Chuvash Indigenous Poetry：Aihi versus“Aigi”

Was it Hegel or some other learned man who said it first

—that God conversed with every people

separately and in its own tongue, as He had time enough for every one of them? For Him there have been no “big” or “little” ones; He wants them all, His library simply wouldn’t do Himself content and proud without all those indigenous or ethnic “shelves”. What is the distinctive feature of “indigenous” poetry? The size of the ethnic group, hardly. Rather, the indigenous poetry is distinguished by the closeness and in many cases identity of the poet and the addressee. This is a special “gift of gods”, and their gift is not to be kept forever. Anonymity is a privilege! It may continue centuries long at the side of a“developed” individual literature, as is the case with Chuvash folk poetry and other lores of Volga region in Russia.

In the early Seventies I was reading Russian poems of Gennady Aihi, 1934, the famous Chuvash poet. At that time Aihi already had become Aigi, the minimalist genius of the Russian avant-garde, somehow ill -received by the Soviet establishment, but rather popular internationally— and, yes, still a young classic of Chuvash literature. Aihi had been translating French poetry into Chuvash, had published an anthology and won the French Academy’s Translators’ Prize. The medium -sized volume had soon inspired a whole young generation of Chuvash poets: well, the French freedom of expression atop the “ingenuous roots”, atop the Chuvash folklore tradition? The young poets were fascinated by something they had not encountered in Chuvash, or for that matter in the contemporary Russian poetry. They remained charm-bound for a time, well, but…… in their excitement they were also “lacking something”. And look, they are already searching for that something in their folk poetry! (I believed the situation had occurred often during the twentieth century.) 

And now I was looking at a Russian poem by Aigi, “Untitled’”. I saw a red rectangle on the page, and under it the line “more brightly than the heart of every single tree”, and a smaller square, and then one more line: “and”. An empty white space, and under it: (The whiles of silence — the pillars of maximal intensity of the song. Not capable to cope with itself, it repeals the audibility. Whiles of un-thought, if grasped the meaning of un-) Next to it —the musical commentary: the big square — Poco adagio, the small one — Listesso tempo, the white space —a while of silence. O you, shy guest, belated avant-garde!

 Where were you when the trumpets were still playing! What was the reason for such a delaying?! Your fellow fighters, once so young and strong, lie nigh their enemies for decades long! We have read such profound poetry back home, all in Latvian. But, my word! The French had been so moved by, and grateful for, Aihi’s anthology that they had proposed a reciprocal volume — France had applied to the UNESCO National Committee of the USSR for an anthology of Chuvash folk poetry. Now Gennady Aihi had for a couple of years collected from earlier publications the Chuvash folk songs, incantations and charms with the help of his younger colleagues. Skeptical smiles at the Chuvash Writers’Union: “UNESCO? Us?” But a few years later Aihi brings to Moscow three versions of an anthology —in Russian and French. Now books appear in different languages, one after another. I looked at the Russian translations and felt that I need the “voice”, the original and a month later my long-drawn studies of the Chuvash language began. I had met my “folk-mates”, and many other Latvians have maintained they felt the same when reading the translations. Searching for a shorter text, I choose now the prayer before entering the bath-house:

Oh, Mother-Fire!

Sit quietly on your cushion, do not play, be at rest.

Let forty women wash themselves and fifty men.

Let me after the bath ride round the village

on a two-year-old colt!

Wash the men on their crowns,

the women on their middle parts,

the girls on their sides!

Let heat remain in the bath house

while in the village strength

remains in the tireless body

of the last loose woman!

Now, the prayer of a sower hear, how the generations of wood-clearers were addressing their brother Rye, their god-ear:

Rye,

with the help of Tura,

be rival of the forest!

In heavy earth, on dark days,

be active and grow,

as buds burst in the forest!

I dip my dusty cap in the spring

and as I see it washed clean,

even so may my soul

be purged of filth

before you,

Oh Rye!

Here, let us listen to the young Chuvash men recruited for the long service in the Tsar’s army. A conscript song:

On both sides of the road

On which we must depart

Flax flowers - blue petals - are scattered.

On both sides of the road

On which we shall depart

Are white cups of white flowers.

On both sides of the road

On which we are departing

To the world’s edge stand iron barriers

And at the edge of the world

the eye of a needle.

