Бажанов, А. Стихи и поэмы о саамском крае = Verses & poems on the Saami land / Аскольд Бажанов ; English translation by Naomi Caffee ; with an essay by Johanna Domokos. - Berlin : Nordeuropa-Institut der Humboldt-Universitat, 2009.

188 To stand on the family kentish where my father and mother lived. My kentish has become an impenetrable depth. That it can recount to me. After completing four years o f school in the village of Iu r’kino, Bazhanov worked as a herd-boy at a reindeer collective farm in the Ko l’skii district. After losing his father in WW II, he turned to his grandfather, also a reindeer herder, for paternal guidance. The motif of the lost father ties Bazhanov strongly to the w ar - this is another theme that Bazhanov shares w ith many other Russian post war w riters. The figure of the grandfather acts as a bridge to the bygone era of the Skolt Saami reindeer herding tradition. These two reoccurring motifs contribute very much to the strong rooting of Bazhanov’s poetry into a clearly definable, fam iliar past time and space (e.g. the poems on pages 53, 55 , 57 , 73 , 75 , 77 , 81, 83, 91, 131, 157). In 1952, after finishing fifth to seventh grade in the city of Kola, he went to study at the Section «Peoples of the Far North« at the State Pedagogical University »A. I. Gercen«, Leningrad. Before he was able to complete a degree as a teacher of mathematics and physics, he moved back to Pulozero due to his mother’s grave illness. There he worked as an electrician on the railroad. In 1962 he relo cated to the village of Lovozero, where he worked as a tractor opera tor for the collective farm »Tundra«. For the past two decades he has made a home in the village of Revda. Despite the geographic discon tinuities of Bazhanov’s past, his innate meditative preponderance lends balance and harmony to his poetry, and to his life as well. Bazhanov’s textual background hearkens back to a culture that values storytelling, the art of oral expression. He has written poetry since childhood, and his first publication appeared in Pionerskaia pravda. Later his poems were included in different anthologies fea turing the work of Soviet poets and w riters of the North. In 1983 he published his first collection of poems in Russian, entitled Solnce nad tundroi (The Sun on the Tundra), under a Murmansk publishing company. These poems brought him recognition amongst the Saami in Russia. He achieved broader recognition in the w ider Saami community w ith his autobiographical novel, which was first pub