There is poor soil in this suburb, yet I try seeding carrot and dill in the beds I just made in my garden, having brought fertiliser from the market-place. “You have got ten days left, then we are going to be back!” The doors of a bus at the bus stop screech under my window like a scream from a woman close to me, who is taken along to be raped. The next night, a show is being held in an apartment in the house across the street: a Jewish grandmother, stretched out in bed, is groaning about me being the enemy of her people, “Haman! Haman!” she is directing curses at me, while her young granddaughter is consoling her, “Yes, he was a Haman, but he is one of us now, let’s not have him hanged after all.” It is past mid-April, a lorry with the box full of ragged prisoners is speeding down the street past my house, the guards in Russian uniforms, slovenly-looking, big, dark men. Different Yiddish girls are passing my house in sharp daylight, their Egyptian facial profiles sending me various grinning grimaces. Somehow they all know I once shouted the foul victory greeting. Pieces of firewood are being sawed in the neighbouring yard in the morning, it sends me the message about how soon enough they are coming to saw off my arms, legs, and genitals, I am to become a stunted torso as the punishment for the sufferings that my words had caused to the people. Jewish women are standing on the pavement and giggling in soprano voices about how the spirit of Hitler is alive in me, who must redeem himself for them. Christian girls are walking in front of my wooden house at night and telling me I am a knight now, no longer the monster I used to be. The time of awakening, with bird-song and a promise of greenery. “Go ahead and get lost from here,” they advise me in low voices on the stairs outside the front door, as I am puffing at my inseparable pipe on the bench in the passage way.
It is enough to say that we have an innocent Little Red Riding Hood of instincts in front of us, which, as the words are flowing, her being decants into a wolf of thirsty visions.Īs the spring arrives, my Yiddish girlfriends keep whispering impish cajolery into my ears.
Maybe all have been written, but the way of presenting every time is a new one.Īnd the significance of the expression at Pilter's is the novelty of prose meridians that makes the living space, the power of input and prints. Although, repetition is the mother of learning. Everything has already been written, they said. Raymond Carver in his encounter with Thomas Bernhard tries to talk about Charles Bukovski while Milan Oklopdžić announces the meeting with Lauri Pilter.Ĭoincidences do not exist, as recently have been told by the philosophers, but there is geopolitics of emotion that interweaves possible variants of testimony through imitating voices within cathedral of the awareness.Īt the same time, this is not about imitation but of sensible interaction of different cultures, voices. Lauri Pilter won the Friedebert Tuglas award for literature in 2004 for his short story "The Double", and the Betti Alver award for the best first novel for his Lohejas pilv.
His collection of short stories, Uncle Endel’s Grendel, was published in English in 2011. Pilter’s own published works in the Estonian language include the novels in short stories Lohejas pilv ( A Cloud That’s Dragonish, 2004), Retk Rahemäkke ( A Journey to the Hail Mountain, 2010) and Aerudeta köisraudteel ( Oarless on the Funicular, 2012). He has translated poetry from English, Russian, Swedish, Italian and Provençal. His translations into Estonian include two novels by Philip Roth, The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy, the chapter Waiting for Glory in the novel The Web and the Rock and the novella The Lost Boy by Thomas Wolfe, Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain, and Lightning Country by the Welsh poet John Barnie. His main scholarly interests include 20th century fiction, modern poetry, mediaeval and Renaissance verse tradition, and epic verse narratives. degree for his monograph “The Comic and the Tragicomic in the Works of William Faulkner“. thesis (2004) focused on the fiction of William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. After years of working as a freelancing translator of fiction and poetry, he has been giving lectures on comparative literature at Tartu University, Estonia, since 2007. Lauri Pilter (born in Tallinn, Estonia, in 1971) is an Estonian writer and translator.
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