http://est-ouest.com
dimanche 24 janvier 2016
The Kaplinski System presented at Festival Est-Ouest in Die - France September 2015
http://est-ouest.com
mercredi 24 septembre 2014
"Plus cela change, plus cela reste la même chose…"
Quoted from Jaan Kaplinski's blog : Ummamuudu
I READ YET ANOTHER POEM
describing how the end will come
with the nuclear holocaust. Suddenly
I felt very sure nothing such
will ever happen. There will be no big bang,
only some tiny ones perhaps. But surely
a long big whimper: Big powers
insulting one another, serious crises,
disarmament conferences in Geneva,
drug addicts in Washington, dissidents in Moscow,
hunger in Sahel, terrorism in the Middle East,
new cars, fashions and hits,
breakthroughs in computing and space technology,
more handicapped children and mentally disturbed people,
more revolutionary and ecological movements,
fewer trees, fewer birds and less time
to be aware of the high midsummer sky turning slowly
above you and around you and of the mild night breeze
touching gently your hair and stirring up
some strange feelings and childhood memories.
I READ YET ANOTHER POEM
describing how the end will come
with the nuclear holocaust. Suddenly
I felt very sure nothing such
will ever happen. There will be no big bang,
only some tiny ones perhaps. But surely
a long big whimper: Big powers
insulting one another, serious crises,
disarmament conferences in Geneva,
drug addicts in Washington, dissidents in Moscow,
hunger in Sahel, terrorism in the Middle East,
new cars, fashions and hits,
breakthroughs in computing and space technology,
more handicapped children and mentally disturbed people,
more revolutionary and ecological movements,
fewer trees, fewer birds and less time
to be aware of the high midsummer sky turning slowly
above you and around you and of the mild night breeze
touching gently your hair and stirring up
some strange feelings and childhood memories.
lundi 24 février 2014
Feb. 24 2014: ETV2 Broadcasts The Kaplinski System / Happy Independence Day Estonia!!!
Today The Kaplinski System was broadcasted on the Estonian national channel ETV2
What a honor! Thank you! With Love. RGM
What a honor! Thank you! With Love. RGM
jeudi 9 mai 2013
THE KAPLINSKI SYSTEM now available on DVD!!!
We are so happy and proud to announce you that THE KAPLINSKI SYSTEM is now available on DVD with English and Estonian subtitles.
You can get your copy for 11.99 € + shipment.
Orders, contact and inquiries at:
allfilm@allfim.ee
For shops and bookstores orders, please write to the same email address.
More infos and trailer here.
You can get your copy for 11.99 € + shipment.
Orders, contact and inquiries at:
allfilm@allfim.ee
For shops and bookstores orders, please write to the same email address.
More infos and trailer here.
samedi 29 décembre 2012
Nature in Us / by Jaan Kaplinski /
Once I wrote:
In fact trees and shrubs are a part of us, they are simply at a greater distance from our body than hands or feet, so it is possible to think that they don't feel pain, that chopping away our branches and trunks doesn't cause us serious injury. But we cannot live without trees. The fewer trees there are, the less we live. In reality we are chopping up and cutting down parts from our own body, we are burning and poisoning ourselves. Instead of the forest new human beings can be born, but they are disabled people, people without branches, without roots, without trees, without Amazonia, without Borneo, without Ruwenzori.
(Ice and Heather, in: Evening Brings Everything Back, Bloodaxe Books 2004)
Nearly nothing to add to this. We are a part of Nature, Nature is a part of us. Makes no sense to discuss why we must protect it. As if we discuss whether we should protect our head, our teeth, our liver...
Jaan Kaplinski in his blog Ummamuudu
lundi 26 novembre 2012
Broadcast of the film on TV Tours France/ Monday November 26th 9:00pm/
TOnight on TV Tours France, The Kaplinski System will be broadcasted on Monday November 26th at 9:00 pm.
