Under and Ivask

Jaan Undusk

doi:https://doi.org/10.54013/kk823a2

Keywords: life writing, correspondence, poetry translation and interpretation, Marie Under, Ivar Ivask, Heimito von Doderer, Charles Baudelaire

Since the 1990s, more texts not originally intended for public circulation or readership have been published in Estonia than ever before: correspondence, diaries, personal notes on one’s own life and that of friends and family members, private and official documents, and other such materials. This is an ongoing reaction to Soviet-era cultural policy, which discouraged the publication of such writings.

One of the most substantial corpora of life writing, amounting to nearly 1,200 printed pages, appeared in 2025 under the title Princess and the Troubadours: The Correspondence of Ivar and Astrid Ivask with Marie Under and Artur Adson, 1957–1979. Its main interlocutors are two writers who had been living in political exile since 1944: the grand old lady of Estonian poetry, Marie Under (1883–1980), in Stockholm, and the critic and poet Ivar Ivask (1927–1992), who worked as a professor in the United States. Between 1967 and 1992, Ivask edited the literary journal Books Abroad at the University of Oklahoma, later renamed World Literature Today. The journal became arguably the most internationally wide-ranging literary periodical in the world, with each issue reviewing up to 300 new books published in a total of 72 languages. Ivask himself emerged as one of the most influential literary mediators of his time, and even the Swedish Academy took note of his preferences when considering candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The cultural-historical foreground of the Under–Ivask correspondence consists of rich discussions of modern world literature. Ivask introduces the elderly poet to his favourites in Spanish (Jorge Guillén), Austrian (Heimito von Doderer), Russian (Boris Pasternak), and Greek (Odysseas Elytis) literature. An engaging dialogue develops that, despite occasional differences in taste, never escalates into conflict. The background of the correspondence, however, is charged with strong emotion. A cosmopolitan thirty-year-old intellectual of Latvian-Estonian descent and a seventy-five-year-old national poet challenge one another with new poetic tasks. Ivask encourages Under to translate Latvian, Lithuanian, and Russian poetry into Estonian (Aleksandrs Čaks, Henrikas Radauskas, and Pasternak), as well as the Latvian poems of his wife Astrid and his own poems written in German. Under, in turn, urges Ivask to write poetry in Estonian – a pursuit in which he ultimately discovers his primary vocation.

This happy “working marriage” lasts precisely until Ivask comments on Under’s own poetry. Emboldened by friendship, he interprets one of her poetic lines in a way that differs from the author’s intention and describes one of her Estonian translations of a line by Charles Baudelaire as “rustically plump”, calling it foreign to the spirit of the original. This proves enough to ruin the creative relationship between the two poets. Under, who saw herself as distinctly urban, is especially sensitive to Ivask identifying “rustic” or “peasant-like” qualities in her poetry. For Under’s generation, in which the cultural divide between town and countryside remained pronounced, such qualities still carried connotations of low culture in everyday discourse.

Jaan Undusk (b. 1958), PhD, Senior Research Fellow at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre (Kohtu 6, 10130 Tallinn) and Tallinn University (Narva mnt 25, 10120 Tallinn), member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, jaan@instlit.ee.

Under and Ivask

Correspondence as a domestic drama

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