A Forum Presented by the Research Group of Luso-Slavonic Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Lisbon

Introduction

A Forum entitled Poetry in Times of War took place in February 2023. It formed part of the activities planned by the Research Group of Luso-Slavonic Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Lisbon.

However, the true objective of this meeting was to read poetry and spend some moments together in this divided world of ours, to offer our constructive energy in response to the destructive events we are experiencing.

The participants, mostly lecturers in Slavonic Languages and Portuguese, presented poems about war and peace from a selection of Slavonic poets in their original language (Bulgarian, Croatian, Russian, Slovenian, Ukrainian) with translations into Portuguese. These verses have now been translated into English.

We need the poetic word to console the pain, to lessen the suffering, to mourn the death of the son, the father, the husband, to await the return of the lost dog, to plant seeds of hope in the bombed field. We need poetry to continue the amazing adventure of life, to continue to be human.

Such extreme situations as war always profoundly affect the spirit of poets and stimulate the imagination. A man writes in pain; pain makes us think and feel, reflect, and deliberate, descend into the abyss of the human being, but it also makes us ascend to heaven. Against the absurdity of war, hatred, and death there is only one weapon worthy of the human being – the word.

Poetry can propose to the irrational world everything and nothing. But ‘when the soul speaks to the soul […]’, as François Cheng says, ‘space is abolished and time conquered’.¹ And we are all human beings.

In this context we remember the experience of Georges Semprun, poet, writer, sociologist of Spanish origin who lived in France.

Semprún spent two years in a Nazi concentration camp, and he described his experience in a book entitled: The Dead Man Needed.² In this book he speaks of the strength of poetry in the inhuman conditions of the Nazi camp. The prisoners recited poems by Rimbaud, Lorca, Valéry, Paul Eluard in unthinkable places like latrines, where the German officers never entered. These were moments of elevation of the soul, moments of affection and harmony. Moments of freedom.

Poets cannot stop war. But poetry helps not to lose our human face: to feel the pain of dying animals, the suffering of warhorses; to save lives by sacrificing ours, to weep with grief or happiness, to see the dying enemy as a friend. Poetry helps us to trust in the forces of good, to live our days in the beauty of small things, of small gestures of fraternity … to admire the perfection of the stars, to see the trees, the flowers, to feel the wind, and to smile to the dragonfly in the wind.

To end my introduction with a touch of hope, I leave here a haiku.

In a land /ploughed by the tanks /a man plants seeds of hope

The next pages present the contributions of the participants in the Forum.

Ukraine

Serhiy Zhadan (1974 -)

‘Now, I know, – he says – what war is like’

Ana Prokopyshyn

Faculty of Arts, University of Lisbon

[email protected]

Serhiy Zhadan was born in 1974, in Starobelsk (Luhansk), and is one of the most prominent Ukrainian contemporary writers, also known as ‘The Bard of Eastern Ukraine’. Zhadan is known worldwide, and his works have been translated into several languages. Since 2006 he has won many prizes (the most recent are the Hanna Arendt Award and the EBRD Literature Prize, both in 2022). His style has been described as ‘journalistic poetry’, ‘photographic narrative’ or ‘verbal jazz’, since his language is so clear and strong, that it can take the reader into a parallel reality. Zhadan’s own view about language is as follows:

Language sometimes seems weak. However, it is in many cases a source of strength. It may retreat from you for a while, but it is incapable of cheating. This is the main and determining factor. As long as we have our language, we have at least a ghostly chance to explain ourselves, to speak our truth, to put our memory in order. That's why we talk, we talk. Even when our words hurt the throat. Even when they make you feel lost and empty. Behind the voice is the possibility of truth. And it is worth taking advantage of this opportunity. Perhaps this is the most important thing that can happen to all of us.³

When one reads Zadan’s works, that person travels into the scenarios that are described, one can hear the noises, smell the aromas, live, and experience the joys and the fears of the poetic subject. Zhadan’s poetry is considered modern lyric poetry, but in what concerns the motive, we could analyse Zhadan’s work in the light of the ‘Crepusculars’, mirroring illness, deformation, and degradation (physical, mental, or social). We find ‘crepuscular’ images, such as bloody hospitals, deserted schools, cellars, abandoned buildings, and cemeteries, combined in a melancholic atmosphere with elements like withered flowers, cold snow, dense fog, smoke, broken furniture, and mutilated bodies. They describe how war transformed the landscape and the people (metaphorically and literarily). There is an uncertain future, despair, although there is a ray of hope, given by the voice of humanity. In a world devastated by war, the main actors in Zhadan's prose and poetry are ordinary men and women: almost archetypal anti-heroes, but endowed with a genuine, self-critical, and resilient humanity fighting for survival:

What does war change in the first place? A sense of time, a sense of space. […] A person in the space of war tries not to make plans, tries not to think too much about what this world will be like tomorrow (…) only the things and people who will be with you tomorrow morning at the latest have meaning - if you survive and wake up.⁴

But war is not exactly the focal point in Zhadan’s writing. It is rather a factor that leads to the existing feelings of heavy-heartedness and displeasure with this new form of living. Through poetic language, reflecting on the current experiences, we will find ourselves expressing grief and solidarity, rage and love, growth, and forgiveness. The experience of surviving the war creates a language-based legacy for the next generations. This can be seen in Zhadan’s poem Now, I know, – he says – what war is like, where resiliency is considered the ‘highest virtue’. At the same time, words and sentences do not just describe or explain what there is to see, but trace what is absent. This same poem testifies to that which is absent. It does not describe the event itself (the capturing and the implicit torture), but its consequences and changes in the human being, the leading to cognitive transformations and semiotic shifts. It does not intend to establish what is right or wrong, and it even ends with an open question about the future still to come:

Now, I know, – he says –

What war is like.

Well, and what is it like? – I ask.

Void – he answers.

He speaks with knowledge on the matter:

after being captured, that’s how he speaks

about most of the things.

With knowledge on the matter.

Which means, with hate.

He speaks in such a way that it is better not to answer him at all:

He wouldn’t agree, anyway.

He will hold his ground,

considering it the highest virtue

during war time – to hold your ground,

to counteract the sun,

to counteract the ocean’s movement.

And that’s what it is like:

War is – void,

and that’s how people talk about it –

without adjectives.

How did you feel?

Void.

How were you treated?

Like a void.

How do you talk about it?

Like a void.

How can we live now, with all this? ⁵

In the words of the writer, this could be a valid answer to the poem’s question:

One way or another, we will have to regain a sense of time, a sense of perspective, a sense of longing. We are doomed to the future, moreover, we are responsible for it. It is currently being formed from our visions, from our convictions, from our willingness to take responsibility. We will regain a sense of our future, because too much remains in our memory that needs our involvement tomorrow.⁶

But what makes this war poetry different from previous writings about previous wars? Each war is different, each war brings its misfortunes, teachings, and, of course, its poetry. This is a current war, this is a current people, this is a current world, and this is current poetry. Ukrainian literary identity is being shaped today before our very eyes. Zhadan’s poetry is not an interpretative response to war, but it is one of the many effects of it. For most of us in the Western world, war was a distant glimpse of the past. Now we are living a new type of war: the so-called hybrid war. And this undeclared and uncertain conflict without rules affects people not only inside, but also outside Ukraine, mainly civilians. Millions of people left their homes to find refuge, although they do not call themselves refugees, but people displaced by force, hoping to come back home as soon as they can. And among those affected by the war, there are the writers, who, through literature, create a collective meaning, with words and images, but ‘the war also undoubtedly changes the language, its architecture, the field of its functioning. War, like a foreign shoe, breaks the anthill of speech’.⁷ Facing a devastated collective and a muddled language, Serhiy Zhadan compares the speakers to ants:

Therefore, the ants – that is, the speakers of the broken language - are feverishly trying to restore the broken structure (…). But this inability to use the usual mechanisms, or rather, the inability of the previous peaceful and pre-war constructions to convey your condition, to explain your anger, pain and hope it is especially painful and unbearable (…) it turns out that the possibilities of language are limited - limited by new circumstances, a new landscape: a landscape that is written in the space of death, the space of disaster.⁸

He states that ‘the work of each individual ant is to restore the overall coherence of this collective speech’, again and finally, the only chance truly to express ourselves is through literature:

Who is the writer in this case? The same ant, dumbfounded, like everyone else. Since the beginning of the war, we are all regaining this impaired ability - the ability to speak intelligibly. We are all trying to explain ourselves, our truth, the limits of our brokenness and trauma. Literature, perhaps, has a little more chance in this case. Because it is genetically related to all previous language disasters and breakdowns.⁹

Bulgaria

Dimcho Debelyanov (1887-1916)

‘One Dead’

Antonia Radkova

Faculty of Arts at the University of Lisbon, Portugal

[email protected]

Dimcho Debelyanov was a Bulgarian poet and author whose premature death at the age of 29 in the First World War cut off his promising literary career.