But the village life is still going on:

The young men’s shirts —at the pile-top,

the old men’s coats—at the pawn-shop,

all the money— at the wine-shop,

the hand — empty,

the pocket —empty!

Song, o Song! Language, o Language! In both of those, the old clearings are still at fire, more brightly than the heart of every single tree. Nice and fair would be to burn in communion like trees in a clearing, but the modern poet has to carry on his shoulder the monkey which was bought by the romanticists in the 19 century: “Me! Me!” Well, not to confuse you with my own word for word translations I chose a Russian poem by Gennady Aigi translated into English much later, in 2004, by Anatoly Kudryavitsky.

The Rain

drizzles and subsides

as if“fortuity”

is romping with itself

(just as a“talent”

capable only of middling sketches)

as if“it exists” really exists

 (in the circle of uselessness

exactly where I find myself)

The gathering of Chuvash folk songs did not start in the romanticist Johann Gotfried Herder’s time, as it did for many a people in Central Europe. When the folklore-seekers came, not much was left over from the old wealth. But a few song splitters had had an enormous determination! Yet another song, which the Tatar Khan would have sung before he turned into a cob-swan and flew from his capital Kazan besieged by the Russian Tsar (1552):

I fly away, I depart

To far places unknown to you;

Whoever comes with me

Will eat cake for bread;

Whoever stays behind

Will chew straw for bread;

Whoever flies with me

Will drink milk for water;

Whoever stays behind

For water

Will drink blood.

All the Chuvash texts included in this short draft had been gathered by Aihi from various sources, translated by him into Russian and French, and to other languages by other“scribes”in collaboration with him. Gennady Aihi, God’s Scribe in the Chuvash language and self-declared genius of Russian Modernism left this world in February 2006, unexpectedly for his Latvian friends. The controversy between Aihi and Aigi was not to be resolved by a foreign reader like me, anyway. If all merge together and flow into the Language, the next generation would have to once more go to the old market place and buy“the individuality”— for a new price. But a time had arrived in the second half of the twentieth century when the collective ethnic experience became actually for many. Today, what I would like to mention is that, from somebody, not from Aihi himself, I had heard why Aigi was “so determined” to win the Nobel prize for Aihi: this prize would help the Chuvash nation to survive…… In my opinion it was the other way round: it was Aihi who won the noble title of God’s Scribe for the Russian Modernist poet Aigi.

two poems

——————

ASTRE

An abstracted clown, surviving

Only in print (not much, I agree)

I turn my indirect and cancelled gaze

Upward: yes, asters are up there, the astra

The sky so black over Prague and Riga

Over tongues and powers that be — what’s that?

It’s August, yes, only the century’s changed

That’s why the asters so bright, the astra

Hey, man, I lift up my empty gaze and

I know even through the layers of mud: that’s it

Asters again, eternal, blinking, white asters

Bright asters, the astra

UNTITLED

It’s me here. It’s you, it’s him.

The forgotten one shows up to ask:

where is that blade of grass reddened with my

blood?

I had a bow and arrow, my aim was very narrow

To shoot a bird in tree.

And then I met my maker,

No bird was on his knee.

Substance crumbles, space expands, cold, misty draft

(Ｃould that be Father breathing?)

And nothing can be seen through glass,

No matter how semantic,

No one to carry messages to coming ages,

Numbers senseless, colors black

And what they taught in school,

Devil takes it back, no, nonsense.

It’s me. It’s you, it’s him.

————————

Uldis Berzins，A Latvian poet and translator. He studied Latvian philology at the University of Latvia and published his first collection of poetry in 1980. Berzins studied Turkish in Leningrad University Oriental Studies Department (from 1968 to 1971), and also studied in the Asian and African Studies section of Moscow State University (concentrating on Persian and Turkish), at Tashkent State University (Uzbek), Revkjavik University (Icelandic), as well as in Czechoslovakia, Sweden and other countries. Berzips has taken part in the international Bible translation seminar at the Amsterdam Open University and Lund University fbrum over questions regarding Koran translations From 2002 on he has been teaching Turkish at the Modem Languages Department of the University of Latvia. Berzins1 poetry has been translated into German, Swedish, Estonian and Lithuanian. In 2009, Berzins finished the translation of Quran into Latvian. His works has won many kinds of awards both at home and overseas. In 2009 and again in 2010 he was named one of the World's 500 most influential Muslims in survey conducted by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center.

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