Myth of Arrival

In case you were curious, here is Kazakh TV Host Borat Sagdiyev's homepage.

They say real life is stranger than fiction; unless real life is a fiction. A couple of weeks ago the news that Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry had threatened legal action against a certain British comedian, Sacha Baron Cohen, who portrays the central Asian country as a state populated by drunks who enjoy cow-punching as a national sport circulated the Web. The New Yorker reported:

Roman Vassilenko, the press secretary for the Embassy of Kazakhstan, wants to clear up a few misconceptions about his country. Women are not kept in cages. The national sport is not shooting a dog and then having a party. You cannot earn a living being a Gypsy catcher. Wine is not made from fermented horse urine. It is not customary for a man to grab another man’s khrum. “Khrum” is not the word for testicles.

Borat (Cohen) appears to have drawn Kazakh wrath after he hosted the annual MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon, arriving in an Air Kazakh propeller plane controlled by a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle. The Kazakh Foreign Ministry later reported in a news briefing: "We do not rule out that Mr. Cohen is serving someone's political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way." Someone's political order? Hmmm.

And here is where it turns even stranger. Apparently under the guise of "not getting it," the Anti-Defamation League has now condemned Cohen for the casual but relentless anti-Semitism Borat spouts in his interviews of local Americans on the mock show Borat in America (but the women-caging, urine-drinking, dog-shooting went unquestioned). What I think is brilliant about Borat/ Cohen is just that — his ability to draw out the racism/ sexism of my fellow Americans by his off-handed comments.¹

For example, at one point Borat appeared in a country-and-Western bar to lead a sing-along of In My Country There Is Problem. The chorus goes: “Throw the Jew down the well / So my country can be free / You must grab him by his horns / Then we have a big party.” The camera keeps panning around the room and at first everyone (all very white and very drunk) seem unsure but as the song progresses the audience start to clap and stomp and whoop it up. By the end of the song Borat has everyone singing the chorus.

In real life, Cohen is an observant Jew, but the Anti-Defamation League has argued that “the irony may have been lost on some of the audience.” So the answer is to not bring these problems into the light and talk about them? The answer is to ignore them? I think that is why they call it irony, folks.

1. Which reminds me of The Onion.com's hilarious Local Jew Feels Left Out Of Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy. [back]

My brother, Eli, and myself at my folk's house, November 26.

This poem is part of the miscellaneous verse collected in the "1971-72″ section of Pizarnik's Obras Completas (page 243); though La Muerte y la Muchacha (Schubert) is dated November 1970, a couple of months after I was born. It is interesting that she was working with the concept of music and death as a combined force, a trigger for killing. She writes in a fragment of an ode to Janis Joplin: "you did well in dying/ for that reason I will speak to you,/ for that reason I will trust in a young monster" (page 242). Young monster, indeed.

Editor's Note: When I first began this blog way back in September, 2005, I had the idea that one of the uses of modern communication could be bringing poets from around the world into the limelight through interviews and publishing on the Internet. To this end, I dedicated part of my blog to this pursuit, a chance for a global exchange between cultures, a chance to forge friendships through the discusion of poetry.

Note: All photos and translations are by E. Evseyeva (2005).

EE: First, let’s agree that I am an amateur poet, this will define a lot.

ZJC: For you, what is Sakha Poetry?

EE: It’s my people’s art, their voice reflected in fine rhymed lines; it’s their reflection of the world which is around us – how sun shines in the blue skies and what its warmth gives to people in this Middle world, how good it is to make hay and then drink fresh milk and cream, how simple, bitter, various, exciting, reverberating life can be, here, in the land of severe, harsh climate. The voice, with wisdom and serenity tells about cultural bonds and why it is vital to secure the generations’ link. I also think that our great poets made big contribution to the world literature both by making translations of world known masterpieces of poetry and just by writing their own ones (Rufov, Kulakovskiy, Gogolev).

It’s one of the ways by which we, the Sakha people, identify ourselves as a nation and show who we are to the world. This is how we – and sure, many others – speak to the world, share souls’ slight movements with others and such activity can be internationally understood.

ZJC: What are your influences as a poet?

EE: If you mean whose artwork influenced me … then I should disappoint you, as I think when I began writing I wasn’t excited by any peculiar poet. Well, I’ve always adored some of the classical Russian poets like Puskkin, Lermontov, Block, Tutchev, Esenin, Fet … and Yakut poets like Kulakovsky, Danilov. They are real masters, no questions. I really liked to read them at my study time, I even try to read them from time to time nowadays, but I should say I don’t focus on poetry as professionally as you do. What I write is my soul’s reflections on paper and I don’t feel like studying why I wrote such and such and what kind of metric form I used … As I wrote “words appearing in my heart, they are full of sunlight and bring joy and solemnity over the whole universe called Katya.” I guess I should pay more attention to poetry theory, perhaps I miss it due to the lack of time.

And maybe it was music and songs that influenced my art in the beginning. For example, some of the classical poets’ works are laid to the music and we have wonderful romances … As I said, I usually hear tune in my head first, then words come along and all this mix together and I write it down. It can be then changed into a poem or what I call a poem-song. What surprises is that I don’t know the musical notes. I am a true amateur, I am.

Still, in writing some of the poems I adopted the structure of lines from poets like Marshak, he writes placing lines like in a stairs, which adds motion to the writing. I also liked the poetical prose of John Muir, an American environmentalist, scientist and great traveler. His “Northwest Passage,” describing his journey along the west coast of the North American continent, reveals a very intricate bond between human and nature.

