annie Playden was interviewed much later in her life by
LeRoy Breunig and other American scholars of French literature—in
encounters that seem almost caricatural of university manners in the
United States—and it appeared she knew nothing of Apollinaire’s
literary ambitions. Her portrait of him is distinctly unsettling; according
to her, he took her to the top of a mountain and threatened to throw her
off if he would not marry her.
He also repeated to her Oscar Wilde’s remark “each man kills
the thing he loves” in a way she considered sinister.
He was subject to intense jealousies and violent rages.
She claimed his attentions caused her to flee England for America,
and a long stay in Santa Barbara, California.
And although she, undoubtedly truthfully, claimed she came from an
extremely proper English family and had never had the slightest physical
intimacy with him, Apollinaire wrote to at least one friend claiming he
slept with her. Of
course, he would not have been the first man (or the last) to indulge in
that lie. But our interest is
elsewhere. When he went
to see her at her family home (twice), the French poet stayed in London
with his friend, the Albanian writer Faik Konica, who published Albania,
a review to which Apollinaire contributed.
Faik Konica, while obscure to the
outer universe, was a major Balkan political and literary figure.
He was born in Konitza, near today’s Greek-Albanian border, in
1876. Although a Muslim
aristocrat or beg, he was a pupil—as were the Albanian Catholic
poets Gjon Sinishta (1930-1995) and Martin Camaj (1925-1992), whom we
shall also examine—at the Jesuit Xaverianum College in Shkodra,
the main city of north Albania. He
also studied in the French Lycée at Galata Seray in Turkey, and in
France, before coming to the U.S., where he gained a master’s degree in
arts and letters from Harvard, in 1912.
In
1897, at 21, Konica founded Albania in Brussels.
Published until 1909, it has been described as nothing less than
“the first modern Albanian journalistic enterprise… colossal” in its
significance, by a historian of Albanian media, Blendi Fevziu.[i]
Faiku, as he is universally known
among Albanians, served after 1929 as his country’s diplomatic
representative to Washington. He
died in 1942, and was buried in Boston.
In 1995, with great ceremony, his remains were returned to Albania
and reinterred in Tirana, the capital.
His writings were extensive, and he is considered one of the
greatest Albanian prose stylists. Apollinaire
was drawn to Faiku, and described him in his Anecdotiques as
follows: “Of all the men I
have known and remember with the greatest pleasure, Faik Konica is one of
the most singular… (He purified) the Albanian language of corrupt and
parasitical terms that found their way into it.” [ii] Apollinaire’s
memoir of the Albanian author is filled with a wonderful humor.
He wrote, “Faik Konica took great pains with the publication of Albania.
On the cover, as an emblem, it bore the arms of the future kingdom
of Albania.” This
escutcheon, showing the double-headed eagle of the 15th century
Albanian patriot Gjergj Kastrioti, or Skanderbeu, had been rediscovered by
Faiku. According to
Apollinaire, Faiku had it designed “by a French sculptor, whose name I
forget and who died a few years ago in the outskirts of New York by a fall
from a balloon.” Further,
Apollinaire recalled, “Because of the meticulous care with which Faik
Konica wrote his articles, and his slowness, his magazine always appeared
considerably behind time. In
1904 only the issues for 1902 came out, and in 1907 the 1904 issues
appeared quite regularly.” Apollinaire
wrote, “Faik Konica had a passion for pseudonyms.
He changes them very often... when I knew him he called himself
Trank Spiro Beg... That lasted only two or three years.
Then he took another pseudonym which he used to sign a very solid,
very well-written book, entitled A Treatise on Artificial Languages. That new name was Pyrrhus Bardhyli.” I should note that I have been unable, as yet, to locate any
reference to this work or the pseudonym in Faik Konica’s works or
biographical studies of him. However,
Faiku had edited Albania under the name Trank Spiro Beg, and he
contributed two essays signed with that pseudonym to Apollinaire’s own
“little magazine,” Le Festin d’Ésope.
These were titled, “Outline of a Method of How to Succeed in
Winning Applause from the Bourgeois” and “The Most Colossal
Mystification in the History of the Human Species.”
I have yet to examine the French versions of these works but they
have never been published in Albanian, as far as I am aware. “As
we waited for lunch, which was always late, my host would play for me
twangy old tunes, sitting at his desk with lowered eyes and a serious
air,” Apollinaire wrote of Faiku. Although Apollinaire described Faiku as a devotee of the
clarinet, the oboe, and the English horn, the instrument in question may
have been the fyëll,
a traditional medium of Albanian music that is, indeed, typically played
in exactly that manner, as if no audience were present.
“Lunch was ŕ l’albanaise; in other words, interminable... The lunches lasted so long
that I was unable to visit a single museum in London—we always arrived
just as the doors were closing.”
Apollinaire
lived in Faiku’s house while pursuing Annie Playden, for whom he wrote
“La Chanson du Mal-Aimé” (“The Song of the Poorly-Loved”).
Of that work, perhaps the greatest love poem of this century, I
will say no more. It is up to readers, and especially poets, to know those
things; but one might add, in retrospect, that she was as poorly-loved as
he, considering his cavalier behavior with her.
The poet himself confessed, “many of the expressions in the poem
are too severe and abusive.” Apollinaire
took Annie, his young and unwinnable love, to Faiku’s house, all the way
across London from her family’s dwelling on Landor Road, also
immortalized in Apollinaire’s poem “L’Emigrant de Landor Road.”
In 1962, in her late ‘80s, interviewed by American academics in a
suburban house on Long Island, she recalled that Faiku’s female
companion made up a bed for her and the poet, but that she said, “Oh
no, I can’t do anything like that.
I must go home, my mother is expecting me.”
It is doubtful that Annie Playden would even consent to kiss him.
Then he walked her back to her house, and returned rejected through
the streets of London to Faiku’s residence. His
affection for Faiku gave rise to many interesting details.
Apollinaire wrote, “I once again spent some time in London with
Faik Konica, who had married and was living at Chingford.
It was spring, we took walks in the country and spent hours
watching people play golf.”
Francis Steegmuller, a leading English-language biographer of Apollinaire, commented, “not that Faik Konica seems to have been in any way disreputable. Still, his eccentricities underline Apollinaire’s own. Including the eccentricity of taking all the way across London, to visit this revolutionary, with whom he had chosen to stay, a girl who had to be home by nine...” Steegmuller had trouble taking much of the whole topic seriously, and could not be expected to do adequate research on Apollinaire’s Balkan pals; the biographer offers a pedantic but wrong “correction” to Apollinaire’s description of his friend, and, after translating most of the poet’s portrait of the Albanian patriot into English, suggests that it was “at least half invented, probably.” In reality, it was 95 percent accurate, and the rest may be accounted for by miscommunications between Apollinaire and Faiku. Steegmuller went on to refer to “buffooneries,” such as the following: one evening Apollinaire tried everyone’s patience by bringing with him [to Alfred Jarry’s salon] a guest who was, or whom he declared to be, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper in Salonika, and solemnly requesting that particular consideration be shown this personage because his newspaper was "read by the Sultan himself.” One can easily imagine the testy laughter this apparent stunt provoked—except that, given Apollinaire’s associations with Faik Konica, it is very likely the guest was exactly who and what the poet claimed he was. He might even have been another notable Albanian patriot who would become quite famous in the West, the former Ottoman diplomat Ismail Qemali Vlorë.
