Editor’s Introduction
JüriTalvet
Since the 1930s JuhanLiiv (1864-1913) has been recognized in Estonia as the epitome of its indigenous poetic genius, yet until very recently his work was almost unknown outside the Estonian language. The twentieth century saw the publication of only three translated selections of his poetry, two into Russian (1933, 1962) and one into Esperanto (1980).
As the twenty-first century opened, though, Liiv’s work began to make its way into the wider world. 2007 saw the publication of the first bilingual Estonian-English edition, a collection of approximately forty translated poems introduced by an extensive essay about Liiv’s life and work (Meelparemateikannata. The Mind Would Bear No Better (ed. J. Talvet, trans. J. Talvet and H.L. Hix; Tartu: Tartu ÜlikooliKirjastus)). Since then, a number of Liiv’s poems have been echoed in various international blogs on the internet, and additional translations have appeared in important journals in the U.S. (Poetry (2011); translations by J. Talvet and H.L. Hix), in Spain (Turia (2006-2007); trans. by J. Talvet and A. Lázaro-Tinaut), and in Slovenia (Literatura(2010); trans. by J. Potrč).
The recognition is overdue: just as JuhanLiiv is an exceptional poet in his native Estonian context, so is he in the broader European and world context. Liiv came from a poor peasant family and never crossed a university’s threshold. During short periods he worked as a journalist in Tallinn, Viljandi, and Tartu, but he always did so reluctantly. In 1892, having decided to dedicate himself fully to literary creation, he left the newspaper Olevik, in Tartu, becoming in the impoverished conditions of his country its first professional writer, in the sense that he tried to earn his living exclusively by his writing. The decision occasioned one apex of his creation. In only eight days, in an intense flash of inspiration, he wrote his best prose story, Vari(‘The Shadow’), a passionate protest against Germanic hegemony in his country, but provided with subtle psychological features, avoiding simplifications. This long narrative remained the climax of his work in prose.
This happy period ended soon and suddenly: in 1893 Liiv fell mentally ill, suffering (from then until his death) nervous attacks and persecution mania. According to the testimony of a number people who knew Liiv in his lifetime, he imagined that he was the son of Tsar Alexander II and the Estonian poet Lydia Koidula, and that he was heir to the Polish throne… The cause of his illness could have to do with the coincidence of unhappy love, the lack of recognition of his work, and inherited genetic factors.
The greater number of Liiv’s best-known poems, though, those that in posterity have formed his unanimously celebrated poetic canon in Estonia, were created in the period of his illness, when he lived in the countryside, helping his relatives with farm work, and when he reappeared in Tartu, at the start of the new century, for extended psychiatric treatment at a mental hospital. In such conditions, Liiv never managed to publish a book he himself prepared.
Recognition of Liiv as a poet did not begin until 1904, when the newspaper UusAegin its supplement, by installment in fascicles, presented a selection of Liiv’s early work in prose and verse, that written before 1893. At that time a group of young writers who formed the intellectual-cultural movement “Noor-Eesti” (“Young Estonia”) started to take interest in Liiv’s poetry, viewing Liiv as a forerunner to their own symbolist aspirations, in which they were influenced by early French modernism. In their first album (1905) they included a poem by Liiv, dedicated to “Young Estonia”. The same year a popular family journal, Linda, published a series of Liiv’s newer poems, including “It Flies to the Hive” and “A Homeless Man.” These poems later became famous, and have stayed at the nucleus of Liiv’s poetic canon.
In 1909/1910 some members of “Young Estonia,” led by the poet Gustav Suits, made a selection of 45 poems by Liiv and published it as a separate book. Liiv was not satisfied with the 1909 edition, which indeed had a number of errors. As a result, the print run was destroyed almost entirely. The editors gave the manuscript of the book’s 1910 edition to Liiv for revision, but the new book did not satisfy Liiv either.
Liiv’s poetic canon was shaped principally after his death, by the dedication to Liiv’s life and work of FriedebertTuglas, another member of “Young Estonia.” Tuglas, who went on to become one of the leading Estonian intellectuals, published two major selections of Liiv’s poetry (1919, 1926) that included previously published work but also work that had survived to that point only in handwritten manuscripts. Tuglas also researched Liiv’s life and work in two monographs (published in 1914 and 1927).
After the publication of Liiv’s poetry by “Young Estonia” and, especially, Tuglas’ research activity, chapters on Liiv’s work, with extensive samples of his poems, were included in all school textbooks and school readers of Estonia. They were annually renewed and reprinted. Liiv’s work began to circulate in the widest areas of Estonian society. The apparent simplicity of Liiv’s poems, along with their brevity and unparalleled spiritual intensity, explainswhy, for a century now, in all generations of Estonians, there have been few in whose mind and memory some poem or line by Liiv did not reverberate.
