Skip to main content

Why I live in Estonia...


The XI Young Song festival, held last weekend. A choir of 30,000 schoolkids and students watched by over 120,000 of the rest of the country. Magnificent and of course not one instance of bad behaviour recorded in the whole three day event.

What land is this? No mountains vastly tower

Just woodlands without end and mires in throngs

but the people here are filled with wonderous power

and strange the tales in their songs...

What land is this? At times the day is eaten

At times it lasts so long, it swallows the night

The two pass us by regardless of season

When outsiders rest, the local has to fight


What land is this? Is here a Man's stature

fit only for when a slave he became?

All this hurt, who would gather

so that love would come and bring an end to pain

What land is this, where mercy is defenseless

(what land is this) where freedom's buried deep underground

Where's the justice, where's the justness

where is justice for the jaded when they're bound?


What land is this? Compassion here's corroded

Corroded is the heartless breast with shame.

I could run away from here overloaded

Still I'm held back by something just the same

What land is this, that takes such hold of me

and how it does it I've not known for long

It doesn't cover me, it doesn't feed me

yet somehow still it carries me along


What land is this? Could I it conceive?

What land is this? Could I be without its caress?

What land is this? How could it leave

all its children motherless...

What land is this? No mountains vastly tower

Just woodlands without end and mires in throngs

but the people here are filled with wonderous power

and strange the tales in their songs...


Labels:

Comments

Karla said…
Elegant translation of lyrics that say it all. Thanks for posting it.

Reminds me of your own kinsman Edmund Muir's poem "The Difficult Land":


The poem (from the collection "One Foot in Eden") starts:

"This is a difficult land. Here things miscarry
Whether we care or do not care enough..."

and goes on to evoke large and small problems of life, then continuing :..

"These things we know and by good luck or guidance
Either frustrate, or, if we must, endure.
We are a people; race and speech support us,
Ancestral rite and custom, roof and tree,
Our songs that tell of our triumphs and disasters
(fleeting alike) continuance of fold and hearth,
Our names and callings, work and rest and sleep,
And something that defeated still endures -
These things sustain us..."

He goes on to say that sometimes all this effort just seems too much, and the temptation is to drop the tools and move on, but:

"we have such hours, but are drawn back again
By faces of goodness, faithful masks of sorrow,
Honesty, kindness, courage , fidelity,
The love that lasts a life's time. And the fields,
Homestead and stall and barn, springtime and autumn
(for we can love even the wandering seasons
In their inhuman circuit.) And the dead
Who lodge in us so strangely unremembered,
Yet in their place. For how can we reject
The long last look on the ever-dying face
Turned back from the other side of time?
and how offend the dead and shame the living
By these despairs? And how refrain from love?
This is a difficult country, and our home."
5:55 pm
Anonymous said…
Czeslaw Milosz has described the Baltic as "home to ghosts of longing and sorrow for eyes long removed".
5:56 pm
Cicero said…
I did not know the Muir piece, pretty apposite for Scotland I think. Thanks for posting.

The Valley of the Issa- Milosz's Roman-a-clef of his childhood says much else in similar vein- after all he was as much a Lithuanian as a Pole.
5:30 am
Cicero said…
Not my translation- but a very beautiful one I thought.
7:25 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop
Post a Comment
Read more

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo
Post a Comment
Read more

One Year On

  Head vabariigi iseseisvuspäeva! Happy Estonian Independence Day! It is one year since I stood outside the Estonian Parliament for the traditional raising of the national flag from Tall Hermann tower. Looking at the young fraternities gathered with their flags, I was very sure that Estonia too would soon be facing the aggression of the criminal Russian regime. A tragic and dark day. 5 eyes intelligence had been clear: an all out invasion was going to happen, and Putin´s goals included- and still include- "restoration" of Russian imperial power across Europe, even to the Atlantic. Yet there was one Western intelligence failure: we all underestimated the guts of the Ukrainian armed forces, the ZSU, and its President and people. One year on, Estonia, and indeed all the front line states against Russia, knows that Ukraine saved us. Estonia used that time to prepare itself, should that "delayed" onslaught ever be unleashed, but equally the determination of Kaja Kallas,
Post a Comment
Read more