But that is another story altogether.[iii]
There is already much about these tales that is distinctively “Apollinairean”:
the poet, who was an outsider of mixed Polish Jewish and Italian
ancestry, as the companion of a representative of a nation completely
unknown in western Europe then, and little better known now; Apollinaire
as an enthusiastic collaborator of Albania, an obscure periodical
which he seems to have viewed as no less worthy than the major Parisian
journals for which he wrote. The
saga of his tormented involvement with Annie Playden, and of her own life,
also possesses a rather Nabokovian quality.
Above all, there is the Borgesian sense of parallel universes, of
events behind a curtain, of a secret history that underpins much of the
contemporary sensibility. This
sense is always present in the contemporary Balkans, which seems like a
kind of counter-Europe—something beyond the title of the “other
Europe” so often used to describe the eastern half of the continent.
To
emphasize, there is something for which there seems no literary label,
though perhaps it is also “Nabokovian,” but with another sense, in the
contrast between the destinies of Annie Playden and Faik Konica in
Apollinaire scholarship. The
American experts found it easy to locate and interrogate Apollinaire’s
muse later in her life, writing about her eyes which retained the striking
blue color that inspired the poet. Yet
the life of a great Balkan intellectual and historical personage was
treated with cheerful disregard, as Albanians in general were dealt with
by the Western cultural hierarchies until the sudden intrusion of the
Kosovo war, in 1998-99, into global awareness.
How curious that Annie Playden should have gone for much of her
life, as discovered by the scholars,
without knowing anything about Apollinaire’s writerly interests and
later attainments; but how dismaying that the poet’s links to the
political destinies of a whole nation should have been completely
overlooked, or, at best, treated as a subject of trivial amusement. It
is nearly impossible to convey to a foreign audience the emotion with
which Albanian readers, especially Kosovars, would view these seemingly
minor incidents. The
collected works of Faik Konica were edited by the outstanding Kosovar
intellectuals of recent years, including Ibrahim Rugova, leader of the
Kosovar civic resistance to the Serbs for a decade and probable future
president of Kosovo. For
Albanians it is as if Americans were to read that Thomas Jefferson was an
intimate friend of William Blake, and that Blake had written The Songs
of Innocence and Experience at Monticello, with Jefferson’s works
having then been edited by Abraham Lincoln.
There
is another issue: the silence imposed on Faiku and his reputation by the
Albanian Communist regime of Enver Hoxha.
Mainly because of his residence in the U.S., but also because of
his Catholic education (which was absolute anathema to Hoxha), Faik Konica
was prominent on the long list of authors who could not even be mentioned
in Albania from 1945 to 1991, except negatively.
I learned of the whole history of Apollinaire and Faiku anecdote
because ninety years after Apollinaire’s trip to London, I read a
denunciation of Faiku by Ismail Kadare, the Albanian author who became
world-famous on subsidies from Hoxha—who is, in fact, the only
Albanian writer known in the world today, and whom I shall also discuss
further on. Kadare assailed
Faiku in terms I believed were hallucinated, as the “patron of European
decadents.”[iv]
Then in Illyria, the New York Albanian newspaper, I
found a reference to Faiku’s friendship with Apollinaire.
I looked it up in Apollinaire’s works, and there it was. But
this anecdote serves for more than an example of a coincidental meeting
among notable personalities. Central
European and Balkan literary verse traditions have nearly always developed
in response to currents in the West.
Yet this poetry has always had an extraordinary strength and
beauty, as if, in contact with a stimulating force from the exterior, the
poetry of the “other Europe” liberated hidden energies.
Notwithstanding the cult of folk poetry that has been maintained
locally, especially by Serb writers, the greatest south Slavic and
Albanian poets are glorious imitators of foreign models, not drinkers at
the wells of popular tradition. The earliest Balkan literary authors, as opposed to authors of religious works or memorial epigrams, and the creators of anonymous epics and popular ballads, appeared in the cities of the Dalmatian coast during the Croatian Renaissance of the 15th and following centuries. They included Marko Marulić (1450-1524), born in Split, and author of an epic in hexameters, Judita, first printed in Venice in 1521.[v] Marulić’s contemporaries and successors included a number of other talented versifiers, such as Hanibal Lucić (1485-1553), Petar Hektorović (1487-1572), author of a notable poem on fishing, Marin Držić (1508?-1567), and Ivan Gundulić (1589-1638).[vi] A vigorous tradition of poetry in Latin also existed in Croat Dalmatia at this time and for some centuries afterward, in which some of these poets also participated. Marulić, for example, wrote a Latin epic on the exploits of King David, Davidias, that was not printed until the middle of the 20th century. An impressive trilingual anthology, The Croatian Muses in Latin, with versions in English and Croatian accompanying the Latin originals, was issued in 1998, in a major series of English volumes printed under the rubric of Most/The Bridge, a literary review presenting Croatian writers in foreign languages. Unfortunately, these useful books are unavailable outside Croatia; finding an Anglo-American distributor for them would be a worthy task, as they include some of the most significant works I will discuss here. (I would also point out that some of the most important English-language volumes discussed here, printed in Croatia, Kosovo, and elsewhere, are not even to be found in the Library of Congress.) A school of Jewish authors in Latin also flourished in Dalmatia in the 16th century, exemplified by the Portuguese expellee Joăo Rodrigues, known as Amatus Lusitanus (1511-1658), author of a work extolling the Republic of Ragusa, or Dubrovnik, and it would be equally useful for a similar selection of his work to appear under Croatian auspices.[vii]
France Prešeren
The first modern poet in the South Slavic area was also a product
of external influence: France
Prešeren (1800-1849), lawyer
by profession, founder of Slovene literature and even of Slovene
nationality—rather like, to extend our earlier comparisons, Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Andrew Jackson in a single personality.
Prešeren was an
extremely great poet, whose biography and work are exemplary
of the influence of Romanticism in the Balkans.
But, as a representative of a minor language, with no more than
three million speakers in the whole world today, he has, predictably, been
ignored outside Slovenia and the former Yugoslavia.
Thus, his name does not appear in the notorious World
Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time,[viii]
which manages to include one
Slovene, Veno Taufer, no born Croats, no Bosnians (of any faith), two
Serbs—the irritatingly ubiquitous Vasko Popa (1922-1991) and a very great poet, Branko Miljković (1934-1961),
whom the Croats also claim with some justice—one Macedonian,
Slavko Janevski, and no Albanians.
It seems all too predictable that World
Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time
would slight Balkan authors; and I do not pretend that the survey I
present here is exhaustive, since it reflects my own preferences and
prejudices. But I believe it
unarguably a major injustice that Prešeren
should be consigned to global oblivion.
I will confess that having heard Slovenes of all classes and
attainments proclaim his praises over the years I was more than a little
skeptical, figuring this was merely a case of local pride in a local
yokel. I was absolutely
wrong. Having now read his
work in the original as well as in (inadequate) translations, I fully
recognize Prešeren as worthy
to stand among the finest poets of the 19th century, in any
language. Prešeren
is profoundly self-critical as well as lyrical.
Unfortunately, the only translations of his work now available are
a sort of doggerel, now tinkly, now galumphing, that cannot do him
justice; nevertheless, even in those rags his treasure shines through.
