Jüri Talvet - Estonian elegy: selected poems

The only certain conclusion of the investigating commission is that the huge ship was brought down by water. No, it cannot be true. Cramps of disbelief constricted throats that morning. Legs turned to lead, as if earth were dragging us to its roots, the way water tore them, naked children, suddenly from their dreams to her iron-cold breasts. No, it cannot be true. Liberty should have meant warmth at last, and joy.

As always, among the first, Estonia pushed forward proudly. The tether tied to us from twilit past times could be forgotten finally, and the dark Middle Ages with their foolish taboos could withdraw. Had there not been enough bowing already to German lords, scions of Vikings, Russian wags? Enough hauling of stumps and stones at the marshs edge? And now that the people had power in its hands, why could not the feast of the bodys solace last forever? (In this land the breath of prophets put pressure on both ears. Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Bakhtin... Who from the left hand, who from the right, depends on which side of the map you adopt. Poor little Jew Yuri Lotman, on the sad, fragile middle way, had no hope of becoming a prophet, his eyes no longer open to the sky, here at the cemetery in Tartu, Europes dump, last year on a biting autumn day, homeless, speechless, taken now for Russian, now for Latvian, his only eulogy the violins nightingale song by the nourishing river that indifferently, coolly flows past.) No, it cannot be true.

What stupid sophistry about God, sin, the duty of fasting! Where was Christ when the Knights of the Cross killed the children of Marys Land and raped women and girls, when, barely having roofed the first rooms of our own, we found ourselves back on the snowy Siberian plains gnawing on permafrost, at the waste lands rocky dump, there from where they say we came. No, it cannot be true. For thousands of years already we have been Europeans: early tillers, at a time when others, the stronger, consumed their neighbors, like an insatiable swarm of grasshoppers discovered and plundered new continents, driven by hunger, by the darksweet womb of a foreign woman. Then a precipice, bitterness, anyway the cool grin of death. Is small size proof of nobility? Have we not also desired a midday under our mournful skies? The king of Estonians rising from the field of mera, his sword, bright with the blood of the foreign exploiters pointed exultantly to the sun! The ships lights went out suddenly; in the waters womb, amid seaweed, shoals of silent fish, a school of children slept, dreaming of a clear, bright summer morning. No, it cannot be true.

We have waded in the mud of history, calling for help from the bastards of our lords. But who would recognize the puny name of Sittow in the endless halls of Europes castles, in the numberless flock of Low Country painters? Who would notice Schmidts sweat and soul in the lens, piercing into space, that illuminates regardless, or Martens, among the faithful Russian civil servants, in the rear of the regiment, without a necktie? Then, Peterson, the Estonian Keats taken too young to the grave, and the father of our song, Kreutzwald, who conducted the hero of Marys Land to Tartarus, as Vergil did Dante, to find love there. (By that time the German Faust already sat comfortably on the knees of the Virgin in heaven late, always late!) Or the singer of sunrise, Koidula, whose streaming ravenblack hair proved the descent of Estonians from the Peruvian arch-Inca, just like the brush of Viiralt, made of Berber womens hair. Who would learn to pronounce their names, or the even less sonorous, clumsily compound Tammsaare? Who would care about his earth-colored proofs in a language the same as the tongue of Basques, the nahuatl of Indians, the nonsense sounds of Celts. No, it cannot be true. Now Estonia sank again to a common grave, so suddenly there was no time to divine who in the mist of times had been master and who slave, who until the death hour had fornicated in the bed of pleasure and who had loved the homeland.