This morning was cold, but it warmed about midday.
Blue clouds piled up in the north.
I came from a meeting – a discussion of
the teaching of classical languages –
and I was sitting by the river with a friend
who wanted to tell me his troubles.
The water was still high. Two boys
were throwing pebbles from the bank into the river.
I had no counsel to offer…. There were
no benches on the bank – probably night vandals
had thrown them into the water once again.
The sun slipped behind a cloud. We were freezing.
We rose and went back to town.
Perhaps he could see his course.
I stopped at a shop for oatmeal and bread.
It was June. Going home, I saw
three young militiamen winding their Rubik’s cube.
JAAN KAPLINSKI
translated from the Estonian by Jaan Kaplinski with Sam Hamill and Riina Tamm
The Wandering Border (Harvill, 1992), by permission of the author.
Some poets you discover on your own, following your nose, not really knowing what you are up to. One of these is the work of the Estonian scholar, politician and poet Jaan Kaplinski. I try to read something by him on most days; increasingly I am thinking of him as my desert island poet, the one I would keep above all others. I can’t really explain this any more rationally than to say I just like being in his presence. That’s it.
Reading his poems I feel as though he is sitting across the room/table/chair from me, silently nodding or smiling. As Philip Gross said in his seminal early review of his work ‘Very conscious of the places words cannot reach, his poems create a space around them that is intensely good to be in.’ That pretty much sums it up for me.
It reminds me of an Ethan Canin quote in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. He says the most important thing a storyteller needs is a narrative voice the reader will find likeable. Kaplinski possesses this.
The poem opposite is from my favourite of his books, The Wandering Border (1992), translated into beautiful plain English. I should say at this point that it is not included in his recent and triumphant Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) – which you should buy anyway.
What I love about the poem is the way it presents an ordinary sequence of events as though they were at the same time full of mystery and even a little menace, but without any accompanying commentary or moralising. The speaker is explicit: ‘I had no counsel to offer…’ and this applies equally to the presence of ‘night vandals’, the ‘freezing’ June weather and ‘militiamen’, as well as the ‘troubles’ of his friend. The poem pulls back from seeking to be, in a phrase of Seamus Heaney’s, ‘instrumental or effective’. It is prepared to let things coexist, if not happily, then at least with clarity, allowing the speaker and world he is part of to ‘see his course’, implicitly inviting us to do the same.