Prešeren’s
printed work is relatively slender, because he had the misfortune to come
under the influence of a Slovene linguistic crank, Jernej Kopitar, who
induced him to burn his early manuscripts—one of several
transgressions for which Kopitar himself deserves to burn in hell
throughout all eternity. Prešeren
wrote sonnets, ghazals, and an epic, Krst Pri Savici (The Baptism On
the Savica)—in other words, a fairly typical Romantic
output. But he is most
famous among Slovenes for his “Zdravljica” or “A Toast,” which has
become the Slovenian national anthem, as an expression of his standing as
the real creator of a Slovene national identity.
His sad-eyed portrait appears on the Slovene 1000 tolar
note.
Prešeren
wrote with great delicacy in his language, which he sought to promote, and
with effect and emotion about his coethnics; but he cannot be pigeon-holed
as a mere poetic patriot, much less a narrow nationalist.
While his outstanding work, Sonetni Venec (A Wreath of Sonnets)
begins and ends with the line “Poet tvoj nov Slovencam venec vije”
(“For Slovenes, I as poet will reap a wreath,”), he was an authentic
humanist and universalist, in accord with early Romantic values.
Thus, the real theme of Sonetni Venec is his
unrequited love for a Ljubljana woman.
Among his other works, he wrote a touchingly beautiful poem,
“Judovsko Dekle” (“The Jewish Girl”), about a maiden
“born a daughter of Abraham” who falls in love with a
Christian, but who puts loyalty to her religion before her desires.
The poem is splendid in its simplicity, but also remarkable in its
depth of insight, and deserves an article-length study of its own.
Prešeren,
whose own love life was unhappy because of his rebellious habits and
literary ambitions, clearly identified the devotion of the Jewish girl to
a higher duty with his own refusal to conform to the narrow-minded society
of 19th century Ljubljana. In addition, although it is
unstated, one must imagine he saw in the unredeemed status of Jewry in the
Habsburg lands, no less than in the world at large, a parallel to the
misfortune of his own small and neglected people.
What a lesson that the Slovenes made his life miserable, as they
truly did, and then recognized in him the greatest advocate of their
nationhood! “The Jewish
Girl” is especially fascinating because 19th century
Slovenia, unlike the other South Slav lands, had virtually no significant
Jewish communities on its territory, and the poem is actually set in
Moravia. Of all the
poets whose works I have read since first approaching the Balkans in the
mid-1980s, none more cries out for decent translation and serious
commentary in English than France Prešeren.[ix]
Romanticism and the South Slavic Poets
Romanticism swept the South Slav nations in the 19th
century, a topic belonging more to the political history of the region,
and of the evolution of “Yugoslav” (i.e. South Slav, from Jug,
south) identity. This subject
is adequately treated in many books, and I will not review it at length
here.[x] However, it should be noted that French Romanticism was to become the long-dominant influence in South Slavic literary life, partially for political reasons. The history of the Balkans had changed forever with the conquest of Slovenia and northern Croatia, which were Habsburg possessions, by the armies of Napoleon, in 1806. As elsewhere in Europe, the eruption of Bonapartist modernity undermined the entirety of the old order. The first seeds of a new, common “South Slavic” identity were thus planted, for the French conception of the nation, as a unifying factor suppressing local distinctions, began to penetrate the minds of the Slovenes and Croats. Two years before, the first significant anti-Ottoman rebellion had broken out in Serbia. Although the French were expelled from the Adriatic and the region returned to traditionalist, Habsburg rule, in the 1830s-40s a movement known as “Illyrianism” was born as a call to unification of the entire South Slav family, initiated by a Croat intellectual, Ljudevit Gaj. It was under the influence of the “Illyrians” that the “Yugoslav” name for all these diverse peoples was coined. The 19th century Romantic notion that all the South Slavs, like the French, the Italians, and the Germans, could voluntarily forsake their cultural differences and become a single nation was especially strong among the Croats.
Likewise, the “infiltration” of literary Romanticism was seen
in the best poetry written in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina in the late
19th and early 20th century.
Its exponents included five poets identified, each in a distinctive
way, with Bosnia-Hercegovina: Silvije
Strahimir Kranjčević (1865-1909), Aleksa Šantić
(1868-1924), Jovan Dučić (1871-1943), Musa Ćazim Ćatić
(1878-1915), and Augustin “Tin” Ujević (1891-1955). Dučić and Ujević, as well as Antun
Gustav Matoš (1873-1914), who lived in Paris and died in Zagreb, were
also dedicated vagabonds. But
Kranjčević was a political nonconformist forced to migrate
around Bosnia-Hercegovina, and Ćatić was somewhat “French,”
i.e. Romantic and radical. The
latter was the first Bosnian Muslim author to break with Oriental
(Turkish, Persian, and Arabic) literary forms, which, with undeniable
distinction, had dominated Bosnian Muslim literature until that time.[xi]
None
of these authors are known outside former Yugoslavia, even in occasional
translation. In the
case of Kranjčević, a fin-de-siecle literary rebel born in Senj,
Croatia, but who died in Sarajevo, this is perhaps justifiable.
Kranjčević’s “Parnassian” style, although
marvellous, is extremely difficult to translate; Matoš, a very great poet
reminiscent of Apollinaire or Cendrars, is also resistant to translation.
Both these poets were identified in their time with the renaissance
of Croatian national identity. But
none of the others should elude study and appreciation by foreign readers.
Šantić, a Serb from Mostar in Hercegovina, wrote many poems
that were set to music and adopted into the repertoire of Muslim popular
singers. His “Emina”
seems a variation on the theme of Prešeren’s “The Jewish Girl”—it is a gorgeous verse about a Serb youth who briefly (“in a single
glance”) sees the unforgettably beautiful daughter of a Muslim imam. The sung version has become inextricably associated with the
town of Mostar and has even been called the unofficial anthem of the old,
multiethnic Bosnia-Hercegovina.
It begins, Last night, when I came back from the warm bathhouse, Muslim
singers like the famous Himzo Polovina typically let out an “oh” of
awe at the beauty of the girl, before pronouncing her name. “Emina”
is widely performed today, with a certain sadness considering the
destruction visited on Mostar during the recent war.
Musa Ćazim Ćatić also wrote love poems that have
been set to music and become popular as Muslim love songs, or sevdahlinke,
a Bosnian term derived from the Turkish word sevdah, for love, but
which also indicates pain, passion, grief, and torment.
One of the most beautiful and popular sevdahlinke, which I
have here done into English, is his “Kradem ti se u večeri,”
(“I steal to you in the evening”): I
steal to you in the evening, In
the evening, under your window, To
throw you a bunch of hyacinth, So
that flowers may tell you, How
much, how strongly I love you; I’m
dying, my love, for you. You
do not care about my suffering, For
the pain within my heart. The
flower withers, youth dries up, Sevdah
fades into nothingness. May
Allah give you to another,
While I’m dying, my love, for you.[xiii]
(This
translation conforms to the sinuous, Oriental melody of the song.) Jovan
Dučić, a Serb born in Trebinje in eastern Hercegovina—an
exquisite town now completely “cleansed” of Muslims – lived in Paris
before joining the Serbian diplomatic service.
He died in 1943 in Gary, Ind., once known as “Serbian Gary” for
its large émigré population. Curiously, his reinterment in Trebinje
toward the end of 2000 provided the first instance in which Serbian reform
leader Vojislav Koštunica visited Bosnia-Hercegovina.
