In his ode “To Autumn,” Keats personifies the season as a goddess presiding over the harvest’s fruit, nuts, grains, honey, flowers; like a gleaner with a load of grain on her head, she steps carefully over a brook, “Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, / Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.”  The nostalgia in this poem for a season that seems to have already passed is enacted subtly in that the apples that were still on the trees in stanza one are by stanza two not there any longer–they’re in the cider press.  Nostalgia, the longing for a feeling of home, even if not the place of one’s own real home, is the mood of much Romantic poetry.  I have felt it, and still do, for places that were never my home, as when I recall now that my father, who spoke very little of his childhood on a small, poor, Mississippi farm, told once or twice of how when the family harvested their sugar cane they loaded it on a wagon pulled by mules (the one whose name I learned Spencer) and took it over to a neighbor a half mile away.  The neighbor had a cane press, also powered by a mule, this one harnessed to a long pole and walking round in a circle.  And as the heavy rollers crushed the juice from the cane, the boy who would become my father would hold a jar at the side of the press to catch dripping juice and would drink it down.

“You couldn’t drink too much of that at a time,” said my Uncle Mack, “it was so sweet.”  I called him once to ask about that little cane press.  Mack told me that the Gibbons cane patch was enough to produce several big loads of the ten-foot-tall cane for their wagon, which was pulled by a two-mule team; in turn, the pressed cane yielded enough juice, which the family hauled back home, to boil down to two to three hundred gallons of molasses, which they put in one-gallon buckets and sold.  That is a lot of labor.

Keats (1795-1821), a young man of the urban working class, was apprenticed in medicine and then pharmacy from the age of 14, having been taught until that time by a literary schoolmaster—a man who was his mentor in later years.  Keats did not have equal advantages of birth, legacy, education, or connections, compared to those of the other major Romantic poets; and perhaps with better physical constitutions than his, they also outlived him (even Shelley, who drowned shortly before he would have turned 30, and Byron, who had ten years more than Keats, before dying of illness).

Did Keats wish not to draw too much attention to his own origins?—which were above those of field laborers but nevertheless weren’t privileged.  It has always struck me that Keats wrote a poem to an imagined goddess of the harvest and put not a single human being into it.  (John Clare, the other odd man out, in terms of social class, among the Romantics, and far less privileged even than Keats, wrote many poems that evoke grain fields and physical labor.)  Keats’s harvest has no reapers, pickers, or gleaners, no children snatching up scattered nuts or a half-crushed apple or holding a tin cup to the side of the cider press.  As for Autumn, Keats in a way substitutes her for the real laborers, even though as a goddess she will suffer no damage, as they do from their lifetime of exertion: “And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep / Steady thy laden head across a brook“—as with her head piled with gleaned grain a woman steps carefully across a stream on her way back to the barn or to… a word that suddenly comes back to me—the byre.

But I’m thinking of the wrong word, since when I look up “byre” I see it means a barn for cattle, not a granary.  Grain has to be winnowed (Keats mentions that in the same stanza, but no one is actually doing it) and has to be put in sacks and stored for seed or sold or carried to a mill for grinding….  For “byre,” the Indo-European root word is bheu-.  “To be, exist, grow” (American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots).  This root word has had an wonderful range of progeny in English.  “BYRE, from Old English byre, stall, hut, from Germanic *burjam, dwelling.”  (Whereas “barn” comes from another root and means a place for keeping barley.)  Ultimately, as the meanings of derivatives have proliferated through various languages and come into English, and then developed within English, bheu- produced BE, FOREBEAR, BONDAGE, HUSBAND, BOOTH, BUILD, FUTURE , BOWER, BYLAW, BEAM, BOOM, and BUMPKIN (a partial list).  To be is to have forebears, and with luck, a future; it is at its best to husband resources, to be free of bondage, to build spaces for safekeeping, to establish rules of fair treatment, to use trees and to suffer bumpkins.  Many a word brings with it a tiny history of human beings and our conflicts, purposes, desires, and fate.  (For words in other languages that derive from bheu-, see root #146, athttp://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/P0249.html, where an expanding lexicon of Indo-European roots is being built, based on the foundational work of Julius Pokorny in the first half of the twentieth century.)

The sugarcane juice in Mississippi ran from the press till the work was done, the wagon mules stood impassively after the last load of cane, the last oozings drip.  Keats’s poem opens an inner space into which pour recollections, associations, word histories, human stories, because it is a space of inner life and of time lived in the imagination.

