Walt Whitman, From New York . . . to Novi Sad

Though the poet Walt Whitman never learned to speak or write in anything besides English, he loved the sounds of other languages.  He announces himself no ‘dainty dolce affettuoso’; his ‘vivas’ are blown through his ‘embouchures’ from ‘Paumanok’ to ‘Mannahatta.’  Though he claims that the United States have veins “full of poetical stuff,” he gave a French titles to one of his most important clusters of the third edition (”Enfans d’Adam”).  Whitman encouraged his readers to think globally by integrating what must have been exotic foreign phrases in nineteenth-century America, from ‘tabounschiks’ to ‘teokalllises.’

Hey Walt! –did you ever consider how fluid and strong and beautiful all of these words would sound… in Serbian?

Sati protiču dugi, mučni i teški,

Sati u suton, kada se povlačim na neko osamljeno i

Pusto mjesto, sjedam, naslanjajući lice na ruke…

That is Elma Porobic’s stunning translation of the first lines of Calamus 9.  Those of you who can read Serbian will not just note her sensitive treatment of Whitman’s language, but her ear for his music.  Elma is one of my six students in “Walt Whitman: The Global Perspective”, and one of three that have chosen to absorb, translate, and interpret Calamus 9 as her final project.  Sanja Stanimirovic offers a different perspective on Whitman’s emotional opening:

Sati teku dugi, bolni i tegobni,

Sati u sumrak, kada se povlačim na neko samotno mesto, retko pohođeno, sedam i zarivam

lice u šake…

And then we have Bojana Acamovic’s nuanced reading:

Sati teku dugi, bolni, nesrećni,

Sati sutona, kada se povlačim na usamljeno i pusto mesto, kada sedam, spuštam lice u šake…

Indira Janic brings another level of meaning to Calamus 22 (later “To a Stranger”) by interpreting him using the Cyrillic alphabet:

Странче у пролазу! Ти не знаш колико те чежљиво гледам…

Neda Kosoric has diligently labored to resolve interesting questions regarding the use of gender in Serbian, in her translation of Calamus 11:

…i njegova ruka lagano prebacena preko mojih grudi,

i te noci ja bio sam srecan.

And Josip brings passion and intensity to Calamus 6 as he continues to try to wrestle down a Serbian word for a distinctively Whitmanic term:

Ne s bilo kim niti sa svima, O adhesiveness! O bȉlo mog života!

Potrebno mi je da postojiš i prikazuješ se, više no u ovim pesmama.

Dragan Purešić,, Karen, Indra, Sanja, Neda, Bojana, and Elma: united we Whitmaniacs stand!

On Saturday 12 December, we were honored to welcome the esteemed translator Dragan Purešić to our classroom at the University of Novi Sad.  In addition to his crucial contributions to the success of the Serbian Book Market Project (see http://www.ceebp.org/book-market.htm for more info), Dragan has published noteworthy translations of the works of William Blake (Belgrade: Plato, 2007) as well as Walt Whitman (Belgrade: Plato, 2008).  He presented us with a memorable lecture on the art of translation, describing some of the challenges he faced when interpreting Whitman’s words for the Serbian people.  ”The poem is an artistic entity,” he reminded us.  ”The translator is both an artist and an artisan.”  Quoting freely and fluidly from works as wide-ranging as Lessing’s “Laocoon” and “The Godfather Part III”, he charged us with the significance and the perils of our task at hand.  And he inspired us.  ”Blessed be the messengers,” he said.  Whitman sounds really good, really true and beautiful, in Serbian.

Ringed round by Dragans: Whitman's women (don't forget Indira, behind the lens!)

Dragan then led a translation workshop (which was further enhanced by the contribution of Novi Sad faculty members Vladislava Gordic Petkovic, Ivana Djuric, and Aleksandra Izgarjan).  We pored over Whitman’s language: what’s the connotative difference between being “content” and “happy”, as we see these terms used in Calamus 9 and 11?  What is behind the unusual statement “I am to wait” at the end of Calamus 22, and how can one achieve that feeling in Serbian?  And when Whitman asks, “I wonder if other men ever have the like” (Calamus 9), does the use of  the idea of  ’mankind’ deny the poem’s true meaning or enhance its applicability?  Dragan offered suggestions and asked thoughtful questions of all of us; all of us responded and questioned our own understandings of Whitman’s words and intentions.

We strolled out of Classroom 37 three hours later, with full hearts and minds.  You see, Dragan knows Walt Whitman.   He ‘gets’ the poet in a fluid and intuitive way, in addition to possessing a finessed scholarly knowledge of  Whitman’s life and work.  And Dragan communicated his love and understanding for Whitman to us with honesty and passion, encouraging and helping shape our responses to these elusive Calamus poems.

