Why we Czechs can understand Gary Snyder’s poetry

If poetry of this American poet is able to address people all around the world (the edition of this magazine is a proof of it), it has to contain Something, what can touch something inside us despite of the color of our skin, cultural and political-social context or our individual dispositions.

Into the world of Gary Snyder is possible to enter through many doors. For me and my generation (I am a man of forty) it was the door of literature: the beat generation poetry and then our interest in the hippie movement and counter culture generally. But next doors are the ecology, Buddhism & Zen, or an interest in the American Indians life-style in the environment of Central Europe. And other doors can be the interest in primitive a tribal cultures, or mythology, or just liking for the story-telling. All places after these doors are interconnected and all these doors are freely getting through. As we find very easy, all these doors lead into the nature.

A contact of my generation with nature wasn’t as tight as in the Gary Snyder’s life, but it was very near. I can rewrite Gary Snyder’s phrase: We Czechs are all yokels.

In former Czechoslovakia every family had parents or grandparents or other relatives who lived in the villages. So we knew the real life in the countryside (however damaged by the collective farming it was): domestic animals and their breeding, feeding, caring for and slaughtering, and also wildlife: moufflons, deer, boars, hares, buzzards, jays, quails, ants & beetles. So I dare to say that every kid of my generation knew some typical village works and activities as cone harvesting, sawing and cutting, bringing water from the well, mowing, picking mushrooms (Czechs, Slovaks, Poles or Russians know edible mushrooms well and eat them) and berries (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries) and so on.

The true is that the times are changing and the situation today is a little different. The countryside is more and more the place for holiday and less and less the place of agriculture. Today not everyone has a relative, who practices farming.

On the other side more and more young people want practice an ecological agriculture, practice the alternative, self-sufficient life-style. In that case Gary Snyder’s poetry and essays can be a good wilderness and nature guidebook for them. And it also works this way for some time.

But the doors of his works introduce into deeper and further countries.

Gary Snyder’s poetry has two levels – the first: a nice story telling, the second: a theme for hard study.

We can read the poetry almost as a fiction. His poetry tells us the story (whether dreamy, mythical, surreal or real). That’s why Snyder’s poetry and essays don’t give any troubles to read and understand it to workers, white-collar workers, farmers, politicians, scientists or philosophers. It’s open to everybody with the open mind and to everybody who wants to take in.

Well, maybe Czechs and other nations with a totalitarian experience have an advantage over the others because they know very well to read between the lines. No doubt, the places, where his story (his story – history) goes on, have got a certain hallmark of exoticism for Central Europe readers, but feelings, impressions, and messages, which his story relays, are generally transmittable. We can say his poetry is local, but its lesson has a global validity

It’s important for us that such a “simple” story excites our desire to know more, to know what happened before, what will happen after, why it happened and why it is happening just now. The poetry forces us to search, find and check some information and to educate ourselves.

Furthermore, or vice versa – for contemporary well-traveled young generation who has the experience with the global world the reading of Snyder’s poetry could arouse interest in the local world.

Gary Snyder is a good story-teller.

He tells lightly, but big events enact under the surface of the tale: the continents move, “diamond drill of racing icemelt waters” works, the woods are being cut or dried, the man is reaching the enlightenment under the new moon tongue, is moved by the flowing of the little creek or by the majesty of mountains.

We are drawn into many ecological, geological, philosophical, spiritual, etymological, or just skillful topics, into the human and non-human relationships, into the transfers of energies, energies of water, rocks and butterflies, into the history of human race, into the world of shamans and dancers, and old ways. And when we are in danger of loss in these worlds, the poet splashes us with cold water and let us to go our own (spiritual) way.

It’s nice, funny, inspiring and also risk and dangerous. The positive aspect is that we remain still free. And we can go back home at any time. Maybe.

I don’t know if my attempt to find some satisfying answers brings any new or specific aspects in comparison with other translators. The fact is that Gary Snyder is well-known in the Czech Republic as the Thoreauesque personality of the world ecological movement. Gary Snyder as a poet is on the second place. However, we can take the ecological aspect of his work as one of the doors to his poetical/philosophical realm.

The first step was done in 2002 during the exhibition “Wilderness – Nature, Soul, Language”, and the international conference “Wildernes as the Phenomenon of Integral Culture” at Klatovy-Klenová Gallery in the Šumava region, which was dedicated just to him and the Czech painter, typographer and philosopher Josef Váchal (1884 – 1969).

For me as the translator, Gary Snyder’s poetry has one more important aspect – his language. Since he doesn’t tell the story with the help of some words. In his poems the words themselves are the storyteller, each with own story (history). He as a poet is just “the speaker”.

So, how is possible to translate them into the other language?

I’ve been reading and trying to translate Gary Snyder’s poetry and essays for almost twenty years – primarily as unpublishable stuff, now for publishing. But I never can say: “Vow, the translation is finished”.

It’s very hard to find, for example, the right expressions for technical terms, activities, or some special equipment for the wood cutting, when the system of the forest harvesting in the Czech Republic is a little different from the one in the USA. It is inspiring, but it’s not the main problem of translation.

These English monosyllabic words! How many, how nice, how voiced! And Gary Snyder’s poetic language and his spare way of phrasing!

I like it but how to say it in Czech, when the Czech equivalent for the most English monosyllabic words is disyllabic at least? When the Czech words are more “lazy”, they are poetical by a different way and I want to try to hold Gary Snyder’s rhythm?

It’s a challenge. So, due to Gary Snyder’s poetry and essays I still discover strange “back countries” of the Czech language. The more I find, the larger region of the Czech language is. Due to Gary Snyder I learn and love Czech. What more could I wish?

For magazine New - April, 10, 2005, Luboš Snížek