History itself pours in, too—here, especially in BONDAGE.  The slaves who worked the cane fields in the US and the Caribbean were mercilessly expended, did hot, horrible, dangerous work with sharp blades on swampy ground.  New Orleans, which despite an arbitrary state borderline is in fact the principal city of both Louisiana and Mississippi, was in the nineteenth century the capital of cane sugar.  (The brutal labor of cane field workers is oppressive to this day; in Africa, to the hard work of tending the crop is added the terrible poverty of workers and the danger of the frightening, fatally venomous black mamba snakes that drape themselves in the top leaves of the thickly growing cane, with which owners have replaced their natural habitat; in the cane leaves, the snakes are hard to see till it’s too late to avoid one.)  Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807; Spain in 1820.  It seems that where sugar cane went, there went slavery–from Haiti after its revolution to the American south and to Cuba…

Keats’ autumn, though, shows no trace of that; instead it celebrates harvest at a temperate latitude.  And at a time when the consumption of sugar was nothing like what it would become, fruit–not sugar–is what’s sweet, the “sweet kernel” belongs to a nut, and bees and flowers imply sweetness, as does the cider-press.   My Northwestern colleague Emily Rohrbach told me once that Leigh Hunt called Keats by the nickname “junkets,” because this is what Keats’s Cockney pronunciation of his name sounded like to Hunt (See the photo of Keats’s signature, above).  It seems Keats did not at all like the nickname; “junkets” is the name of  a sweet milk pudding.  And Keats had a sweet tooth–the sweet tastes in his ode to autumn are not the only trace of sugar in his work: Emily sent me to look at “The Eve of St. Agnes.”  There I found Keats naming many “cates [sic] and dainties” (line 173): “candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; / With jellies soother than the creamy curd, / And lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon; Manna and dates” (lines 265-68; “soother” means “softer” or “smoother”).  (That “creamy curd” would be, I suppose, a “junket.” Anyway, the two lovers of the poem do not pause to taste these sweets, which are merely figures for the sweetness of Madeline and of love itself; they escape the violence and darkness that make up anti-love.)

Nor is there any question that Keats had the sweetest tooth for words of any poet in English, savoring the rich compound of syllables he could concoct (in Cockney, whatever it sounded like in his time).  In one rhyme sequence, he enacts a progress of action and thought: “thy hook [i.e. scythe] / Spares the next swath and all its twinéd flowers: / And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep / Steady thy laden head across a brook; / Or by a cyden-press, with patient look, / Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.“  The hook is the tool of perhaps the hardest labor of the harvest, scything the grain all day—mens’ work; the brook is a physical obstacle to carrying in the last of the grain—what has been gleaned by women after the sheaves have been bundled in the field and loaded on a wagon; the look is a passive taking in—evidently in a daze (which can’t, in the case of the goddess, be from physical exhaustion)—of a slow, late, perhaps inconsequential dripping of apple juice from the press, “hours by hours.”

The last stanza of the poem is about sounds and sights; the eyes of the reader rise with those of the poet up to the clouds, then gaze across the stubble-fields, and down to the river; all that lives is mild and sweet.  That work is done. The invisible laborers are at rest, we hope. 

(This is a slight revision of an earlier post.)

A few ideas pulled from two books–not to argue anything, but simply to hold them close to the idea and practice of poetry, and wonder what they might suggest about it:

Christine Kenneally (all quotes from THE FIRST WORD, 2007):

“Swearing […] uses parts of the brain that support language and also parts of the brain that are used when laughing or crying.  Often people with severe brain damage remain able to swear even when they are unable to produce other language.” (116)

[I don’t agree with the inference that Kenneally draws from this fact, about similarities between animal languages and human language.  I think Derek Bickerton’s proposal (see quotes from his book below) is much more persuasive: that language evolved originally from a set of words (no syntax) that improved the ability of human beings to survive.]

