MPeople, landscapes and stories of Latvia, more precisely: the old provinces of the Teutonic Order Livonia and Courland, could be familiar to a German readership through Eduard von Keyserling, Werner Bergengruen or Siegfried von Vegesack, if their presence is not slowly fading now. But apart from the Baltic German literature, which has long dominated the image of this region, there was and is also a separate Latvian tradition, not just since 1918 or 1991, since Latvia – meanwhile occupied by the Soviets – exists as a politically independent state entity. The fact that several publishers have recently had Latvian books translated into German is a testament to their sympathetic courage and genuine interest in the Baltic States.
As early as 2020, the Berlin Guggolz Verlag published “Straumēni” by Edvarts Virza (1883 to 1940), a Latvian counter-narrative to the German-Baltic descriptions of rural life before the First World War, for example in Vegesack’s “Baltic Tragedy”. This prose poem celebrates a farmstead that is close to nature as the seasons change: a world that smells of calamus and pine resin, where people live with animals, where rye is threshed on the threshing floor and gypsies roast a hedgehog in clay. The language of Virza, translated by Berthold Forssman, has the painterly brilliance and intensity possessed by the Dane Jens Peter Jacobsen, except that Virza’s sensual vitalism is not a defiance of atheism (like Jacobsen’s) but a form of spirituality in its own right. For Virza, as he writes at the beginning, the poet is “constantly in dialogue with the Lord” and also with the ancestors, because he “can awaken the language of those who have fallen asleep”.
Edvarts Virza: Straumēni (1933). From the Latvian and with an afterword by Berthold Forssman, 333 pages, €25
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Image: Guggolz Verlag
One cannot imagine a greater contrast to this than the youth novel “Jelgava 94” by Jānis Joņevs, which was written in 2013 and has now been published by the Cologne Parasite Press in the touchingly clumsy, as pointed as heartwarming German translation by Bettina Bergmann. He tells of life in the Latvian provinces three years after regaining independence from the Soviet Union from the point of view of an adolescent schoolboy who was too young at the time of his parents’ freedom struggle to understand the big reality, and now with gang crime and drug trafficking and metal scene is exposed to a world that also overwhelms his parents. It’s the “also” that counts, because the first-person narrator stumbles through life rather awkwardly and watches himself – from the writing distance of almost twenty years – with good-natured self-mockery. Great sentences like: “I really liked old music of all kinds. For example, the Beatles.” And the introduction of the new subject of sex education in a Soviet-style school that was completely uptight is tear-jerkingly funny. One could call “Jelgava 94” a picaresque novel, but it is not the shy, thin-skinned hero in his helplessness who is the rogue, but the author who grew out of this hero.
The latest and most elaborate publication of Latvian literature in German comes from Mareverlag: “The bed with the golden leg”, published in 1984 in Soviet Latvia by Zigmunds Skujiņš (1926 to 2022), now translated into German with sovereign humor and a desire for rural drasticity by Nicole Nau, who also contributes helpful notes in the appendix, complemented by Judith Leister’s informative afterword.
Baron Münchhausen had already hung around there
As the subtitle says, “The Bed with the Golden Leg” is the “legend of a family”, namely the fictional Vējagals family from the Livonian coastal town of Zunte in the border region between modern-day Latvia and Estonia. While this little town is just as fictitious as the Vējagal family, it is reminiscent – as Judith Leister wittily notes – of the Livonian town of Dunte, where the real Baron von Munchausen married Jacobine von Dunten in 1744 and deigned to live with her there until 1750. The appeal of this may be a hint from Skujiņš that in his “Legend of a Family” from the seventeenth to the twentieth century facts and fiction mix merrily like in a Munchauseniad.