After WWII,AarneVinkel, a literary historian, dealt in depth with Liiv’s manuscripts. Vinkel published two major selections of Liiv’s poetry (1954/1956 and 1989), in which he not only corrected Tuglas’ mistakes, providing new facts about the poet’s life and work, but also made accessible to Estonian readers 76 previously unpublished poems. Vinkel died in 2006, leaving to posterity, as a synthesis of his dedication to Liiv, a book titled Sinugajasinuta(With You and Without You, 1989). With its 363 poems, including 93 short aphoristic-philosophical poems, known since the editions of Tuglas as “killud” (“fragments”), it became the largest edition of Liiv’s poetry ever published.
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Without doubt, JuhanLiiv belongs with the frontline of European and world poet-philosophers. There is strong resemblance between Liiv and Walt Whitman. Both were practically autodidacts, but despite that, without any systematic formation in philosophy or aesthetics, each managed to build up his own aesthetic-perceptual system, irreducible to any prior models. Rebellion against all models and fashions existing in poetry unites these two men of spirit, noble and proud, always in search of original expression, ever aspiring to resemble God in the inimitability of creation.
It is quite certain that Liiv knew nothing about Whitman. (The first selection of Whitman’s poetry in Estonian translation was published seven years after Liiv’s death.) Through German translations (because he did not know English),Liiv had some knowledge of Byron, another rebellious and noble spirit. The Estonian translations of Byron’s poems then appearing in periodicals could hardly have satisfied Liiv, though. In one of his poems, Liiv even attacks translation as a phenomenon in the widest sense, comparing it with a coffin, and arguing that translation, as a species of imitation, stifles and kills the creative and imaginative force of any young culture.
Liiv’s favorite poet was the German Heinrich Heine. Indeed, in a number of his own poems,Liiv applied the poetic form of German traditional poetry, quite common in Heine, because it offered more liberty for expression than poetry written in strict rhymes. Liiv’s rebellion against rhyme was quite conscious. He wished that thought in creation would seek its own identical forms, rather than submitting to pre-established formal patterns. For that reason there is a lot of irregularity in Liiv’s poems. There are poems in which initially applied metrical and rhythmic patterns are replaced in the course of the work by a different rhythm. Liiv’s rhymes – he could not ignore entirely the taste of his contemporary reading public – were intentionally loose. Liiv knew that the Estonian language, with its great variety of individual forms, offered little potential for pure and strict rhymes.
Liiv had no concrete models for his philosophy, either. There are notable parallels with Heinrich Heine and Walt Whitman in the acceptance of a life totality in which spirit and soul are inseparable from the biological-sexual basis of existence. In the footsteps of the great Renaissance thinker Michel de Montaigne, Liiv ridiculed the predominant Western thought-pattern that has tried to proclaim the preeminence of intellect and reason over senses and feelings and, consequently, to establish for man, “a rational being,” special privileges in the totality of nature, privileges that –ironically – include the right to destroy nature around himself, or the very basis of his own existence.
It is quite certain that Liiv did not know the work of Montaigne, nor of Miguel de Unamuno (who was born the same year as he), with whom he had in common a radical rejection of his time’s rational and scientific-technological aspirations to dominate nature and make it serve the materialistic-consumerist impulses of the human race. Liiv has become famous for his patriotic poems, but his kind of patriotism was too tough to be swallowed by nationalistic fundamentalists. Liiv insisted on the rights of individuality and independence of any nation, big or small, including his own nation, Estonia, but also severely criticized in his compatriots, the Estonians, such faults as vulgarity and material greed.
To arrive at the nucleus of Liiv’s thought, one must resort to terms put into circulation after Liiv’s lifetime. This nucleus could be qualified as a kind of intuitive existentialism and holism, intensely intertwined. Liiv claimed for life a totality – spiritual and corporeal at the same time – in which every element was indispensable. That totality, according to Liiv’s philosophy, makes no room for the “first” – the “lords” aspiring to establish their superiority and dominance over “others,” socially “second” or “third,” or over the rest of nature beyond humans. The ferment of that totality, through any individual life limited by death, is love. Much more than any rationalistic and materialistic aspirations of the human species, love and death, according to Liiv’s ideas, have to do with our deepest and noblest self.
To a degree few of his contemporaries could match, Liiv managed to achieve a synthesis of philosophy with an original and unrepeated poetic image. He created a large body of lyrical poems of great sensibility and concentration, transmitting the tragic sense of our existence, and at the same time, the beautiful and the purifying, of which the eternal source is nature. Another part of Liiv’s poetic creation is ironical and humorous. He observed with a melancholy smile the human follies and paradoxes of our everyday life. At the same time, Liiv bitterly and sarcastically undercut false ideals that in the name of materialistic progress had led humankind to annihilate and subvert the bases of its own existence.