(Untitled painting by Livonian Latvian painter Jāņ Bēļța (1893-1946). Only about 18 of his paintings are currently known)

Silver Grave

I wade in the wavy silver shallows, Pearls and amber roll beneath my feet, I squeeze the very silver with my toes.

I wade further into the silver floodplains How cool the silver is, how gentle it feels! The silver already now reaches my knees!

And higher it climbs around my limbs Now silvery ivy twisting Around my pale thigh-columns it winds.

Up to my burning chest From my hips is a pillar Blanketed now in silver waves.

Already my red blood like icy frost Turns to silver, flowing through my flesh My heart thumping like a silversmith's hammer.

The silver rides higher, splashes thrown, It closes my eyelids Sprinkling eyelashes with silver.

I am swayed by the silver lullaby - Lifted up on the water’s surface Only the two gulls of my palms. -

Soon they too will be swallowed up And a white waterlily alone Will grow on my silver grave.

- Aspazija (1865-1943) (From her collection:  In The Time Of Asters - Autumn Poems, 1928)

My translation from the Latvian; see Keep Reading for the Latvian original.

Painting: The Sky in the Sea, Belongs to Me, by Aigars Rinkulis (1970-2013)

The Violet “Ave”

The sea surface lies heavy, like molten tin… Then suddenly it shows itself sun-crowned: In flaming glory the sun sets westwards Searching amongst cool waves for its grave Bit by bit disappearing as it treads the red dunes, Leaving the earth behind to its darkness and pain, Here now it disappears, - but the waves before it, take its life And they shine, and shimmer, and mirror, and slide and splash; The grey coast of even stoney hues Bursts into branching flashes like a ruler’s crown And sounds, flowing from afar on the waves, Sweet melodies, breaking in anguish:

“The sun was gold, Now sallow, deathly old,- There were path of light, Now linen and night, - There was burst of beams, Now the darkness teems, - Fading, light fading! Fear and vapours - dismaying!”

Bells toll with heavy tongues clanging, Winds cry on the shivering zither strings, All the little fish tremble.* And cry along. The mermaids’ pearly jewellery appears, Sapphires and emeralds all cast out. A mirror falls out of the moon’s hand Floating on the waves, splintered in pieces. Tears rain from the stars: “Is the sun dying?” But louder and louder comes the reply, The violet “Ave”: “It is not death! It is not death!”

- Aspazija (1865-1943) (From her collection:  In The Time Of Asters - Autumn Poems, 1928)

My translation from the Latvian; see read more for the Latvian original.

The Mill, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669)

In Rembrandt’s Light

Sunset stretches round the earth as a golden bow; Little by little the day’s paintings fade, Green-shimmer and purple-glow: Night draws over its velvet hand.

In violet vapours the Universe sinks, Milk and opal dashed across the water, Pink-streaked clouds fill the sky Meandering like rose-petals dissolving.

Sharp darkness take the colours of all, Harsh mountains down to the soft valleys, Bitter life drinks from sweet poetry, Hearts again become sisters of the stars.

- Aspazija (From her collection:  In The Time Of Asters - Autumn Poems, 1928)

My translation from the Latvian; see read more for the Latvian original.

Farm Workers, Edgars Iltners (1925 – 1983)  Soviet-Latvian painter

Pan’s Bed

Between the last roses and the first mint, Between July’s bird chorus and November’s storms Fleeting Time has burned up the cult of Pan. So between the golden sunny days And the threatening stormy walls Pan sleeps in his gold and purple bed.

Though Pluto sends him Persephone With flax flowers, and narcissus in hand, Bacchus offers the cup with vine-leaf crown And sheaves and fruits, encircling round; Still the cups foam with divine fuel, Still the flow of plenty masks the rustle of destruction.

Is Autumn loss or gain? The seed of life? Or nearing of annihilation? Do we again feel chilled, turned to tin? No! - Autumn is more than just pain, He is both the culmination of Summer, And in death, wears the wreath of May.

- Aspazija (From her collection:  In The Time Of Asters - Autumn Poems, 1928)

My translation from the Latvian. Read more for the Latvian original. Even if you can’t read Latvian it is worth looking, just so that you can see the strong rhyming she used here - alas, sacrificed in the translation.

Landscape with Rider, Aleksanders Romans (1910)

Pale Moon, Sky Lotus

Pale moon, sky lotus, Planted by Isis hand, When Osiris loved her, Her on the blue blossom nights, The short, blue blossom nights.

Stretching the root-rays earthwards, Ripening desire, ripening love, Pale moon, sky lotus, Planted by Isis hand.

Sailing away on a golden boat, Osiris travelled dark nights, Long, dark autumn nights, — Desire wilts, love wilts, Even Isis’ flower wilts, Pale moon, sky lotus.

- Aspazija (From her collection:  In The Time Of Asters - Autumn Poems, 1928)(my translation from the Latvian - see read more for the Latvian original)

War Caryatids, by Džemma Skulme (1925-2019), Latvian painter.