In a few weeks, you will be able to listen to my students’ final versions of their Calamus translations on our “video map” (just go to “Video Map” on top of our class website– http://unovisad.lookingforwhitman.org– and swing the pointer a bit east of Walt’s usual stomping-grounds).  You, too, will be able to enjoy the benefits of Dragan’s sensitive tutelage– as channeled by this outstanding, unforgettable collective of new Serbian Whitmaniacs.

Hvala, Dragan! Vidimo se, Josip, Indira, Elma, Bojana, Sanja, Neda and faithful right-hand man Dragan!

…I ostavlja vama da dokazujete i određujete,

I glavne stvari očekuje od vas.

(the rousing challenge of “Poets to Come”, as delivered by Walt Whitman and Dragan Purešić)

One of our family's treasures is this rare photo of my father and Inge, taken before the onset of Tito's expulsion campaigns in 1944.

21 November 2009.

All day long I walked around thinking that this was the anniversary of Daddy’s death.  I lit a candle for him in the Serbian Orthodox Church in Zrenanin, and told Aleksandra’s mother (who had made some vanille krenzen for a lavish St. Michael’s Day feast I was treated to today) that these were my father’s favorite cookies, that he would be pleased to see (even more to eat) them.  I just called my friend Jackie Gardy to tell her no, I wouldn’t be able to come to the Novi Sad Jazz Festival tonight, that I wasn’t up to it.  You see, seven years ago, I lost my beloved dad.  His end was sudden and quick, the result of a brain anheurism and, undoubtedly, more than a lifetime of trauma and hard work.  In 2002, November 22 became the most difficult day imaginable.  And every year on this date, I allow myself to be engulfed by floods of memories and emotions.  November 22 marks my counter-celebration of self-pity and grief.

Well, November 22 is tomorrow.

I only realized that when I looked at my calendar a moment ago.  Today’s the twenty-FIRST, not the twenty-SECOND, of November.  So that call to my mom, and the drama of thinking about my father on this heaviest of days, could wait another day.

But it felt like today, like today was connected with that other day in 2002 when I last spoke to my father in person and when I had angry words with a thoughtless, disconnected doctor in Glen Cove Hospital, about disconnecting my father from life support.  Such a strange day.  I was teaching at Colby College at the time, and had flown down from Maine to New York the day before, at my sister’s request.  Dutifully teaching my last pre-Thanksgiving classes and giving my students assignments for the break, I drove to Portland Airport in a daze.  When the fog lifted, I was holding my father’s hand in the hospital and thinking about what I needed to tell him.

I will write the story, Daddy.  I promise.

And then blurriness and hospital smell, and then Tante Inge’s arrival and then waiting.  And then hope and then not.  And then blankness.

My father is the reason that I am writing to you from Serbia.  He, along with my great-grandfather, are my loving courage-teachers, my representatives of what the best of us can aspire to be.  Philipp Karbiener (or, as his birth record reads, Филип Михаел КАРБИНЕР) was the first son born to one of the wealthiest households in Sekitsch, Yugoslavia in 1935.  His grandfather, who had served as the mayor of Sekitsch and had  expanded the family’s properties and wealth, saw more potential in the steady gaze of his grandson (see photo above) than in the boy’s father.  From an early age, my dad had received tutelage on land and agricultural management; by age nine, he was a skilled horseman who could gentle-break the wildest stallion on any of the family’s four farms.

Read the rest of this entry →

The trio enjoying the fruits of my father's harvest on the threshold of his former house in Sekitsch (now Lovcenac), Vojvodina.

My cousins Lisa and Michelle came to visit me for a few days last week.

–Very nice, you say.  Been there, done that.  Don’t families just do this sort of thing?

What if I told you that they left their families and busy schedules in Chicago and the Philadelphia area, respectively, to visit me here in Serbia?  That they’ve never been here before, and that they don’t know another living soul besides me who lives in this part of the world?  And that  they’re not exactly my cousins in the strict definition of the term?

Michelle and Lisa came here on a mission motivated by love.  Though we’re only distant blood relations (their grandmother and mine were first cousins), we’re bonded by history, our devoted interest in the story of our family, and a time-honored friendship.  Michelle’s father Helmut (godfather to both Lisa and myself), Lisa’s dad Ewald (much-beloved Onkel to Michelle and me), and my father Phillipp (their late ‘Onkel Phil’) were all part of the last generation of Karbieners/Karbiners born in the Vojvodina town of Sekitsch.  The family lines had remained in this small town from 1786 to 1944, when the ethnic German residents of Vojvodina were expelled from their homes.  Homeless and homelandless, our family was torn apart by physical separation, forced labor, disease, starvation, and torture.  Surviving against all odds, these young men and their parents eventually emigrated to America (Helmut and Ewald in 1950, my father in 1955) with little more than a vision of a bright future there.

