Amanda Aizpuriete is a mystical poet. In conversation this past fall, she told me she writes “about places I haven’t been, lives I haven’t lived.” We met in Jurmala, a place whose name literally means “seashore” and which comprises a string of resort towns halfway between Riga and Kaugari, where Aizpuriete has lived all her life. Her mother was entitled to military housing there. Her children went to the same school she attended as a child. “I have lived through the most dramatic changes,” Aizpuriete says, who was born in 1956 and has published collections of poetry while Latvia was under Soviet control to the present.
“There was only one publisher at the start, and an ‘inside’ review was of the greatest importance.” She explained this meant a critique and recommendation of a prospective book by a well-known writer.
Aizpuriete studied philology and philosophy at the Latvian State University from 1974-1979, as well as at the M. Gorky Literature Institute’s Translation Seminary in Moscow from 1980-1984. Through this time, she met translators from Ukraine and Azerbaijan and discovered what she describes as “great writings,” just opening up to publishing in the mid-eighties when Gorbachev entered power. First to translate this work into Latvian, she interviewed Josef Brodsky a couple of years after he’d won the Nobel Prize, and translated his play Demokratija into Latvian with his collaboration. “This was a beautiful episode, done through relationships,” Aizpuriete says. As poetry editor for the magazine Avots (Wellspring) in the mid-eighties, Aizpuriete was able to see the debut of banned Latvians, those it was not possible to publish earlier.
Aizpuriete has translated Anna Ahmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Georg von Trakl and other poets from German, English, Russian and Ukrainian. The English she taught herself—she can’t speak it. She is fluent enough in Russian to have translated from Latvian to Russian, can understand Polish and Czech, but concedes that she “knows” only two languages, namely, Latvian and Russian.
She still feels a relationship to Ukraine and the translators there due to shared life experiences; she would like to translate recent poetry, possibly combing it with hers. When I asked her earlier to confirm that seven collections of her poetry have been published, she hesitated and said she didn’t quite know—because some had been combined with other work and republished.
Only the thinnest of veils separates these poets from a dark world of the past, whether it be ancient barbaric tribes moving over the land or the more recent Soviet occupation. Bruveris writes in the title poem of his collection Amber Skulls, “who knows what languages were spoken/by the tribes who wore those skulls?” and in the poems “The Last Galindian Soldier” and “Scull” he depicts a world with marshy, undefined borders. It is as though you can feel the skin of the valiant armored man brushing past you in this opaque watery air: “I am given ten cubic meters of darkness/every night I pace over them obediently//until the Sun presses its golden electroset to the panes…”
Aizpuriete’s poetry speaks to the brief beauty to be found in a cruel and barbarous world, transmuting this to the transitory passion of relationships. Like most Latvian poets, well-schooled in the classics, she refers to mythology and uses its symbols of immortality and decay. War is a wave that passes over the land, inevitable: “It’s late. War lies at the roadside, and as a pillow/has a sack of lives./So late, that the poets are waking up.” In writing of the past, she invites a combination of the prosaic and the poetic that makes us totally believe she is there:
Into the caving-in dugout of forest brothers
I crept. At their table of bones
there four forest ghosts played cards,
firing off jokes that fell flat
about the world’s transience and ecology.
They were glad of my company
and wound up the worn-out gramophone’s spring,
and all together invited me to shimmy.
“Why be a prude? If you were born at another time,
you’d be one of us, you’d be a forest girl!”
And so we shimmy with all our strength,
and the dugout is completely caved in.
More than that, the shadowy figures she sees are regarded as members of her family, a parallel life experience that has not changed throughout history, continues. The first stanza of the first poem I chose for a collection of her selected work reads: “Which lifetime was that/In which I was born by the sea?/Sisters spun skeins of gold,/With our brother we kindled a fire on the shore.// Each had a bonfire in the night.//What did we wait for? A ship or a miracle?”
Poet and translator Tomas Venclova describes samizdat in Lithuania, the underground circulation of forbidden literature (this is how Venclova was published during the years of repression). Samizdat was present in Latvia too, typed on very thin paper so that more than one copy could be made, of Russian authors who had emigrated and the work of dissidents, translations of philosophy unacceptable under Communism.
Aizpuriete read Carlos Castaneda in this way, Nabakov, and James Joyce’s Ulysses in the Latvian translation by Sodums—there was only one single copy in all of Riga, one that traveled from home to home in the seventies, a journey facilitated by radio journalists, philosophy students, and “creative Bohemians.” Thanks to these sorts of people, Aizpuriete says, one could get also music. When Aizpuriete went on her “mandatory philosophy course” that consisted of digging potatoes, she had a tape of Jesus Christ Superstar with her. “So the Iron Curtain wasn’t so ironclad…” But just because Latvian poets didn’t publish in this way, doesn’t mean they didn’t share the art. Poets read at poetry readings— everyone had heard Bērziņs’ poem about Latvian Riflemen, they just hadn’t read it.
