| |
Review by Zoya Marincheva
Lyubomir Levchev’s poetry craves tranquility and sagacious finality, yet is ruptured by the perplexities of human experience and the vitality of creation. It is apophatic in its assertions, biblical in its axiology, discursive in its rhetoric, and conversational in its method, baring a depth that is both treacherous and soothing. Conceived as the biography of a creator’s soul and springing from the well-trodden traditions of neo-romanticism and realism into the realms of ironic skepticism, his poetry is modern and easily read. Behind the soft eloquence and accessible phrase, however, are fierce irony, rigor, and the swift hand of a demiurge with “an aura of violet fatigue” holding tightly the reins of expression. Yet it is difficult to explore the many metastases of his heavy-rooted, omniscient “I” without exploring the shafts of his language. Such an archaeological work will reveal painful self-scrutiny and an ambivalent Sphynxian (Levchev means ‘lion’s’ in Bulgarian) blend of the creative urge and the death wish.
[…]
Then we‘ll sit down at the café
under the umbrellas on the sidewalk.
Then we will free ourselves of the secrets.
A lot of people will go by
Disgusted with history.
They will look at me
with sympathy
And whisper to themselves: Look at that one—
Talking with himself without a cell phone.
Then I’ll lean on the edge
where everything else begins.
And I’ll only feel how love and freedom
merge within me.”
”Caprice No. 16”
With Lyubomir Levchev’s Ashes of Light. New and Selected Poems, Curbstone Press makes a gracious nod to a literature virtually unknown to the American readership. It is a quintessential collection for the eminent Bulgarian poet who has been penning verses for the last 50 years. His latest book of the same title, Ashes of Light, published in 2005 and coinciding with the poet’s 70th anniversary, comprises poems written in the new century that are by far the most philosophical and dense in his oeuvre. Curbstone’s Ashes of Light adds to these a handful of earlier poems, tracing the evolution of the poet’s imagery, ethos, and form over five decades. The sensuous, almost surreal artwork by Mark McKee augments the feeling of out-of-this-world purposefulness. Much of the success of this delightful poetry collection is owed to the superb translations from the Bulgarian by Valentin Krustev and Jack Harte, who beautifully capture and convey into English the silences and exultations of the author’s unique and highly ironic language.
Lyubomir Levchev belongs to a generation of very talented Bulgarian poets who were ushered into the forefronts of Bulgarian culture after 1956, the year of de-Stalinization in communist Eastern Europe. As the regime transitioned into its more mature post-radical stage, its ideologists, although never retracting from the policy of interning its opponents into socialist-style concentration camps, allowed for a relative liberalization of the rigid Socialist realism canon. Poetry was called on to become the ultimate vehicle of its “humanizing” message. Poets were awarded the romantic aura of elevated human beings chosen to lead the masses to a better brighter future. Out of that thaw came some of the best modernist verse. In a way, the Bulgarian artistic generation of the 50s and 60s did for the Bulgarian literature what the beatniks did for America – introduced poetry-for-performance, experimentation with form, internalization of the world’s sorrow with a powerful ironic twist of the brush, a quest for the universal truth through allegories, metaphors and obsessive attention to the self and to minuteness.
As one of the most charismatic of this generation, Levchev went on to make a head-spinning career within the communist party and its artistic wing, which inescapably drew clouds of controversy and backlash upon him after communism was officially abolished in Bulgaria in 1989. Some of his later works’ preoccupation with duality, marginality, fractured identity, death and freedom as abandonment bear traces of apologetics that one inadvertently reads through the lenses of the author’s real-life dialogues with his critics:
“[…] I am the one-eyed one!”
the smoke will utter, rising,
abandoning the fire
(just as my truest little comrades
abandoned me) […]”
(”A Tale from 24 451 Nights”)
“[…] I never was as free as now – a beast
Having escaped from the political zoo.
So what if across the bridge with its arches of stars
Some new century is said to have passed.
[…]
Lord, thank you for forgetting
To lock my cage.”
(“The Gardens of Eternity”)
Interestingly, a dispassionate look at some of his earlier poems reveals smug irreverence to the dogmas of the socialist realism as well as a foreboding of the playful concomitance of high- and low-brow notions and language, a matter-of-fact stringing of self-excluding characterizations, and always, everywhere a powerful undercurrent of irony that is the poet’s most distinctive trait. “Skepticism is in style again”, he writes later on. The anecdote, the smirk, the humorous self-chiding, the vulgarization of speech in fictitious dialogues, the mannerisms, the sardonic comments even, often contextualize the poetic message to the point where cutting just a slice makes quoting anti-climactic. His poetry is like a string of beads, ora rosary– a holistic sequence of simple words held together by deep understanding of the world and the self.
