che si è tenuta l'8 agosto 2015 nella Biblioteca Nazionale di Riga – Lettonia
Nella foto in alto: Juris Kronbergs e Piera Mattei
Foto al centro: nel pubblico a sinistra Janis Oga, l'organizzatore dell'incontro
foto in basso: Piera Mattei con Knuts Skujenieks
The Juris Kronbergs’ Human Comoedia
by Piera Mattei
Let me start saying thank you very much to
Janis Oga, who so kindly invited us here
in Riga, giving us also the opportunity to better know this beautiful
country and first of all to meet personally
Juris Kronbergs whom, till today, I’ve only met in his poetry.
I was also glad to meet Paolo Pantaleo and Pierpaolo Pregnolato
of the Damocle edizioni and the author of "Un seme nella neve, poesie e
lettere dal gulag", Knuts Skujenieks.
Let’s now recollect how everything started.
Antonio was visiting last year Riga, meeting here scientists, but I had provided
him also with good literature addresses . We had from the very good Estonian poet
and good friend Doris Kareva, the name and the address of Janis Oga, as one of
the most interesting connection in Riga.
So Antonio came to meet him, telling that we will like to know Latvian poets
and poetry collections to be eventually translated and published by our
publishing house Gattomerlino edizioni.
Finally Antonio came back to Rome with some
books from Janis, books in English
translation with a fronte the
original. I read all of them but from the very beginning I did not have any
doubt about which was the book I will like to translate. So I called Juris Kronbergs and Juris kindly
accepted our proposition.
This
was the book I liked, since it really corresponds to the kind of poetry I
prefer. It is a book not only working on
the language, but working on the language to say something, to put questions
that are the questions that also science pose to itself.
Vilks
Vienacis – Wolf One- Eye in the English translation–
is of a book by Juris Kronbergs about a very personal and tragic experience
that opens universal questions and also scientific ones.
To translate a poet means for me living in
this other poet’s sensibility and thoughts at least for the entire period of
that work. It is a kind of essential and necessary integration of my activity
as a poet. So I very carefully choose what I’m going to translate.
Of course when you translate from a foreign
language, even by means of a good translation–
as, for many reasons, was the one I had – you really need to be in contact with
the author, and Juris was always ready to reply to any question I would pose to
him about the book. He also, on my demand, wrote me about the experience that
had started the urgency of it.
I ‘ve found so important what he wrote to
fully understand these poems, that I asked
him the permission to translate and put at the end of the book.
So I think I can also start to read it
here:
“Well, difficult to describe,
but I´ll try. I had been a diplomat for 5 years, living a rather hectic life -
embassy work, 6 children, writing and translating at nights. One day I suddenly
discovered a dark spot in my left eye, the next day it had grown bigger (from
the bottom, upwards), my field of vision was now quite small. I went to the
hospital, they said I should lay down on my back, and they´ll operate next
morning. Well, to my surprise, I had a retina detachment. It was my first visit
ever to a hospital as a patient. After the operation the doctor said that it
went well. I couldn´t see anything with my left eye so I asked if I would
regain my sight as it was before. He answered: That you can only dream of. That
was a shock! It felt like death had begun to take a part of me.
Well, after the operation I
had to stay at home for 6 weeks. All my hectic life had came to a stop. And I
was confronted with myself and my half-sight. I had the feeling that my life as
it had been, had ended, and that I now had to create for myself a new life. A
sort of "mid-life crises", I guess. I wanted to write about my
experience, but it didn´t go well until I invented this protagonist, Wolf
One-Eye (Vilks Vienacis in Latvian, I liked the sound of it, it seemed also
folkloristic), which gave me the opportunity to be very "personal"
and "universal" at the same time.”
So the book is the story of how Wolf and his human corresponding
figure lost their binocular sight. But, for what concern the human, he finds
the way to accept his life in the new condition. In fact the poem put at the
end of this volume recalls the one in the beginning and this make us understand
that what was dreadful and frightful in the beginning has became more and more bearable
and accepted at the end.
Of course the book is beautiful and interesting as a all. There
is a particular construction given by a particular consequentiality of the
poems, based also on semantic recalls or on sequence of thoughts. But in this
collection there are poems that I particularly like, and I would like to read my
Italian translation of some of them with Juris, if he likes, reading the
original, after this short speech of mine.
I will like to note that, from a structural point of view, this
poems collection is similar to the “Divina Commedia”. In fact it starts, not in
a symbolic but in a physical sense of the expression, “in una selva oscura”, and
in the last poems speaks of having found again not of the same sense of freedom
as before, but a new one, may be also a larger sense of freedom and a new
special sight. It is as a personal descend to Hell, may be necessary to acquire
the real Vision.
I will distinguish here two different kind of visionariness: the
first is done by the physical feeling of being part of the Universe, in an
infinite Space–Time dimension, the other one is different, out of the
Space-Time coordinate, put inwardly. For what concern the first one, in that same
email I have cited before, Juris wrote
to me that, obliged to stay home lying in his bed for a while, he read a lot of
books about astronomy and scientific studies and definition of the time dimension. For what concerns not the intellectual , but, say, the
spiritual Vision, with a certain irony in Vilks
Viens Kronbergs writes that at a certain point he understood that he could
escape his condition by the window or by the door or, finally, inwardly, and this was he decided to do. So, as the Agostino first and then Petrarca affirmed, may be Juris
want to confirm that ”In interiore homine stat Veritas”.
But I do not want to go too far away or backward away.
What this book , that I will call an “existential novel in lines”, says is that ”Sight is cast not only
in the eye”.
But coming back to what
poetry is able to speak about that also science says, I must here underling that I was reading, while translating
this book, a scientific book written some years after Juris’s. It is The Mind’s eye by the very well known neurologist Oliver Sacks, that also recalls in
that essay the personal experience of losing what is so precious: a eye
– there is an Italian idiomatic expression that is difficult to translate in
English “luce dei miei occhi” to speak about something you like as much as your
own life. After terrible panic, Sacks understands in his own experience and
others’ that mind is so strong that will
make you see: mind can give you the idea of space, but also can create images,
or make you recall images of the past, even if you have lost that open window
of the mind that is a eye.
Finding that, using different language, poetry truth corresponds
to the science’s, made me love even more this book, that is, as I said, not
about lyric sensitivity but about what is in the same time physic and psychic,
I will say, what speaks at the same time the language of the body and of the
spirit. All is spiritual goes through the body and its modifications. And
modification is not necessarily a loss, it
must be taken as an occasion of extending his own humanity and experience. This
is also what this book –through its poetry– want to say.
I hope with this short speech to have indicate how interesting, strong,
real and human is “Lupo Occhi-Solo”, that I hope others will love as I really do.
