The Wooden Tongue Speaks - Romanians: Contradictions & Realities

The Wooden Tongue Speaks is a collection of short stories and poetry, concerning the lives of various characters in post-communist Romania. Mainly set in Brăila, these tales are fragments into the day to day reality of a nation attempting to shake off the yoke of the Ceauşescu reign, a regime that was characterized by an increasingly brutal and repressive apparatus and, by some accounts, the most rigidly Stalinist regime in the Soviet bloc. It was also marked by a pervasive cult of personality, nationalism and a deterioration in foreign relations with the Western powers as well as the Soviet Union, isolating it from both East and West. This lead, eventually, to Ceausescu’s government being overthrown in the December 1989 revolution, after which he and his wife faced a hastily organised televised trial which ended with their execution.

So, what would make one feel nostalgic for those days? This is one of the questions raised in this book. In a nation that is haemorrhaging out it’s youth, as they head for the bright lights and bling culture of the west. The old & infirm are left behind without the support of family, and only past memories for sustenance, and yet with this freedom also comes opportunity, with all the positive and negative connotations in its wake. As an exile from Romania,  Bogdan Tiganov, uses his own experiences to create these fragments of individual life, allowing us a glimpse into the day to day reality of a nation & it’s people.

In the introduction to this book the author states that:

“The lives of Romanians in post-communist Romania creates an endless pool of interesting characters and situations and I am determined to throw light on situations that are generally not covered by the media, without being overtly political. The wild democracy of Romania also allows for some absurd moments to occur that are humorous and sad at the same time”. 

He does this through tales such as A personal history of a city called Brăila,  in which he states that the walls of his home were so thin, you couldn’t even whisper a joke about Ceauşescu, or An Interview, in which an individual is being sold a job as an au pair. Then there is Lost and Found, the tale of a lonely exiled Romanian returning home to find a wife. These are some of the tales in this collection that highlight the reality of a modern Romania with all its complexities, in the process taking us the reader on a guided tour of his birth place & revealing how life is lived in a post communist world.

Apart from the tales, there is also a series of poems that, according to the author, add another dimension to his tales and, having read them I agree with him. They add a more direct, instinctual & in some cases visceral edge, complimenting the stories in this collection. Poetry such as;

A PIECE.

I am not a monkey

Now

But a piece of my

    Grandfather,

A piece of heart

  Perhaps

**

I am not a machine

Now

    But a piece of my

     Mother,

A piece of courage

     Perhaps.

**

    A genetic

    Nameless

    Unspoken

      Underdog piece

      Honest

      To God

**

      Hidden

      Survival

        Spiritual piece, yes

       Spirit.

**

      Death comes quickly and unexpectedly

       And when it comes it comes

        Leaving memories and

     Journalists to write their stories

  But its the little pieces that live on

  Not the monkeys or machines.

Bogdan Tiganov was born in Braila, Romania, 1981. There he attended the Nicolai Balcescu School of Music at the age of seven, learning to play piano as well as composing. At the age of 11 he was exiled with his family to London, UK, where he wrote and illustrated his first book at the age of just 14. His writing credits include short stories and poems that have appeared in magazines and periodicals worldwide, such as Exiled Ink!, Parmentier, Planet, Delivered, Krax and Bright Journals.

Suko’s Notebook (Interview)

Bogdan Tiganov Interview

Bogdan Tiganov Blog,

.Com

Honest Publishing, is a new British independent book publisher of both fiction and non-fiction. Founded by three friends in 2010, the company strives to publish alternative, original voices, and to provide an audience for unique writers neglected by the mainstream. Their aim is,

“At Honest Publishing, we are proud of our commitment to producing and promoting high quality literature, and take great care to ensure that honesty and integrity lie at the heart of our business practices.”

 

More, Romanian Poetry

The Best Words In The Best Order.

Definitions

 Octavian Paler

Translated by Ileana Stefanescu and S. D. Curtis.

In Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, the protagonist Paul Chowder, talks about how after compiling the poems you want for an anthology, you revisit your selection and realize that it’s a particular stanza, a particular line that stops your breath, that is perfect. You then read it again and slowly an awareness seeps into you that if…

  "you stare for a while at one of the single lines--stare into its rippling depths where the infant turtles swim--you realize there's usually one particular word in that line that slays you. That word is so shockingly great...and so then all of your amazement and all of your love for that whole poem coalesces around that one word.”

Sometimes that stanza, that line or that word has enough allure to beguile you and the poem becomes part of your world, a charm called upon when needed.