Aizpuriete says the field of publishing was confusing after Latvia’s freedom; with the lack of government funds, writers had to pay for their books to be published or find a sponsor, and to pay the tax to boot. “Is it worth doing?” she wondered. Latvia was, as Venclova once described, one of the “small countries to which democracy comes from the top.”
Even now, there is the same uncertainty as to whether a finished collection will be published. The online journal Satori is the only real literary journal Latvia has; Aizpuriete feels: somehow Latvia has difficulty in sustaining, it is not so in Lithuania or Estonia. “It’s an absurd situation,” she says. “It is an existential question.”
I saw increasing references to death in her poetry, and asked her about this. She was silent a few minutes, then said her mother had died before emergency services could arrive—there was nothing she could have done. “It changes one,” she said, and I nodded, having been with my mother as she died of cancer.
In December 2010, Aizpuriete herself confronted death by attempting suicide, in part due to the death of her life companion, poet Andrej Bergman, but also because the government was liquidating, to save costs, the journal Culture Forum for which she wrote (here only scant source of income at the time).. She was also disturbed by the increasing violence in society. A friend in Norway saw her farewell letter on the Internet and contacted emergency services in time to save her.
I interviewed Aizpuriete after my residency at Ventspils Writers House in Seetember, during which the local newspaper reported that police had made a shocking discovery: two dogs hanged by their leashes in a grove of trees. A like atrocity had been revealed in April, when in Parventa a dog was found starving with a leash glued around its mouth and paws tied. During my residency, I was asked to translate Andra Manfelde’s autobiographical novel The Needle, published in 2005, about overcoming drug addiction; the publisher of the third edition said that the problem of drugs has only worsened and the book is necessary. We know that I will not be paid for the translation by Latvia, and that I will have to apply to the European Union for the funds.
Aizpuriete’s latest collection, Tonight I Was A Green Bird (2012), is composed of diary excerpts posted on the site draugiem.lv, dating from July 3, 2010 through March 3, 2011, along with photographs by Jānis Kreicbergs, also a lifelong resident of Kaugari. ‘Draugiem’ means for friends, and like me, Aizpuriete does not like to make telephone calls but would prefer to write letters or email. The site, at least ten years old by now, was like a blog, very user-friendly: at first Aizpuriete formulated poems, but later simply posted reflections on life. The number of visitors was posted, and the fact that one could have followers was as good as being published to Aizpurete. If more than a hundred people read her texts, what more can she want, she asks?
It is so little to be content with, a hundred Latvian readers. One of Pēters Brūveris’ poems is titled “Nightmare. The Grinding Years:” “…and upon waking four blind walls surround me,/of brick masonry, upon their backs/in phosphorescent letters is written:/USSR HISTORY, USSR HISTORY, USSR HISTORY…”
That claustrophobic sense of not being able to communicate freely persists, though Latvia has been independent since 1991: its Culture Capital Fund awards funds to the Latvian Literature Center; the amount of funding and purposes it was allocated for, including sample translations and translation of classic literature, used to be posted on its webpage, but no longer is. So director of the LLC, Jānis Oga, with his board of two is free to use the funds to run around to European book fairs with nothing to show— the magazine used to publish translated excerpts of writers’ work hasn’t been issued since 2005.
As well as dreams and poetic images, Aizpuriete responds in Green Bird to the vilification of poets by a politician, and describes the difficulty of her self-described “odyssey” from her town that lacks adequate transport to Ventspils for a residency. A thread that connects the posts is of the ordeal of the replacement of the standpipe in her building.
Aizpuriete describes the wearing-down by poverty she endures:
rose garden?
December 5 4:23
but maybe my life really was foreseen to be like a rose garden? yesterday morning in Kaugari there was light snow drifting, I calmly shuffled home from the supermarket in the twilight – with cat food and bread in the unprestigious Supernet bag, shoes down at heel and snow in my tangled hair. on the corner I was stopped by a girl with roses. she was publicizing a newly opened flower shop, handed me a half-alive, red-orange rose and a coupon for a discount good until January 30th – if there will be a new year . . .can’t imagine – did I really look like a person who would go to buy flowers, or – did others in Kaugari look still more drab? whatever – I floated the rose in a bath, after that put it in a vase, into the water of which a little sugar had been sprinkled – and now it blooms and is fragrant as though there were no drifting snow.
***