0. The aim o f the present article is to study some aspects o f sub
versive rhetoric in the poetry o f Juhan V iiding (1948-1995), one o f Estonia’s most adm ired and cherished poets and actors whose
“Complete Poetry” (edited by Hasso Krull) includes texts written between 1968 and 1994, published either in collections (until 1978, under the pseudonym o f Jüri Üdi, which translates as George M arrow in English) or separately in new spapers and m agazines. It is important to mention that Juhan Viiding often read and sang his texts (accom panied on the piano by Tõnis Rätsep, a friend and colleague from the Estonian Drama Theatre), quite a few o f which are recorded on cassette and CD. Üdi/Viiding was and continues to be widely read, quoted, imitated and discussed by his Estonian readers, fellow poets, intellectuals and critics.1 However, despite the fact that Vii- ding’s poetry has been translated into sixteen languages, according to Aare P ilv ’s “Juhan Viidingu ja Jüri Üdi bibliograafia” (Pilv 2010:
170-175), Viiding has not achieved the sort o f fame abroad which he enjoys in Estonia. Indeed, the volume o f articles and essays written in Estonian on V iiding’s poetry is not equalled by w riting in other languages. Reviews written in English and Russian are m ostly by Estonian critics or Russian critics from Estonia (ib. 196-208). O f course, poetry in general does not subm it easily to being translated, but in Ü di/V iiding’s case we are dealing with a kind o f poetic which makes the process even more com plicated, perhaps also partly
1 The m ost recent collection o f articles, essays and rem iniscences Juhan Viiding, eesti luuletaja (ed. by Marin Laak and Aare Pilv) w as published by the Estonian Literary M useum only in D ecem ber, 2010. It includes a com prehensive bibliography (com piled by Aare Pilv) w hich lists o f Ü d i/V iid in g ’s works, translations o f his poetry into other languages, songs perform ed by him and by others, his theatrical roles, his TV and theatre perform ances, and articles, review s and essays written on his poetry.
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unachievable. This seems to be the m ost probable explanation for the asym m etry o f O d i/V iiding's poetic reputation. So, apart from the peculiar charm o f his poetry, with its highly intricate poly-sem antic spectrum w hich calls out for discussion o f the organising principles o f his texts, I am w riting this article" in the hope that m ore foreign critics will take an interest in this exceptional poet and m ore poets who write in other languages will rise to the challenge o f translating his texts or providing their own original pieces o f creative w riting in Üdi/Viiding* s wake.
1.1 Before I discuss V iiding's poetic based on the exam ple o f “ Selges eesti keeles" ("In clear Estonian”), a collection published in 1974 under the pseudonym Jüri Üdi, I shall give a broad outline o f my approach. First o f all. there is the question o f language and text. The purely form al-structural approach w ould understand text as a self- contained system o f signs w ith its own hierarchical structure. The text in this case w ould be a system o f its own discourse. Yet a text is not created in. nor does it live in a void, but in a shared cultural sphere; it is the result o f dialogue with other poetic texts and also the com m on (and o f course changing) linguistic usage.' Therefore we may say with J. Lotm an that "the rhetorical structure does not arise autom atically from the language structure, but is a deliberate reinterpretation o f the latter [...]; the rhetorical structure is brought into the verbal text from outside, giving it a supplem atary ordered- ness” (Lotm an 1990: 49). For example, if we take the title o f Ü di/
V iiding's collection "Selges eesti keeles” (w hich may be translated as "in clear Estonian.” and also as “ in plain Estonian” or “in lucid Estonian” ), a mindful reader w ould not understand it as a heading/
text per se. but as a heading/text in relation to some out-of-this-text 2 The present article in part fo llo w s m y essay in Estonian on the g en esis o f spaces in V iid in g 's poetry (P loom 2 0 1 0 ).
C om m on oral com m unication also occurs in situations w hich should be understood as situational texts, but they are not m eant to be preserved as the enounced w hich in the course o f re/presentation engender n ew enunciations;
for once the enunciation in this kind o f com m unication has achieved its pragmatic aim. the text w ill norm ally be can celled , or at least not recorded in the sen se o f written texts, or film or sound recordings, etc.
139 Some Aspects of Subversive Rhetoric in Juhan Viiding’s Poetry usage. In fact, “selges eesti keeles” is part o f a great num ber o f everyday com m unicative and pragmatic utterances. Very often a person who says “M a ütlen sulle selges eesti keeles” (“I am telling you in plain Estonian”) means either that he wants to m ake his point plain and sim ple or that the person to whom the discourse is directed is som ew hat slow or stubborn in understanding. But the phrase also has the connotation o f the beauty o f the Estonian language, both in the sense o f clear and logical, and also in the sense o f the phonetic beauty o f this particular phrase or, by extension, o f the Estonian language in general. In this case, “selges eesti keeles” may even be extended to “sulaselges eesti keeles,” which would convey that “the Estonian language is as beautiful as liquid honey.”
