On Ana Blandiana's My Native Land A4

On Ana Blandiana's My Native Land A4Ana Blandiana is pen name of Otilia Valeria Coman, probably Romania's greatest contemporary poet. Coman continued political opposition to Ceausescu's totalitarian regime that she learned from her father, so soon a pseudonym was necessary if she were to enact her faith that poetry is a form of resistance to what history makes of us. One aspect of her greatness is to understand not only tyranny that so readily issues from political authority but also modes of complicity that seduce people into cooperating with it. An even more compelling aspect is her grasp of why her strand of poetry, her poetics of silence, demands integrity forged on opposition to that tyranny. The blank page (A4 is a standard European stationery) stands as a perennial reminder of how freedom emerges even within repression.Yet I am most moved in her book by delicacy and scope realized time after time by her profoundly analogical imagination. This imagination is as visible and as powerful in her prose as in her poetry. Consider essay from 1999 with which translators conclude volume. Blandiana's basic claim is that the ultimate purpose of a poem should be to re-establish silence. This claim may seem like a cliche of Eastern European pseudomysticism, but Blandiana makes a brilliant case with appropriateness of her examples, which produce intricate and surprising analogical turns. The silence of lyric, says Blandiana, stands out against epic's ways of offering an immense river of without even the slightest room for doubt. This comparison is quite inventive. The epic introduces a striking contrast not only to her own poetry's lyricism but also to entire culture in which all aspects of assertive generalization have become highly suspect.But if poetry today has largely turned from power of assertion to power of suggestion, then we are likely to have some questions about suggestion's actual power. That is, until Blandiana puts case this way: [T]he higher ratio of inference to speech, closer verses come to poetry.... Where nothing is said, all can be suggested. Her prose may be built on discipline of trying to say nothing, but she considers it-and proves it-capable of saying a great deal with concision and bite. These are not unfamiliar sentiments. But they are rarely stated with such concise scope. So while idea of art as non-being is familiar from Kasimir Malevich, idea of artwork as a tenuous and imprecise boundary between existence and is pure Blandiana, born of intense realism that demands non-existence as a means of surviving.Blandiana recognizes that in poetry it's words that mediate, shape, and define what silence becomes possible: We witness how words withdraw into themselves-as a snail, disappointed by what it discovers, retracts its antennae- in a process that has no end, like time. The double simile here leaps first into psyche of snail and then into figure of time as endless process. This is analogical double turn that makes sentence itself quite a voyage of discovery, establishing a rhetorical form for what lies beyond words.In Blandiana's poems, a lean, sharp style and recurrent devices like simile define structural contrasts that make poetry dwell in a place of difference, and hence a kind of non-being, by its awareness of competing poles of desire. This place of difference is very difficult to maintain. (Some of poems collapse into generalized assertion; some into precious ways of maintaining aura of poetic value.) For Blandiana, best way to maintain force of difference is to create rhetorical figures that comment on poetry's own fragility. It is as if preserving fragility while giving it structure (and so intelligence) were one way poetry could both acknowledge and finesse forces of destruction that world brings to bear on space of silence. …