Check it out on TV TOURS
mercredi 7 novembre 2012
The Kaplinski System/ Projection Tallinn University Estonia/ Nov. 9th and 15th.
The Kaplinski System will be projected at the Tallinn University on November 9th and 15th.
As part of the Autumn French Cultural Season and exhibition of my photographs and films : MY ESTONIAN SUMMERS 2002-2012.
Place to be confirmed and more infos on www.accord.ee
As part of the Autumn French Cultural Season and exhibition of my photographs and films : MY ESTONIAN SUMMERS 2002-2012.
Place to be confirmed and more infos on www.accord.ee
mercredi 27 juin 2012
If a documentary could be a piece of art...
"If a documentary could be a piece of art, then Gianelli- Meriano`s film is just that."
Rein Veidemann
/ Kui dokumentaalfilm võib olla kunstiteos, siis Gianelli- Meriano film seda on. /
Rein Veidemann / Professor / Tallinn University
`Postimees`- Estonian daily
lundi 5 mars 2012
THE KAPLINSKI SYSTEM/ NATIONAL ESTONIAN PREMIERE: TALLINN KINO SÕPRUS/ MARCH 13TH 7:00PM/
ESTONIAN National Premiere of THE KAPLINSKI SYSTEM in Tallinn March 13th at Kino Sõprus 7pm. More infos here (sorry only in Estonian for the moment)
jeudi 17 novembre 2011
lundi 10 octobre 2011
FILM COMPLETED/
Dear all,
It's been a long long time since I've posted anything on this blog. It was worth it as the film is now almost completed.
We are now dealing with the English and French subtitles for everybody (almost) to understand the whole film.
The film length is now of 60mn and is due to be projected on November 22nd in Paris at the MK2 Beaubourg theatre, during the Cultural Festival: Estonie Tonique.
I hope you will enjoy watching the film as much as I enjoyed making it, with passion and a strong desire to share some ideas and thoughts I deeply believe in/
Here is a photo from the film/ The sentence on the billboard reads: "From dust and colors new butterflies will be born" Jaan Kaplinski 1967/
With love,
RGM
samedi 7 mai 2011
THE KAPLINSKI SYSTEM: an introduction/ May 2011/
A thin imaginary line exists, both temporal and geographic, it runs between the East and the West, but also at the turning point of two areas: Soviet Union and today's Europe.
This line goes through one country: Estonia, and most of all penetrates the work, spirit and body of JAAN KAPLINSKI.
This line goes through one country: Estonia, and most of all penetrates the work, spirit and body of JAAN KAPLINSKI.
EVERYTHING STARTS HERE/
EAST AND WEST/ NORTH AND SOUTH/ A THIN LINE THROUGH THE TREES: EVERYTHING STARTS HERE AND EVERYWHERE.
lundi 4 avril 2011
JAAN KAPLINSKI/ 1967/
A portrait of J. Kaplinski from the cover of his first poetry book, TOLMUST JA VÄRVIDEST, published in Estonia 1967/
jeudi 31 mars 2011
samedi 22 janvier 2011
jeudi 16 décembre 2010
GOODBYE MY ESTONIAN/ by JAAN KAPLINSKI/
Dear visitors,
Please take time to read this article in order to reflect on your own language.
This text was written and published by Jaan Kaplinski in his blog last week.