Therefore many different out-of-this-text utterances “in plain/
clear/beautiful/logical/lucid Estonian” may be drawn into dialogue w ith the enounced “selges eesti keeles,” both in the title and in many other textual units contained in the same collection. In the light o f this kind o f dialogue between this com m unicative utterance and other com m unicative and pragm atic utterances (outside o f this text), the sem antic possibilities o f a (poetic) text are not confined to the relationship o f the code and the m essage as som ething fixed and monolithic. They are both bound to change in the act o f com m u
nication. Jakobson, in his famous article “Linguistics and Poetics”
(1960), certainly stresses the supremacy o f the poetic function in poetry, but he also warns against its reduction to the absolute: “any attem pt to reduce the sphere o f poetic function to poetry or to con
fine poetry to poetic function would be a delusive oversim pli
fication” (2003: 91). The poetic function which focuses on the m essage is in interaction with the other linguistic functions also in poetry. Lotman develops Jakobson’s views and shows how the m es
sage and code relationship in the process o f different com m unication systems (I-I, 1-s/he) may bring about a change in both o f them w ith a resulting shift in context (Lotm an 1990: 20-22).
In Ü di/V iiding’s poetry we witness a deliberate transform ation of the code and m essage relationship already on the level o f language.
The ordinary linguistic code (the choice is thereby m ainly m ade from am ong idiom atic expressions which are actually already results o f previous code breaks) is questioned and the reader is asked to make
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repeated m oves onto the metalinguistic level. In the case o f “selges eesti keeles," the initial relationship betw een the code and the m essage is shattered. From the outw ardly sim ple com m unicative code and m essage relationship “in clear Estonian” the reader is called upon to move (because o f the intrusion o f som e other possible utterances quoted above) to a new and altered code and m essage relationship, even though the out-of-this-enounced textual m em ories o f the addresser and the addressee need not coincide. W hat they must share, though, is the understanding that other texts have to “trans
late" this very m essage, acting as its code; therefore, “ in clear Esto
nian” may becom e “in plain Estonian” or “in lucid Estonian” or even, absurd as it may seem, “in clear Estonian,” which is only seem ingly tautological, for this “clear" is no longer the initial
“clear.”
Thus it appears that the language o f the poetic text is not com m u
nicative and pragm atic in the sense o f easing and sim plifying these processes but, on the contrary, it thickens the possibilities o f the sem antic field. The poetic language o f Ü di/V iiding often questions idiom atic codes and breaks them. But it is not for the sake o f breaking the codes as such; it is also to focus the dichotom y o f things and words, being and language. As some phenom enologists put it, language while disclosing being also closes it (G adam er 1974). In this light, “in 'clear* Estonian" also hints at some reality beyond the outw ardly com m on, plain and conventional linguistic reality, although its perception by the addresser and the addressee (and here we tackle the difficulty o f the im plicit “ lector” as a textual strategy and the em pirical reader draw n into that position) cannot overlap.
And they need not. This kind o f keeping horizons apart (the difference betw een expliquer and comprendre) in herm eneutics has been indicated by Ricoeur (e.g. 1986: 180). Therefore my objective in this article is not to analyse in order to arrive at som e final unified understanding o f what the author “m eant,” but to analyse some aspects o f the rhetorical m echanism in Ü di/V iiding w hich may lead to possible ways for a further understanding o f his texts.
1.2 In Ü di/V iiding’s poetry the question o f the transform ation o f the linguistic code is closely interrelated with the questioning o f other
141 Some Aspects of Subversive Rhetoric in Juhan Viiding’s Poetry
cultural codes. The sim ultaneous interplay o f different codes which get into contradiction is one o f the main devices o f Ü di/V iiding’s textual rhetoric. Rhetoric, in this context, does not m ean the art o f prose as opposed to poetics as the art o f poetry, nor does it mean ornate discourse, but the principle o f text organisation and especially the principle o f m eaning-generation (c f Lotm an 1990: 36-53). I shall underline in L otm an’s approach one specific idea which for me seems seminal: the opposition, from the sem iotic point o f view, o f stylistics to sem antics, on the one hand, and to rhetoric, on the other (ib. 50). A literary text as a com plex o f hierarchically organised segments cannot be either exclusively rhetorical or exclusively stylistic, but one o f these features may be predom inant. A ccording to Lotman, a stylistic effect is produced when one and the same sem antic content is expressed in different registers, but the signs within each register belong to that particular register, i.e. ‘‘a self- contained and hierarchically bonded group o f signs”, whereas a rhetorical effect arises when there is a conflict o f signs relating to different registers, and when this conflict leads to a structural renewal o f the feeling o f a boundary betw een the self-contained worlds o f signs (ib. 50-51). The stylistic effect is formed within a hierarchical sub-system (ib. 51). Hence, “stylistic consciousness”
derives from hierarchical boundaries as som ething absolute, w'hereas
“rhetorical consciousness” derives from hierarchical boundaries as som ething relative (ib.).
