By Milan Rufus, Viera and James Sutherland-Smith
Edited by David L. Cooper, Milan Richter
Illustrated by Koloman Sokol
Translated by Ewald Osers

Description

Slovak-English edition of selected poems (64 poems) of Milan Rufus, poet laureate of Slovakia, illustrated with paintings by Koloman Sokol, translated from Slovak to English by Ewald Osers, and Viera and James Sutherland-Smith.

Crane Summit Award for Poetry 2008

SME Kultura, December 10, 2008

Milan Rufus (December 10, 1928 - January 11, 2009)

Special Features

First edition in English and Slovak, 64 poems by Milan Rufus, illustrated with ten paintings by Koloman Sokol.

General readers interested in poetry, especially poetry that synthesizes Western and Central European spirit.

Comparison

This is a first English edition of the best poetry of Slovak poet laureate Milan Rufus, candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature, illustrated with twelve paintings by the Slovak-American artist Koloman Sokol.

Comments and Reviews

THE TRANSLATORS' preface to And That's the Truth notes recurring images of bread and water, with sacramental overtones, in Milan Rufus's poetry, but perhaps more striking-in part because of Koloman Sokol's drawings of sculptors and their work-is the emphasis on stone. In "Rodin's Lovers," love is the chisel, and in "What Is A poem?" the answer is that "the poem is greater than the word" because it is "Not a stone. A statue. Lot's wife. / that's a poem." In "Carpenters," the task is "to hack through into beauty."

Throughout the collection, selected from twenty volumes of his œuvre, Rufus emphasizes the struggle not only with artistic creation but with destiny. Like some English modernists, he feels that, in literature as in life, "all roads lead to silence." A path that once seemed to lead to God now "leads to the unknown."

Suffering, as inexplicable as that in the poetry of Thomas Hardy (whose short lines and simple language offer some basis of comparison for the anglophone reader)' is somehow, unlike Hardy's, redemptive. In "Lines," where the extended figure is employed most successfully, markings on the face become grooves in a record for the wearer to "listen to / his master's voice." "Thus" echoes Gerard Manley Hopkins's "generations have trod / have trod / have trod," and although Rufus cannot praise the glory of God, he concludes that hunger, neither too great nor too little, offers a space in which humanity can eat and love. Less effective is "Visitors," in which hunger, death, poverty, and worry find consolation in the fact that "The earth came to us and brought flowers."

The next line, "And that's the truth," serves better as title to this volume than as conclusion to the poem. Perhaps too much aware of his position as "a kind of national conscience for Slovakia and its people" Milan Richter's words Rufus too often flattens his endings with didactic generalizations.

English-speaking readers may be missing something in translation, for many of the poems do not seem to generate effective internal rhythms. Perhaps Milan Rufus's poems in English are best read singly, as meditations rather than lyrics. Seen this way, they bring a valuable new note into poetry in English.

Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma