Name: Sonetid
Rating: 4.02 (5 reviews)

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December 20, 2021

December 20, 2021 Update Edited to fix the link to the downloadable editions (under Trivia and Links).

First Flowering
Review of the original Siuru (1917) edition in facsimile

The Siurulind (Siuru Bird) is a fire-bird in Finno-Ugric mythology. It inspired the name of both the Siuru literary movement and its publishing moniker. Marie Under (1883-1980) was the movement's leader and its only female member and her book of sonnets Sonetid with poems collected from 1912-1917 was its first publication.

It is still somewhat of a shock to read the passionate poetry of Under's youth from over a hundred years ago and to imagine the reactions of the non-bohemian society at the time. In that late Tsarist era it was probably only the political turmoil of the time that prevented the censors from stopping publication altogether. Helged sonetid I (Bright Sonnets I) is probably the most notorious of the early erotic works, and my poor attempt to translate it is below. I can't match the metre or the rhyme of the original, but I think the meaning comes through easily enough.

Your fingers wandered in the silk of my blouse,
Then the cloth from the brooch was released.
And like a blossom a white shoulder emerged,
As from the shirt the breast swelled to be loose:

The passionate heat of your gaze cried out,
As if you were to cancel the debt of love:
The body slid from under the snow-white dress
No part of me is left covered anymore.

From head to toes the passion stripped me.
As through a veil with half-closed eyes
I saw you standing there aquiver,

Admiring the beauty of my body.
Then suddenly desire's flame ignited both of us:
And I fell lost into your arms. - translated from Helged sonetid I from Sonetid

An excellent summary of Under's early work and the reaction to it is below:

"Under’s youthful poems are predominantly classical in style, but by relaxing adherence to strict structural rules, she succeeded in achieving spontaneity of rhythm even in the most demanding forms. Under’s emphatically feminine imagery is baroquely decorative and derived from the boudoir, saturated with perfumes, colors, ﬂora, especially ﬂowers, and sensual shadings of mood. The basic theme is the radiant ecstasy of love and the rapture of passionate surrender. Under’s love and nature poetry, intense in feeling and graphic in depiction, shocked the contemporary bourgeois public with its erotic explicitness and its almost narcissistic self-absorption. Among younger, more liberal readers, however, her poetry immediately became enormously popular. Sonetid was reprinted three times in 1917, a rare occurrence for that time in Estonia." – Sirje Kiin, from the Introduction to Marie Under: Selected Poetry (2016)

Trivia and Links
You can read a 2017 article by Elle-Mari Talivee about Marie Under and the Siuru Literary Movement at the Estonian Literary Magazine (ELM).

The original Estonian edition of Sonetid (1917) by Marie Under is available to view online as both a facsimile & an html edition and also as a downloadable eBook at the Kreutzwaldi sajand (Kreutzwald Centenary) website.

2020-reading-challenge eesti estonian-language

Sonetid

Marie Under, Nikolai Triik (Illustrator)

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