I regard translations of poetry as new creations and here I was faced with a dilemma: how can I unravel Viirlaid's idiosyncrasy if I am not familiar with his seven books of poetry? You see — I live in Brisbane, Australia, and I suffer from the tyranny of distances. It isn't possible to buy Estonian poetry here. ORTO and EESTI KIRJANIKE KOOPERATIIV didn't publish poetry. ORTO did give sometimes a slim book of poetry as a bonus to its subscribers and I cherish my gift of Tagore's AEDNIK.
There is an Estonian Archive in Sydney, but they don't loan out anything. For years the literary magazine TULIMULD was my tenuous connection with Estonian literature and culture. Luckily, I have kept all the old numbers and now have found quite a number of examples of Viirlaid's poetry there with Bernard Kangro's long criticism of his seven books of poetry. This gives me some basis for comparisions with the translated English versions found in this collection.
I find Viirlaid's unrhymed free verses hard to translate. They are rugged and virile. They have a heavy beat of their own. They mean more than they say. Viirlaid comments:
Staccato, staccato
rhythm of my verse.
Roughness and splintering are a postmodern vogue. One often notices in his hard-edged verses cracks in associations. Note the following stanza from the poem THE PRISONERS ARE SINGING
It is a cry ascending
at the foot of the scaffold,
a dark flame
of desire
echoes like small chimes
from childhood.
But the roar is also there:
the scorn between staves
of Estonians in Siberian taigas.
Bernard Kangro is intrigued by Viirlaid's double, but a poetic persona can have multiple personifications. I prefer to retain a certain mysterious aura around the poet. Our lives are unpredictable. Our thoughts flit about. Our moods fluctuate. There is a constant change and hence it is only natural that the poet's persona remains ambiguous.
What most appeals to me in Viirlaid's poetry are the poems where the mourning persona touches theistic themes using wind as the metaphor for transcendentalism.
You, transformed into a flower,
myself into wind, love grows poetic
like nothing we have known.
A high wind cooling,
I stroke your leaves;
I tenderly kiss your dewy mouth.
Or:
No, on a bleak autumn night
when the winds
scream in stone walls
and death's step
crushes grass,
when the sky presse us into mire
and dust bites our eyes
Or:
Winds whisper in trees,
but we
have nothing to say.
The young Viirlaid is much more lyrical, and in his early 1949 collection A SUMMER EVENING SMILE there his love poems are not madly passionate but rather shy and serene:
You're everything that
obsesses, haunts the mind.
You're the one who weeps
rejoices in the lyre.
Or:
You had the courage to smile
when I left
and you knew
I'd never return.
True, there is also much of the dance of the shadows and of sinking underground, into despair and grief in Viirlaid's poetry and he laments:
I search for a room
into which there is no door.
Blindman, I see:
white is black.
I find here echoes of my cherished poet, Annus Rävälä's VORKUTA POEMS of 1949.
In this collection of translated poems are seven books of poetry sewn together. The poetic persona is a survivor — half warrior, half wanderer — perhaps a prophet? He walks hand in hand with the ‘cosmic smile’.
My world, grain of sand,
and I am with you,
when you laugh at the sun
your cosmic smile.
Viirlaid's poem TO THE SINGERS does sound like a prophesy of the Baltic Singing Revolution from the 1982 collection BLINK OF ETERNITY:
Sing! Tame the storm and fire!
A melody can open walls and graves.
Your heart-beat here today,
distant and far-away,
reverberates in the homeland soil.
Let’s hope that Viirlaid's poetry reverberates in his homeland.
(This splendid collection is available at Toronto’s estore and through Estonian Life. ed.)