Rarer is the poem that works on every level, that has a simplicity that captivates, a poem that is the living example of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s definition of poetry “the best words in the best order”

 

Definition of Departures

I didn’t know that the bitter flower of loneliness

when held up close

sounds like departing steps.

Definition of an impossible Alternative

The fire has no choice:

either to remain itself

or turn to ash.

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Definitions by Octavian Paler is a small book of poetry, made up, for the most part, by a series of forty seven poems titled “definitions”,  of which the two above are examples. They range from a poem of one single sentence through poetry that could be described as “haiku”, as well as several longer pieces, the book then ends with six poems all with individual titles. Although I describe this book as small (approx. 17cm x 13cm & 46 pages), it’s subject matter couldn’t be larger, we range through definitions of time, regret, departures, love and silence, subjects which the poet wanders through haunted by a restless nostalgia, trapped by the knowledge that there’s no going back and going forward leads to a further sense of alienation from himself, or an ideal sense of self.

**************

                        Definition of Belonging

Even drops of blood know the meaning of “home”

Otherwise they would wander through the body

and forget to return to the heart.

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The poetry reads as though an individual, the poet, is going through a process of examination, attempting to define his relation to the world and to himself, to define not just how he fits in, but if and why. Therefore making this a very introspective collection of poetry, but one that will have you smiling at that collection of words placed in that “best order” & then the awareness of a deeper thought process will seep into your mind – that this collection of beautiful, clever introspective poetry, is not merely one individual’s exploration of self, but that it relates to you, us, all of us.

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Definition of Unspoken Words

Clear snows

fall between our words.

Or is it just the silence between our words?

Our last words

went so far away that we can no longer hear them

and we don’t know what we said to each other.

And through the silence between our last words

I am running and calling your name.

We are side by side.

And I am running and calling your name.

*******************************

Octavian Paler (1926 – 2007) was a poet, novelist, essayist, journalist and a politician. He was born on July 2 1926, into a peasant family in Lisa, Romania and attended the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy and the Law School of Bucharest (1945-1949).

He was a substitute member in the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party (1974- 78) and deputy elected for the Great National Assembly (1978-1982). In the 80’s, however, his relation to the Communist authorities deteriorated and he found himself in conflict with them. This resulted in his persecution by the secret service agency (“Securitate”) due to his pro-Western views and his critique of PCR (the Romanian Communist Party) and Nicolae Ceauşescu himself. Consequently, he is house arrested and prohibited in terms of his literary activity.

After the Romanian Revolution and the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu in 1989, Octavian Paler worked first for “România liberă", then for “Cotidianul" whilst continuing his anti-communist activity as one of the founding members of the Group for Social Dialogue (Grupul de Dialog Social), together with Ana Blandiana and Gabriel Liiceanu amongst others. During his last years he was an intense critic of Romanian politicians and politics.

 

During his long career, he worked as an editor for the cultural section of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Company (1949-1964), Agerpres correspondent in Rome (September-December 1964), General Manager of the Romanian Television (1965-1968), Vice-President of the Radio Broadcasting Company and coordinator of the literary and music sections (1968-1970), editor-in-chief with “România liberă" newspaper (1970-1983) and starting from 1990, honorary director of the newspaper.

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This book is a review copy I got from Istros Books. One of the new small Independent publishing houses that have sprung up in the last few years, with the aim of filling in the gaps often left by the larger publishing houses. In the case of Istros their aim is to

“showcase books you won't find elsewhere: books from unusual places, books from undiscovered writers, stories that might otherwise be neglected”

Istros’s particular focus is on quality literature in translation from South-East Europe (Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro), bringing you stories and ideas from newly-discovered writers as well as established ones whose works have been neglected in the English language. The intention is to dispel the image of Eastern Europe as an indiscriminate collection of grey tower blocks filled by Vodka drinkers, their mission is to shine a light on that ‘other’ Europe and reveal its glories through the works of its greatest writers, both old and new, revealing the best from a wealth of local prose and poetry and to offer it to a new audience of English speakers.

Octavian paler (Wiki)

susan-curtis-kojakovic( Istros Director) at London Book fair discussing Definitions

Istros Blog

Istros(what’s in a name?)

The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto by Kenji Nakagami.

Burakumin (部落民 hamlet people/village people) are a Japanese minority group who have faced discrimination in Japan. The Burakumin, although one of the main minority groups in Japan, are racially and ethnically identical to other members of this country. Most historians trace the creation of a rigid outcaste class back to the early eighteenth century, when the Toku-gawa government issued a number of edicts defining outcaste status and listing rules to regulate outcaste dress code and freedom of movement, going so far as to cover what style of house they could live in (no windows facing the street). Some scholars claim more ancient origins tracing outcaste communities to the 14th –15th century, these conflicts notwithstanding, Ian Neary* traces a development over time in the formation of outcaste identity: “ whereas  before 1600 the emphasis was on occupation afterwards it was on bloodline”. Although they were legally liberated in 1871, with the abolition of the feudal caste system, this did nothing to put a stop to social discrimination or lower standard of living.