As a result of the ordeals of his wartime experience this sensitive love poet underwent a profound stylistic metamorphosis. His verses, once expressing symbolism, assumed a newfound simplicity, characterised by impressive clear images. From a leading figure of Bulgarian symbolism, he moved to realism.

Debelyanov is not merely a gifted lyricist; he emerged as a socially significant author. His poetry reveals the immense pain within the context of war; his poems express, with profound impact, sympathy for the victims of the merciless war, in which he himself became a casualty.

One of his notable works, the poem One Dead expresses the poet's emotions and sorrow for a enemy soldier who has been killed. The poem was inspired by the letters of a dead French soldier that Debelyanov came across by chance in the fields. Fate, in its capriciousness, ordained that the poet himself would be killed in battle shortly afterwards. The parallel continued in an astonishing way; four years later Debelyanov‘s wife stumbled upon two poems written on a small piece of paper, one of which was One Dead.

The following lines are taken from the poem ‘One Dead’, translated by the author of this text.

He is no longer our foe,

The Living divide from their foes.

A wave sweeps them far away,

Towards an opposite and distant bay.

Beneath, in meadows sunk low,

He lies, pale, in a tranquil flow,

With sorrow reconciled in his stare,

He gazes at the sky so deep and clear.

 …  …  …  …  … 

Amusing sorrow, absurd despair,

In thunderous, ruthless times!

Didn’t he with his life declare,

To take the enemy’s lives … 

Did he, under the enemy's flag,

Show mercy to us at all?

No, he grasped what befell him,

A dead man is not to be our foe!

Croatia

Vesna Parun (1922-2010)

‘Ballad of the Deceived Flowers’

Arijana Medvedec

Piaget Institute, Portugal

[email protected]

Vesna Parun’s Ballad of the Deceived Flowers from the poetry collection Dawns and Whirlwinds ¹⁰ came out before the publication of probably the most spontaneously and frequently invoked idea nowadays about war poetry: that ‘writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’.¹¹ And it is fortunate that it was so because the collection was a sustained proof of the possibility and the need to write poetry to integrate the ordeals of war, the irrepresentable in human experience, into the collective consciousness – and thus, transform it into an opportunity for healing. Like all Parun’s later poetry, the collection is fundamentally about love – love that is a measure of all life, and of, at one and the same time, continuous suffering, and the redemptive, sacred state of the soul.

Dawns and Whirlwinds was Parun’s first book of poetry. At that time, she was 25 and had been severely criticised for being decadent and removed from the prescribed ideological and political concepts. However today, the book is considered a milestone in post-Second World-War Croatian poetry and the first deflection from the poetics of Socialist Realism of the late 1940s.

Vesna Parun, often called ‘the Croatian Poetess’ – a title she disliked, and/or ‘the Croatian Akhmatova’, was the first Croatian woman poet who lived exclusively from her writing. She published more than 87 books of poetry, and more than 20 children’s books, but she also wrote fables, plays for children and adults, essays, aphorisms, epigrams and autobiographical prose. She was also a prolific translator. She was awarded more than a dozen literary prizes and she was a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.¹² Despite all these distinctions, her life could be described as sad and lonely: she suffered from poor health, lack of affection and social recognition, mainly because she lived in the literary and social counter-current, dedicated only to free and deeply felt creativity.¹³

Poetically speaking, Vesna Parun was a master of the untamed and exuberant word and the most surprising metaphor. Her verses make up an extremely rich universe of topics and motifs, mostly based on the five senses and feelings – and on the truth, her truth. Throughout her life, when the words would dry up and the imagination run shallow, Vesna Parun would resort to painting, to lines and colours. Thus, she also held a couple of independent exhibitions of her own paintings, as well as inspiring some others on the occasions of her various anniversaries.