Though they had lost nearly all of their worldly possessions and now faced a challenging reassessment of their cultural identity, surviving Danube-Swabians quickly tried to re-establish what had always been at the core of their communities: family and the bonds of friendship.  The new American émigrés were only too happy to find each other alive and well, and took comfort in settling within close proximity of each other in the Ridgewood/Glendale/Middle Village straddling Brooklyn and Queens.  Families lived together (my grandparents, for example, lived in the apartment below ours) and worked together at knitting mills and meat-packing plants, like Tru-Fit and Merkel’s in Brooklyn.  And when we firstborns came along, we too developed bonds and friendships while frequenting the German-Hungarian Soccer Club, Niederstein’s, Plattdeutsche Park Restaurant, and of course our own elaborate house parties.  Now that I have been living in Vojvodina for a few months, I see that our parents tried to surround us with the comforts they had known ‘back home,’ particularly the food: cremebitte, bundt cakes, dobosch tortes, and apfel strudel were among the treats served at our birthdays (though all we kids really wanted was a Carvel cake).

As the American-Donauschwaben families grew and prospered, many of us moved out of the ‘old’ neighborhoods.  But though the branches grew upward and outward, the roots remain strong. Every time my mother checks up on the old house (which we now rent), she returns vowing that she’ll move back to Middle Village one day.  Our family patriarch Onkel Ludwig still takes his daily walk on Metropolitan Avenue; he’s even found some comfort in the apple strudel and cute waitresses of the Arby’s that replaced Niederstein’s.  And all those parties and gatherings that we firstborns were obliged to attend, have secured lifelong bonds and precious friendships.  Michelle, Lisa, and I—all bossy older siblings that loved school, hated boys (for a while, anyway), and benefited from the unconditional love and support of fathers–  are bonded by our respect for our shared history and our dedication to family.  And in our own 21^st century American way, we carry forth the Danube-Swabian sense of community that held the lot of us together for over 150 years.

Read the rest of this entry →

“Salasch-hund,” my father used to grumble to himself about that lazy co-worker, slacker gas station attendant, and the occasional late-sleeping daughter.

I actually saw what he meant when Aleksandra, Alphild and I took our first look around Salas 137, one of the several Vojvodina “farm-estates” now more devoted to entertaining tourists than harvesting wheat and corn.

Salas 137 attempts to portray a type of existence that my family knew and loved for a century and a half, though it is lost to us now.  My father, along with his parents, grandparents, and everyone else in the Vojvodina village of Sekitsch (now Lovcenac), were expelled from their homes, dispossessed of their properties, and put into death- and work-camps at the end of 1944.   After nearly eight years of suffering, sickness, the experience of watching others tortured, killed, or die of starvation, my father, his sister, and their father were reunited with my grandmother (who had been working in a coal mine in a forced-labor camp in the Ukraine, near Luhansk).  Homeless and homeland-less, my Oma decided for them all: “America is the future.”  On the 17 of December 1955, they caught their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty.

Read the rest of this entry →

Introducing Aleksandra Izgarjan:

prolific scholar, skilled Yugo driver, Serbian gourmand, and my dear friend.

You are meeting her as I did, when I first arrived from Belgrade weighed down by book-filled boxes and overstuffed suitcases.  With her cheery pink t-shirt and instant smile, Aleksandra presented me with a warm and gracious welcome to Novi Sad.  Somehow, through the muddle of newness and jetlag, I was gently guided into my new home, my office at the university, and a fabulous outdoor café in the heart of the city (Mediteraneo, on Isa Bajica).  And I listened with wonder and interest as my new colleague discussed her challenging teaching experiences and a startling number of recent publications.

I am pleased to say that my rather small library of Necessary Reading Material now includes Aleksandra’s Maksin Hong Kingston I Ejmi Ten: Ratnica I Samanka.  And I’d happily dig into the over-400 pages of analysis on Kingston and Amy Tam, if only my Serbian were, o, 10,000 times better.  Tiny Walt seems to have gotten much further. (more on Tiny Walt later.  As several of you predicted, he has really taken to Balkan folk dancing– and thanks to Aleksandra actually knows more about two of his most illustrious fans.  Whitman Ah Singh, indeed!).