GOODBYE MY ESTONIAN
Some people have been irritated by the fact that I don't use Estonian in my blog. I am sorry, but I have some reasons not to do it. First of all, I have written and published poems, essays and articles in Estonian for more or less fifty years, that is, for half of a century. Isn't it enough? And for about thirty years, I have written about the problems of contemporary Estonian language. Often polemicizing with people who have the authority to say how one should write and speak Estonian, what words and forms we are allowed to use in press and in books. I have different, sometimes radically different ideas about this. I want to use my own breed of Estonian. I have had a lot of controversies with people who think they know better -- editors and specialists in language policy and language maintenance (keelekorraldus). I haven't found much understanding, and even now, editors change the words and forms I use calling their changes amendments and generously giving me the right not to agree with such "amendments". I certainly accept real corrections of my typos and other mistakes -- errare humanum est; I think every writer needs an intelligent and attentive "first reader". But to a writer with fifty years of experience and a background of linguistics being able to read texts in about dozen languages, to see his text, his style changed, his words replaced with different ones, is an insult. But my attitude towards the official Estonian is not just a purely personal matter. I feel deeply sorry about the fact that the language that, according to my deep conviction, should be our common property, should belong to the people who have created and are using it, has become a property of a group of specialists (and, in fact non-specialists too) who have usurped the right to tell us what is right and what is wrong, and to many amateurs who enthusiastically try to invent new words to replace the old ones. I cannot agree with such a situation: I don't think anybody has the right to tell Estonian people what words they should use or not. And nobody has the right to change the language according to his or her ideas, but the people, the speakers and owners of the language. This simple fact is ignored both by our authorities and institutions whose task is to maintain and develop our language. Our linguistic policies are authoritarian, and it seems to me that this authoritarianism has increased in recent years. Now, even our president has intervened in our language policies telling to us what words we should use and what words not. Even if his command of Estonian and knowledge of linguistics were perfect (what is not the case) no president has the authority to teach people how to speak or write. Now, our State Broadcasting authority has, in a hurry, replaced the loanword "infrastruktuur" with a newly formed word "taristu", and all the reporters are obediently using the new word. In my opinion, this neologism is a failure for several reasons. I could explain my opinion in detail, but here I mention only the fact that it makes little sense to replace one compound with the word "struktuur" instead of finding a purely Estonian word for "structure". And for most Estonians, the root "tari" has only the meaning of cluster of berries. But the authority of our president has most probably helped to replace a well-established international word with a strange neologism. In my opinion, such instances are a proof or the absence of democracy in our language policies. It is the result of some ideological stereotypes our language authorities and amateur neologists have inherited from the futuristic ideas of the early XXth century, and the passive attitude of our common language users who have given away their rights, their proprietorship of their language. I has led and is leading to creeping alienation of our people from their language, of the standard Estonian becoming more and more an artificially standardized and maintained language. While most people seem to silently agree with this, I cannot. I feel I have been too intimate with my language, I have tried to do my best in using it intelligently and creatively. I have tried to defend it from excessive normativeness and excessive fondness for neologisms. Now I feel that my efforts have had no results. I have lost my battle. I have nothing left than to resign. I don't want to read Estonian press, to listen to our radio or TV. The modernized language hurts me. I have to abandon writing in Estonian, and try to write in Võru keel, English and Russian. Certainly my command o these languages is not perfect, but I can without resentment accept editors correcting my texts written in English or Russian. And I cannot accept editors "correcting" my Estonian texts. Thus I feel I have been an Estonian writer for half of a century, but I am no more an Estonian writer.
Please take time to read this article in order to reflect on your own language.
This text was written and published by Jaan Kaplinski in his blog last week.