Dučić also wrote wonderfully about love, as in his
“Pesma Ženi” or “Poem to a Woman,” which begins: You
are my moment, and my dream, and radiance, My
word in the tumult; my footstep, and sin; You’re
only beautiful while you are secret; You’re
only true when I’m desperate to have you.
(Translation
mine)
Augustin
Ujević, who signed his name as “Tin” and is familiarly referred
to by that nickname alone, was a different sort of poet.
A complete Bohemian, he lived on the edge of survival for years, in
Paris as well as Belgrade, Sarajevo, Split, and Zagreb.
A political as well as literary free spirit, he was associated with
the extremist youths of the Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia)
movement, which organized the assassination of Austrian crown prince Franz
Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo in 1914, bringing about World
War I. According to the
contemporary poet Vlado Gotovac, Tin gloried in being called “the
Baudelaire from Imotski,” a rural district of Croatia where he had
his early schooling. His
work is extremely varied, and of all the poets in this group, his verse is
that which, for its versatility and popularity, seems most unjustly
neglected by foreigners. His
“Pomorci” (“Seafarers”), which I have translated here, describes
the emigration of Croatians from the Dalmatian coast, including to the New
World: Oh
sea, unplowed field, on which neither basil nor quince bloom, sea
with the smell of iodine and the corrosion of salt, glorious
image of nature, in your deeps I sink with my pain like
a treasure that will never emerge from the pearls’ hidden place. Easy
it is to weep, but fine to be serene as the sun and the sea, Adriatic,
on your shore the fishermen’s nets lie ragged; and
you remind me of the mythical monsters of the prophet Jonah, long
ago they called out: Venice; and now, America; Companion
to the genius of the Atlantic and the Pacific! Old
is the song of the galley slave, the toiler at the oar, new
is the song of the worker, from California; I
don’t know which is sadder, But
certainly each is sad, monotonous, nothing relaxing. War
dies out, far away, in forgotten borderlands, where
neither mourning nor sadness nor reason will loom large, All
there is monotonous like your soft waves And
words from the high seas write over the shore. But
only they could do it, free captains, whose
grandparents were pirates, on the waters freely singing; you
people will never again be chained and
you will be able to die knowing you will be happy. In
the embrace of the waters martyrs of the waters, under
the world’s storms devotees of the sea, worldly
yes from bright deaths no greater pleasures will come and
yes the costume of fate alone is necessary. And
when the birds come with the serene song of their wings on
the limitless sea the sails will appear festive. So
in some dilapidated temple with the smell of old age on
whatever shore stubbornly eaten by water iodine
and lightning flashes spurt at a distance in the heat breath
of the sea so clean over priestly garments; and
there under glass, little pictures of true things only, with
flags of the whole navy in the little jobs, a
pledge from the sailor’s house out of the age of unknown coins; a
prayer to God, with folded hands in the Boat. Yes,
I know the wind... on the sea... from the springtime of wind... Billows...
deafening murmur... and creaking... Dust...
from whence comes dust on the sea... Dust...
in the eyes blood... yes reddened eyes... blind... blood
flowing in the eyes from the dust the sea throws up... bloody
powder... bloody waves... bloody rain... what
cracks in the ship... What,
if not their firm bones like people’s bones when
bursting under strangling pressure the
ship cracks up... falls into the abyss... and
there remain neither planks nor pallets in the shipwreck... no
grass grows on the surface of the sea... like
the fanciful greenery at the bottom of the pit or graveyard moss there in the grey of the mountain. The Croat dissident Communist Ante Ciliga (1898-1992), an early escapee from the Soviet GULag and author of one of the best analyses of the Bolshevik horror, The Russian Enigma, recalled at the end of his life how, as a 15-year old high school student in Mostar, still under the Habsburgs, he “went running to enroll” in a French language course. Ciliga’s first great influence had been Matoš, especially his articles in the Croatian press, from Paris, on French intellectual life, including Baudelaire and Rimbaud.[xiv] In the aftermath of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, extreme modernism extended its roots in Yugoslavia, which had come into existence in 1918-19—first in Slovenia under the influence of various European movements, then in Serbia with the emergence of a Yugoslav Surrealist group, which commuted between Paris and Belgrade.
Srečko
Kosovel Once
again, then, the penetration of the South Slavic region by a major new
intellectual trend began in Slovenia, on the Italian and Austrian
frontier, where the earliest extreme avant-gardist, Srečko Kosovel
(1904-26) appeared. In his
brief life, Kosovel gave Slovenia quite a shock with his boldly
experimental work, even though it was frankly derivative of the tendencies
in France, Germany, Russia, and Italy.
He worked through three phases of what might have seemed like
fashionable imitation—impressionism,
expressionism, and constructivism—except that he adopted all these
styles at the same time, and understood each in his own way.
Like Prešeren before him, he was somewhat neglected during his
lifetime. Living in a zone
where Slovenes fell under Italian rule after 1920, Kosovel, again like Prešeren,
united a dedication to the spirit of the new with a defense of Slovene
nationhood against the aggression of Italian fascism, which included raids
on Slovene cultural institutions in Trieste.
Thus, he was also influenced by futurism, but reacted strongly
against its Italian imperialist and fascist pretensions.
He launched his own unsuccessful literary journal, Lepa Vida
(Beautiful Vision). However,
only about 40 of his poems were published in his lifetime, and his most
interesting collection, Integrali (Integrals)—poems
sometimes reminiscent of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, elsewhere of
the more extreme futurist examples—did not appear until the
late ‘60s. We
are lucky to have a complete English edition of Integrals,
published in Slovenia.[xv]
Here, from that translation, is Kosovel’s poem “Europe is
Dying:” Europe
is dying. The League
of Nations and the apothecary, both are a
lie. Operations!
Revolutions! On a grey
road I appear. Brown
leaves are falling from trees, and only
one thing I fear. When these
trees are black, no longer verdant and grey
fields and small
houses and I will
scream then
everything, everywhere around will be
silent. The Yugoslav Surrealists There
are several other interesting aspects about the history of the Yugoslav
Surrealists. Like their
French mentors, they became Communists, though most of the Yugoslavs
remained within the party. But
their fate was different, and to understand it we must skip one or two
decades ahead. Surrealism
flourished in a number of countries that had not previously experienced
major avant-garde movements, such as Czechoslovakia,
Romania, and Greece, as well as Yugoslavia.