“Is it true that the complexity of human language is without parallel. […] But […] it implies that anything can be expressed by human language, when we don’t know if this is in fact the case.” (116-17)

“John McWhorter […] emphasizes the way that, like biological evolution, language change results from accretions or acumulations of struture.  In this sense language is an artefact of the collective mind of history.  It has imperfections and odd quirks, and makes peculiar demands of its speakers.  Its textures and patterns have been created over a long period of time as it has been dragged through millions of mouths, expressing their individual agendas.” (165)

“The most exciting implication of the language-as-virus metaphor is the finding that some features of language have less to do with the need of individuals to communicate clearly with one another than with the need of the language virus to ensure its own survival.[…] the features of language structure reflect its struggle to survive in its environment–the human mind.” (234-35)

[Citing several researchers, Kenneally askes “why language is learned so readily by children.”  But anyone who has watched a child learn a language over time, and who might have read Steven Pinker on much sheer brain power that requires, over a period of several years (THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT, 1994), would wonder what she can be thinking.  It’s hugely difficult and takes so many brain cells, Pinker says, that after language has been consolidated in the brain, the brain has to shed huge numbers of those brain cells because it can not afford to support them now that their job is done, and there’s so much more that it must develop over the coming years.  The most interesting point that Kenneally does take from the researchers she cites on the “language-as-virus metaphor” is this:]

“If language is driven to survive, and the language learners of the world are children, language must be adapted to the quirks and traints of the child’s mind.  As Deacon puts it,language is designed to be ‘particularly infective for the child brain.” (236)

“What about the evolutionary processes of adaptation, where a trait evolves for a particular purpose, and exaptation, where a trait that is used for one function becomes co-opted to serve another purpose in later generations? What role have these played in language evolution? For all the furious words expended on the subject, everyone agrees that both processes have had a role.  And everyone has acknowledged that communication has to have something to do with language evolution.  Regardless, the rapid spread of the human mutation of the FOXP2 gene is definitive evidence that there has been a positive selection for a form of the gene that had major consequences for language.” (268)

[What I think of, reading this passage, in the midst of a much longer argument that Kenneally is presenting, is… the possibility that in some such terms poetry is an exaptation of language itself.  That is, having evolved, at least culturally, but perhaps even in biological/neurological ways, too, language (like living creatures and like cultures) continues to evolve not only to develop from a vocabulary to a syntax, etc., but also from one use to other uses.  The elaborate musical and other *formal* aspects of the earliest poetry we can recover suggests that language developed uses associated with different human activities–one of which emphasized a seeming power of language over reality.  (Reality means not only what we can touch, see, small, harvest, and eat, etc., but also storms, mountains, oceans… i.e. concepts of the divine.  Poetry is not only associated with the divine in religious practice, but in fact is a kind of co-evolutionary relationship with it.  I write about this in HOW POEMS THINK (coming out Sept. 2015).]

“Researchers have shown that humans consolidate spoken language during sleep.  It’s known that many different memory tasks are improved by sleeping, and the complications of speech are no exception. […]  Other researchers have monitored the brain of songbirds during sleep and discovered that the parts of the brain activated while singing while awake were reactivated during sleep, suggesting that in the way we dream of speech, songbirds dream of singing.” (314)

Derek Bickerton (from ADAM’S TONGUE, 2009):

“A concept is something in the mind.  Once it exists, it can affect behavior.  Before it existed, it couldn’t. All that natural selection can see is behavior.  So concepts could only have been visible to natural selection once they existed, once they’d begun to affect behavior.  But they couldn’t exist until they’d evolved, and they could only evolve if they were selected for. So human-type concepts couldn’t have evolved by themselves.  They could only have evolved if some other thing had been selected for, something that *was* visible to natural selection–in other words, some overt behavior that gave an adaptive advantage to those that had it.[…]  The fact that language is by now the main engine of thought doesn’t have any implication for its status when it began. That’s the fallacy of first use, the idea that whatever a thing started doing will be what it does mostly nowadays–and vice versa, naturally.  It was the fallacy of first use that led Robin Dunbar to propose gossip as the engine of language evolution, just because gossip is what (spoken) language is most used for today. […] Certainly, language is now the means by which we structure the world of thought, but it would never have gotten off the ground, never developed into what it is today, and certainly never have raised thought to a new power if it hadn’t first entered the real world in the tangible form of communication.”  (184-85) 

Joseph Brodsky: 

“Poetry is not ‘the best words in the best order’; for language it is the highest form of existence. In purely technical terms, of course, poetry amounts to arranging words with the greatest specific gravity in the most effective and externally inevitable sequence. Ideally, however, it is language negating its own mass and the laws of gravity; it is language’s striving upward—or sideways—to that beginning where the Word was.” 

