The interplay between different art forms has long been a subject of poetry. How can visual art, color, or sound be translated into the medium of language? In the following essay, Vladimir Martinovski reflects upon such meeting points in contemporary Macedonian poetry: the poetic dialogue between Mateja Matevski and the Japanese haiku-master Kobayashi Issa; ekphrasis in the poetry of Blaze Koneski; musical instruments in the poems of Jovan Strezovski, Slavko Janevski, Jovan Koteski, and Bogomil Gjuzel; medieval Byzantium sacred art in the poems of Mihail Rendzov. Through a selection of extracts from his essay collection Literary Cross/roads, Martinovski explores the rich and subtle interaction between words and the artistic forms that inspired them.
Contemporary Macedonian poetry is dialogical—a spiritual fruit on the literary crossroads between the East and the West, between tradition and modernity, between different artistic forms of expression and the art of the poetic images. A dialogue is established between poetry and different modes of artistic expression. In the attempt to transform paintings into a poetic text, poets must inevitably choose which pieces of visual information is to be transposed into poetic discourse. During the process, the semantics of ekphrastic poetic text is inseparable from—even incomplete without—the connection with the work of art that is the subject of literary description. The poem always depends on the role of the viewer that the reader receives, connecting the words from the poem with the work of art to which they refer.Therefore, a work of art could be treated as a “visual catalyst” of the poem, whereas the poem is an opportunity—thanks to the art of language—to see the work of art in a new way.
Reading ekphrasis (between words and images):
In 2006, I had the honor to prepare a thematic selection of contemporary Macedonian poetry for the Struga Poetry Evenings Festival, titled “Ut Pictura Poesis—Poetry in dialogue with Plastic Arts”.To begin the discussion dedicated to ekphrasis as a product of (inter)semiotic transposition in contemporary Macedonian poetry, I selected “A Visit to the Museum”, a short poetic piece by Blaze Koneski (1921-1993):
Their arms touched each other
in silent excitement
at the entrance to the small hall.
They sat together, closely, on the bench.
They had no need to talk about their life—
they just stared at Claude Monet’s Red Water Lilies,
and behind them, in silence, Picasso’s Guernica.
This poem might be read as a simple poetic testimony of an ordinary event in one of the great museums, but also as a metaphor for the dialogue between the visual and the verbal, between plastic arts and literature. From the viewpoint of the spatial arrangement, it is indicative that the protagonists are in between two representative works of fine art. On the other hand, the reader of this text, visiting this small poetic museum, is confrontedwith the titles of the two paintings in the two final verses. In his book Museum of Words, James Heffernan reminds us: “the ekphrastic poetry of our time . . . represents works of art within the context of a museum, which of course, includes words that surround the pictures we see, beginning with picture titles”.
Certainly, even this poem—in which the works of art are merely named, not described—clearly shows that the creation of the meaning of the text is impossible (or incomplete) unless the reader is familiar with the paintings in question! In fact, from the (inter)semiotic perspective, it does make a difference which two paintings the museum visitors are positioned between. The description, even the very mention of the paintings in a literary context, must represent an in-betweenexperience for the reader. In order to achieve the effect of the poem, the readers need to project the paintings in question to their mental screen. And the readers should—at least for a minute—find themselves in-between these works of art.
Musical instruments (and the human body) in poetry:
Like every instrument, the musical instrument is a kind of “extension” of the human body, and the most illustrative examples are the miniature sculptures from Cycladic art in which lyres and flutes merge with the hands of the players. It is said that the human body is the most perfect musical instrument, possessing (vocal) cords and organs that, resonating, amplify sound. One of Man Ray’s first photomontages presents a female torso as a cello, and in Marc Chagall’s paintings, the lines between the musicians’ bodies and the instruments disappear. But even when we describe musical instruments, we often employ lexemes suggesting parts of the body: the double-bass has a neck, or the guitar has a body and a head. So it is no surprise that instruments themselves are represented as bodies in poetry, as in Garcia Lorca’s poem “The Six Strings”:
At a sign from the guitar
Dreams start to weep.
Sighs of lost souls
Escape from its round mouth.
Like the tarantula it weaves a star
To catch the sighs that float
In its dark well of wood.