GOODBYE MY ESTONIAN
Some people have been irritated by the fact that I don't use Estonian in my blog. I am sorry, but I have some reasons not to do it. First of all, I have written and published poems, essays and articles in Estonian for more or less fifty years, that is, for half of a century. Isn't it enough? And for about thirty years, I have written about the problems of contemporary Estonian language. Often polemicizing with people who have the authority to say how one should write and speak Estonian, what words and forms we are allowed to use in press and in books. I have different, sometimes radically different ideas about this. I want to use my own breed of Estonian. I have had a lot of controversies with people who think they know better -- editors and specialists in language policy and language maintenance (keelekorraldus). I haven't found much understanding, and even now, editors change the words and forms I use calling their changes amendments and generously giving me the right not to agree with such "amendments". I certainly accept real corrections of my typos and other mistakes -- errare humanum est; I think every writer needs an intelligent and attentive "first reader". But to a writer with fifty years of experience and a background of linguistics being able to read texts in about dozen languages, to see his text, his style changed, his words replaced with different ones, is an insult. But my attitude towards the official Estonian is not just a purely personal matter. I feel deeply sorry about the fact that the language that, according to my deep conviction, should be our common property, should belong to the people who have created and are using it, has become a property of a group of specialists (and, in fact non-specialists too) who have usurped the right to tell us what is right and what is wrong, and to many amateurs who enthusiastically try to invent new words to replace the old ones. I cannot agree with such a situation: I don't think anybody has the right to tell Estonian people what words they should use or not. And nobody has the right to change the language according to his or her ideas, but the people, the speakers and owners of the language. This simple fact is ignored both by our authorities and institutions whose task is to maintain and develop our language. Our linguistic policies are authoritarian, and it seems to me that this authoritarianism has increased in recent years. Now, even our president has intervened in our language policies telling to us what words we should use and what words not. Even if his command of Estonian and knowledge of linguistics were perfect (what is not the case) no president has the authority to teach people how to speak or write. Now, our State Broadcasting authority has, in a hurry, replaced the loanword "infrastruktuur" with a newly formed word "taristu", and all the reporters are obediently using the new word. In my opinion, this neologism is a failure for several reasons. I could explain my opinion in detail, but here I mention only the fact that it makes little sense to replace one compound with the word "struktuur" instead of finding a purely Estonian word for "structure". And for most Estonians, the root "tari" has only the meaning of cluster of berries. But the authority of our president has most probably helped to replace a well-established international word with a strange neologism. In my opinion, such instances are a proof or the absence of democracy in our language policies. It is the result of some ideological stereotypes our language authorities and amateur neologists have inherited from the futuristic ideas of the early XXth century, and the passive attitude of our common language users who have given away their rights, their proprietorship of their language. I has led and is leading to creeping alienation of our people from their language, of the standard Estonian becoming more and more an artificially standardized and maintained language. While most people seem to silently agree with this, I cannot. I feel I have been too intimate with my language, I have tried to do my best in using it intelligently and creatively. I have tried to defend it from excessive normativeness and excessive fondness for neologisms. Now I feel that my efforts have had no results. I have lost my battle. I have nothing left than to resign. I don't want to read Estonian press, to listen to our radio or TV. The modernized language hurts me. I have to abandon writing in Estonian, and try to write in Võru keel, English and Russian. Certainly my command o these languages is not perfect, but I can without resentment accept editors correcting my texts written in English or Russian. And I cannot accept editors "correcting" my Estonian texts. Thus I feel I have been an Estonian writer for half of a century, but I am no more an Estonian writer.
lundi 4 octobre 2010
lundi 30 août 2010
THE KAPLINSKI SYSTEM selected at: THE BALTIC SEA FORUM FOR DOCUMENTARIES 2010/
THE KAPLINSKI SYSTEM documentary film project was selected for THE BALTIC SEA FORUM FOR DOCUMENTARIES 2010/
RIGA, LATVIA, 7th to 12th September 2010/
Check out their web page here/
RIGA, LATVIA, 7th to 12th September 2010/
Check out their web page here/
An Article by Jaan Kaplinski/ From his blog: http://jaankaplinski.blogspot.com/
Sofi Oksanen and the Stalin Award
