Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani’s Gazelle, Gazela, Gazelle
“Only after I decided that I would not or did not have
to choose a language did I arrive at my writing.”
Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, (English) Foreword
to Gazelle, Gazela, Gazelle, ‘My arrival at writing:
on the (non-)sacrifice of writing’
This carefully chosen and presented collection of multilingual poetry extends generous invitations to the reader.
It offers immersion in ‘the words, worlds and sonorities of the different languages’ at work and at play here, Croatian, English and French; it offers participation in the power of multilingual poetry to challenge linguistic hierarchies, structures, expectations and assumptions; it offers multiple experiences of multilingual poetry’s potential to disrupt, perhaps to disturb, certainly to delight.
Beyond the text, a journey outwards beckons from the printed page to sound readings of selected poems from the collection (alongside some additional poems) – encouraging a departure from the too often silent act of reading to engage physically with the multiple sounds and sensations of the poems’ language(s) (an experience essential to Jasmina’s multilingual, multifaceted work) – and to discover interlinked images, essays, interviews and meditations on the many forms and meanings of the ‘gazelle’ and the #ghazal which gives the collection its title.
This additional content can be accessed through the QR code included at the opening of the the collection and at https://jasminabradovani/pages/gazela. Explore the generosity of material which exceeds and spills over from this concise collection and enter the world in which Gazelle, Gazela, Gazelle comes into being.
Gazelle also offers a different approach to much of the poet’s previous multilingual poetic practice in which multiple languages often weave together inside one poem. In the recent Knitting drum machines for exiled tongues (Tears in the Fence, 2022) multilingual poems are further interwoven with visual-textual fragments and ‘poem-tattoos’ (irresistibly calling to mind Abdelkébir Khatibi’s ‘mémoire tatouée’). There, poems in turn interweave across the collection, moving beyond poetic and linguistic experimentation to complex language interplay. In Gazelle, the reader experiences the multilingual differently: each poem apparently complete unto itself within its language…. and yet, and yet…… each poetic creation and each language calls to the others, exceeding apparent boundaries and borders. Both approaches to engaging with the multilingual and with poetic interplay articulate fullness and loss inherent in these forms of poetry-making, carrying memories, emotions, sensations; both articulate the in-betweenness of identity, of culture, of language(s).
Of poetic creation in three languages, Jasmina writes:
“The three versions of the poem that I have written become translation of something that does not reside at the level of the linguistic; they become representations, reflections of a non-linguistic form of thought, of a series of images that exist ‘before’ language and that only acquire their meaning and linguistic form in the system of language” (‘“Unbound” Lines: Writing in the Space of the Multilingual’, Balkan Poetry Today, February 2018; https://jasminabradovani.com/blog/unbound-lines-writing-in-the-space-of-the-multilingual).
The open, curious, alert reader shares this experience of the journey towards and within multilingual poetry and the experience of how the practice of poetry and – essentially – the poetic voice comes into being(s), takes shape(s) and finds expression(s).
Most readers will not read, speak or understand all three of the languages here. The collection, then, offers further invitation to collective and personal experiences. For me, this takes place back and forth between English and French; the French ‘invitation au voyage’ further carrying resonances of the rhythms and sounds of Baudelaire’s invitation to travel with the poet. The presence and sounds of Croatian intrigue and urge me on to new discoveries.
This is an elegantly crafted collection – both in content and in form – to carry with you. The poems are given multilingual form by a publisher who understands a reader’s delight in the multi-sensory experience of the printed word. It is an elegant treasure to hold, an intellectual pleasure to navigate. Allow yourself to alight on a page and ‘to embrace the familiar and unfamiliar signs on paper through play’ as the poet’s foreword invites us to do.
*The gazelle is an elegant animal, but there was something more; the title that came to my mind has, of course, an irresistible resonance with Moroccan-born, French educated Muriel Barbery’s philosophical French novel L’Élégance du hérisson (2006)/The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2008). I then realised that in Gazelle’s concluding poem, René has a (philosophical) cat, while the novel’s concierge Renée also has her cat… Coincidence? Serendipity? Languages at (inter)play……
Debra Kelly, Centre for Language Acts and Worldmaking www.languageacts.org
13th May 2024, London
Images from the Gazelle book launch, 29 December 2023, Galerija Kranjcar, Zagreb (top to bottom: Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, guitarist Ana Čehaić, author Ksenija Kušec, guest and poet, Branko Čegec)
Related materials
Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, “Na svjetlosti dana, u sjeni sjećanja: slika, akordi, gazela / In the light of day, in the shadow of memories: an image, a guitar, a gazelle”, 31 December 2023.