Some instruments (such as bagpipes) are made of animal entrails. Others (such as the lyre) are made of the body parts of several animals: the resonance body of the turtle, the string holders of goat’s horns, and the strings of horsetails or mouse entrails. The poem “Bagpipes”, by the Macedonian poet Jovan Strezovski, thematizes the relationship between what the traditional bagpipe instrument is made of and the sound coming out of it:
When Grandpa made the bagpipes
He’d pick the skin of a troubles sheepSo the bagpipes
Let out painful screamsAnd he wouldn’t squeeze hard
To keep the sheep’s soul
In a Japanese kabuki play, a fox recognizes its mother’s voice in a percussion instrument. One other such poem treating the necessity of sacrificing an animal to create a percussion instrument is the poem “A Drum” by Slavko Janevski:
With thunders from the entrails
It burns the dancers’ feet
It prances. It’s a live-flayed goat.They buried its soul in a ring
The tail surpassed the head.It’s banged with bull’s bones daily
Have sparks beaten out of its throat
And green lightning jump out of the fire
The brides are wearing veils.They don’t let it sleep at night.
They don’t even
Let it be dead:
Skin and bones
An ashtray fitted with song.
The fate and the purpose of musical instruments is, of course, for them to make music, so Gibran was right to say that the dry stick used as a cane is better than the loveliest flute that no one ever plays. The poem “Curse” by Jovan Koteski is along those same lines, in which the curse is precisely that no white flute will chirp in my home/ or yours!, as if giving an implicit response to the verses of Miladinov’s longing. The world without music would be an unbearable place, and according to Friedrich Nietzsche, life without music would be a mistake. In the anthological poem “Spring at the Apocalypse” by Bogomil Gjuzel, the most powerful poetic images suggesting apocalyptic visions are those in which the instruments are silent:
The deserts are playing
The drums trampled on
The armies or wedding parties gone
Only the bagpipes, barely breathing
One by one
And the wastelands die
Dearest to me is silence.
It is symptomatic that the images of traditional musical instruments in Macedonian lyric poetry are sometimes symbiotically linked with body images. So, in Bogomil Gjuzel’s phantasmagorical poem, “A Vision”, the drum is represented as a sort of a tomb: I found myself alone in the dark/ inside the deaf drum—/ a dried ancestral head. But a testimony to the fact that even the human body in poetry could be perceived as a sort of a musical instrument is the poem “Untuned Head” by Borče Panov:
unturned
too long
too long
that’s how I carry you
with too many
loose
and overtightened
strings
to which
often
sorrow
is the tuner
and you
the player
Motherhood and maternal suffering in religious texts, medieval frescos and contemporary Macedonian poetry:
The enormous iconographical wealth of the St. Panteleimon church in Nerezi, Skopje (12th century) is an intertextual breeding ground for the multiple poetic achievements of Mihail Rendzov, a poet whose creations live in symbiosis with biblical motifs, spanning from his first poetic attempts to the book entitled Psalms(2000), as well as his long poems Apocalypse (2002) and Harbinger (2009).
His poems created in a dialogue with the Nerezi frescos were published in the poetry collection Nerezi (1982), the only book of poetry in contemporary Macedonian literature entirely dedicated to this monastery complex. In this sacred space of forgotten colors and trowels / forgotten angel-masons, the poet dives into the search for the “meaning of existence”.
The spiritual vertical reflected by Rendzov in his introspective projection in Nerezi finds its central point in the perception and intermediate transposition of several magnificent frescos related with the painted narratives of the most dramatic life episodes of Jesus Christ, the God-Man. It is quite telling that the subtitles of the poems: “Entry into Jerusalem”, “The Apostle’s Communion”, “The Descent from the Cross”, and “Lamentation”, titled after their respective iconographical representations of biblical scenes, contain the word “fresco” in brackets. Despite the fact that the subtitles point to explicit quotations—bearing in mind the ekphrastic character of this poetry—the latter suggests that what stands before the reader is a “fresco painted with words”. Taking into consideration that the sources of medieval frescos are found in biblical texts, Rendzov’s poetry is simultaneously intertextual and intermediate: the poem converses both with the Nerezi frescos and the biblical texts.
In this respect, the poem “The Descent from the Cross”, dated 1976, and included in almost all anthologies of contemporary Macedonian poetry, is particularly striking. This poetic creation is inspired by the eponymous composition (painted around 1164), and located on the western wall of the church. The first two stanzas of the poem thematize the moment when the Mother of God and the apostles lower Jesus Christ’s dead body from the cross:
When taking you down—
They wept.
