THE ARTS / European Culture from the Balkans to the Baltic: This year's Cúirt literary festival focused on Eastern Europe, giving rise to many memorable moments, reports Eileen Battersby.
The Old World, the new Europe: Cúirt International Festival of Literature 2004 offered an ambitious, diverse programme that tested the bilocational abilities of even the toughest attendee. Robust choices had to be made, and the greedier one is for writing the more one feasted and fretted - but, ultimately, delighted in the surge of discoveries courtesy of that most magnificent phenomenon, the European mind.
Yet again translators emerged as valiant messengers helping us discover wonders, explore ideas. As expected, the poets of Central and Eastern Europe dazzled. Here are the words that have always been hinted at in the images and life of the great music of Hungary, Poland, the mysterious Slav world. The door to that region from the Baltic to the Balkans opened wide and the multiplicity, mystery and individuality of Europe's heroic cultures arrived in Galway, rendering the Anglo-American world somewhat smaller.
An intoxicating journey that began for many with Claudio Magris in Danube (1986; English translation 1989), his seductive cultural travelogue shaped by history and the geography of the great river, settled into the present and acquired further textures. Poets long established in their own countries and beyond experienced being discovered for the first time on the western border of their continent.
Fiona Sampson, a Welsh poet, academic and critic, pointed out that the more one discovers about the wealth of Central and south-eastern European writing the more aware one becomes of how much more there is to discover. She is contributing to this quest through her translations, which she calls co-translations, and through her editorship of Orient Express (oemagazine@yahoo.co.uk), a valuable biannual literary journal launched in 2002. It is the only source for Western readers anxious to investigate contemporary writing from the entire European Union enlargement region.
A week that had opened powerfully with the gentle humanity of Ivan Klíma, the Czech novelist, who shared the stage with Ireland's Eugene McCabe and the Polish poet Ewa Lipska, continued with an inspired juxtaposition of the familiar with great writers previously only names to many Western readers. The poet and critic George Szirtes, who left Budapest as an eight-year-old boy, in 1956, acted as translator for one of the giants of Central European literature, Ferenc Juhász, the embodiment of poet as seer. Juhász had become a legend on the publication of the epic The Boy Transformed Into A Stag, based on the death of his father. The verse equivalent of Bartók's folk music, Juhász's work, with its rich folk imagery, possesses a romantic rhetorical grandeur that for Western readers echoes the voice of Dylan Thomas.
Surprisingly, considering that Szirtes has been travelling to Hungary since 1984 in pursuit of his other, "Hungarian" self, Cúirt marked the first time he had met Juhász. "For me," said Szirtes, "it was like meeting Yeats."
For me it was like looking at Robert Frost. Juhász was born in to a peasant family in 1928 and was first published at 18. The best of his sombre, rich work dates from the 1950s. He was both fostered and somewhat alienated by having the favour of the ruling Populist or Ruralist political party for most of his career. He has been a famous poet for almost his entire life. Only latterly has he encountered the hurtful neglect that comes with a political shift. Silence, not criticism, has greeted his recent collections.
A small figure from Europe's past wrapped in a dark green coat and wearing a large hat, Juhász wandered through the streets of Galway. Benign, curious, detached and faintly amused, he is a veteran European poet who witnessed and survived many changes. More than any other writer at Cúirt, Juhász gave the impression of carrying his poems in his pockets. Not because he had ever lived on the run but because he is a minstrel who has openly lived the role of poet.
Also given to solitary walking, albeit with a far more developed aura of self-drama, is the Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski. Widely read in the West thanks to Harvill having published his early work, he read from Evening Brings Everything Back, a new Bloodaxe edition of previously untranslated work. Translated with Sampson, the volume also includes some of the earlier poems, as well as Summers And Springs, the later public man's musings as a diplomat. At Cúirt Kaplinski concentrated on extracts from Ice And Heather, his autobiographical prose poem.
His is a self-contained, aloof, almost impersonal eco-voice that manages to be interesting if also coldly conversational. He observes rather than confides - there is no passion, no questing - although there are tinges of regret: "I have gone through this world like a tourist through a museum. I've tried to glean something from these thousands of displays." His connections are most often made with the natural world and the environment. Yet this campaigning ecological awareness doesn't quite convince. Stones and trees rather than people are his witnesses.
He was born in Tartu in 1941, shortly after the Soviets invaded Estonia. More pragmatist than romantic, he declares: "The world doesn't consist of matter or spirit, / of fields, particles or dynamic geometry / The world consists of questions and answers." Asked about the work of his countryman novelist Jaan Kross, he said: "I'm not Jaan Kross." And that was that. Nor was he particularly forthcoming about the Estonian language: "It's like nothing else."
The Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun, whose work includes Homage To Hat And Uncle Guido And Eliot and Poker (1966; English translation 2003), has an easy smile and is a metaphysical poet of thoughtful, surrealist eloquence and sudden passion. Well established in the US, he has an anarchic streak. He can disarm, but if you look again additional layers and depths, rather like those of Paul Muldoon, are there to be explored. Salamun's verse, which is often as improvisational as jazz, and is often based on a series of sense impressions and cryptic statements, is wry as well as urbanely graceful and draws on his understanding of modern US poetry. Visual poise, the legacy of his interest in art, undercuts the work. "Dürer's hare / hisses and falls, from a great height / onto / the linen which will not / sustain it."
Time and again the complexities of translation arose. Mila Haugová, who was born in Budapest, raised in Slovakia, lives in Bratislava and writes in Slovakian, read her dark, felt poems centred on a female character, a kind of universal Everywoman in the original sense, and was aware that for most of her audience "it will be the first time most of you will have heard this language". She referred to the life of a poet and described herself as living in "a cave full of words".
