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This essay proposes a study of the poetics and local generic context of the work of Juhan Paju (1939–2003), arguably one of the very few original Estonian crime writers emerged from the twentieth century. The focus is on five of his novels centred on investigations led by Toivo Kivistik, a small-town police detective. The series is set in the last decades of the twentieth and the early years of the twenty-first century. This tumultuous period in local history has provided rich material for socially relevant themes. Paju’s work is original in treating this material, but also in his experiments with generic conventions, which he progressively adapts to his own talent and to the local context.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Preface

Editors’ Preface

Introduction

The idea of Estonia’s cultural and national self-sufficiency emerged in the nineteenth century. The contribution of writers and poets was essential to this development. Literature anticipated not only cultural, linguistic, and artistic, but also the economic and political emancipation of Estonians. Cultural practices leading to this emancipation were largely based on Baltic German models; many key elements to the independent Estonian national identity are of foreign origin. On the one hand, the nineteenth-century nationbuilding could therefore be described as self-colonization. On the other hand, it rather created a new nation than transformed a preexisting one, since the very concept of national identity was introduced by this process. Through various political and cultural upheavals, the most influential authors from this seminal period of the Estonian modern culture have remained iconic to this day. The traditional identification with them is so strong that the tentative origins of the nation and the identitary struggles of the national poets themselves may often be forgotten and the personal and individual nature of their contribution downplayed.

Editor's Preface

Introduction

Introduction

Denis Diderot’s work has recently been enthusiastically translated into Estonian. Translations of Neveu de Rameau, Jacques le Fataliste, Paradoxe sur le comédien, Lettre sur les aveugles and Lettre sur les sourds et muets have been published from 2003 to 2015. In the 20th century, there was seemingly much less interest for his work. Only a few excerpts from his texts were translated and critical attention rarely focused on him. However, a closer look reveals that Diderot has held a rather important place in several culturally significant debates and that the relatively discreet response to his work reflects some key developments of Estonian literature.

Introductory Note

This article positions the translations of French verse works (plays and selected collections of individual poets) that August Sang, Jaan Kross and Ain Kaalep made in the 1960s, onto the background of their own original works. At that time, August Sang translated four plays by Molière (The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, The School for Wives in 1961; Amphitryon in 1961), which have already been discussed in relation to the tradition of translating the French syllabic verse into Estonian, because these translations form a considerable part of the body of Estonian translations of French verse poetry. For Jaan Kross and Ain Kaalep, the wider context is created by the so-called free verse battles in the 1950s, to which we can link Kross’ translation of a selected collection of Éluard (Veel enne kostma peab, 1969) and Kaalep’s translation of a selected collection of Prévert (Kuidas portreteerida lindu, 1965). One of the two remaining translations by Kross, (Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, 1964), can also be examined in relation to the problems of translating verse, but the other, (Béranger’s Laulud, 1963), should be discussed in the framework of intellectual and cultural resistance, a part of which was also the struggle put up for the existence of free verse in the 1950s and 1960s. Of August Sang’s original work, the article examines his collection of poems Võileib suudlusega (1963), written simultaneously with his translations of Molière’s plays and published right after them. Both the translations and the collection of original poems have attracted critics’ attention with their remarkable lack of linguistic constraint and simplicity. Although Sang has rarely voiced theoretical ideas about translation or explained his method, both his poetic image, outlined in the collection Võileib suudlusega, and his search for right words, reflected in the drafts of his translations, let us believe that the simplicity of expression and the avoidance of marked poeticism are his purposeful intentions. Were his linguistic and form-pertaining principles intentional or intuitive, they are still consistent and can be seen in his translations as well as in his original poetry. Although Võileib suudlusega is principally a collection of lyrical poetry, it displays some inclinational or even some generic closeness to Molière. We can feel a sharp sense of comedy, and often there is a powerful dramatic element in Sang’s poems. His poetic self experiences and interprets himself and the surrounding world through scenes that embody some kind of conflicts or antitheses; showing varying moods, they often contain satirical, benevolently humorous or self-ironizing elements. Concerning Jaan Kross, his translations of Béranger and Éluard have been examined against the background of the developments in his own poetry of the 1960s. The closest comparison has been made between the collection of his own poems Vihm teeb toredaid asju (1969) and the selected collection of Éluard’s poems Veel enne kostma peab, published the same year. Béranger’s traditional verse and his cheerful yet satirical view of the world around him are quite close to Kross’ own earlier poetics and attitudes. The more varied and mostly free verse poetry of Éluard, with its more intimate subjects but also more abstract way of thinking, is better reflected in Kross’ works of the late 1960s. When we look at Ain Kaalep’s poetry, his translations of Prévert’s poems have been compared with his own collection Aomaastikud (1962). We can see a Prévert-like formal method in the structure of his poems and in the development of his subjects, but Kaalep’s poetry is characterised by his search for a much broader variety of form. Experiencing and translating somebody else’s poetry is, characteristically, the starting point of Kaalep’s search and also its method. Thus, working with Prévert’s texts is an essential part of Kaalep’s own poetry, although there are only fleeting formal similarities between the works of these two authors. However, some noticeable differences from the authors whose works they have translated (especially from Prévert and Éluard) can be seen in the general pathos and attitude of both Kaalep and Kross – they are more playful and joyful. The use of different forms, the language of images, subjects of the poems and the author’s attitude can affect the closeness or distance between translations and the translator’s own work in a different way for different authors. Poets do not translate only the authors who are similar to them in all senses, and we cannot point out one certain factor that would establish an interest and a fruitful creative contact for all. However, the corpus of works we have examined allows us to conclude that in the case of a large-scale translation project, such contact is, on some level, intense and meaningful, and that a kind of a poetic, ethical, cognitive or intellectual continuity can always be found between translations and original creative work.

The article describes the conception and editing process of an anthology of Johannes Becher’s poems (Unistades täiusest, 1962) in Estonian, and discusses its status in the Soviet and contemporary literary canon. The work on the Becher anthology was led by an already outstanding literary scholar Nigol Andresen and a young poet and translator Ain Kaalep, who later became one of the most prolific and wellknown poetry translators in Estonia. An important part was also played by another poet-translator, August Sang, who already had achieved such a standing in the Estonian literary field. Several other translators contributed to the anthology, making it a common project for intellectuals otherwise very differently positioned vis-à-vis the Soviet political authorities and cultural agendas. Becher’s work was strongly promoted by these instances, but his poetry was also read with genuine enthusiasm by the main contributors to the anthology (whose own poetry has certain parallels to some aspects of Becher’s), as well as the general public, at that time. After the fall of the Soviet regime it has been forgotten, mostly for the same contextual reasons that once granted its success. The case of his poetry in Estonian explores the question of this new invisibility of now politically irrelevant, but still voluminous and aesthetically intriguing literary works in the post-Soviet canon.