Poetry | Russian | United States
December, 2009Marina Temkina was born in Leningrad in 1948 and emigrated to New York City in 1978. She has published four books of poetry in Russian: Chasti chast' (A Part of A Part), V obratnom napravlenii (In Reverse), Kalancha (Watchtower), and Canto Immigranto. Temkina's first book in English, WHAT DO YOU WANT? (just out from Ugly Duckling Presse) consists of several texts made for installations or as part of handmade artist's books, and two poems translated from Russian (by Vladislav Davidzon and Alexander Stessin) accompanied by installation images and original drawings by the author. Many of her other poems have been translated by Alfred Corn. She is a past recipient of an NEA grant and a Charles H. Revson Fellowship on the Future of New York at Columbia University.
Alexei Khvostenko (1940-2004) deserves a larger, "literary" audience, but his "outsider" status is unlikely to be reversed posthumously and outside the Russian context, requiring an appreciation of him as a multi-artist (poet, singer/bard, collagist/sculptor) and an awareness of his immense popularity as a persona non grata during the exhilarating cultural moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Soviet status quo was still in place but the liberating/decadent influences of the West had flooded in. Suspector (literally: "he who suspects") is the title poem of Khvostenko's first samizdat book (1965) at the height of the Khruschev "thaw” which was to be shortly followed by the suppression and stagnation of the Brezhnev years. These words were revolutionary, eliciting the disproportionate response from the authorities that made the Russian outsider bards Pop Icons. Khvost (his nickname means "Tail”) lived in Paris after his 1977 expulsion from the USSR.
Additional translations of Bei Dao's poetry by Clayton Eshleman and Lucas Klein may be found in Bookslut (September 2009); Jacket (Issue 38); and Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics blog (October 2, 2009). A set also will appear in a forthcoming issue of New American Writing.
All of the poems have been translated and published with the permission of the author.
Earlier translations of the four poems presented here appear in Landscape Over Zero (New Directions, 1996; translated by David Hinton and Yanbing Chen).
Novel (excerpts) | Spanish | Venezuela
December, 2009Described by Álvaro Mutis as “Latin America’s best-kept secret,” Juan Sánchez Peláez was born in Altagracia de Orituco in 1922. He attended university in Chile in the 1940s, where he was associated with the radical surrealist group Mandrágora. He lived in Paris in the 1950s, and in 1969, he was a Fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, after which he lived in New York City for two years. He worked as a teacher, journalist, and diplomat in Venezuela, Colombia, France, and the United States. Between 1951 and 1989, he released seven collections of poetry. In 1975, he was awarded Venezuela’s highest literary prize, the Premio Nacional de Literatura. Juan Sánchez Peláez died in Caracas in November of 2003. A definitive edition of his work, Obra poética (Lumen, 2004), was published in Barcelona, Spain after his death.
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
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