We are permitted to think of “that beginning where the Word was” in many different ways. That beginning does not belong only to beliefs figured in the beginning of the Tanakh, the Bible (at the beginning of the book of Genesis). “That beginning where the Word was” is the beginning of language use, and our use of language (as well as its use, with us, by Yahweh and other gods) is one event (as we imagine it) by which we may define the beginningness of a human way of being. 

Language is always looking for things to do within the rough boundaries of what someone says with it, and it slips over those boundaries—sometimes sloppily, sometimes to speak a marvel. >>>>>>>

Hélène Cixous: “It is in the poem, hybrid of music and language, that something of mysterious and unstoppable life can be produced, with subverted grammar, with liberties in the bosom of language, in the law of genders, in dance, the darts (in), the dancing of the poem, minimal world in movement, the poem speaking French, the tongue, very differently from prose, the poem playing with language more than it speaks, changed expression of drives—but here I am evoking only the poem that invents the other tongue within the tongue, the dreamtongue […]”

Marianne Boruch on writing:

Which techniques might you use that tend to best elicit your meaning or illuminate your thoughts best?

Well, I’m addicted to what I call my “begging bowl theory” of writing poems – and essays, for that matter, though those require a little more willful engineering. With poems, intention doesn’t mean much. I try to empty my mind completely, and see what turns up – an image seen or imagined, a phrase, something that I feel stirring and I have no idea at all where it might go. Then I let it lead me; I follow it. The whole business can get scary; then I know I’m on the right track. And for months, I go over and over my drafts very early each morning, tweaking and redreaming, slashing and burning. It gets pretty wild, the revision process. I call that my “hospital rounds” and in a way, that’s where the real writing takes place.

See: http://www.purdueexponent.org/features/article_e127149a-33fb-11e5-b4b3-17ebb5e0f578.html?mode=jqm

In September 2015, the University of Chicago Press will publish my book about poetry, How Poems Think.  

In it, I present a gallery of texts and examples of poetic devices, strategies, and techniques, as well as thoughts about the poet’s stance toward language and toward his or her own temperament.  I explore rhyme, metonymy, etymology, and other elements of poetry not simply as part of the rhetoric and technique of poetry but as modes of thinking and feeling. Of course, to write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways—guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more.  And poetry’s own stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed articulation that expands inner experience, imagining with words what cannot always be imagined without them. Through translation, particularly, poetry has diversified poetic traditions.  I also show how some of poetry’s ways of thinking that we might think are essentially modern in fact begin in the ancient world and simply remain potent across the centuries even into our own time.  

In my gallery I use poetic texts by Sappho, Pindar, Shakespeare, Keats, William Carlos Williams, Marina Tsvetaeva, Odysseus Elytis, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mahmoud Darwish, and many others. 

Alfonso Reyes: “The purpose of literary creation is not to give rise to exegesis, but to illuminate the hearts of men, of all men insofar as they

are simply human, and not as specialists in this or that discipline,” and says also–wryly–that “between criticism and life there is not

some metaphorical mediation called poetry.”

Cacamatzin (1494-1520), an aristocratic but illegitimate son of an illustrious father known for his learning in doctrine, poetry, and astronomy, was intensively trained—like all boys of the Mexica (Aztec) nobility—in both warfare and song.  An extraordinary essay by Inga Clendinnen, “The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society” (Past and Present No. 107, pp. 44-89, 1985, available online in JSTOR) very persuasively explores the links between the Aztecs’ highly aestheticized poetry on the one hand, and their warfare and human sacrifice on the other; she provides lots of compelling detail about Mexica ritual, lifeworld, and belief.  But Aztec poetry and death are not opposite poles of a schizophrenic society, she argues.  Rather, they are  two consonant, interrelated aspects of the same Aztec religious understanding (a stance that I think we cannot possibly inhabit): life is unremittingly cyclical, shockingly fragile and ephemeral, deeply ceremonial and heirarchical, and has been unremittingly established thus by gods who require the spilling of great quantities of human blood as an analogy to the rain that they themselves provide for human crops.)

