News

/ 6 February 2017

Between Small Languages: Orbita Group

Goran’s Spring launches a publishing edition for translated poetry

The Croatian partner of Versopolis, Goran’s Spring, responded to the consistent drop in the number of books of poetry translated to Croatian by starting a new publishing edition called Susreti. The first book gathered four authors from the Latvian group Orbita, whose members were guests at last year’s festival.

The author collective Orbita was founded in 1999 in Riga. In this book, amongst the represented poets (and not only poets) are key members Sergej Timofejev, Semjon Hanin, Artur Punte and Vladimir Svjetlov, as well as numerous other associates from the fields of literature as well as visual arts, performance, music and other disciplines. With one leg firmly planted into the world of literature, Orbita has from the very beginning bravely moved towards a synergy of the mentioned fields of art and media. This is obvious as soon as you examine the specter of their in-house activities: the internet portal with their name, a poetry almanac, books and publications (usually with a detailed design), exhibitions, multimedia happenings and performances and various interdisciplinary interventions in public space. Their basis is primarily in poetry.

The core of Orbita is made of the four mentioned Russophone poets born at the “European periphery” of the Soviet Union. With the exception of the somewhat younger Punte, they were born in the period of transition from the 60s into the 70s – exactly old enough to be formed as authors in the time of the swan song of the late-soviet off-poetry, in a time when the Perestroika and Glasnost had already significantly weakened the centralist hold and the tentacles of the repressive regime. The vibrant and potent underground culture – kvartirniks, samizdats and the popular but officially invisible underground bards – had already gone deep into its decadent phase. Apart from being on the edge of paradigms, ages, artistic media and disciplines, the poets of Orbita find themselves on a thin line separating cultural and language identities. They all grew up with Russophone families in Latvia, they write in Russian but consider themselves part of Latvian literature, participating at the same time in the literary life of contemporary Russia. “It is a kind of a cultural stereo, two channels in my head”, says Timofejev. These poets are fluent in Latvian, they were educated in both Latvian and Russian higher education institutions, they publish their work in bilingual form in Latvia and in Russia, they translate Latvian literature to Russian and give it a recognizable signature through their activity. At the same time, they are well known and appreciated in the Russian literary scene, where Baltic Russophone poetry still has a sound of audacity and innovation; a meeting of the traditions of Russia and the West.

The poetry of each of the poets represented in the book is different – they are connected primarily by the tendency to step outside of the classically understood borders and boundaries of poetry, insisting on simple, transparent expressions similar to the language of daily, non-poetic communication, and an almost exclusive use of the free verse. We are used to seeing that last element in the context of the contemporary poetry of the “western circle”, but in Russia free verse is still more of an exception than a rule. Russian poetry – at least its mainstream – is still deeply connected to metrically strictly defined forms and patterns. The mentioned insistence on conceptual and figurative clarity and the closeness to the unencumbered “urban” idiom is described by Hanin as “an attempt to produce a language of poetry identic to the language of daily use, which nevertheless stays poetic”. A whole series of projects maps out the trajectory of Orbita’s departure away from the standard poetic form and the established receptional context “eye-paper”. Whether it be installations which connect “ready-made” poetry of cutouts of random radio shows from several dozen old transistors, the white noise of the broadcast into the atmospheric auditory stage of live poetry readings, walls covered with radios which emit multi-lingual poetry collages, compositions by pocket fans with printed words which as they turn create a fragile kinetic poem, projections of visual poetry powered by a bicycle, or something completely different, the constant characteristic in Orbita’s work is the attempt to give the word of poetry its multidimensional, poliperspective prosthesis into the material world around us, to move towards the recipient and takes over as many of his senses as possible.