But Czechoslovakia and Romania, which produced excellent surrealist
poets and plastic artists, saw all of them on the margin within their
countries; then, they were either bought off or driven into exile by the
coming of Communist rule after 1945. By contrast, the Greek surrealists, exemplified by Odysseus
Elytis, Nikos Gatsos, and others, completely conquered literary life on
their territory and ended up as national idols, with Elytis winning a
Nobel Prize, but had no impact in painting or sculpture. Yugoslav surrealism was weak in plastic creation, but greatly influenced the poetic idiom in the country, as represented by such names as Alexander Vučo (1897-1985), Dušan Matić (1898-1979), Milan Dedinac (1902-57), and Oskar Davičo (1909-89), all of whom, but especially the last, became major cultural figures. Vučo and Davičo saw translations of turgid novels they wrote about the Tito Partisans during the second world war published in Britain in the 1950s, in a series that included one magnificent work, the Croatian literary master Miroslav Krleža’s Return of Philip Latinovicz, alongside which they look very pale.[xvi] None of the Czechoslovak, Romanian, or Greek surrealists committed to Communism with the seriousness of the Yugoslavs. But in addition, none of the other groups benefited from a situation such as existed in the Yugoslav Communist movement under Tito. The Yugoslav surrealists, once they had proven their loyalty to the party, rose to great prominence in the Yugoslav cultural and political hierarchy. One of them, the poet Konstantin (Koča) Popović (1908-92), author of some of the most luxuriantly novel surrealist texts, later served in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and became a leading officer in Tito’s Partisan army, and then a major figure of the Yugoslav state. Popović would live out what was arguably the most “surreal” career of any surrealist anywhere. Aside from serving from 1953 to 1965 as Yugoslav foreign minister, he was several times head of the Yugoslav delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. Most remarkably, during the period of extreme tension between Stalin and Tito after their break in 1948, he conducted negotiations with Western military representatives, in his capacity as Chief of Staff, for modernization of the Yugoslav Army in anticipation of his country siding with NATO in a war against the Warsaw Pact. In 1932, he and Marko Ristić had collaborated on a surrealist “Project for a Phenomenology of the Irrational.” Unlike their surrealist comrades in Czechoslovakia and Romania, the Yugoslavs obviously had nothing to fear from cultural commissars after 1945. (The Yugoslavs were likewise the only contingent of International Brigaders in a Communist country that avoided being purged and murdered en masse, and which also attained high positions).[xvii] Miroslav Krleža and Yugoslav Surrealism
Krleža was close to Ristić and Davičo,
and in 1939, soon after the main Soviet purges, Krleža launched a new
literary review, Pečat (The Seal) in Zagreb. Its editorial board included Ristić and two other
authors already labelled “Trotskyites” by none other than Tito
himself, who had taken over control of the Yugoslav Communist apparatus as
a Stalinist, at the height of the purges in 1937.
In Russia the “Trotskyite” charge was a death sentence; in
Paris, Breton, the mentor of Ristić, had become the most prominent
defender of Trotsky in the European literary scene.
In reality, there was no Trotskyist movement in Yugoslavia.
The truly noble Krleža defended his accused compatriots, and more;
he went on the offensive, and in December 1939, with Stalin and Hitler now
allied and World War II having begun, dedicated an entire issue of Pečat
to a polemic, “Dijalektički Antibarbarus” (“The Dialectical
Antibarbarus”) in defense of artistic freedom, against the Stalinists in
the Yugoslav party’s intellectual cadre. The former surrealist Koča Popović, sadly, rallied to the orthodox elements, which included, as one of their leaders, none other than the Montenegrin writer Milovan Djilas, later to gain world fame as a critic of Communism. But in those days Djilas was a fanatical and even violent Stalinist, and Krleža later admitted that Djilas’ behavior in the intraparty quarrels over modernism inspired him with a literal anxiety for his physical well-being. Nevertheless, the Croat author pressed on as if utterly fearless. Krleža’s group was purged from the party in 1940, but not all the party members were willing to concur. The author Kočo Racin, considered the creator of modern literature in Macedonian, was expelled from the party because he declared that while he was willing to separate from the Krleža group, he could not denounce them, since, in his words, “because of him… I became a Communist, which for me means: I became a man!” The brave Krleža also opposed the Soviet invasion of Poland and Finland. But Tito was not Stalin, and Krleža, Ristić, and Davičo were eventually returned to favor, without, let it be said, any apology or renunciation on their parts. Indeed, Tito later turned against Djilas, who after his fall from the heights of party power, reinvented himself as a democrat and pursued a new career in the West. Popović died during the Bosnian war; some had spoken of him as the only figure among Tito’s heirs who could have kept Yugoslavia together, but it was too late, for him as for his country.[xviii] Four Major Figures: Popa, Miljković, Mihalić, Kocbek In
the wake of the carnage in Kosovo, no matter how one feels about the
policies pursued by Yugoslavia and the West there in 1999, all such
manifestations have a distressingly “Wagnerian” feel.
One wonders why, out of the Yugoslav matrix, only Serb literature,
including such stars as Popa, has been sold in the West—and with so
heavy a burden of nationalist sentimentality.
Certainly nobody has gone out of their way to translate the love
lyrics of the Serb surrealists. And
it is extremely doubtful that Croatian verses on the 10th
century King Tomislav would have gotten much of an audience among Western
poets and readers, much less have excited the enthusiasm of Octavio Paz.
I consider the Serbo-American poet and translator Charles Simic, a
Pulitzer Prize winner, to be an accomplice in this campaign of
intellectual propaganda. For
example, his The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry,
spares us Popa on St. Sava, but also ignores Šantić, Dučić,
the latter really an absurd oversight, and Davičo.
However, we are offered a selection from the surrealist Vučo
on the Slavic Christianizers Cyril and Methodius, icons of Serb
nationalism (even though they were Macedonians), with the charming lines,
grab the lustful second wife of some
Moslem
Before the rapacious mocking scissors of
madness…
Although I may be accused of political
correctness, I find the sentiments seemingly expressed here more than a
little distasteful in the light of the Bosnian war of 1992-95, in which
quite a few wives of Muslims encountered literal “scissors of madness”
in the hands of Serbs. Further
along, we find an unabashed promoter of maudlin Serb legendry, Milorad
Pavić (1929-) represented with a poem on the “Great Serbian
Migration 1690,” another favorite item of nationalist Serbism.
Pavić is considered a fraud by many readers in the former
Yugoslav lands, but Simic’s promotion of him is inexhaustible.
But the worst failing of the Simic enterprise is that its chief
executive officer has a tin ear.
The same anthology includes a really terrible mauling of a poem by
Branko Miljković, whose date of death (1961) Simic also manages to
get wrong. A great many
people worthy of trust consider Miljković the best Yugoslav poet
after World War II, and it is interesting to note that because he died in
Zagreb, Croats also claim him. The
poem in question, “Frula,” is titled “Shepherd’s Flute” by Simic
and appears on page 83 of The Horse Has Six Legs.
I will leave it to readers to look his version up. Here is mine, from which I have taken the title of this
essay:
The gentle fevers of flowers,
disturbed,
you sense.
Behold, oh plants you bow again.
Seeking the drunken south and a
disappeared summer,
Hurry, sing to the holiday of the world.
Repeat the day because the ungrateful
body
returns shadow to the sun and twists the
song.
Give a bird back to the lonely man.
Under empty skies falconers weep.
Summon wild ducks from the mountains by
tradition.
Merge the senses with a song so they
shall not decay
In the bodily night.
Let less and less be
Visible so that you realize memory.
Empty my knees and seize my heart
Hurry, circle, sing, deceive bad fortune
Smederevo is open, birds are cooing
Under empty skies falconers weep.
Smederevo is a city; the poem is rhymed
in the original, which makes a considerable difference.
It is a difficult poem in Serbian, to say nothing of English;
Miljković was a difficult poet, who also distinguished himself as a
translator of Osip Mandelshtam into Serbian.[xix]
Yet if such a poem merits attempting in translation, it is worth a
better try than that made by Simic. Simic
proves he is merely lazy when, for example, he allows the first word in
line five, “ponovi,” “repeat,” to be printed as “repent.”[xx]
The fine Croatian poet Slavko Mihalić
(b. 1928) also fared poorly in his refashioning by the Simic tin works.
