Carcanet @ The MLF: European Poetry Night ~ CookingFood.Org

Descending from the ivory tower above Greggs and hurtling through the chaos of rush-hour Oxford Road, the intrepid Carcanetti arrived at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation for an exciting line-up of European poets: Ágnes Lehóczky, Toon Tellegen and Marcelijus Martinaitis. An international audience of old friends and new filtered into the restored mill, pored over the Burgess archives, typewriters and harpsichords, and settled into their seats.

After an introduction by the linguist and BBC journalist Rosie Goldsmith (pictured, near left), the Hungarian poet Ágnes Lehóczky (pictured, far left) took to the stage and the perspex lectern. Reading from her Egg Box collection Budapest to Babel, Lehóczky described herself as ‘a fragile being’, one of a generation of Hungarians who ‘do not own their mother tongue’. Written in English but resonant with Hungarian poetics, Lehóczky’s poetry is indeed a ‘hybrid thing’. Both ‘in this language’ and yet ‘in the other tongue’, her poems arise from a point of collision. These are Babel-like constructs, solid and shifting, full of palimpsests and vestiges. Like a ‘map of dislocation’, her poems search for a path through cities and selves, back to the beginning, back to the country of origin. Reading a final poem from her forthcoming collection Rememberer, Lehóczky scattered the ashes of memories. It is only by releasing the past that we can fully know it; it is only in ‘departing’ that we 'arrive’ where we began.

Next to take the stage, the translator Laima Vincë read from The Ballads of Kukutis by the Lithuanian poet and activist Marcelijus Martinaitis, who was sadly unable to attend due to illness. Speaking through the persona of Kukutis, a visionary trickster, Martinaitis’ ballads covertly criticized Soviet Lithuania. Set ‘beyond the forest’, beyond society and even beyond sanity, The Ballads of Kukutis miraculously survived Soviet censorship in 1971. Under the guise of ‘nonsense poetry’ Martinaitis exposed the absurdity of the regime and the politics of linguistics: ‘All letters are equal' but Z cannot come before A. Ending with ‘Kukutis’s Swallow’s Hymn’, Vincë offered a poem of hope in which Martinaitis looked forward to the time ’when all of Lithuania returns’ to the world. This first complete English translation of The Ballads of Kukutis, published by Arc, is a fitting tribute to Lithuania’s linguistic and cultural resurrection.

Nonsense also provided a framework for the absurdist poetry of the final reader, Toon Tellegen (pictured, right). A household name in his native Holland, Tellegen has written over twenty poetry collections, as well as novels and children’s stories. Affable and wise, he arrived bearing vast quantities of beautiful Dutch liquorice. Reading from his Carcanet collection Raptors, poems unfurled in fluid, limitless parables of creation and destruction. Often performed with a jazz quintet, Raptors has all the infinite cadence of improvisation. Poems rise and fall and circle back to the irascible, expansive figure of ‘my father’, whose presence swallows up the world. Sometimes profoundly light, full of ‘dissolution and syrup’ and ‘frivolous marmalade’, sometimes darkly twisted, Raptors offers a familiar, and yet warped, world in which abstract phrases become concrete and inhabited: ‘My father/ was in seventh heaven, /my mother visited him’. Even the title of the collection, Raavfvogels – raven-like birds, not ravens but raven-like, chimes perfectly with the shifting certainties of the sequence.

Gathering up these uncertainties and absurdities, Rosie Goldsmith led the poets through a final discussion about self and nation, the perils of translation and the Pan-European canon. The audience then spilled over into the red-deep cafe for free-flowing wine and high-piled canapés. And, with minds full of colliding cultures and languages, we set out into the crisp Manchester evening to share Italian-Mancunian pizzas with poets, publishers and Lithuanian cultural attachés in a Sistine chapel under the arches of the railway.

Alice Kate Mullen, Carcanet Press

Raptors by Toon Tellegen, Carcanet 2011

Click below to read an extract from Raptors.

Open publication - Free publishing - More dutch

Raptors is available now from the Carcanet website. Click here.

Also at the European Poetry Night:
The Ballads of Kukutis by Marcelijus Martiniaitis, Arc 2011
Budapest to Babel by Ágnes Lehóczky, Egg Box 2010