Motecuhzoma (called mistakenly in English Montezuma), the ruler of the Aztecs, was Cacamatzin’s uncle.  Cacamatzin ended up being one of Motecuhzoma’s ambassadors to meet the advancing Hernán Cortés in 1519.  After much discussion among the Aztec nobility, Cortés and his men were allowed to enter Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Mexica.  But there at the heart of the city, the Spaniards then took Motecuhzoma prisoner, along with others of his court—an act for which the Mexica, the brutally dominant power of the Valley of Mexico, were completely unprepared, because such behavior was unknown in their society; they could not have imagined this possibility.

Then, however, Cortés, interrupting his own dealings with Motecuhzoma and his improvization of a conquest in the face of a vastly more numerous Mexica nation, had to leave Cacamatzin, Motecuhzoma and others in the custody of his subordinate Pedro de Alvarado while Cortés himself went to meet Spanish enemies who had come, just at this crucial moment, with the intent of removing him from power.  Under Alvarado’s temporary power, Motecuhzoma was suddenly killed, many of the other Mexica leaders were killed, and others, like Cacamatzin, were tortured to reveal the location of their gold, and killed.  In the resulting chaos, Alvarado had to flee the city with his men.  Later, in a long siege and conclusive battle, Tenochtitlan would be conquered and effectively destroyed, along with many of its inhabitants.

This familiar story is summarized by Miguel León-Portilla in Quince poetas del mundo nahuatl (1994, Fifteen Poets of the Nahuatl World—nahuatl was the language of the peoples in the Valley of Mexico),  and in translations of León-Portilla’s work into English.

What I notice, without knowing even one word of nahuatl, when I look at the bilingual Mexican edition, is the use by Cacamatzin of anaphora and phonetic figures.  Evidently these—as gestures of linguistic authority and also of the pleasures of language—are hard-wired among our human linguistic capacities.  Which again confirms for me that at its heart, poetry is first of all (not not only) a certain stance toward language.

Even without knowing a word of nahuatl, we can see the poetic figures in the opening lines (and in all the more than 50 lines of this song):

In antocnihuané,
tla oc xoconcaquican:
ma ac azo ayac in tecunenemi.
Cualanyotl, cocolotl,
ma zo ilcahui,
ma zo pupulihui,
yeccan tlalticpac.

The hard “c” is very frequent in all transcriptions of nahuatl that I have seen, so perhaps it is so common a sound (like our English “schwa,” the sound of “uh”) that it wasn’t even noticed as a repeated sound by the nahuatl ear.  But the anaphoric figure in lines 5-6 is evident, as is the repetition of the final vowel sound of lines 5-6, and the doubling of “pupu” in line 6.  Translating loosely from Leon-Portilla’s Spanish, I would phrase the meaning of these lines as: “My friends, / listen to this: / let no one live with the presumption of royalty. / Let rage, disputes, / be forgotten, / let them disappear / when on this earth the time is right for that.”  (This is a song of resignation to death–reflective, melancholy, expressing as much awe as it does sadness, and it was apparently regarded by the Aztecs as a great composition, in after years, when it was still sung.)

Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, is a tremendously capacious literary journal published in Cambridge, England, and edited by Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich. The newest issue, no. 7, includes (among many other very interesting things) “Evgeny Baratynsky: Poems from Twilight,” with poems introduced and translated from Russian by Peter France, and a second introductory essay and extensive commentaries by Ilya Kutik (also translated by France).  Kutik describes Baratynsky (1800-1844) as a poet who was submerged after his death by the literary fashions of the Russian nineteenth century and whose work was resuscitated by much later poets, especially Osip Mandelshtam, who saw Baratynsky’s work as a valuable un-Romantic or even anti-Romantic poetic precedent, in the midst of Russian Romanticism, for Russian poetry in the twentieth.  Of course Peter France and Ilya Kutik see in Baratynsky far more than that—but I mention this one aspect of Baratynsky’s achievement simply to situate him among twentieth-century poets, and to suggest why a twentieth- and twenty-first century Russian poet, Kutik, is interested in bringing into English at least a sampling of Baratynsky’s poems and an account of Baratynsky’s importance.  Kutik’s commentary runs to more than 30 pages, and along with more than a dozen poems and the substantial introductory essays, this is in effect an impressive small book.  Kutik’s commentaries are especially valuable.  Returning to one of France’s deftly worded translations after reading Kutik’s commentary on the poem enriches the English version wonderfully.