As intellectual, industrious, and professional as she is, Aleksandra is also adventurous, funny, and—well, cute.  She shares these excellent qualities with her beloved 19-year old Yugo.  It may rattle your teeth, smell like petrol and allow any passerby access to whatever’s on the front seat, but the Yugo has character.  Like its owner, it’s got pluck, volition, get-up-and-go.  That is, when it’s not in the shop.

Read the rest of this entry →

…it’s a helluva town!

Stari Grad’s up and the Limans are down,

The fortress on the hill has tunnels underground.

New York!  New Nork!  Both such hellsuva towns!

Liner notes:

“Nork”: a shopping center ‘for the people’ (and actually, there’s a huge “IDEA” supermarket—a relatively new concept here in Serbia—on the basement level of New Nork).

“Stari Grad”: old town.  Despite its name, Novi Sad has a quaint downtown lined with multicolored two-story structures that have a distinctly Viennese flavor.  This, for example, is Dunavska Street, which extends to the Danube River (or Dunav) behind the camera, and connects up ahead with Zmaj Jovina, Novi Sad’s café-lined pedestrian zone.

Most of these buildings were constructed while the city was under Austro-Hungarian rule in the eigthteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Established in 1694, obtaining its present name and status as a free royal city in 1748, Novi Sad soon became the cultural and economic center of the region. The first grammar school opened in 1791 (a good 30 years before Brooklyn’s P.S.1!),  the Serbian National Theatre was founded here in 1861; Matica Srpska (a time-honored cultural institution and the center for the study of Serbian language, literature, and philosophy) moved here in 1864.  Even after being attacked by everyone from the Turks to the Russians to Hungarian Fascists, even after NATO bombardment left Novi Sad without bridges, communication, and a water supply for months in 1999, the center city is charming, elegant, and welcoming.

Read the rest of this entry →

The first words I read upon landing in Belgrade  weren’t actually part of an exotic-looking Cyrillic greeting, nor were they the captions of the HSBC ad campaign that framed every other flight I’ve taken this year.  “Karen Karbiener” greeted me from a sign held up by smiling Dida Stojanovic, the American Embassy’s indispensable Cultural Affairs Assistant.  Dida had ensured a warm welcome for me well before this moment: her fact-filled, friendly emails and her assistance in rescuing a package from Serbian customs humanized complex and often mysterious processes.  We chatted like old friends on the way in to Belgrade, and I found her a great source for juicy tidbits about the city—like the location of its own Silicone Valley, a street well known for its plastic surgeons and parading patients.

After meeting Cultural Affairs Officer Susan Delja at the American Embassy, the three of us walked down Kneza Milosa to the Monument Café, a sleek restaurant with a shaded terrace humming with conversation and a scene-setting soundtrack (you’ll here piped-in music almost everywhere you walk in Serbian cities, from walking streets to public parks).  We were joined by Jeff Lash, the only other Fulbrighter to be sent to Serbia this year.   Susan recommended the cheesecake, and all of us—except you, Dida!—indulged as we were briefed on the Embassy’s cultural activities.  Though the American presence returned less than ten years ago after Milosevic fell, and Susan’s only been in her position for two years, she and her staff have been busy inviting American speakers and initiating new programs designed to build understanding and cooperation between the two countries.  “It’s a great time to be here,” Susan said, and I knew she meant it as she described the interesting challenges of raising daughters in central Belgrade.

–I know what you’re thinking.  Yes, this is a perfect place for a photo of Susan, Dida, Jeff and I.  But at this point I was still shaken from what happened when I tried to photograph the American Embassy earlier that afternoon.  The grand building at 50 Kneza Milosa was firebombed last year during the Kosovo crisis, and though the Embassy is still in full operation, they have kept the front windows boarded up and painted as white as the building itself.  It’s s ominously faceless— and a great photo opp.  You’ll have to believe me when I tell you that an Embassy guard asked me to show him the photos I had taken, and then watched as I erased them.  And to accept the fact that you’ll never know what the Embassy looks like (unless you google it, of course.  I see from what’s out there that I should have just crossed the street).

So, let me focus on a subject that’s much less camera-shy: the esteemed and energetic political geographer Jeff Lash.

Read the rest of this entry →

September 24, 2009– squeezed into Seat 23C of American Airlines flight 100 (to London, where I’ll connect to Belgrade-bound flight 888).   Sandra  Bullock’s antics in “The Proposal” just can’t keep my interest—  I’m more incredulous about the mere fact of my sitting here, in this seat, in this plane headed to that place, than her overdrawn portrait of ‘The New York Woman.”  So much history and serendipity, planning and packing and Love has led to this moment… so many people inspiring or enabling this mission.  Squeezed into Seat 23C with me are some of the biggest people in my life: my father, my Oma, and my Walt.  This visionary company have been more present than ever these past few weeks: my dad remembering his favorite horses on the salas, Oma singing the old songs in her high thready voice, and Walt laughing heartily (eyebrows raised, cheeks on fire) that, by God!  He’s making that overseas trip at last!  And to Serbia, no less!!!