Moreover, in 2001 I visited the UK and bought an anthology “The nation’s favorite Twentieth Century Poems,” edited by G.R. Jones. Perhaps I was caught by its title, I just felt the desire to buy the book. And thank goodness, I bought it. There are poems to suit every mood and emotion. I mostly enjoyed Philip Larkin’s poems, like “This be the verse” which is a very sad and bitter poem, not much surprising but very honest about human nature. And treasures are Kipling’s “What If" and its rewritten modern version by Benjamin Zephaniah's “If.”

ZJC: What are some difficulties do you find as a translator?

EE: I don’t do much of translation work. Just from time to time when I come across some very intriguing lyrics, I hold up my bilingualism and try to translate poems. So, when I translate Sakha poems into English, I try to keep the format of a poem, to keep the style of the author…in other words, to reveal the atmosphere of a poem. Yes, and to succeed in the last point, I need to find the most suitable words, which is sometime a difficult task since I am not a native speaker.

ZJC: In your opinion, name a Sakha poet who has yet to be translated from Sakha into English and why we need to read him/her?

EE: Oh, I guess with the time given, all our poets should be translated into English, the world leading language today, so the rest of people get to know the Sakha literature and poetry. As far as I know, there are some translations of masterpieces by our major poets, Oiunskiy, Kulakovskiy, Danilov, some others.

I’d like to tell you about a poetess Natalia Kharlampyeva. She is quite an elderly woman, in her 50s, but she continues to work and very actively. Besides being a poetess, she is also a host at our local literary TV program, she is often a member of different literary juries at various competitions. For she’s been a poetess for many years, she represents both classical (20s century) and contemporary Sakha poetry. I like her artwork due to its richness, very intimate attitude to the reader, softness of sounds rhyming, philosophical themes presented from woman’s point of view. In the collection of her poems “Khumys"¹ (1999) Natalia continues her traditional theme – praising the life-bound powers of kindness, love and friendship.

ZJC: Finally, tell me the story of Ekaterina the poet?

EE: I first wrote what can be called a poem in 1992, so it’s been almost 14 years since I began writing. I wonder now about what could make an 11 years old girl open a new copy-book and express her feelings in a more or less rhythmical/rhymed form? Was it due to the fact that it was a springtime and that’s why my young soul felt the pulse of awakening nature and I put the words coming from my heart on the paper? Maybe … and it was close to a girlie thing, I mean, to have a diary, to have a poem-journal. So I first began to write down my poems, not showing them to anyone except some close people. I don’t do it very often even now, though I published some of my works but not in specialized poetry magazines and I used a pseudonym or didn’t sign at all. Can this be called shyness/modesty? No, or a little bit, because I didn’t take any specialized poetry courses (though later at the university there was a course in Poetics) to be called a real poet.

I guess I need to write for myself mostly, to clear up my thoughts, to express my feelings … and I show some of poems to people. I think for me writing is like a self expression or a method of relaxing, raising your spirits.

Well, then I felt taste for such kind of activity and continued to write. And a strange thing is that in a year (in 1993 to be exact) I began writing “song-poems”, or lyrics…because they have a music, which I first would develop in my mind, and then fill it with words. I sang them at family parties or to close friends. The themes? Love, mere observations of life… for the next two years I mostly wrote various “congratulation-poems”, perhaps you could call some of them as odes.

As I was getting older I shifted to more serious themes and developed rhyming. Being a 15-year-old girl I became a typical teenager and my works at that time show that I was in full romantic swing. You know what trouble teenagers’ minds: the opposite sex, the choice of way in life, defining who you are…Pinkish-blue, philosophic poetry. No surprise, right? And I kept writing some of my poems as “songs/ lyrics.”

As for language, I mostly wrote in Russian (I know my native tongue, but we speak Russian mostly), it’s my primary language of communication. But then in 1996 (the time I got to a new school where they had good English courses) I began writing in English, also, making part of the poems as “songs/lyrics.” If you ask me what caused me to use English in writing poems … perhaps, the love for this language, I somehow got attracted to it; plus I studied it well in my high school and it made me listen to English songs … I can also say that nature takes an important part in my writing, I address it in many of my poems. Should I say my poetry has an environmental tint? Oh, yes, certainly. Nature calms me down, it reflects your thoughts, it inspires…

Then I started to write about some social issues like generations’ bond, the native peoples … not many works on that, though.

“The Northern Odyssey” you found on the web site of the UArctic was written in the year 2000. It’s the very first time I joined the project of the UArctic by taking its Circumpolar Studies courses. That opened a whole new world for me, I learned much about my native region, so I couldn’t resist from not mentioning this theme in my writing. [ed. note: I present here Evseyeva's poem, "The Northern Odyssey," first published on the UArctic website]

The Northern Odyssey

Starts in the darkness of the sky
And with the sun,
With rays of sun which fly westward to shine
The endless of the Frontier Land.

The nature in diverse
Within the circle of severe frosts
Here, way up north
I start the journey of my life,
United with the Frontier Land.

Of all the feelings
That people worldwide call "the finest"
- Love - you’ll find in me,
My love’s as strong as the strongest frost
And it’s born in the Frontier Land.

Literature and reading the world famous masterpieces also made me write my reflections on what I was reading. Like I have a poem about “The picture of Dorian Gray” by O. Wilde, then a poem inspired by Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine.”

Well, in the 21st century I continued my major themes – place of human in the world, love, relationships, and some personal thoughts. The years 2003-2004 were quite “quiet,” not much written, but that what was - look quite nice; besides, I was asked to write some of the poems to be included in a bulletin our NGO publishes.

And now I wait … wait for inspiration, for some free time (you know I have business to keep me busy), but there in my soul I feel - I still have some ideas, thoughts to be expressed on paper. Just wait and will see.
[end interview]

1. A Sakha traditional beverage of happiness [back]