The Mihalić collection in English, Atlantis: Selected Poems
1953-1982, translated by Simic with Peter Kastmiler, includes the same
lame and anemic presentation, although Mihalić is one of the best
Croatian poets of the post-1945 period.
Kastmiler bungles the end of Mihalić’s beautiful poem
“Približavanje Oluje” (“Approaching Storm”) by rendering the
lines, “Dakako ovo će mjesto u mojem sjećanju ostati svetu/Molim
te brže koračaj i nemoj se osvrtati” as:
Of course this place will remain
sacred in my memory.
Please walk faster Vera and stop looking
back.
In fact, the name “Vera” does not
appear at the conclusion of the original poem, though it does at the
beginning and elsewhere. I
would render the whole poem as: Look at those clouds, Vera, why are you silent I’m not, by God, an animal, but here’s the rain How it suddenly gets colder We’re far from town Of course, Vera, I can never forget what you’ve given me Now we are one, so how should we speak Yellow clouds typically mean hailstones All is now still, the crickets and the wheat
If you wish, we can stay here I’m afraid for you, for me it’s nothing Lightning is dangerous in the fields And we’re now at the highest place (and so damned alone) Tonight the farmers will curse at the grain scattered by the storm I wouldn’t be able to depend so much on change Don’t cry, Vera, it’s only nerves And they sense the storm I’m telling you, life is in every way much simpler Here are the first raindrops, now the deluge begins Button your skirt, watch out, even the flowers close up I’d never forgive myself if something happened to you Obviously, this place in my memory will remain holy. Please
hurry up and don’t look back.[xxi] I am quite fond of this poem; it summarizes much of which I have experienced in the human landscape of the Balkans, and seems to stand as a general statement of existential experience in modern times. Its diction is original and complex. But the Simic “industry” seldom, if ever, conveys the special qualities of the original. His style of translation is less Slavic than slovenly, as if he realizes that most American poetry readers will never attempt the originals, and therefore he may foist on them whatever comes first from his pen.
Mihalić was a founder of the Most/The
Bridge enterprise, in 1966, but was fired from it in 1972, during the
repression that followed the “Croatian Spring” of 1971 – a brief
period in which restrictions on national culture in Tito’s Yugoslavia
were relaxed. He has also
translated into Croatian another Slovene whose work we are lucky to have
in a good English translation, the Catholic social poet Edvard Kocbek
(1904-81). I recommend a
reading of Kocbek’s work to all who really want to grasp the
contradictions of South Slavic history.
He manages to encompass virtually all the qualities of his
forebears and contemporaries: folklore,
epic traditions, Slovene nationality, nature, the struggle for freedom,
deep religiosity, dedication to truth, and an exceptional lyric sense.
The collection Edvard Kocbek, translated by Michael Biggins,
has so many fine verses in it I find it difficult to choose an example.
Here is one untitled poem from it:
We walk, exhausted and deeply changed.
None of us remembers where or when, but
somewhere we sang around a poplar and
slept beneath
steep hills; sometimes we go downward as
though
for night work at a mill, at others we
climb up,
as if expected at a winepress.
A windmill jerks, its faint creaking follows
us down the valley floor.
There is no center to this
dark space, I constantly strain forward,
my loved one is far off.
A cold shudder courses through
my body, how much I would like to see her
smartly, autumnally
dressed, ready for a night journey, we
have so far to go.
The biography of Kocbek demonstrates that
not all was love and liberty in Tito’s Yugoslavia.
Although the author participated in the antifascist struggle in
Slovenia and held major responsibilities in the regime after 1945, the
publication of a collection of four short stories, Strah in Pogum (Fear
and Courage), in 1952, led to his exclusion from politics and a bar on
his publications, the latter for more than a decade.[xxii] Kocbek got in trouble in Communist Yugoslavia because of his Catholic humanism. Of course, given that Tito was the dictator, it is a strange aspect of the country’s literary history that, because of his opposition to Stalin, some “non-conforming” Yugoslav authors, especially in the later period, took a strong pro-Soviet position. Although the Croatian woman poet Irena Vrkljan (b. 1930) cannot be considered a Stalinist, she did commit to print a long and unfortunate essay on the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetayeva, Marina or About Biography, that has been published in the West. In it Vrkljan identifies her own biographical details with those of Tsvetayeva, in a syrupy, sophomoric manner, which is no great sin; she also offers an interesting description of the early death of Branko Miljković. Yet a major aspect of her book involves a seemingly wilful obfuscation of the most tragic and even outrageous aspect of Tsvetayeva’s life—namely, the long association of the Russian author with a Stalinist secret police spy and assassin, Sergei Efron.[xxiii] Vlado
Gotovac After his death, I myself contributed translations, composed in collaboration with the Croatian writer and cultural activist Mate Maras, to a memorial collection of Gotovac in translation, although I doubt Vlado himself would have authorized it, as he was uncertain about whether his work would survive Englishing. His work is concise, often brief, but profoundly eloquent. The commemorative volume, simply titled Vlado Gotovac, was published by Most/The Bridge in 2003. I am proud to describe it as the most beautiful book in the series.[xxiv] Vlado Gotovac was a gentle, reflective personality. One of his best poems reads (in my translation): I never thought of leaving the angel The angel that can do nothing for me The angel that can do nothing against me The angel that glimmers constantly throughout my space The angel that does not save me from either pain or happiness The angel that only excuses I will never end my combat with this omnipotent spirit I would need him for one more life If I die let it be in time to help him Another outstanding poem, “Lazarus’ Canticles,” begins: From the bottom of the darkness of the exiled Who after being wise hunters turned into servants I have salvaged my song. The memorial volume includes a memoir of his experience in prison, when Communist guards seized from him a copy of the poems of Mansur al-Hallaj, a ninth-century Islamic mystic executed for heresy in Baghdad, after declaring “ana ul-haqq,” or “I am God [in the divine attribute of Truth.” But “Hallaj was not thwarted,” Gotovac explained—by which he meant that the voice of free inquiry will always prevail, uniting a medieval Muslim poet like Hallaj with a modern Catholic poet like Gotovac. Much has been said in praise of the Sufi poet Rumi, but I know nothing more eloquent in celebration of Islamic spiritual traditions than the recollection of Gotovac, who placed Rumi, along with such other Sufis as Hallaj and Suhrawardi, on an equal level with St. Augustine, Holderlin, Melville, Apollinaire, Mandelstam, and others as the master writers of civilization. That sort of unity is Croatia at its best and the reason Vlado Gotovac needs to be remembered. He died in Rome; like the next author I will discuss, as well as the best Albanian poets, such as Lasgush Poradeci and Martin Camaj, he was deeply influenced by Italian poetry. Viktor
Vida The Croatian poet Viktor Vida (1913-60) died before Gotovac, and in very different circumstances: he committed suicide in Argentine exile. But he also stood for an ideal of Croatian national integrity and opposition. His early work appeared in Krleža’s Pečat, and possessed an anticlerical and leftist flavor. However, during the second world war he worked in Italy in a news agency associated with the collaborationist regime in Croatia, and with the coming of the Tito regime he chose not to return to his native land. He worked for some time in the Vatican, and his verse took a religious turn. Nevertheless, he remained in some sense a man of the left, and was treated as such by the émigré social-democratic intellectual Bogdan Raditsa, a former Tito official, among others. Regarding his move to Italy during the fascist era, at a time when his native town, Boka Kotorska was a section of Croatia annexed to Italy, thus making him an Italian subject, Vida wrote, “I didn’t go to Italy with the intention of voting in the elections there, but simply to retain my physical integrity…Thousands and thousands did the same thing, [for] one reason or another, and well-meaning and reasonable people do not make a fuss about it.” (It should be noted that Boka Kotorska was annexed a second time, and is now part of Montenegro, rather than Croatia, although its population continues to speak Croatian.) Regardless of his personal philosophy, however, Vida was a profoundly gifted writer. The above excerpt from a late polemic appears in his extremely valuable Collected Poems, translated into English and published in Croatia in 1998, also in the Most/The Bridge series.[xxv] Unfortunately, however, the ‘Americanization’ of world poetry that has induced Slovenes and others to write unrhymed and unmetered verse has also encouraged the translation of beautiful verse that was composed in rhyme and meter as if it were written in free verse. I previously indicated this problem in the case of Branko Miljković. Here is my adapted translation of the poem “Sužanj vremena” (“Time’s Captive”), which appears in the mentioned edition: I don’t know, what I am, where I am, where I am going, only this mysterious body is my witness, that from Fullness I was torn away, into time between Nothing and Everything, wandering and alone. I don’t know, where I am, nor if I may be dreaming, I dream a staircase of Night in the desert of the living, and ivy winds around my trunk, and from my eyes I clear it, remove it and lift the eyelid of the dream from the crevice, where “I” falls. But He through the wall of jasper stares unblinking in all my motions and rings he gives me a sign, that for me he conceived the world, the sun’s cup, the wing of darkness. I feel time like sand falling in an hourglass, as at the doorway of moonlight, an unnoticed ray. The black bird of Night settles on my shoulder.
