Home and Away

The November 2014 issue of Poetry offers translations from Russian, Korean, Chinese, Welsh, and many other tongues. Uprooted from their languages of origin, the poems consider the very idea of origins, of what it means to call a place home. Walking a beach by his cabin, Ilya Kutik notes that only a gull’s cry “marks this deaf land not as the island of a castaway / but as a massive continent”: near home as he is, the speaker is at once landed and unmoored, resident and castaway. In an excerpt from “Translations in Bare Outline,” Lev Oborin establishes a similarly complex relationship with his country. He will be returning his veteran’s pension, he writes to his president: “Where were you, where was your human feeling, / when my fingernails were being torn out?”

The speaker of Abraham Sutzkever’s “The Blade of Grass from Ponar” hails from the town of Ponar, and his view of that place is complicated indeed. He receives a letter from Ponar—a site of mass murder during the Holocaust—that includes a local blade of grass. The grass

ignited, letter by letter, the faces of the letters.
And over letter-faces in murmuring smolder:

The blade of grass from Ponar.

Sutzkever’s lines smolder with a strange mix of the benign and the horrific. The blade of grass that “ignite[s], letter by letter, the faces of the letters” might seem at first something to read by, like a light passing over a page. Yet the ignition of letters has a more terrifying connotation, too: it suggests the Nazi burnings of books and, more particularly for Ponar, the cremation of corpses (the “faces” of the letters recall human faces). One of the next images offers a similar combination of sweetness and scariness: “children play the fiddle in a line on fire.” The initially lovely image of children playing music “ignites” at the end of the line and becomes dreadful, all the more so because the fiddling children, as artists—and as children in the place where the speaker was a child—parallel the scribbling poet.

Away from home, he finds his home in the blade of grass—the grass that signals at once fiddling and flaming, his growth and others’ deaths, the fires of illumination and destruction. “This blade of grass is now my world, my miniature home,” he writes:

I will not separate from my hometown’s blade of grass.
My good, longed-for earth will make room for both.
And then I will bring a gift to the Lord:

The blade of grass from Ponar.

He declared at the poem’s beginning that he would hold onto the letter; now, he announces he will keep the blade of grass. Why this reliance on physical objects? Might it be a response to the many forced separations he has endured—from his hometown, from loved ones killed in the war? He will hang onto the grass even when he dies—and in returning to earth, the source of the Ponar grass, he will, in a sense, at last go home.

In Seán Ó Coileáin’s “The Ruins of Timoleague Abbey,” the poet tries to go back to an old, meaningful place—his version of Ponar—only to find that it has changed; for him, as for Sutzkever, no conventional return occurs. In the Timoleague Abbey of the past, the “foot-sore” “lingered in the storm,” and the walls were “god-bright with the king’s theology.” The speaker recalls

the slow chorus
of the low bell,

the full hymn
of the byre and field.

Now, in stark contrast, all that remains is his hymn—this poem—and he is a soloist without a chorus: “My kin / lie under the ground.”

Note, in the lines quoted above, the preponderance of Germanic words, which provide this hymn its particular tones: “slow,” “low,” “bell,” “full,” “hymn,” “byre,” “field.” In his essay “The Medium of the English Language,” James Longenbach calls our attention to the “myriad minded” nature of English, which melds together Germanic, Latinate, and many other kinds of words. What’s the effect of encountering mostly Germanic ones here? Does the direct language give you a feeling of closeness to the speaker and his experience; do the simple, earthbound words link you intimately to byre and field? Do you—following Longenbach’s lead—recognize these word choices as strategic, an artificial crafting of plainness? If so, how does that realization influence your sense of the poem’s immediacy?

Just as the abbey has fallen into ruin, so has the speaker, thanks to the dual pressures of time and emotion. “My shape /
 is sloughed with grief,” Ó Coileáin writes—much as a building gets eroded by the elements—and there is “no more red tree / between my thighs.” And just as he describes himself in terms of the ruined abbey, he describes his actual home, his “pathetic hut,” in human terms:

Rain-cracked and wind-straddled.
Your walls bare-nubbed

by chill flagons
of ocean spit.

Bare, spit-upon, and cracked by weather, the hut resembles a person who has seen better days.

What's the significance of comparing people with buildings? Perhaps the motif suggests that people are just as much homes as houses are. Unable to reenter the abbey of his memories, the speaker instead enters the memories themselves: “I am in my remembering,” he notes, as though remembering were a physical place. In a similar spirit did Sutzkever, far from Ponar, find himself at home in a blade of grass.