Now I will copy here a few comments Kutik makes on rhyme, which readers of this series of my small essays on poetry will know is of great interest to me.  (Not because I use it in my own poems very often—although I do highly prize rich sound-textures—but because of how Kutik explains rhyme as a mode of thought, which I very much think it is, even though its potential as such is not realized by very many poets in English, and in all phonetic repetitions, not only in full rhyme.  It’s not realized because English-language poets can’t do so, but because our literary history has carried us through times, and into times, where for other reasons poets don’t choose to do so.  This has been true for centuries, even when poetry was at the height of its use of rhyme.)

Twilight was Baratynsky’s last book, was written over about ten years’ time, and he organized his book very carefully.  The final poem in the collection is “Rhyme.”  Baratynsky’s figure for rhyme is the dove that returns to Noah’s ark with an olive leaf or leafy twig in its beak.  That is, from a new world elsewhere, as yet unknown, the dove brings an answer to Noah’s question: does any land yet exist that stands above the flood?  Neither the question nor the answer is expressed in words.  The question is the releasing of the dove, and the answer is the twig brought back by the dove–a human gesture, a living bird; then a material object, presumably still silver-green with life.  And, as I mentioned, from a place not yet known.  Kutik writes that rhyming for Baratynsky (and for himself and so many others) is “as if the Russian poet was throwing a word into the linguistic abyss and waiting to see what other word it will return with.”

That is not a figure that I can imagine being used by any poet writing in English of French (the two languages that Kutik mentions as comparisons) or for that matter in Spanish or Italian or Portuguese (a few more languages that I can add to the list), in any century.  What would the figure for rhyme be for a poet writing in English, formed by English-language poetic traditions?  If it had come in that dove’s beak, it would have had to be something of a kind already preserved on the boat–but on the ark there are no leafing plants, only pairs of animals.  What other figures might we imagine for rhyme in English?

In just a few paragraphs, Kutik’s succinct account of rhyme as a part of the poetic process is revelatory of it as a poetic mode of thought.  He speaks of the remarkable flexibility of Russian syntax and the richness of rhyme sounds in a poetic tradition in which what we call half-rhymes are considered true rhymes— these aspects account for the acrobatic Russian line; he also speaks of the effect on thought of producing the rhyme-word in the context of a stanza, which I have not before seen discussed; and he writes that one “can see why free verse finally triumphed in French and English poetry, since it offers a liberation from the limitations and set patterns of the language, which in Russian do not exist.”

“[R]hyme is for the poet above all a searching device that animates the language.”  And it is, he writes, a kind of companion of the poet even where there are no others.

Here’s something apropos of the poet’s sense (which Baratynsky clearly felt, in that last poem of his last book) of writing with the poetry itself, the language itself, as the needed companion.  In an interview of the Russian poet Victor Sosnora (b. 1938) by Darra Goldstein, published in 1988 in the New York Review of Books, Sosnora says, amidst other responses equally extreme and yet persuasive in showing us a man of intense, sometimes unlikely, and sometimes almost repellantly truthful opinions: “I don’t write for the present.  I don’t write for the future, either. […]  I write because that’s what it takes for me to live.  If I’m not published, that doesn’t mean that I don’t exist. […] An ideal reader has a talent equal to that of the writer.  I’ve had three such readers who understood poetry in the absolute sense: Nikolai Aseev, Lilya Brik, and Nikolai Gritsiuk.  I want to stress that I’m fifty-one, I’ve published nine books, and I have had only three readers.”  About Sosnora’s diction, Goldstein says that his “words seem to arise from a dream or a state of intoxication.  His images are startling, even hallucinatory.”  But I don’t mean to imply that these qualities are typical of Russian poetry in general; as far as I can tell, they are merely qualities that the Russian language makes possible by the poet’s use of what Kutik calls the “justification” of sound.  I.e., of phonetic figures, including rhyme.

Again I’ve been absent a while in the unreal yet inconceivably populous virtual spaces of the web.