On another occasion (“Filmi sem iootika” - “Film sem iotics”) Lotman analysed the mythical figure o f Charlie Chaplin. Charlie C haplin has two opposite semantic halves, the gentlem anly h alf and the tram p half, but these segm ents are not separated by a rigid boundary: in his gentlem anliness Chaplin all o f a sudden becomes the m ischievous Charlie, and amid the dow diness and m ischievous
ness a gentlem an bows and doffs his hat. But in Charlie C haplin’s figure, despite these separate halves and a hint o f the one in the other, we may still find a kind o f sym m etry w hich we do not have in Jüri Ü di/Juhan Viiding. I do not intend to analyse the figure o f Ü di/Viiding, who was, by the way, very keen on hats and old- fashioned elegance, which was in striking contrast with “Soviet fashion,” nor his habit o f using different voices even in everyday
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speech. The object o f my analysis is his poetic body, his texts which on the one hand reflect his position as an Estonian poet in a Soviet Estonia w hich could still rem inisce about a past world; on the other hand, there is the contradiction between the rough and the civilised, the savage/free and the cultured/norm ative, w hich extends well beyond narrow political barriers and questions the depths o f human existence. Secondly, and what constitutes the biggest difference from C harlie C haplin is the fact that the “I” w hich should link the different segm ents into one whole is not congruous or analysable, but m ani
fold and elusive. Therefore, diverse and asym m etrical spaces, not clearly definable, are being generated in one and the same text, even in one and the same stanza, in one and the same couple o f verses or in a single phrase. As a result, boundaries m ove and one finds oneself re-segm enting what seems to have been segm ented already.
2
.
1Ü di/V iiding’s collection ‘'Selges eesti keeles’* com prises 63 texts all o f which I cannot, o f course, analyse. My purpose is to draw exam ples from a num ber o f com positions in order to illustrate a) how his poetic language is built on the interaction o f various codes and b) how Ü di/V iiding m akes use o f a certain rhetoric which generates diverse or even contradictory m eanings within and between sub-seg- ments which cannot be easily ordered because o f m oving boundaries.U nder the title “Selges eesti keeles” (“In clear Estonian”) is a footnote which translates as:
When translating this book, please alter the title
according to the language o f translation.
Author
This paratextual allusion suggests that the author is very m uch aware o f the “linguistic question” and the difficulty (if not im possibility) o f translating his poetry. If this request were acted on, ideally all o f the textual specificities which spring from the possibilities o f the Estonian language - the specific im agery o f its idioms com bined with its prosody and rhyme - should be changed according to the
143 Some Aspects of Subversive Rhetoric in Juhan Viiding s Poetry
language o f translation. Translation, therefore, would m ean the transposition o f the tension between Estonian figurative language and prosody and Ü di/V iiding’s textual language (including the questioning and breaking o f its codes), for example, into a tension betw een English figurative language and prosody with the translator’s textual language, which also has to be code-questioning and -breaking.
Estonian sayings and proverbs w ith their specific prosody and textual transform ations very often make the textual incipit. In my analysis, I shall explain the idiomatic phrases and som etim es also offer suggestions for possible alternative translations.4
võta pikksilm, oota pikisilmi a) take the long-glass, wait with longing eyes
(“Võta pikksilm, vaata pikisilmi”) b) take the spy-glass, spy with longing
öö käest pannakse päeva käele from the hand o f night onto the hand o f day is put
koiduni alahoitu what was preserved until dawn (“Öö käest pannakse päeva käele”)
The Estonian text transform s everyday speech based on m etaphoric phrases connected with “hand.” E.g. “öö käes” (“in night’s hand”) has becom e neutrally com m unicative and is no longer perceived as a m etaphor. In the same neutral way one can say “tuule käes” (“in the w ind”), “külm a käes” (“in the frost”), and also “päeva käes” (“in the sun”). But the illative case “päeva käele” (“onto the hand o f day”) is clearly “abnorm al” for the Estonian reader. It is not only a question o f poeticalness in the sense o f personification, but there is a hint o f the unheimlich, as Freud would put it (c f Freud 1919). The translator should therefore use some idiomatic com m onplaces and then subvert them. The same feeling is achieved in the next example.