Adonis is dead!

Nymphs sadly bow heads on shoulders Like shivering pigeons Letting their long green hair hang down, Fountains gasp, And tearful leaves murmur in the trees: They refuse to green-up anymore And toss downwards brown onto waves. Amongst the reeds the mermaids wring their pale hands: “Adonis is dead!”

And with the pale sun and moon - With the gods they left, as did the rest. - Pan’s silver flute sounds in our forests no more, No whooping bacchanal bands dance any longer, Sad Bacchus sleeps amidst the overturned wind cups The sweet juice gives way to salty tears No more he rides a panther-pulled chariot The broken ivy reins, lie limp on the ground: “Adonis is dead!”

Climbing cold up from the earth is Pluto’s breath:
 Withering all, that blooms and buds in sunlight, Black cypresses, like smoke turned into vegetation, Pointed columns against the blue of the sky, A mourning choir gathered at the divine tomb: “Adonis is dead!”

Laid underground lying
 On black tables is Adonis His white flesh glows Cut to pieces in golden bowls Steaming life-blood poured in crystal dishes Mounds of pomegranates alongside Invite tardy guests to the subterranean banquet: “Adonis is dead!”

The ruler of the underworld is a glutton, Eating the offered body, The icy lips are not warmed, in drinking the warm blood, The bitter cry sounds around the world: “Adonis is dead!”

- Aspazija (From her collection:  In The Time Of Asters - Autumn Poems, 1928)

(my translation from the Latvian - see read more for the Latvian original)

Image: Why didn’t you wake me? (2013) Installation by Latvian artist Ginters Krumholcs.

Hamlet’s Monologue

When the ground is covered with shimmering autumn vapours And has swallowed up the last leaves of the trees, The moon shines wanly in the sky, Like a corpse, Then the sorrowful times begin again, As Hamlet rises once more from the grave And, wrapped in a black toga, Holds forth his monologue:

“Has life improved after me? With fewer tragedies? Less crime? It seems better to be suffocated in elemental sleep! Or hang unseen like a foggy patch Over the world’s inhabitants, Filled with the new seeds of stars, - Or to be formed in marble, So smooth and white, Laid in a mountain bed untouched, unwrinkled, Not under the sculptor, nor chipped by his hand, Where the chisel splits, and the sparks fly? Who thirsts for a hot-bodied life? Who would climb the tower of beauty? Or yet reach the pinnacle of perfection, When earthly life is filled with such struggle?


“It is hard for who has not been, to be, But much harder for who has been, to not be!”

- Aspazija (Prologue to her collection:  In The Time Of Asters - Autumn Poems, 1928)

(my translation from the Latvian - see read more for the Latvian original)

As an unwritten poem

As an unwritten poem Clouds flowed with the wind, But in my withdrawal, I saw no clouds.

As an unwritten poem Snowflake phalanxes fell, But in my withdrawal, I hammered joy to the cross.

As an unwritten poem Sunset’s clarion call blazed in the window, But in my withdrawal, I only whiffed the storm’s shreds…

As an unwritten poem…

- Ārija Elksne (Latvian poet, 1928-1984)

Painting by Latvian artist, Ilze Smildzińa (from her Daļa ceļa - Part of the road - exhibition)

(My translation; read more for the Latvian original)

Dundaga Shire, Latvia

I thought I’d learn a bit more about Latvia by looking through the different regions. I particularly want to pick someone associated with each place to make it personal. To make it even more personal I’ll look for opportunities for linking to my parents’ lives, but that will not be always possible since there are lots of nooks, and my parents didn’t really travel widely.

I start with Dundaga - the pointy bit sticking out into the Baltic Sea - in the western Courland region (Kurzeme in Latvian). In some ways it is an odd place to start, since it is one of the least Latvian, since the majority of people living there were not Latvian, but Livonians, speaking the Livonian language, very different to Latvian, and instead much more closely linked to Estonian and Finnish.

The Livonians were great sailors, and the marshlands below Dundaga isolated them from Latvian farm communities helped them maintain their identity into the 20th Century. By sea they connected with their Estonian cousins. However the world wars, and Soviet cultural movements aimed to erase the Livonians as a distinct ethnic and lingustic group.

To some Livonian is now an extinct language. In the top right we see Grizelda Kristiņa (1910-2012) who was the last fluent Livonian speaker alive.

My family connection is that my Dad recalls being confused when their teacher referred to frogs as “vardas”, when to him (and his school friends) they were clearly “koonjas”. The issue was the teacher was teaching them in standard Latvian, while these country kids - living only about 10km from the Estonian border - had internalised many Estonian words. Googletranslate tells me Estonian for frog is “konn” - I guess on the border they took that root and turned into a Latvian word. I don’t know, but I guess that the Livonian word for frog is probably similar to the Estonian - sadly googletranslate doesn’t have Livonian!

