Editorial: March 2005

18 januari 2006 What do we discover about Indian literature when we compare poets such as {id="2716" title="Chandrakanta Murasingh"}, who is from the very North-East, and writes in the embattled tribal language Kokborok, and southern poet {id="2721" title="Jayant Kaikini"}, writing in Kannada?

Questions of national identity keep coming up here – perhaps inevitably so, given the fact that our website is subdivided into countries, rather than for instance language areas. Such questions seem particularly pertinent for the Ukraine, after the ‘Orange Revolution’ of last December. Thus, well-known intellectual {id="5522" title="Mykola Ryabchuk"}, who wrote his last poem in 1988 but has since acquired a ‘guru-like’ status for a younger generation of poets, reflects on changing values in post-independence Ukraine and the need for writers to re-engage with social responsibility in several essays published here. His poems, however, subtle, humorous and conspicuously free from any explicit political statements, are as timeless and urgent now as twenty years ago, when he wrote them:

So here you are, a poet,
who one morning wakes up
and sees himself, side by side
with Li Po and Tu Fu, side by side
with Bhagavadgita, next to
Seneca’s Letters – so close –
say, two or three pages or
just on the next page and you
close the magazine, smile: “At last”,
then sit down at the table
and write as usual; the pen only
stumbling in front of
the abyss.

One can only regret that Ryabchuk has “no intention of ever resuming this business”. The work of our second Ukrainian poet, {id="5520" title="Halyna Krouk"}, is available here in English translation for the very first time.

As you have come to expect of PIW, there is more poetry in this issue that has never before been published in English. Here is an opportunity to explore, for the first time, the poetry of {id="973" title="Song Xiaoxian"} in English, in a new translation by Chinese editor Simon Patton. Plain-spoken, quiet and serious, it is easy to mistake his poems for light reading, says critic Xin Boping in this issue. Yet compared to other contemporary Chinese poets on PIW with a similarly minimalistic, plain style, Song Xiaoxian’s work distinguishes itself by a clear religious element and social consciousness. Here are “compressed poems, deceptively slight,” writes Simon Patton, “that stick to your clothes like burrs and grass seeds and won’t be shaken off easily”.

Equally hard to shake off is the sense of disquiet one gets on reading Dutch poets {id="3997" title="Alfred Schaffer"} and {id="4004" title="Erik Lindner"}. Both young, with a predilection for fragmentary, alienating, disconcerting verses, they also share a remarkably cinematographic approach to poetry. Erik Lindner creates poems like a cameraman, says reviewer Paul Demets in this issue, whereas Schaffer takes snapshots – but never shows the entire panorama. What better way to explore this cinematic connection than by viewing our {id="4073" title="animation film"} of Schaffer’s poem ‘Droom en werkelijkheid’ (Dream and reality) by artist Sander Alt?

Finally, in an exciting new departure, the Slovenian magazine has announced it will exclusively be publishing women poets this year. Despite the rich tradition of women poets in Slovenia, and their influence on Slovenian literature as a whole, these female writers have been “pushed into the background” for too long, argue our editors. Kickstarting the new year is {id="5044" title="Taja Kramberger"}, one of the strongest poetic voices around, male or female, and one that can both demand and command our attention:

This poem is here and now,
and only for those who deserve it;
for those who, here and
now, understand it,
and not those
who might see it come aglow                            
in the crackling dark of 30 to 90 years,
if not even more, when I am everywhere dispersed
and nowhere as buoyant and full
of life as now.
(-)
this poem is for you.