I was in NYC for the first day of the July 27-28 celebration of the 75th birthday of the great Romanian fiction writer and essayist Norman Manea.  (I had been mispronouncing his last name for years, and he was too polite to correct me, and now finally I’ve learned how to do it—when Romanians say “Manea,” it sounds like “monya”; the “e” is very fleeting.)  The announcement for this can be found at: http://annandaleonline.org/s/990/noright.aspx?sid=990&gid=1&pgid=252&cid=1915&ecid=1915&ciid=5764&crid=0

This tribute seemed to me to have required the emergence of two generations of Romanian writers and readers younger than Manea.  Literary culture in Romania, after so long under Nazi and then Communist dictatorship, is still fraught with nationalist rigidities of attitude, extremism, and a history that even now can scarcely be discussed fully.  Manea kicked a hornets’ nest when he published his essay “Felix Culpa,” an unmasking of Mircea Eliade’s fascist years in Romania and of others connected with him whose mentality and program remains fascist to this day.  The vitriolic response was anti-Semitic, nationalistic, and dangerous.  (The essay first appeared in The New Republic, and Manea included a fuller version in his 1992 American collection On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist.)

At the tribute, among the first of these two younger Romanian generations who are trying to open Romanian culture were Silviu Lupescu, the director of the Romanian publisher Polirom, which is now issuing all of Manea’s work in a uniform edition; Corina Suteu, the director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York; Carmen Musat, the editor of Observator Cultural, a weekly publication in Romania; and Bogdan-Alexander Sta Nescu, the editorial director of Polirom.  (On the occasion of this tribune to Manea, Polirom published a bilingual Romanian-English book in his honor, edited by Cella Manea and George Onofrei, Obsesia Incertitudinii / The Obsession of Uncertainty.)  Among these and also among several Romanians in their twenties with whom I spoke, there was great reverence for Manea, not only because of his writings, but also because of his having refused to make an existential trade-off with the twenty-four-year-long Ceaucescu regime: he would not go along with the regime in order to avoid pressures, threats of imprisonment or worse, and very effective censorship.  He somehow held his own, having to accept the limited publication for which he was eligible in that society deliberately distorted by its government.  (In the title essay of On Clowns, Manea’s description of submitting his typewriter for its annual required inspection at a government office—absurd ritual of an absurd state—is funny, creepy, and all too meaningful.)

Among the Americans speaking on the first day of the tribute was the president of Bard College, Leon Botstein, whose work as an orchestral conductor took him to Romania in 1997 and provided the occasion for Manea’s first return visit to the nation he had been forced to flee.  His meditation on that trip, his parents, Romania, and the course of his own life, took the form of The Hooligan’s Return: A Memoir (Farrar Straus, 2003).  Also speaking were Robert Boyers, who has often published Manea’s writing in his invaluable and (happily) long-lived literary journal, Salmagundi, and the novelist Francine Prose, among others.

In English translation there are several works by Manea.  October, Eight O’Clock (1992) contains the first (and unforgettable) story he published in the USA (in TriQuarterly), “The Sweater.”  Manea and his wife Cella arrived here in 1987 via Germany, bringing with them only what they could carry, after Manea was told by the Securitate of Romania that he had permission to accept a fellowship offered to him in Germany, and that he should take it, and that he should not come back.  October, Eight O’Clock and On Clowns are both in print, published by Grove Press.  Published very recently by Trinity University Press is the collection Manea has edited of Romanian Writers on Writing (2011), one of those books that opens up a whole world that overflows the banks of the present nation of Romania.  It’s a world previously unavailable to all who must wait for translations into English.  We have had bright flashes of that world in the amazing work of those who left Romania during the twentieth century and found readers and audiences elsewhere—driven out or voluntarily withdrawing from that oppressed place—including Paul Celan, E. M. Cioran, Eugene Ionesco, Mircea Eliade, Andrei Codrescu, and Manea himself (to say nothing of the artists Constantin Brancusi and Saul Steinberg, the pianists Dinu Lupati and Radu Lupu, the composer Georges Enescu).  Only a few Romanian poets have been translated into English, among them Tudor Arghezi, Ion Caraion, and Benjamin Fondane (who wrote in French).   Now Manea’s edited collection of Romanian writings on writing give us a fuller sense of how much we are missing.  Also, two other, earlier, books by Manea have been published in English—the collection of stories Compulsory Happiness and the novel The Black Envelope (both by Northwestern University Press).  And earlier this year, Sheep Meadow Press published The Correspondence of Paul Celan and Ilana Shmueli, which includes a brief essay by Manea and his lengthy interview with Shmueli; she too was from Romania, and has much to say about the world that formed Celan and herself, and the somewhat younger Manea, too, and about Celan himself, to whom she remained close until the end of his life.

Manea’s stature, as a fiction writer and a thinker about human destiny, is that of a world artist.  I wish more of us would read his work!