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I wonder has anyone researched and considered and written
about poems employing a the total lack of punctuation. And lack of
capitalisation as well. Does anyone know who started it, or in what
culture?
Eugenijus Alisanka's poems (original publication 2002) are of this kind, the
only letter in capitals being the 'I' in the translation, which seems to have
no equivalent in the Lithuanian, I suppose the first person singular built
into the (lower case) verb. The
original and translation face each other.
The review copy is an uncorrected proof 7" high by 5 & a half wide,
large pocket size.
The poet (born1960 and lives in Vilnius) is new to me but a web search
suggests he has wide circulation and significant status. I'm confused these
days about such things: the 'poetry world', the wider world, the internet,
how and why, who knows, who cares.
Having no knowledge of Lithuanian I am curious to find lines that tally. Here
are two from part 3 of '16 ways to kill poetry':
su retorika
onomatopeja metafora
imperatorius
megsta rafinuota erotika
(My underlined 'a's here have a tail and the underlined 'e's have a top dot
not available on my computer). These lines can in part be guessed at,
translated as:
with rhetoric onomatopoeia metaphor
the emperor loves refined erotica
The grammar looks a bit suspect but there is an interesting correspondence of
root language, at least in part. Most of the original language cannot so
easily be recognised. Often there is a correspondence of overall shape, while
sometimes the English stretches a line well beyond its original.
Part 4 of that same poem is one line:
crucify her
on the semiotic square
the original giving away only 'semiotinio'. There is an elusiveness about the
whole book, and where a translation reads like this following (the opening of
'the letter of eugenijus ališanka to himself'),
I can't write
a poem like bloze [z
circumflex, e with dot]
the world is
big more things than people
even they
mostly the dead the hanged
the shoulders
breasts foreheads of others
there is a game of voice, grammar, punctuation, that perhaps gets the
original 'right' or not. I can only guess that bloze (with accents) is if
capitalised another writer.
The translator's introduction locates the poems in 'the lives of the saints',
Augustine's in particular, for whom 'everything is divine revelation',
whereas for Alisanka 'the tenuousness of his own existence brings
everything, even the most universal, to a human scale.' For him, ambivalence
(I suppose) is everything, while (I quote Hix) 'nothing in the external world
sanctions or validates the inner impulse to speak.' But speak he does, even,
it seems to me, with a rushing into speech, again and again. If there is
uncertainty, if there is ambivalence, then he can't stop going on about it.
The insistent 'I' in these lines, for instance (towards the end of 'in the
middle of the afternoon I sat in the don quixote cafe and sampled sherry'),
I will betray
others and be betrayed
I will stroll
through cities in undarned socks
I will visit
my sons-in-law all over europe
seems to close off rather than be open to possibility, divinely opened or
otherwise.
I have to be
curious that the repeated initial 'I' here seems to have no equivalent in the
Lithuanian, which appears to work quite differently. Someone will know.
© David
Hart 2011
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