Her poems, translated internationally and known in the Slavonic countries as early as in the 1960s – among which ‘Ballad of the Deceived Flowers’ is one of the most famous ones – are a synthesis of tradition and twentieth century modernity. They bear echoes of ancient stories and legends, folk poetry and sayings, Greek and Slavonic mythologies, the Bible, as well as of the trends and styles of her own times.

Thus, there are several layers of meaning that structure Dawns and Whirlwinds: the meta-poetical Mediterranean scenery and society in the background; the figure of time – past, present, or future, as a personal and collective, mythical element; the relationship with the Other; and the utopian/dystopian dichotomy of life vs. war, in turn related to all the other layers.

And ‘Ballad of the Deceived Flowers’ exemplifies all of them. There is a utopian individual and collective past, the ‘golden-red’ childhood, peaceful and innocent, in harmony with nature, which is ‘in awe’ when faced with the dystopian present of the nearly mythical destruction of war. There is a war arranged around the chronology of human perception: it is foreseen – ‘[t]here is black smoke on the horizon’; it is felt – ‘the army is coming’; it is taking place – ‘a drumming fire has destroyed the entire spring’; and eventually it destroyed the world – ‘The dead / have poisoned the day. What shall man do now?’¹⁴

Thus, Dawns and Whirlwinds is a ‘grammar of how to be human’, a painfully simple truth about war: there is no place for man in these circumstances. A new man is needed, a man who is actively going to mould the new times.¹⁵ It is a belief in the future, quite different from Adornoian questioning. And it is also proof of Parun’s literary value, which earned her a place in well-known and respected Croatian poetry anthologies as the signpost of a new post-and anti-war sensibility.

Ballad of the Deceived Flowers

Goat-leaf honeysuckle has just bloomed on the mounds.

With the gold of the bleating flocks

The green field murmured in the lull.

The boys took off their shoes so they would not trample the daisies.

It was a warm Sunday, as when the swallows come back from the blue.

[…]

There is black smoke on the horizon. They say the army is coming.

Whose are the golden-red fields, whose are the windows on the hill?

The bells are ringing wide, ringing in the daisies,

in the gazes of violet hue.

[…]

Yesterday, goat-leaf honeysuckle blossomed on the mounds,

and today a drumming fire has destroyed the entire spring.

The bells are ringing down peaceful clearings, ringing to alarm the flowers.

The shot has confused the squirrel. The boys have tumbled

into the boats tied to the shore, but the guards wouldn’t let them pass.

Go quickly into the tiny anthills, extinguish the candle.

Hidden torpedoes have ravaged the fisheries. Nothing has remained

in the sun. Only a few dried graves

have brought their nameless ashes out into the wind. The dead

have poisoned the day. What shall man do now?

The daisy has opened its eyes in awe because the machine gunman

didn't take off his boots.

The lamb has lost its milk and stayed in the road

bewildered:

the enemy-man has come to pay a visit to the unarmed flowers.

Russia

Marina Bogdanova (1972 -)

‘Apocalypse of a Fool’

Olga Russinova

Independent Researcher

[email protected]

Since last February the war has become a matter of utter importance for many Russian poets.

Russian-speaking poets could oppose the war in words in a special way because of the repressions of any other anti-war resistance. Now even words have become dangerous. The only book of this kind is published in Russia in 2022.¹⁶ As the editors say,

It is documentary evidence of the actual literary process at the breaking point of Russian culture, when poetic texts, like flags on a map, mark the scale of a humanitarian catastrophe.

During 2022 many went abroad, spreading and publishing new anti-war (prohibited and dissident) poetry. For instance, two volumes saw the light in the Israeli Publishing House Krik (https://nowarpoetry.com),¹⁷ together with new Russian anti-war poetry project on the web, a volume The War published in Germany, and some other individual poets too.

However, the poetry discussed here does not belong either to any classical school or to dilettante poetry. It stems from the tradition of the late-Soviet Bard poetry, which became popular in the 1960s as a symbol of freedom. It is no surprise that there is no such poetry in the volumes mentioned above. Bards do not care so much about literature per se but they care about concrete situations, almost like ‘case-studies’.

The bard presented here writes under the name of T. A. Shelien. Her real name is Marina Bogdanova; she is a philologist, musician, and poet. Born in St. Petersburg, she had lived in Moscow for some years, and since the mid-1990s until 2010 she had her own ethno-folk project called Rowan Tower. Soon after the beginning of Russian invasion of Ukraine, she left the country for Varna (Bulgaria), where she helps Ukrainian refugees and organises a Russian-Ukrainian choir for teenagers. She also publishes literature reviews in the mentioned volume The War. It is as if she is speaking about her own poetry there.

