Yet even when Liiv and Jidi apply allegorically shaped imagery in their poems, they find means by which they manage to escape monologues of an omniscient “self”. Instead they catch moments of life in its contrasts, contradiction, change and ambiguity, all of which have to do with sensuous shades of the total image. For me, Liiv has among his outstanding achievements a longer poem without title (its first line beginning: “Kes see vahib vainu päälta…”), a semi-allegorized vision of the advent of spring. Written in a rhythm pattern very close to the traditional Finno-Ugrian folk-poetry, Liiv’s poem1F shows by means of a series of metaphoric images the triumph of Spring, in its supreme beauty and at the same time its sexual cruelty (something that is constantly present, for instance, in the telluric-tragic poems of the Andalusian Federico García Lorca).
In a greater part of his poetry, Garcia Lorca was inspired by late medieval Spanish romances and lyrical folk-song, of which the most notable feature is a loose assonant rhyme, the famous Spanish rima asonante. Juhan Liiv did not apply in most of his poems Estonian (that is, Finno-Ugrian) folksong’s metrics – which does not have rhyme in the traditional sense, but instead forms repetitive sounds by artificial word-endings, relying heavily on alliterations. However, in the above-mentioned poem about spring’s advent as well as in some other allegorized poems, like for instance “Mure” (Anxiety) he indeed showed a masterful use the Finno-Ugrian folksong’s rhythm pattern.
Curiously enough, the Yi poet Jidi Majia, whose poetry is basically written in free unrhymed verse and has thus followed Western poetics in the vain of Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda and many others, achieves an analogous wonderful magic blend of metaphorical allegory (or allegorized metaphor) in his poem titled “Folksong” (which by its use of repetition is also close to ancient traditional poetry, either Chinese, Yi, Spanish or Estonian), insofar as its imagery is utterly concrete and sensual (thus in a way contradicting the essence of allegory).
“Poetry” in Jidi’s poem is an allegorized character, embodying and symbolizing love: first a human being, presumably a maid, in the rapture of love, with the traditional harp kouxian in her hand. Then in the next stanza it becomes sheep (picked out for copulating – sexual domination by the leader ram). Finally, she is a maid in despair, because human love is much more subtle than mere sexual intercourse. Thus, the poem alludes by its ending to the male tyranny, one of the main causes and sources of tragedy both in nature and in history.
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1. The mentioned poem was published for the first time almost half a century after Liiv’s death, in 1953. It has not yet been translated into English or any other foreign language – the obvious fate of a significant part of poetry created originally in minority or minor languages. For the most comprehensive selection in English translation of Liiv’s poetry to date, see Liiv 2013.