There have been other mentors, muses, facilitators, and friends whose brief roles in this saga occurred at just the right time, providing a memorable encounter or a key idea.  Here are nine of them—none of whom I knew a month ago, though they’ve added immeasurable (and literal!) meaning to my Serbian odyssey. 

Read the rest of this entry →

The love that M. Wynn Thomas and I share for Walt Whitman crosses oceans. His latest book on Whitman (Transatlantic Connections: Whitman U.S., Whitman U.K.) is an energetic and provocative exploration of the remarkable endurance and continued influence of the poet’s work, breaking boundaries of space and time. Wynn’s Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry helped set me on my Whitmanic path in graduate school, and I now recommend this illuminating and passionate portrait of Walt to my own students. When I met Wynn in person this June at the Transatlantic Whitman Symposium, I was pleased and awed to experience the power and connectivity I so keenly feel in his writings. The graduate students attending the session, too, were visibly moved by his fierce dedication to studying, teaching, discussing, and loving Walt Whitman.

Catching up at one of the conference’s many after-hours gatherings, Wynn and I found we shared a similar devotion to teaching as well as dedicated passions to our hometowns. Wynn has been living and teaching in Swansea most of his life—which means that he’s been living with Dylan Thomas. Though Wynn admitted that he had never wanted to teach a single author course on Dylan (though he’s led several Whitman seminars), he knows the poet as a neighbor, a ghost, an obsession, a symbol. Wow, I said shyly. If you show me your Dylan’s Swansea, I’ll show you my Whitman’s New York.

Dylan Thomas stagger-danced back into my life this spring, when I decided to include him in my NYU-London seminar, “Bohemian Ink, Beginnings to Beats.” Our final session focused on Dylan’s poetry and love letters (Kerouac’s scroll, on exhibit in the UK for the first time through January 2009, prompted us to read On the Road first)— and as I attempted to wrestle down a few ideas for class, I realized how challenged I was by these rich and highly crafted poems. It was slippery, shimmery stuff, and I needed and wanted to spend more time with it. So Dylan stayed with me through the summer in Whitman’s New York (accompanying me more than once on strange and sad pilgrimages to the White Horse Tavern, where according to urban legend he drank himself to death in 1953) and then back over to the U.K. in August. Of course I had to write to Wynn. Could I take him up on his offer for a Dylan Thomas tour of Wales? Might we really be able to see the house where everything started, hunchbacked Cwmordin Park—maybe even the boathouse at Laugharne, about an hour’s drive west of Swansea? While New York had spelled the end of Dylan Thomas, Wales was the place where he had written best (and most). And M. Wynn Thomas was the person who could best explicate and demonstrate the importance of this place for this poet.

On the morning of August 11, Wynn greeted me warmly at Swansea’s busy train station—and was hailed in turn by several passers-by as we crossed the High Street to the parking lot. It was a wonderful, breathless thing, to drive with Wynn through streets he knew and loved so well. He chatted easily about Swansea’s troubled history, and pointed out several Dylan-related sites that no longer are. The Blitz had ripped through Swansea’s heart, so instead driving by Dylan’s Kardomah Café we past Castle Street’s bland 1950s structures and big parking lots. The streets teemed with life, though—mothers and children, old folks and droves of students. And when Wynn brought me to the top of Townhill, the city looked like a British version of the Bay of Naples—shinier with industry, perhaps, but just as beautifully situated around the curve of Swansea Bay.

Read the rest of this entry →

On Sunday, September 6 2009, a dedicated crew of Whitmaniacs gathered to recite and celebrate Whitman’s great personal epic. We found well-favored roosts aboard the timeworn tall ship Peking (which, after years of service, is now docked permanently at Manhattan’s South Street Seaport) and dove into “Song of Myself” around 3 pm, finishing up the final section at about 5:30. With Whitman’s Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the East River before us, and the sun setting over Walt’s Mannahatta at our backs, readers declared the poem with spirit and listened with interest (and ready smiles).

The diversity of voices and faces and body languages– the great sound effects and accents and intonations– the complex shifting sea-, sky- and landscape– all of it, food for the soul! Warmest whitmanic thanks to you participants, who affirmed that this poem is very much a song of yourselves… and have done your share to keep Whitman and his message alive and radiant here, in his beloved New York.

Here then, are you readers… and you numberless patient listeners…

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

So Long! –’til next year…