Multilingualism and the Language of the Heart
Genuine poetry, for me, is like a sudden truth spoken by a child. When I am asked how I can compose poetry in a foreign country or, indeed, compose it in four languages, as I do, I remember how as a child of ten was denied an education in my native Kazan Tatar tongue. It was considered superfluous by the Soviet government to proceed with education in Kazan Tatar, as Russian had already become the lingua franca for all the peoples of the USSR. So, the teaching of Kazan Tatar was abolished altogether, its thousand-year-old written tradition notwithstanding.
Russian, thus, became my second mother tongue. So much so that my Kazan Tatar was all but forgotten. But my heart, if not my lips still spoke it, even if no-one could hear. By the time I was eighteen my knowledge of English and German was considerably greater than of my Kazan Tatar native tongue.
For twenty or so years I wrote and published poetry in Russian. I published eight books and became known as a poet, and only I knew how painful it was to be mute in my real mother tongue. It was a need for expression that drove me to write poetry in Hungarian, another of my languages, which I learned in a year while in Budapest. Only when my Hungarian poetry earned some quite unexpected approval, could I bring myself to write in the language of my childhood.
In view of these linguistic ordeals, I see no special merit in my attempts at poetry in English. It has always been my desire to speak to people in their own language, especially since for the greater part of my literary life I have been a professional translator of poetry. I earned my living this way, it being possible at the time in the Soviet Union, with its Babylonian multiplicity of tongues and national literatures. But often when my own poems began to be translated into various languages, I did not recognize myself; it was like being shown one’s own image in a distorting mirror. Then I decided to try breathing myself into English. It is very difficult, if not impossible, not only because of linguistic deficiencies.
Russian, as well as Kazan Tatar and Hungarian poetry is still not afraid to weep for joy or out of sadness. It is much less sceptical about impulses of the heart or, for that matter, heartfelt appeals to God. English renderings of such deep feelings are often perceived as oldfashioned or childish, naïve, or simply unacceptably sentimental.
But to be frank, I have no further literary ambitions. In recent years my ever-increasing work load has left me less and less time for creative writing. So, when I do have the time, it is most precious, and my only concern is to say what I really want to say, whatever that may be.
When I go into my small Dulwich garden in the morning, the first things I see are trees, rose bushes, flowers, often different from those of my childhood or of my years in Russia. Yet this vegetation speaks to me in a tongue I can understand wherever I am. It is often an autumn leaf or a spring snowdrop that awakens in me the desire to write, and not the monumental urban vistas I encounter every day in London. The speech of leaves, grass, flowers makes a poet’s life if not extra-terrestrial, then definitely extra-territorial.
And, of course, I can always hide away in the reaches of my own soul, so full of memories, earthly pictures and the desperate search for harmony and balance between my many tongues. So painfully full of Russia.
Translated by Richard McKane
Page(s) 70-71
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