In Russian poets the theme of motherland - a drunken mother-killer - flows into the apotheosis of a deserted, insane infernal space, cancelling everything that was good, valuable, and sacred on this territory … Poets say how their (not their) country turns into a desert, because friends who are able to, go away wherever they can go. They tell us what it is like to live in a system of anti-values … 

I translated into English the poem of Shelien entitled Apocalypse of a Fool. I chose this poem because it is the most humanistic, in my opinion.

Apocalypse of a Fool

When they just blow up

our poor sad Earth,

and spoil it

with their filth from depths

we’ll get what their child sacrifice is for,

why they need

live candles, and temples of war.

When they just do what

they want to do,

obsessed by hatred

and long-lasting insanity

nobody stops them, neither honest nor dishonest,

nor sage nor warrior. I believe, nobody, but three girls and Christ

One girl will come closer and say:

don’t do it, my mum is there.

She’s still looking for me.

You know, she’s still alive.

And God for His Mother’s sake listens to a human child,

Who asks Him. Because here

she is perfectly right.

The second will laugh – as she

laughed flying over the world

free from her body – that she

is no longer thirsty.

The third will come in a dream, a vision before the fiat.

The Lord will nod in agreement. And the Earth will be able to live.

I am singing to you – it is not

because it is awful.

It is not because all the forces

are exhausted by the war.

I just believe in this image. Three girls in Eternal Heaven.

The last of our chances. Girls and the blaze at the back.

Slovenia

Janez Menart (1929-2004)

The War Horse

Mateja Rozman

Faculty of Arts, University of Lisbon.

[email protected]

Janez Menart was a poet and a translator, a graduate in Slavic Studies and Comparative

Literature from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Liubliana. He worked on national

television and at the publishing house ‘Mladinska knjiga’.

In collaboration with Kovič, Pavček and Zlobec he published the collection of poems Pesmi štirih (Poems of the Four) in 1953. Throughout his life he was more faithful to the romantic and realistic tradition than neo-romanticism. With a stripped-down language, he maintains rhythmic order and vocal harmony and addresses not only timeless themes such as love, youth, life, and death, but also contemporary social phenomena (using irony and satire) when he considers that they disagree with ethical principles. He is considered one of the best Slovenian translators from English and French. He received many literary honors and prizes, and among others the Prešeren and Sovre awards.

The War Horse

He is standing like a ghost. He has broken skin.

He is dirty, squalid, and haggard.

No one ever caresses him gently,

at night he goes to the stable tired and cursed.

Toil all day, toil day after day.

He does not know why but he still works.

And he is happy if he falls asleep when he is tired,

and if the keeper leaves something in the manger.

So, he spends his strength year after year.

Thus, he loses vigor, youth, and freshness.

The reins will lead him to war,

and for his country he will fall.

No one will mourn his death,

no gentle hands will seek him.

They will only say in a military report:

‘One thousand five hundred horses were lost … ’¹⁸

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Cheng, Chant Touchant

2 Semprun, Le mort qu'il faut

3 Zhadan, Speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

4 Ibid.

5 Zhadan, From the Poetic Cycle.

6 Zhadan, Speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Parun, Zore i vihori, 76-7.

11 Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society, 19.

12 National and University Library of Zagreb, Ne pitaj više zašto te ljubim – u spomen na Vesnu Parun.

13 Rebac, Život kao tužna priča.

14 Parun, Zore i vihori, 76-7.

15 Petković, Vesna Parun: Zore i vihori.

16 Poetry of Late. A Chronicle. Complied by Yury Levin. St. Petersburg, Ivan Limbach Publishing House, 2022. 576 p.

17 New anti-war (prohibited and dissident) poetry, two volumes, Israeli Publishing House Krik (https://nowarpoetry.com).

18 The poem and the text are taken from Poetas Eslovenos e Portugueses do século XX. Slovenski in portugalski pesniki XX. stoletja, Guimerães Maribor, Orgal Impressores, 2012, coordinated by Mateja Rozman e Casimiro de Brito and translated by Mateja Rozman in collaboration with Casimiro de Brito, Américo Meira et al.