[ii]
Citations from Guillaume Apollinaire and interview materials on Annie
Playden, see Steegmuller, Francis, Apollinaire,
Poet Among the Painters, 1963.
Also see Destani, Bejtullah, ed., Faik Konitza: Selected
Correspondence, 1896-1942, London, Learning Design Ltd., 2000, and
my short work, Schwartz, Stephen, Ëndërrime
në shqip/Dreaming in Albanian,
Skopje/Shkup, Fakti, 2003. [iii] The memoirs of Ismail Qemali Vlorë constitute a classic of Balkan and Ottoman historiography. The first edition appeared as Story, Somerville, ed., The Memoirs of Ismail Kemal Bey, London, Constable, [1920], an expensive rarity. The volume was reprinted as The Memoirs of Ismail Kemal Vlora and His Work for the Independence of Albania, Tirana, Toena, 1997. The memoirs describe Ismail Qemali Vlorë’s collaboration with Faik Konica on Albania. [iv] Kadare, Ismail, “The Literature of Socialist Realism is Developing in Struggle Against the Bourgeois and Revisionist Pressure,” Tirana: Albania Today, 3, 1977. [v] See notes on Marulić in Pavletić, Vlatko, 100 Pjesnika Književnosti Jugoslavenskih Naroda, Zagreb, Mladost, 1984.
[vi] On Gundulić, see Pavletić, ibid., hereafter Pavletić (I). Selections from Lucić, Hektorović and Držić as well as the Latin tradition are included without biographies in Pavletić, Vlatko, Zlatna Knjiga Hrvatskog Pješnistva od Početaka do Danas, Zagreb, Matica Hrvatska, 1991, hereafter Pavletić (II). [vii] Published by the Croatian Writers Association, Trg bana Jelačića 7, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia, e-mail [email protected]. [viii] Ed. by Washburn, Katherine, John S. Major, and Clifton Fadiman, New York, Norton, 1998. [ix] For the life of Prešeren, and Slovene originals of his poems, but not the translations, see Prešeren, France, Poems/Pesmi, Klagenfurt/Ljubljana/Vienna, Hermagoras Verlag, 1999. [x] I will, however, recommend my own Kosovo: Background to a War, London, Anthem Press, 2000, and the various works cited therein.
[xi] For biographies of Kranjčević, Šantić, Dučić (with the original of the poem cited here), Matoš, and Ujević, see Pavletić (I).
[xii] For the original text of Šantić, see Šantić, Aleksa, Emina, Sarajevo, Sarajevo Publishing, 1998. [xiii] Ćatić’s lyric is performed on the CD Mostar Sevdah Reunion, World Connection, WC 43011; a better rendition by Himzo Polovina is unavailable outside Bosnia-Hercegovina. [xiv]
Schwartz,
Stephen, “Ante Ciliga 1898-1992,” New York: Journal of Croatian
Studies, 1993-94. This
text may also be found at the website of the British magazine Revolutionary
History. [xv] Kosovel, Srečko, Integrals, Tr. By Nike Kocijančič Pokorn, Katarina Jerin, Philip Burt, Ljubljana, Slovene Writers Association, 1998. [xvi] Vučo, Alexander, The Holidays, and Davičo, Oskar, The Poem, both tr. by Alec Brown, London, Lincolns-Prager, 1959. On Krleža’s Latinovicz, see Schwartz, Stephen, “Five Yugoslav Classics,” New York: The New Criterion, May 2000, to be reprinted in my Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan Jewish Notebook, forthcoming. [xvii] Biographies of Matić, Dedinac, and Davičo, see Pavletić (I). A useful account of Serbian surrealism is Kapidžić-Osmanagić, Hanifa, Hrestomatija Srpskog Nadrealizma, Sarajevo, Svjetlost, 1970. On Popović, see Kapor, Čedo, Za Mir i Progres u Svijetu, Sarajevo, n.p., 1999 (memorial volume on Yugoslavs in the Spanish civil war); on the International Brigaders in Yugoslavia see Alba, Víctor, and Stephen Schwartz, Spanish Marxism vs. Soviet Communism: A History of the P.O.U.M., New Brunswick, Transaction, 1988.
[xviii] On the Pečat affair, see Banac, Ivo, With Stalin Against Tito, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1988; on Krleža, also see Schwartz, “Five Yugoslav Classics,” op. cit. in note 16.
[xix] A selection is included in Bogdanović, Nana, ed., Moderna ruska poezija, Preveli Danilo Kiš i dr., Beograd, Nolit, 1975. [xx] Simic, Charles, The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry, St. Paul, The Grey Wolf Press, 1992. On the intellectual misadventures, which is a kind description, of Milorad Pavić, see Anzulović, Branimir, Heavenly Serbia, New York, NYU Press, 1999. The original of Miljković’s poem appears in Pavletić (I).
[xxi] Mihalić, Slavko, Atlantis: Selected Poems 1953-1982, Tr. By Charles Simic and Peter Kastmiler, Greenfield Center, N.Y., The Greenfield Review Press, 1983. For the original of “Approaching Storm” see Mihalić, Slavko, Sabrane Pjesme, Zagreb, Naprijed, 1998..
[xxii] Edvard Kocbek, Translated by Michael Biggins, Ljubljana, Slovene Writers’ Association, 1995. [xxiii]
Vrkljan, Irena, Marina or About Biography, Tr. By Celia
Hawkesworth, Zagreb, The Bridge, 1991.
This work has also been published in the U.S. by Northwestern
University Press. Further
on the Tsvetayeva case see Schwartz, Stephen, Intellectuals and
Assassins, Anthem Press, London, 2000, and Brossat, Alain, Agents
de Moscou, Paris, Gallimard, 1988.Sergei Efron was a writer of
some talent who had been linked with the terrorist People’s Will
movement of tsarist times, and had been Tsvetayeva’s lover beginning
in her teenage years.