In 1968, he wrote “Poetry Readings,” a stand-off between the idea of poetry-read-in-stadiums (“And Zhenya Evtushenko gives readings in stadiums!”) and the romantic notion of poetry-read-in sacred hours “like love letters! Like secret leaflets,” alluding in earnest to the propaganda leaflets. The poem is a travelogue of poets’ visits to “those distant small towns” where in “Canteen No. 2, amid the smell of stew“ under the “electric flower of the construction site” they address the 20th century and promise ravishing miracles to the “handful of fitters” who prefer to go out for a smoke.
[…] Poets can survive everything-
being hungry,
and yet sing,
expelled students…
But my God,
can one possibly do without applause?
Grin a bit!
Say it doesn’t matter.
Defeat!
Defeat! […]
Pathos and subdued tonality sharply fluctuate through the patchwork of romantically extolling, declaratively realistic and colloquial de-emphasized speech. In the decorated with optimistic exuberance final scene, the poet plays a Hamletian middle-of-the-night monologue in a stadium with “three billion stars sitting on the bleachers.” And he recites to them “how man rises./And how difficult it is for him to shine all life long. Yet with his own light/reduces himself to ashes/over new foundations/or over honest stanzas…” How man rises and turns to ashes is Levchev’s retort to “to be or not to be” in the wholesale vision of the stadium as a grandiose locus of the collective soul, quite in tune with the 1960s, the times of the industrialization and space exploration in communist Eastern Europe.A time when love happened under the power plant chimney stack or on a bridge with locomotives rattling underneath amid clouds and steam.
Rigor and bold declarative statements chimed well in the context of the socialist writing. That type of poetry freely borrowed devices from the expressionist movement embraced by the Bulgarian poets of the 1920s and 1930s. The language is expressive and the statements direct. The poet’s mind cannot stand still, it is not even simply searching, rather it is in a state of entropy, growing, permeating, engulfing vast expanses of space and universe, much like Whitman or Ginsberg. Only time remains out of reach, at least for the young Levchev. To the extent that this is a vision akin to romanticism, romanticism plays just a procedural role in his method, similar to the rhetorical questions used to trigger a key change of logic or direction in the discourse. Over the years, the poet has filtered the brazenness of youth, and his verse, no less expressive and just as wise and witty, starts to exhibit a quality of modulation intrinsic to the complicated spiritual life of a modern tragic man.
The program poem, “Ashes of Light,” written in 2005, picks up the metaphor from 1968 as well the construction symbolism. House-building reverberates through several of his poems as a symbol of creativity and life:
I have found a house
older than the Universe.
And master-builders turned up right away.
Well, you’ve bought
quite an old elephant there,
they said.
Actually old age is irremediable.
Better to pull it down
and make
something entirely new
out of the material.”
[…]
Be wary of the master-builders
who offer
to repair the world
In between the nimble irony of the opening lines and the didactic presentiment of the ending, self-isolationist sentiments sound off against a backdrop of purely symbolist imagery. The protagonist is cloistered in a room behind glass walls “like a wick burning low./Ashes of Light,” ruminating about the sunset, another favorite allegory of old age in Levchev’s cosmology, that nestles in him at night and tiptoes away in the morning. The stars of his youth have mutated into enormous moths with crimson eyes. The foundations of the house-world are hiding the caravan of time full of secrets. Sometime over the years “how man rises” has become irrelevant and is duly replaced by “And I pretend that I don’t hear.” The poetry of ecstasy has morphed into the poetry of Nirvana.