hirmul on suured silmad fear has big eyes
4 T itles o f poem s, or the first lines o f untitled poem s, are given b elow the quotations in Estonian.
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ja kokkusurutud suu and a compressed mouth (“Hirmul on suured silmad”)
“ Hirmul on suured silm ad” is a w ell-know n Estonian saying used in everyday speech to express the idea that when one is frightened, one cannot think logically and tends to see things which do not exist or to exaggerate. But Ü di/V iiding links it to an extension which is never used in everyday speech. The translator's task is to find an analogous linking pair in which the second elem ent should extend and at the same tim e question the first element.
I could continue this list with many m ore examples, but those given should suffice to explain one o f the m echanism s o f the Ü di/V iiding rhetoric. There is the tw ofold usage o f linguistic spaces:
an idiomatic, but out-of-the-poetic-text, normal, correct and “civil”
use o f language and an extended idiomatic, poetic, abnormal,
“incorrect” and savage use. As a result, the first type o f norm ality is questioned and shattered, and at the same time, a new potential idiomatic is created.
2.2. Som etim es in the process o f transform ation the linguistic code is com bined with other specific cultural codes (m ythological codes, biblical codes, arm y-life codes, codes o f the crim inal world, etc.):
laev tuli kaua üle suure lombi
the boat took long to cross the big pond (“Meremehe küsimus”)
“ Suur lom p” (the big pond) here, o f course, stands for the Atlantic O cean (the pond), but by extension it m eans the shut-out or m ythological or dream w orld in general, w hen juxtaposed with Soviet reality.
tuhat korda kulpi löödud
a thousand times the hand scooped up (“Sõja eelõhtul”)
145 Some Aspects o f Subversive Rhetoric in Juhan Viiding’s Poetry
“Kulpi lööm a” in m ilitary slang means raising an ostentatiously and eagerly cupped (literally “ladled”) right hand abruptly to the ear w hen saluting an officer, and it also m eans respectful behaviour in general tow ards those o f higher rank.
me ei tea, mis Luukas kodus teeb we do not know what Luke is up to at home
(“Hobuste laul rändajale”)
The com m on m enacing expression “N äitan sulle, kuidas Luukas õlut teeb” (“I ’ll show you how Luke brews beer”), i.e. I’ll teach you a lesson, is transform ed in the text.
ma loodan täna ei saa nuga neeru I hope, I won’t get a knife in the kidney
(“Õhtu Valgas”)
The alliterative “nuga neeru” is clearly connected with the criminal code, yet it is also facetious. Very often the use o f this kind o f idiomatic phrase springs from the principle o f melopoeia.
Sometim es Ü di/V iiding’s poetic language transform s the existing linguistic code com pletely, e.g.
oma särk on kõige ligedam (instead o f “oma särk on kõige ligemal”) (“Oma särk on kõige ligedam”)
one’s own shirt is wettest or sweatiest (instead o f “one’s own shirt is nearest”, i.e. dearest)
The com m on saying for indicating egotism - “o n e’s own shirt is nearest to o n e s e lf’ (“o ne’s own skin is dearest to o n e se lf’) - is trans
formed into apprehension and weariness. Perhaps the translation could be som ething like:
one’s own shirt is weariest
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or som ething sim ilar; all the more so since the text speaks about shirts hanging on a line and which seem to have an individual existence separately from their wearer.
The same kind o f phenom enon is m anifest also in:
ma tulin saama kõhtu varju I came to get some shade into the stomach (“Laps”)
The Estonian saying “kõht on hele” (“the stom ach is light,” i.e. “not dark”) m eans that one is hungry. Perhaps the etym ology is connected with the sounds m ade by an empty stom ach, as “hele hääl” means a
“clear and high-pitched voice,” but there may be other possibilities.
In any case, the poet extends the code, suggesting that “when the stom ach is light,” it should be filled with “shade.”
This described m echanism actually anticipates the leading o f the normal linguistic code into crisis and, as a result, the generating o f new and unexpected m eanings. The m essage does not “hit hom e”
easily, and so the code is checked and the revised m essage provides a shift in context. Code- and context-shifting often occur within a single line or w ithin a couple o f lines and act as a kind o f hinge uniting different, even contradictor}', sem antic spaces. In the
easily, and so the code is checked and the revised m essage provides a shift in context. Code- and context-shifting often occur within a single line or w ithin a couple o f lines and act as a kind o f hinge uniting different, even contradictor}', sem antic spaces. In the