The cross looked like a bird to him.Blood trickled like myrtle from his wounds.
Upon His face, ah, upon His faceYellow fruits between two rows of stars
Angels alit upon that face
White basil blossoming
Angels alit upon me
These lines are the most convincing proof that the art of painting provides the poet with an incentive towards “painting” a new “fresco”, comprising a series of metaphorical descriptions of what has been seen, and also complemented by and enriched with new and original poetic images (Rendzov interpolates the bird to each painted artwork), which issue from the poet’s fevered imagination, all of which work towards enhancing the dramatic effect, also brought to the extreme in the artwork as well.
As opposed to the painted composition, which, in accordance with the characteristics of its medium, is fixed on the scene of “The Descent from the Cross”, Rendzov’s poem also speaks of what transpired prior to the Savior’s crucifixion. If in the first two stanzas the lyrical subject depicts “the descent from the cross” occupying the role of a witness of the events, then in the last stanza—by means of a shift of viewpoint—the role of the lyrical subject is assumed by Jesus himself:
The cross looked like a bird to me.
Blood trickled like myrtle from my wounds.When taking me up,
Ah, when taking me upThey wept.
The answer to the question of whether it was “the Mother of God and the apostles” who cried, or the Roman soldiers whose task was to crucify Jesus, is left to the reader to decide.
The most renowned composition “Lamentation of Christ”, which, according to Balabanov represents “an apogee of dramaticism in medieval art”, and a unique image that is distinguished by “the inner emotional content of the saints painted”, is the source of inspiration for two of Rendzov’s poems. The literary intertextual model for this exceptional masterpiece of painting (which portrays Christ’s dead body, lamented by the Mother of God, who is kissing his face; John the Apostle, who is kissing his hand, while Joseph and Nicodemus are holding his legs) is scientifically located in Nicodemus’s (apocryphal) gospel, on the pages of which the Mother of God says: “How am I not to lament thee, my son? How should I not tear my face with my nails? . . . This is the sword which now goes through my soul. Who shall put a stop to my tears, my sweetest son?”
Art historians Sasho Korunovski and Elizabeta Dimitrova deem that it is precisely the motherly suffering of the Mother of God that is highlighted in this composition: “In the perfect rhythm of the painted architecture of the scene, the Mother of God, devastated by the agonizing pain of the death of her son, falls over Christ’s body, lamenting him. Touching her face to his cheek, torn by profound emotion, she weeps in bitter woe, with a motherly torrent of tears”.
Therefore, in Rendzov’s poem “Lamentation”, the lyrical focus is placed on the very visage of the Mother of God and her suffering: Two birds / Two swallows / in a sad flight / in the Mother’s eyes. E. Kletnikov notes, too, that black as a color of lamentation and grief predominates in the poem: “Even the face of the Mother of God is black; black are the two swallows, the brows knitted in anguish, blooming on her face as she laments the dead son at the northern wall of the ancient Byzantine temple”.
Vladimir Martinovski (Skopje, 1974) is a poet, story teller, essayist, literary critic, and translator. He works as a full professor at the Department of General and Comparative Literature at the Blaže Koneski Faculty of Philology in Skopje. He is the author of the following works of poetry: Sea Moon (2003),Hidden Poems (2005), And Water and Earth and Fire and Air (2006), Quartets (2010), Hurry Up and Wait (2011), Before and After the Dance (2012), Real Water (2014), Inner Mountains (2016), and Dream and Awake Poems (2017). He has published three collections of haibuns: An Echo of Waves (2009), Cat in the Mist (2016) and Sky Without Stars (2016), as well as one poetry book for children, Dum spiro spero (2019) and short fiction collection Zoostories (2019). His poetry has been translated and published in twenty different languages. He is a winner of the following literary awards: “Brothers Miladinovci” (for poetry), “Nova Makedonija” (for short fiction) and “Dimitar Mitrev” (for literary criticism). He is Vice President of the Macedonian PEN.
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Read more about North Macedonia on the Asymptote blog and in our issues:
- Resurrecting the Dead: Translator Will Firth on Unearthing Balkan Classics
- Translation Tuesday: “Punctuation of Life” by Lidija Dimkovska
- “The Master of the Mahala” by Kalina Maleska