This is one of the very few poems where the poetic Self dissolves into the practice of quiet meditation, and no desires or fears tempt the imagination. The didactic ending thus reads as a philosophical commentary on a world in which the line between good and evil has thinned out and become ineffable. Hence the abundance of characters of marginal status but grand axiological value for the human experience: the poet, the visionary, the naked idol, the madman, the traveler or ancient god, the artist, the old man…Likewise, Levchev is preoccupied with the borderline dots on the temporal axis. Time is the one most troubling metaphysical notion for the poet. In 1968, he writes the exquisite farcical poem “Caprice No. 1,” where in a delightfully paradoxical verse his persona appoints Death as his secretary and listens in on Death’s refutations to the people calling in that “he is definitely not here,” and all the while through that infinite time he is gazing out the window at the world’s routine involving, among other things, changes of seasons and girls looking at themselves in glass doors. Time in 2005, however, is a formidable unforgiving anti-thesis of the forgiving God. It “hides the treasure of virgin happiness,” yet is unattainable: either gostolen, irretrievable or has never begun. “Do you know what it is like to be and yet be unable to make a start,” a young character in “Lullaby” channels Hamlet’s philosophical question. Time can just stop, “a scarecrow sees how the infinitive tense appears, how the shade of time sways and halts abruptly.” The poet’s present time is “a withered posy left without water.” The most profound articulation of the myth of creation and dialectics of life presents itself in “Spiderman:”
[…] There is a time for making nests,
the Preacher will say.
Then God provides
his special mud.
Nature provides the straw.
We-labor.
And here comes history
and lays its cuckoo’s eggs
in us.
Man, possessed of history,
wants to fly away from himself.
He flaps the wings
he doesn’t have.
He is great, if he perishes.
He is wretched if he survives.
For it’s not him but history that flies off.
Then he climbs down
his thin posthistoric threat
into the nothingness.
Into ordinary time,
which has neither cause,
nor consequence.[…]
Throughout the book, internalized biblical imagery provides the framework for expressing the soul’s existential drama. The mythological illumination in Levchev’s poetry draws its power from the heroic narratives, possessing high symbolic status in the Bulgarian poetic tradition. Mythological versus ordinary time, freedom versus abandonment, the solitary visionary-poet-madman versus his disillusioned wretched memoir-writing inconsequential imitation. The biography of the soul unravels a spiritual journey towards ridding the soul of time, words, and experiences in pursuit of a Sartrean freedom that is so emptied of human breath and worldly passions that looks almost utopian. The other condition as an end-in-itself is love when “I’ll forget your name./ I’ll forget to breathe./ And only your tenderness will flow instead of time” (“Letter”). Levchev’s love poems are masterful creations of intellectual intensity and emotional drama.
On a larger scale, paramount to Borges’s vision of a universal ever-living library, the principle of dictionary provides the Bulgarian poet with a method to fathom and narrate the state of being. A dictionary is a collection of all words, signifiers of both literal and abstract meanings, tied to each other by phonetic proximity. Stunning paradoxes, parallels and lightning metaphors produce the thrust in Levchev’s poems. He alights on a word’s adjacent associative nest, either through proximity or argument, and assure the conversational flow, whether quiet or theatrical, ofteninfusingthe text with a thought’s elliptical motion within a structured hierarchy:
I am walking.
And I am leading my father by the hand.
And he is ever smaller and smaller.
He has lost the key to home.
But he will never admit it.
Like son, like father.
And actually now
I don’t know where I could take him.
The Internet café
is closed for prophylaxis.
Besides,
I don’t know
how to open the site
to the Hereafter.
I only know
that the world is a sentence
from a long apocrypha for gods.
And I am trying
to build up a home of words.
But it collapses on me.
And I shout
oxygen,
help me burn down more quickly!
I feel intolerably wretched!
Iron,
I renounce you!
Damn you,
rigidness.
The world is a manner of expression.
Daddy,
I don’t want to be a father!
I feel terribly wretched.
Mom,
I don’t want to become older than you, either! […]
“The Last Caprice”
As is often the case, Levchev directly summons up or metonymically points to these hierarchies and ultimate meanings. In “Ultima Verba” he expands on the word/world relation, “…this world is made/ of the ultimate words/of other worlds. Quite other. Quite vanished…/ And then I feel/ I’m one of them.” Whether he is the word or the world is not clear – and most probably he is both. Because the otherness and the act of vanishing seem to most often ignite the creative energies in this book.
In “The Wall,” Levchev appeals to the eyes not to say goodbye to the visible world because he feels like a manuscript that “has already been written down/ but not yet read.” As with most everything in this very entertaining, shockingly direct, intellectually provoking, existentially powerful poetry, the vector of transcendence is neutralized by the vector of jest: “Now I feel so bookish / that I am writing on my own self--/ unrepentant and/ with unsharpened lightings.” (”Irish Fantasies”).
If, reading this book, you, reader, are stricken by an unsharpened lightning, then the Bulgarian poet must be holding you by the hand on a journey “out of the wicked words.” But bewarealthough he promises freedom and sublimation, he may be joking...
|
|