Todays Burakumin are descendants of these feudal era outcaste communities, whose occupations would have mainly comprised of work considered unpure, tainted with death or ritual impurity (such as executioners, undertakers, workers in slaughterhouses, butchers or tanners) and traditionally lived in their own secluded hamlets and ghettos. This isolation, added to the long history of taboos and myths concerning the buraku, has left a legacy of social desolation. In the early 1970s the Japanese government who could no longer ignore the widening gap in the living standards between the prosperous middle classes and the outcaste community, began to throw loads of money at the problem, bulldozing the old housing and replacing with concrete prefab buildings. Since the 1980s more and more young buraku have started to organize and protest against their plight, with movements whose objectives range from "liberation" to integration with the aim of ending this situation.

* “Burakumin in contemporary Japan” Japan’s minorities, ed.Michael Weiner (London, Routledge, 1977)

The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto, contains three early tales of Kenji Nakagami set in and about the Burakumin community, a segment of society he was familiar with, being a member of the baruku himself. In these stories he reveals a section of Japanese society that most will never wander through, the alleyways and “unclean” spaces, recording the dialect of the labourer, the uneducated manual workers & leather workers. By using the local idiom of the outcaste, he created a prose style that captures all the nuances and richness found there.

Kenji Nakagami won the Akutagawa Prize in 1975 for The Cape, becoming the first author born in the post-war period to win this prize. The Cape tells the story of a tough burakumin family, gathering together to hold a memorial service for the first husband of the matriarch. Akiyuki, the son of a women who although married twice, but never to his father grows up in a world of half-siblings. One of these is Ikuo, a half brother who engages in violent against Akiyuki and his mother after she remarries and moves in with her new husband. Ikuo commits suicide when Akiyuki is twelve. We learn all of this as the memorial service is being organised and yet the shadow of violence is never far from Akiyuki and its spectre raises its head once more as Akiyuki’s in-law murders Furuichi (his own brother in law). All of this isolates Akiyuki even more and in search of answers to who he is, he turns to his natural father, which merely piles confusion upon confusion.

The second tale, House on Fire, is a study of an ordinary man, constantly ambushed by his own rage, endlessly reliving the memory of his father’s acts of violence. This story is framed around the illegitimate son of an arsonist, who hears that his father is in a hospital bed, his body shattered in a motorbike crash. This tale moves back and forth in time, between different characters and perspectives. The uniting force between father and son is violence, the one clear memory that the son has is of his father fighting another man at a school fair, this act seems to define for the son ideals of sexuality and manhood. This legacy follows the son into adulthood, although now, his own violent impulses shows themselves in the petty and sordid acts of bullying committed against his tired wife or in the destruction of inanimate objects. This tale plays out the drama of identity, as the protagonist tries to piece the shards of his life, sifting through what is memory and myth, caught in this riddle the son ends up alienating all. 

The third tale in this collection is Red Hair, and possibly the most straight forward of these tales.  Kozo, a construction worker picks up a red headed women at a bus stop, what follows is a tale of sexual excess as Kozo & this unknown insatiable redhead explore each others bodies, punctuated only by the other bodily needs and Kozo’s job. This account of sexual obsession is raw, it burns off the page with a brute force and a passion that could light up a major city and yet?Within its twenty four pages, this book hints at a lot more, insinuations that this mysterious women has a dark past, carries a lot of emotional baggage, then there’s the screams each morning from a neighbour who’s addicted to amphetamines and wakes them up with her cries.

These three tales are dark and foreboding, the people involved live lives, not of quiet despair, their pain is writ large. The tragedies could be picked out of any line up, the usual suspects of alcoholism, murder, rape and suicide, of people bound by a fickle constraint. The stories, like the characters go nowhere, confined within the limitations of their world, leaving you with no egress, no key to why - just endless questions. Kenji Nakagami doesn’t detail the disease but shows the symptoms of a life where discrimination isn’t that awful thing that happens to someone else, but is the entirety of ones existence.