Kindred (2018; silicone, fibreglass, hair) by Patricia Piccinini

“We can see the humanity in her. And then we look at her longer and think, But she’s different, in fact she’s different from her children. But we recognise the relationship between them. It is familiar. And we feel that. And then we realise that the work is not about external difference — which is the difference between us and other animals that we use to justify erecting barriers and driving them to extinction for profit. We realise that this family, this amazing family is completely connected. And that we are all also connected. And this connection is a beautiful thing. She is an amazing expression of nature, even this mediated nature. And she’s valuable. And it’s from that more affirming place that we are able to act. It makes me think of Mary Shelley—she was an abolitionist. So she didn’t believe in slavery—the slavery that made her generation of people wealthy. And because she was an abolitionist she didn’t eat sugar.

“Because slaves made sugar. Now eating sugar is a small thing in someone’s life. But it’s hugely symbolic. And then when she comes to write Frankenstein this whole narrative of the master-slave informs how we relate to the monster who is presented as the slave. Like, completely controlled by the master-father. So I see this beautiful connection between these two stories — Shelley and sugar and Frankenstein and Kindred and palm oil. This idea of how can we treat slaves or nature as badly as we do because we don’t see them as human.”

- Patricia Piccinini, from this great long read

Map of Greece

It’s reminiscent of a great Tao - if you look at it closely, you can indeed see a great Tao made of water and land. But in no place is it as though one were gaining an advantage over the other - they embrace each other reciprocally: earth and water. The Peloponnesian Straits are what the earth give to the water, and Crete what the water gives to the earth. 

I do think that the Peloponnese has the most beautiful shape. Its the shape of a great maternal hand, not a human one, that is dipping into the water to check if the temperature is right for a bath.

- from Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk (trans. Jennifer Croft)

What the shrouded runaway was saying

So go, sway, walk, run, take flight, because the second you forget and stand still his massive hands will seize you and turn you into a puppet, you’ll be enveloped in his breath, stinking of smoke and fumes and the big rubbish dumps outside of town. He will turn your brightly coloured soul into a tiny flat one, cut out of paper, of newspaper, and he will threaten you with fire, disease and war, he will scare you so you lose your peace of mind and cease to sleep. He will mark you and record you in his records, provide you with the documentation of your fall. He’ll occupy your thoughts with unimportant things, what to buy, and what to sell, where things are cheaper and where they’re more expensive. From then on you will worry over trifles - the price of petrol and how that will affect the payments on our loans. You will live every day in pain, as though your life were a sentence. But for what crime? Committed when and by whom? You will never know.

- Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk (trans. by Jennifer Croft)

Flights, Olga Tokarczuk (trans. by Jennifer Croft)

Juvenile Pacific Gull, Largs Bay

(Drawing by Vincent van Gogh)

“I want to add an important side note: that artists have learned to employ these ways of seeing does not mean that they don’t also see what we see. They do. They just see more because they’ve learned how to turn off their minds’ tendency to jump to conclusions. (This is why it is so frustrating that funding for arts programs in schools has been decimated. And those cuts stem from a fundamental misconception that art classes are about learning to draw. In fact, they are about learning to see.)”

- Ed Catmull, from Creativity Inc. Ed was a founder and long-time CEO of Pixar.

Steering Her Craft

As a child I read Ursula Le Guin’s fantasy novel The Wizard of Earthsea, and loved it. When I then started reading the following book of the series, The Tombs of Atuan, I rapidly gave up... my excuse was that it was all underground, and sooooo boring.

I read very little of Le Guin in the years since  (I think I read The Left Hand of Darkness in my adolescence), but gradually developed a sense of what a huge influence she had become over the intervening years, amongst both scifi and fantasy writers and readers. As an example, her wisdom would turn up repeatedly in Maria Popova’s BrainPickings. I really respected her - but I still wasn’t reading her.

This year I have read all six of the Earthsea books, just finishing now with the Tales of Earthsea (yes, I realise that is not exactly in order). I totally loved them, and recommend them all. The fact that she would keep coming back to this world from decade to decade is lovely (gosh, I’m sure her publishers gave her every encouragement imaginable too ;) ). It was exciting to see how she made this world she formed, go deeper and deeper.

Also in my reading this year was her Steering the Craft: A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story. This is a very dangerous book! If you are not careful, all her wonderful examples and guidance will make you desperate to try your hand at creative writing - and who knows what that could lead to? I am trying hard to be self-controlled here... wish me well!

Reflecting back on my youthful aversion to The Tombs of Atuan - what was that really about? It really cannot have been solely due to the underground scenes (I had not minded Bilbo and Gollum under the Misty Mountains the slightest). The realisation I have now is that it was all a simple, unconscious sexism. The protagonists of The Tombs of Atuan were women - girls even! - and I simply did not have the maturity to get involved emotionally with such characters. It shames me now - but it is well to have made this realisation, and to have belatedly made good, now enjoying to the full this wonderful magical archipelago created by Le Guin.