The English translations of her work were read by a woman whose thoughtful, gently insistent voice captured the internal tension of the Everywoman figure. An increasingly experimental poet now drawn to fragmentary phrases rather than narrative, Haugová works within an at times threatening dream world of inner space and tradition that is timeless, ancient and intimate.
Later in the week the Polish poet Piotr Sommer would pause when reading the English translations of his angular, quirky, ironic work, aware that a poem changes when it moves from language to language. As an accomplished translator whose work includes the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Tom Paulin, Sommer also remarked that poets possess several languages within their mother language. Nuance, vital in any form of writing, proves vulnerable in the translation process. Sommer's verse epitomises the toughness and humanity of work shaped by the everyday shifts of living. In common with many European writers, there is that additional beat that makes the listener or reader stop and look again.
Exciting is the word that is most consistently exact when describing this year's Cúirt. It was an experience that left one greedy for words. As if presiding over the gathering of contemporary writers was the spirit of the great Franz Kafka. Klíma had brought him, his hero, with him from Prague to Galway. The gifted cast of young Galway Youth Theatre actors appeared in Steven Berkoff's adaptation of The Trial, Kafka's surrealist satire. This energetic, committed production honours and defines the concept of theatre and was well placed within Cúirt's programme.
Directed by Max Hafler, it was a revelation: here is brilliantly inventive and choreographed ensemble playing. Untouched by complacency, the scourge of so many Irish theatre productions and performances, it was fresh, funny, physical, immaculately paced and ingeniously staged. Led by Martin O'Sullivan as an initially irritated, gradually bewildered and ultimately defeated Joseph K, the young cast, including Róisín Stack, Bridget Deevy, Ciara Delaney and Eamon Stack, took every chance. Hafler is an intuitive original, possessing flair for detail and lightening quick shifts in mood and tone. Comedy and menace walked hand in hand in this exposé about the compromise of conforming. His new company, Theatrecorp, will perform Marlowe's Dr Faustus at the Black Box in November. His wonderful production of The Trial merits a nationwide tour.
The Turkish Cypriot Alev Adil is multicultural. Having fled Cyprus at eight, in 1974, she lives in London and jokes: "My job is fleeing war zones, not visiting them." Her work is informed by juxtaposing classical reference with modern situations. Her approach can seem casual, almost lightweight, but she is a shrewd observer and critic with a grasp of the real. Candour is her medium. Cassandra-like, she informed the Cúirt gathering that the Greek Cypriots would keep the Turkish Cypriots out of the European Union. They did.
The Australian poet Robyn Rowland braved seasickness to travel to Inis Oirr, the farthest western border of that expanding union, to read with Sommer, Kaplinski and the Irish-language writer Dara Ó Conaola, who lives on the island. Also travelling as interested observers were the poet Mairéad Byrne and the Canadian Alistair MacLeod, one of the world's finest natural storytellers. MacLeod - who had earlier read three extracts from No Great Mischief, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2001, about three journeys, one by water, one by ice and one by land - had no problem with seasickness. As Rowland and Sommers battled sea sickness, MacLeod dealt with the hovering presence of a Canadian television crew.
Inis Oirr, with its maze of low stone walls, is appealing on a bright April day. Memory, anecdotal narrative and strong emotion shape Rowland's strong, personal and well-crafted verse. "In the greater sutra of loss / there are more important keenings / than the drawn out crackle of dead love's dry bones" resounded with personal experience, pain and wonder. Her reading, drawing on poems from her Shadows At The Gate collection, was honest and questioning. When in Ireland she lives in Connemara and the West, and Irish history filters through her story as told in appealing, unsentimental but humanly touching poems.
Back on the mainland Jan Morris had delighted a large gathering - while yet again the Scottish writer James Kelman demonstrated that he remains one of the most authentic voices in modern British writing. The genius of this year's Cúirt, however, was an outstanding formal poet of magisterial Yeatsian presence, the Lithuanian Tomas Venclova, who has lived in the US since 1977, the year he was "told" to leave his country.
Born in 1937, he knows the world of the Old Europe, welcomes that of the new and shares Klíma's humanely moral grandeur. Venclova is also aware that if poetry is a cultural pursuit in the West, in the East it has been "a matter of life and death". Looking at Lithuania's past and the more recent history of the 1991 revolution, he compared it with that of Ireland. In the US he is a respected essayist, academic and critic - he is professor of Slavic languages and literature at Yale. As a poet his work has been translated in to 25 languages by poets such as Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky.
The distinguished American poet Ellen Hinsey, who lives in Paris, having earlier read her own work at Cúirt, also read some of her translations of Venclova. In her he appears to have found a superb English translator. "From the highway, down to the meadow / led the path. In the ravine, you watched / the sunset brush up against wires, fade. / The State's mark crowned the signpost / and bittercress stems scratched cement." (From The Junction.)
Kindly, engaged and astute - qualities that shine through his verse and essays - Venclova spoke about his friendship with Brodsky, his meetings with an aged Anna Akhmatova, who looked to mystery in poetry, not mere technique, and his regard for Pasternak. The sonorous beauty of Venclova's work, well served by Hinsey, herself a Jamesian committed to poetry as a responsibility, alerted all at Cúirt that we were in the presence of a visionary with a feel for humanity and a grasp of both the weight of history and of life itself.
Cúirt 2004 sent us home with our bags full of books, our minds full of images and eager for more of Europe's multiplicity of voices.
• Tomas Venclova will read his work at Parade Tower, Kilkenny Castle, at 8 p.m. on Friday. Admission is free
• 4. European Culture, on Friday: Shane Hegarty traces how 10 Irish towns are welcoming the 10 new EU states on Saturday, May 1st