Kenji Nakagami

Stone Bridge press

School of Forgery–Jon Stone

  In the first chapter (Or so we say – 21 propositions) of Simon Critchley’ s Things Merely Are, Proposition four states:
*“What then are poets for? In a time of dearth, they resist the pressure of reality, they press back against this oppressiveness with the power of imagination, producing felt variations in the appearance of things. Poetry enables us to feel differently, to see differently. It leavens a leaden time. This is poetry’s nobility, which is also a violence, an imaginative violence from within that protects us from the violence from without – violence against violence, then.”
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I was having trouble trying to find the key to writing about this collection of poetry until reading the quote above, in the same book Critchley writes that “poetry reorders the order we find in things. It gives us things as they are, but beyond us”. He goes on to state that  poetry give us an idea of order.
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This makes sense as Stone creates his verse from the flotsam and jetsam of culture, from scraps of film and other poetics, crafting his language into works that, at the surface, shine like some glitter ball. It states on the inside cover that the School of Forgery, postulates the poem “as knock-off, as reclaimed scrap, and most of all as through-and-through fabrication” . This chimes with the idea of poet as artificer of the world using their imagination to contrive a reality, to reorder the order found in things. The poet finds the words that allow us to see life as it is, anew &  transfigured. It also states in the introduction that the School of Forgery principal teachings concern the volatile relationship between fakery and invention of which we all are alumni as is…
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“the bandit boiled alive in a cauldron of oil. So are the perpetrators of hoaxes, the writers of pornographic Dōjinshi*, counterfeiters in love with their teachers and teens who dress up as birds to fight tyranny. Its professors proliferate. Its graduates excel in every field. Its campus is the world.”
*****************

This is Jon Stone’s first full-length collection and you get the impression of someone with a great knowledge of both pop culture and the arts, an individual who is as equally inspired by the works of Kenji Miyazawa as he is Arthur Rimbaud  & can cherry- pick from either. Yet beneath all that artifice, beneath the games there is a candour that resonates, a passion that hooks you in past the word-bothering puzzles and clever facade, past the glitter-ball and the wizard of Oz contrivances, you find the poet, obsessed with language, and who has the ability to use it, not just as poetic gesture but with a depth, a strangeness and a beauty that beguiles.

          The School of Forgery.

We’re doing Ernst this term – corkboard,
collage, gouache on card, “beyond painting”.
But all I want from Mrs W is Mrs W.

I’ve practised for months her husband’s hand,
almost finished the letter he was too wooden
with shame to write himself when he was twenty.

I’ll slip the envelope’s blanched almond tongue
into the just-open mouth of her marking drawer,
listen for her slight cry when she comes to it,

sweet as juice-pearl unwinding from a glass’s rim,
huge, to me, as the eye of The Fugitive
or one of those petrified cities under moonlight.

Then to perfect his body, its itch and scrawl.
His lurch for the knur-and-spell of her knees.
His leer for her waist’s gay lavolt.

Poetry Book Society Recommendation
School of Forgery saunters into the treasure-filled territories between original and derivative, fabricated and found, real and imagined. Here, through the medium of translations, travesties, knock-offs, collages and impersonations, through wrong-footing, fluid forms and wild tales, the slipperiness of language and identity is revealed for what it is.
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PBS Selectors' Comments These are poems with an edge, or rather, multiple sharp edges, poems as elaborate 'fabrications' challenging conventions of form and voice. This is an inspired, integrated debut, endlessly inventive, with a lively intertextuality and a wide frame of reference. The language is both playful and hard-wrought, words at high voltage, words as collector's items.

                         Mustard.

Its flavour in the nostrils a thundercloud smart
like seeing your crush on a superstud’s arm;
you’d have to be sturdier than durmast
oak to contain such a bastard stum
in your head’s barrel and not cry out drams
of tears. But if you, in your dilemma, durst
eat another spoonful, your throat’s drum
is often only half as stung, your heart’s mud
stirred to a soup and every untoward smut
on your tongue expunged in one broad strum,
leaving nothing – no points, no clear datums
from which to measure pain, no lukewarm dust
of hurt feelings, rags clinging to an absurd mast
or pins or crumbs or flakes of seed-hard must.

Jon Stone was born in Derby and currently lives in Whitechapel. He's the co-creator of pocket poetry journal Fuselit and micro-anthology publishers Sidekick Books. He was highly commended in the National Poetry Competition 2009, the same month his debut pamphlet, Scarecrows (Happenstance), was released.

Salt Publishing
Sphinx
Poetry International (Jon Stone)

* Dōjinshi (同人誌, often transliterated as doujinshi) is the Japanese term for self-published works, usually magazines, manga or novels. Dōjinshi are often the work of amateurs, though some professional artists participate as a way to publish material outside the regular industry