a-- Gloominess if it can be thought of as
such would be easy to ascribe to a reading of the New York Times Book Review or any of the other book reviews in the
country at the moment.
But not giving into the gloom yet
writing into the sparsely populated steppes of this site.
a-- Yale University Press sent me Volume 4 of
THE LETTERS OF T.S. Eliot… 1928-1929… but how should a reader describe such a
book? Naturally one reads the letters
because Eliot wrote The Waste Land, the single most important poem to come out
of the Twentieth Century and it will live on in that select company of The
Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, The Duino Elegies, Eugene Onegin. Eliot’s letters are part of the background
music to a life that produced that poem
and then had to live on and on in some way.
Of course there are the other poems: Four Quartets, The Hollow Men, The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock
a-- Well, how to read a book of letters: via the index, of course. I remembered Eliot had published Hermann
Hesse in The Criterion and when Anna
and I were in Estonia we found the Hesse family plot in the Reopalu cemetery in
Paide where Anna’s father’s mother was buried…
a-- Hesse was in the index but the eye
drifted down to the bottom of the page and there, ‘The Hollow Men’ (TSE):
Estonian translation. A Letter to Ants
Oras was included in the book and he did
indeed translate The Hollow Men into Estonian and I have here in the house a
book by him, in both Estonian and English, ESTONIAN LITERATURE IN EXILE,
published in English by the Estonian PEN Club in Lund, Sweden in 1967 with
a bio-bibliographical appendix by
Bernard Kangro.
a-- A footnote to the letter includes a quote
from Oras’s original letter, “I am quite aware that any attempt to translate
your verse is a daring enterprise but I hope some of its style and spirit can
be retained in Estonian without deviating too much from the wording of the
original poems. Our language has
attained to a considerable degree of flexibility and precision.”
The editor tells us that Oras had
taken a B.Litt in English from Oxford and
was a lecturer, later a professor at the University of Tartu and wrote The Critical Ideas of T. S. Eliot.
a-- A few weeks after reading this letter we
had lunch with Denis Donoghue who had reviewed the Eliot book for The Irish Times. He had not mentioned Oras and I guess there
was no reason for him to do so. He had
heard of Oras and mentioned that he had read a book by Oras in English on the
pause patterns in Elizabethan drama.
a-- From Wikipedia one easily learns that Oras was a professor in Tartu from 1934-1943 when he left for Sweden and from where he went to England and then to the US becoming a professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville. This leaving of Estonia was much ahead of both Anna’s mother and father who didn’t leave Estonia until well into 1944 when things had really turned…
a-- I had mentioned to Anna’s mother my
discovery of Ants Oras and she said she remembered the name from her growing up
in Tartu as she is 92 and had lived in the part of Tartu that housed many
professors at the university and other prominent citizens. Her own father had been a judge on the
Estonian supreme court who was arrested and later murdered by the NKVD in the
Gulag in 1941. She had mentioned Oras’s
book about Estonian literature in exile and that the family had it both in
Estonian and in English.
a-- The
Critical Ideas of T. S. Eliot by Oras was originally published in German
and Russian it seems and then translated into English. There is a copy in the Hunter College
library.
a-- So even in 1929 Eliot was being read in Estonia.. reminding me that
Solzhenitsyn once wrote that for Russians, Estonian was the first European
country they came to when leaving the USSR:
the presence of Latin on buildings…
a-- But, but this map hints at what always
lurks when the word Estonia is mentioned and while this is not the occasion for
that discussion… the single best book about Estonia and the
murder of all of her Jews and gypsies by BOTH the Estonians and Germans see MURDER WITHOUT HATRED by the Estonian
writer Anton Weiss-Wendt.
a-- Via the Wikipedia biography I discovered
in addition to the two books of literary criticism by Oras another book, BALTIC ECLIPSE and it was also available
at the Hunter College library and it is on my desk as I type this.
a-- Oras born in 1900 was fluent as a result
in Estonian, Russian, German and English.
Baltic Eclipse published by
Gollancz in London in 1948, is Oras’s memoir of the life during both the Soviet
and German occupations of Estonia.
a-- Not read much, I fear, as it did not
appear in the bibliography of Weiss-Wendt’s book it is however still a well
written detaling of the life endured by Estonians first under the communism and
then under the Nazis. But I will save
that report for another time.
a-- BALTIC
ECLIPSE fully acknowledge the murder
of the Estonian Jewish population though Oras does not really come to grips with the fact that the
main killers of the Estonian Jews were Estonians, with the full approval of
their German masters, thus strangely duplicating Estonian history that had long
been a story of the Baltic German
nobility telling the Estonians peasants what to do and the Estonians hat in
hand sucking up to their German masters.
a-- Oras understands the
debilitating role, the destructive presence of the Baltic Germans in Estonian
history but while mentioning a few of the Estonians collaborators the murder of
the Jews is really only mentioned but not explained. Oras is very good on just how vile and
personally corrupt many of the German soldiers were and how this mirrored the
long relationship between Estonians and Germans.
a-- I write of this as Estonia and our
relationship with that country is always shadowed by that word: JUDENFREI.
a-- However BALTIC ECLIPSE is still a very important document for understanding
what it was like to live in Estonia and has helped me understand a little
better the life Anna’s mother and father during the two occupations.
a-- Oras begins his book: “The lecture was over. Twelve girl students
and one man--- the only male student of the English department who had not been
forced by the German occupation authorities to enlist with a military or labour
unit or had not gone into hiding to evade conscription—had been listening to an
attempt to unravel the intricacies of Richard Crashaw’s mind and style, taking careful
notes as usual.”
It is that wonderful tone, detailed
and suggestive which is the reality of the book.
Oras will continue on to mention that it is the last day of March 1943. He will finish the class, go to the Café Werner---
where Anna and I had lunch four years ago--- and meet a friend who will tell
him in a few days they are fleeing by boat to Sweden.
Final thought: at first I thought it was because Estonian
was a small country that the revelations contained in MURDER WITHOUT HATRED had
really changed our understanding of Estonia and had in some way made it very
hard to think of going back to Estonia, even though Anna’s first language is
Estonian and she thus has total access to that country right down to an
Estonian passport, mirroring my own Irish passport.
b-- The smallness and the resulting
intimacy of the Estonia and out coming from the vastness of the United States…
and the detail about how after the Jewish children had been murdered in Tartu
the Estonian killers had distributed their toys and clothing to deserving poor
Estonian children… but I felt again the discomfort as I drove across Oklahoma a
month or so ago as one passes a series of signs about entering and leaving the
various Indian nations. AGAIN, one of those uncomfortable reminders
of the near genocidal campaign against the native peoples of what became the
United States.
b-- I would quickly tell myself well,
the Irish part of my blood didn’t get to this country until after the closing
of the frontier but the Whitney part of the family had been here since one boat
after the Mayflower and what had they been doing, back then… I am avoiding the Joycian word: nightmare
Final thought: does any of this
lurch to Estonia take anything away from Eliot?
I think not.
b-- Reading is always a constant
re-reading of one’e own history
Final thought: The
Critical Ideas of T. S. Eliot by Ants Oras is of interest as it does not
avoid Eliot’s long interest in the
writings of Charles Maurras though to go into that can send the reader right to Action Francaise and what
happened to Maurras in France at the end of World War Two…
b-- So I hope I have established the value
of reading Volume 4 of THE LETTERS OF T.S. ELIOT while going to Estonia and
discovering the Baltic Eclipse by Ants Aoras who died on 21 December 1982 in
Gainesville, Florida. My mother died on
21 December 1972 at Saugerties, New York.