The immense success of Sofi Oksanen's novel "Purge" (Puhdistus) astonishes me. But recalling books I read in my childhood I think I understand it to some degree. In the early fifties of the XX century I had not many books to read in Estonian, and after having read nearly all children's books published in the independent Estonia that were accessible to me I began to read Soviet literature, mostly books for grown-ups. Among those translated were a couple of dozen books by laureates of the Stalin award. I remember some of them that were really well written as Peter the First by Aleksei Tolstoy or In the Trenches of Stalingrad. Most of everything else has become something anonymous, a fuzzy whole of half-mythological stories with sadistic Germans and their collaborators as anti-heroes and brave patriotic Partisans as heroes. But nevertheless, these books had a certain appeal, the fitted into some of our deep psychological needs, to our needs for fairy tales, for tales of heroes and villains. Oksanen's book falls into the same category as the Stalinist books of my childhood, only the heroes and anti-heroes have exchanged their role. It's a skillfully written horror story with many corpses. Let it be. My only, but very serious objection to the book is that it pretends to be a realistic story about life in Soviet Estonia in the second half of the XXth century, and seems to have been accepted as such by the public in Europe and America. S. O. who has no direct experience of the time and events she describes has taken parts of our life, sewing them together according to some age-old rules of ideological-mythological literature, and is now selling it in the West. She is selling something that pretends to be our life, but isn't. Our life in the Soviet Union was not a horror story! Of course, there were many horrific episodes, years of terror and counter-terror, but as a whole, we lived a life that was often quite interesting and funny. I cannot approve the idea that my life, the life of my parents, my friends, my colleagues was not a life worth living, that we felt we were prisoners in a large prison camp. The USSR after the death of Stalin was not a prison camp. It was a lousy country, but there were and there are many much more lousy countries in the world. One of my basic convictions is that there is no Devil (probably no God either, but here it's not important). Soviet Union was not a diabolical country. And the lives we lived in the second half of the XXth century in this country were not lived according to some diabolical rules and supervised by the Devil or his henchmen. I don't want anybody to take my life away from me and sell an adulterated version of it to unknowing people abroad. Dixi.
Jaan Kaplinski
Check out Kaplinski's blog at:
http://jaankaplinski.blogspot.com/
The immense success of Sofi Oksanen's novel "Purge" (Puhdistus) astonishes me. But recalling books I read in my childhood I think I understand it to some degree. In the early fifties of the XX century I had not many books to read in Estonian, and after having read nearly all children's books published in the independent Estonia that were accessible to me I began to read Soviet literature, mostly books for grown-ups. Among those translated were a couple of dozen books by laureates of the Stalin award. I remember some of them that were really well written as Peter the First by Aleksei Tolstoy or In the Trenches of Stalingrad. Most of everything else has become something anonymous, a fuzzy whole of half-mythological stories with sadistic Germans and their collaborators as anti-heroes and brave patriotic Partisans as heroes. But nevertheless, these books had a certain appeal, the fitted into some of our deep psychological needs, to our needs for fairy tales, for tales of heroes and villains. Oksanen's book falls into the same category as the Stalinist books of my childhood, only the heroes and anti-heroes have exchanged their role. It's a skillfully written horror story with many corpses. Let it be. My only, but very serious objection to the book is that it pretends to be a realistic story about life in Soviet Estonia in the second half of the XXth century, and seems to have been accepted as such by the public in Europe and America. S. O. who has no direct experience of the time and events she describes has taken parts of our life, sewing them together according to some age-old rules of ideological-mythological literature, and is now selling it in the West. She is selling something that pretends to be our life, but isn't. Our life in the Soviet Union was not a horror story! Of course, there were many horrific episodes, years of terror and counter-terror, but as a whole, we lived a life that was often quite interesting and funny. I cannot approve the idea that my life, the life of my parents, my friends, my colleagues was not a life worth living, that we felt we were prisoners in a large prison camp. The USSR after the death of Stalin was not a prison camp. It was a lousy country, but there were and there are many much more lousy countries in the world. One of my basic convictions is that there is no Devil (probably no God either, but here it's not important). Soviet Union was not a diabolical country. And the lives we lived in the second half of the XXth century in this country were not lived according to some diabolical rules and supervised by the Devil or his henchmen. I don't want anybody to take my life away from me and sell an adulterated version of it to unknowing people abroad. Dixi.
Jaan Kaplinski
Check out Kaplinski's blog at:
http://jaankaplinski.blogspot.com/
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