With the coming of the revolution, Efron had joined the
anti-Bolshevik armies. Tsvetayeva
returned to Moscow, intending at first to join him; but she was forced
to stay in the Red zone. She
was respected as a poet by the Bolshevik intellectuals, although
Efron’s service on the other side was well known.
She professed to hate the Communists and wrote many poems in
honor of the White soldiery. But she also worked briefly for the Bolshevik government,
under, of all people, Stalin.
In 1921, while she was still in
Moscow, Tsvetayeva received news that Efron had survived the civil war
and emigrated to Czechoslovakia.
Marina immediately joined him.
In the late 1920s Efron began to
express pro-Soviet sympathies. These
became so pronounced as to make Tsvetayeva an object of suspicion in
the Russian exile community in Paris.
Eventually, Efron became involved with a Russian-speaking Paris
group operating as a front for the secret police or N.K.V.D., the
Union for Repatriation of Russians Abroad.
The political life of the Efron
family seems to have proceeded at a rather lazy pace until the
assassination in Switzerland—on September 4, 1937, at the height
of the Soviet purges—of a middle aged man bearing a passport
identifying him as a Czech citizen named Hans Eberhard.
Eberhard’s real name was Ignacy
Porecki. He was also
known as Ignace Reiss, and was a senior official of Stalin’s secret
police. A veteran of the Communist International or Comintern, as well
as Red Army Intelligence (G.R.U.), he had played a crucial role in
Soviet espionage in the West.
Ten weeks before his death, Reiss had
begun a protest against the purges in the U.S.S.R., which had just
decapitated the Red armed forces, and from which Stalin had ordered
extended to Republican Spain, in the middle of its civil war.
Reiss broke with Stalin in a thundering letter, returned his
decorations, proclaimed his solidarity with the exiled Leon Trotsky,
and warned against an extension of the N.K.V.D. into the West,
specifically, the Spanish Republic.
His liquidation came almost immediately.
The Reiss murder was a central event
in the history of Soviet intelligence operations, leading to more
deaths and involving personnel also assigned to the murder of Trotsky.
A complicated trail led the Swiss police, seeking Reiss’s
killers, to France. With
the cooperation of the French police, the center of the terrorist
group was located in Paris, in the office of the Union for
Repatriation of Russians Abroad and in the person of Efron.
Efron escaped the police net and returned to the U.S.S.R. via
Republican Spain, but the scandal alienated many Russian exiles from
Tsvetayeva, including the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who agreed with
the widespread belief that she was a knowing and deceitful Soviet
agent. To make matters
worse, Efron’s group was also connected with a conspiracy to murder
Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov, and to the sensational kidnapping of White
Russian general Yevgeny Karlovich Miller.
The Reiss, Sedov, and Miller cases have become subjects for
academic commentators on Tsvetayeva’s work.
The single question with which all have wrestled centers on how
much she knew about Efron’s activities.
Efron had fled to the U.S.S.R.
Her daughter Ariadne having preceded him, Tsvetayeva herself,
with her son Grigory, nicknamed Mur, returned to her homeland.
For some time she and Efron enjoyed the patronage of the
N.K.V.D. But Efron’s
performance in the Reiss case had not been brilliant.
He was eventually purged and executed.
Marina committed suicide in 1941, after the German invasion of
Russia forced her evacuation to the interior of the country.
Desperate, she hanged herself.
The mystery has long remained:
how much did she know?
The question may never be answered in full.
But a key document, long considered lost by specialists, lies
in the archives of the Hoover Institution in California:
the record of the French police interrogation of the poetess. It does not provide a full picture of her state of mind at
the time of Reiss’s murder, but it should help correct many
inaccuracies and fantasies, including tales of hysterical recitations
of verse to the French detectives which have been purveyed by some
“scholars.”
The document shows that Tsvetayeva
said her husband had left France to volunteer in the Spanish
Republican Army. She also
said she had no idea what he did when he occasionally left Paris, and
never asked him about his business.
These I believe to be lies formulated
by Tsvetayeva to protect her husband.
Efron was a weak individual, extremely dependent on Tsvetayeva,
with no business or income apart from what he received from her and
from the N.K.V.D. She
must have known he was headed “home,” to the U.S.S.R., where she
soon followed him.
Throughout their relationship Marina had betrayed Sergei Efron,
pursuing numerous affairs, including one with another Soviet spy,
Konstantin Rodzhevich. But
at the end she remained loyal to Efron in the face of the police.
In this late act of her drama, Marina
Tsvetayeva accomplished not an act of baseness, but of nobility.
She protected the man to whom she had sworn her life. The Stalinists created a morality that sought to punish
spouses and offspring for their relatives’ actions.
But it is not in the tradition of Western law to condemn a wife
for her refusal to bear witness against her husband.
That her courage and sacrifice would be crushed and deformed by
the evil of Stalinism seems to have been, as in so many other cases,
an inevitability.
Nevertheless, Efron was undeniably
guilty of horrendous acts. Unfortunately, however, Vrkljan chose to sweeten the pill by
writing simple-mindedly, “Sergei wanted only one thing:
to go back to Russia… Did Sergei do something wrong in 1937
in order to ‘earn’ his return?
Rumors about his spying activities spread through Paris.
Marina… never believed them.
Was Sergei the victim of anti-Semitic circles in Paris?
Did they hate him also because he wanted to go back?
Hatred towards Marina as well therefore, because of her pride
and defiance? Was Sergei
a broken, sick man already, before 1937, before he was shot in 1941? No one can answer these questions any more now.
At least that justice should be left for someone who cannot
defend himself.”
Vrkljan is entirely wrong in this
entire paragraph. First,
she has no standing to speculate on Tsvetayeva’s state of mind.
Second, the suggestion that “poor Efron” was a victim of
his simple patriotism is worse than stupid; it is despicable.
Third, the assertion that these questions were destined never
to be answered reflected the obtuse outlook of those Communist
faithful who really thought that the system would never fall and that
the archives would never be opened.
In reality, and in addition to the above-mentioned French
police document, we now have the entire file of the Soviet secret
police on Sergei Efron. The alleged martyrdom of Efron as a Jew is a refrain in Vrkljan’s concoction. Earlier in the narrative, she writes, “Neither friends in Russia nor abroad wanted to accept Marina’s choice: a sick man and a Jew. That is the darkness which lies over Sergei. Everything else to date is rumor.” This gives the strong impression of being a deliberate lie. The involvement of Efron in the murder of Reiss and the plot against Trotsky’s son—neither mentioned in Vrkljan’s book—was anything but rumor, from 1937 on. Nabokov was no anti-Semite, and his suspicions about the couple were well-known. Vrkljan should reissue her book in revised form, at least. [xxiv] Vlado Gotovac, Ed. by Tea Benčić-Rimay, Zagreb, Croatian Writers’ Association, 2003. For purchase of Most/The Bridge books, see note 7. An alternative e-mail address is [email protected]. [xxv] Vida, Viktor, Collected Poems, Tr. by Magda Osterhuber, Zagreb, Croatian Writers’ Association. For the original of his poem, see Vida, Viktor, Izabrane Pjesme, Zagreb, Erasmus, 1994.
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