Q&A: Unforced Flourishing Author Thomas Salumets speaks with Jaan Kaplinski

Among Europe’s major contemporary poets, Estonia’s Jaan Kaplinski offers a rare vision of human advancement and fulfillment: the less we intervene the more we flourish.

But how then can we remain involved in what evolves of its own accord? How can we move away from a life forged by human design towards a quietly attentive yet spontaneous responsiveness?

Unforced Flourishing, by Thomas Salumets, is the first major English study of one of Eastern Europe’s most important literary figures, detailing Kaplinski’s embrace of that which is undifferentiated, intuitive, non-calculative, and natural in the modern world.

The Estonian translation for Unforced Flourishing is scheduled to appear later this year. In this special Q&A, author Thomas Salumets discusses the forthcoming translation with Jaan Kaplinski. 

What are your main concerns as a writer?

Not to get stuck in any fixed shell, not to become an epigon of myself or of somebody else, not to lose touch with the great flux of life, of the wonder of life.

What do people most often fail to understand about you as a poet and public intellectual? 

It seems to me that they don’t understand that first of all, I want to be an independent intellectual, and then only – an Estonian intellectual. My homeland is “La République internationale des lettres”.

Later this year Unforced Flourishing is scheduled to appear in Estonian translation, with Varrak, a major Estonian publisher. You gave your consent, but somewhat reluctantly. Why?

We in Estonia are not accustomed to read such frank revelations about intimate life of an author and his/her relations with other people. But after all, it’s probably time to accept such books. We, authors, are human persons with all our strong points and foibles, and possibly it helps the reader to understand better what being an author means, to understand that most of us are neither superhuman geniuses nor decadent bohemians.

How do you think Estonian readers will respond to the book? 

This is the question. Fortunately, I don’t have an aura of a national hero or a saint, thus, I think, the book will not be a shock to our readers.

In part, Unforced Flourishing details your relation to Soviet power. How does the account in the monograph align with your views about current power politics in Russia and its leader’s tense relationship with the West?

In some ways, my attitudes have not changed much. Actually I think about Russia and its politics more or less in the same way as Henry Kissinger, Jack Matlock, or the late George Kennan. Russia’s leaders feel humiliated by Western attitudes and threatened first of all by the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, and react to this. Sometimes they over-react. As do the US.

Jaan Kaplinski at his retreat, Mutiku, in Estonia 2009.
(Photo: Alar Madisson, Estonian Literary Museum, Tartu)

An excerpt from Unforced Flourishing, by Thomas Salumets:

His stellar ascent did not come as a surprise to his closest friends. They described Jaan Kaplinski as the quintessential if not stereotypical poet: eccentric, intensely sensitive, highly intelligent and knowledgeable, ecstatic but also prone to dark moods, a libertine of sorts with a troubled family background, often in precarious shape financially, drawn to tumultuous relationships, easily at odds with social conventions and society at large, “wise on the page,” as someone said, but “unwise in life.” “I knew from his first poem” that he was a “good poet,” Kaplinski’s mentor and teacher Ain Kaalep once remarked, not without pride, in an interview remembering the precocious teenager.

And indeed, already in 1965, when Kaplinski was only twenty-four years old but had been dabbling in poetry writing for about a decade – his first published poem dates back to 1956 – he received considerable attention in major Estonian publications hailing him as one of the new and promising young writers. His debut collection of poetry – Jäljed allikal (Tracks at the Wellspring) (1964) – was reviewed, for the most part favourably, in Estonian newspapers such as Edasi, Looming, and Sirp ja Vasar, as well as in the literary periodical Keel ja Kirjandus. “Intelligent,” “deep,” “noteworthy,” and “philosophical” were some of the recurring accolades used to describe his early work, and within only a few years he had established a reputation of being among the most promising young Estonian poets in recent memory.

The washing never gets done.
The furnace never gets heated.
Books never get read.
Life is never completed.
Life is like a ball which one must continually
catch and hit so it won’t fall.
When the fence is repaired at one end,
it collapses on the other. The roof leaks,
the kitchen door won’t close, there are cracks in the foundation,
the torn knees of children’s pants …
One can’t keep everything in mind. The wonder is
that beside all this one can notice
the spring which is so full of everything
continuing in all directions – into the evening clouds,
into the redwing’s song and into every
drop of dew on every blade of grass in the meadow,
as far as the eye can see, into the dusk.

Jaan Kaplinski

(From Selected Poems, 75)

To learn more about Unforced Flourishing, click here.
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