IN FIRST PERSON
Reading to the gods
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SUDEEP SEN on the world's oldest poetry festival in Struga, Macedonia. He was a recipient of the Pleiades honour this year.
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Macedonians dancing the Oro to the accompaniment of traditional music.
I FELT as if I was reading poetry to the ancient Macedonian and Grecian gods! The shimmering volcanic blue-black expanse of Ohrid Lake in front of me, the picturesque boat-speckled fishing village of Kaneo below the cliff, the mountainous Albanian border in the haze-veiled distance, and the 13th-Century Byzantine/ Armenian Church of St. John with its frescoes and typical ceramo-plastic facade behind me provided the most extraordinary mis-en-scene. I stood on this church terrace reciting from the Macedonian edition of my "new and selected" book of poems, Alexander's Soil — and what an unforgetfully magical setting to read poetry from to an audience of distinguished international poets, Balkan and local literature lovers.
I'd recently spent a couple of weeks in Macedonia, where I was one of the recipients of the prestigious "Pleiades" honour at the world's oldest poetry festival — the Struga Poetry Evenings (SPE). As the Pleiades title suggests, seven internationally "famous poets" who have made "significant contribution to modern world poetry" are chosen to receive this prestigious honour — the other six on this year's list included the Nobel Prize nominated Chinese poet Bei Dao, Herder European Award winning Romanian poet Ana Blandiana, the Irish poet John F. Deane who has won innumerable international prizes, Arturo Korkuera from Peru, Al Janabi from Iraq, and Philip Johns from Belgium.
Origins of SPE
As part of the honour, all our work was translated into Macedonian and published as individual books. It was a treat to hear the assonance-lilted Macedonian translations being read out by two famous actors that followed our own readings in the original language on this awesome stone stage. I read selections from my English books, both old and new — about childhood, memory, art, politics, history, erotica, illness — about shifting landscapes, fragility of our lives, grimness of death, and the evanescent elation of being loved.
SPE started in 1962 with a series of readings by Macedonian poets in honour of two brothers, Konstantin and Dimitar Miladinov, great intellectuals and writers born in Struga in the 19th Century. Konstantin is considered the founder of modern Macedonian poetry, and appropriately the festival opens with a ceremonial reading of his memorable poem "T'ga za Jug" — "Longing for the South".
From 1963, poets from the countries that now have come to be known as "former Yugoslavia" joined the festival, making it the most important one in the region. The Miladinov Brothers award, given to the best book of poetry published that year in the country, was also established then. I had the pleasure of co-translating this year's winner Petko Dameski into English and the resulting book will be out at next year's SPE.
Going international
In 1966, SPE turned into an international poetry event when one of the most important awards in the world of poetry, "The Golden Wreath", was instituted. The first winner was W.H. Auden, and subsequent winners' list is truly impressive — Pablo Neruda, Eugenio Montale, Leopold Senghor, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Brodsky, Ted Hughes, Yehuda Amichai, Seamus Heaney — many of whom went on to win the Nobel Prize. The Indian poet Sachidanandan Vatsyayan Agyeya won the prize in 1983 and this year's winner was the Portuguese Vasco Graca Moura.
John F. Deane (Ireland) with the cask for the best wine poem.
Every year, a "national" poetry is featured as a special evening — and this year at the atrium of the magnificent St. Sophia Church in Ohrid, Dutch poetry was presented with young musicians playing the Macedonian flute and string instruments. Italian, Venezuelan, Polish, Chilean, Palestinian, German, Hungarian, Chinese, British, American, Australian, Korean, Portuguese, Egyptian, Tunisian, Russian, Indian, among many others, have been featured in the past. This year Meena Alexander and I represented India at SPE, and last year I was asked to edit the anthology, Midnight's Grandchildren: Contemporary English Poetry from India (in Macedonian translation), for the national evening — so India has been well served there (with the 1983 "Golden Wreath" in our national kitty).
The director of the festival, the fine Macedonian poet Zoran Anchevski, said, "Despite the tremendous difficulties and harsh realities that the festival has had to live with — the fall of Yugoslavia, the war in Bosnia, the Kosovo crisis, the political and ethnic clashes in Macedonia, the terrorist crisis after the September 11 attacks, and the numerous political and economic embargos imposed on the region — the SPE has successfully flourished, making it among the most important poetry festivals in the modern world. And that is a tribute to world poetry and its poets."
When poets dance
This year's festival started and ended in the capital city of Skopje where the impressive closing ceremony and international "Bridges" reading was held on the banks of Vardar next to the historic old stone bridge. The bulk of the festival was in the UNESCO heritage town of Ohrid with other readings held in various places across the country, such as the Church of St. Andrews on the gorge at Matka Lake, and St. Naum's island where the prize for the best "wine poem" was awarded.
At St. Naum, amid the rustic and romantic Oro folk-dance, traditional Macedonian music, and picnic under the wide-skirted 1000-year-old oriental plane trees, the poet-participants were invited by the local dance troupe to join them. In spite of my enthusiasm, I seemed to get my feet all tangled up even with the simplest of moves. The winner of the wine poem competition, John F.Deane of Ireland, was greeted with loud cheering, the loudest by those who wanted the wine-laden winner's cask to be emptied before it left the island.
True diplomats
This festival is not only about showcasing the best international poetry to a Balkan audience and the best work of this region to an international audience, it is equally about camaraderie, friendship, and bonhomie, as over 100 poets, writers, translators, editors, and publishers from all over the world get together. As the Israeli Amir Or, a past Pleiades poet points out, "In our own small way, the only way we can cement the fractured state of our world is to gather together, laugh, love and communicate intelligently, and through our art. We are the true diplomats, not the politicians and bureaucrats".
Now, as I write this in my study in heat-stricken Delhi, I wonder how it would be if we had such a festival in our country. Poets from all over the world constantly ask me if there are any international poetry festivals in India, and all I can muster up is an answer that approximates to: "perhaps sometime in the future". There are regional language poetry meets I am aware of, but none on a national or international level in India. International poets want to visit us in our country where we have a ready-made amphitheatre of ancient, medieval and modern cultures thriving concurrently. All it takes is visionary and creative literary programming and backing by government and financial institutions to sponsor it. Any takers? Offers solicited.
In the meanwhile, long live SPE! And also let poetry flourish here! It is the least our poets can hope for in a commerce-driven, largely "un"literary modern society.
Sudeep Sen's book-length poem, Distracted Geographies, has just been published by Indialog.
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