Austria | German | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2011Die Alaskastrasse is a road novel, a tale of men against men and men against women. It details conflict both exterior and interior; it takes an unsparing look at insecurity, lethargy, and boredom. It is suffused, in the words of one critic, with "an erotic pessimism." The unnamed narrator in an unnamed city quits his job as web manager at an Internet dating firm and takes a spur of the moment trip with his girlfriend to an unnamed island that ends badly, setting in motion a quest (the tip-off is the book's epigraph, from Walker Percy's Lancelot) for some sort of inchoate fulfillment. Die Alaskastrasse is a dark, funny, compelling, self-lacerating passion play, shot through with a coruscating moral intelligence.
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Known for his famous definition of Acmeism as "nostalgia (or thirst) for world culture," in the later poem of 1933 Osip Mandelstam wrote: "Do not tempt foreign tongues--attempt forgetting them, alas,/Because your teeth will never bite the glass," which seems to deny everything he believed.
Having gone through all the circles of earthly hell and purgatory and anticipating his own arrest and perhaps death, Mandelstam, nevertheless, claims that heaven is a "lifetime home" creating thus his own pattern of "Paradiso terrestre."
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The "Slate Ode" is one of the most esoteric poems in Mandelstam's creativity. The poet is known for his exceptional manner of hiding allusions and destroying bridges-associations.
Omry Ronen in his profound book An Approach to Mandelstam made diachronic and synchronic analyses of "The Slate Ode" and "January 1, 1924."(1) While restoring the bridges in these of Mandelstam's poems written in 1923, Ronen hit the right target and even created a kind of a history of the Russian verse from Lomonosov and Derzhavin to the twentieth century on the one hand, and connected Mandelstam's prose, essays, and poetry on the other, by thus achieving a striking and sometimes a superfluous effect as, for example, in his citations of the use of blazhen and blagosloven (blessed) in Russian poetry: since Derzhavin and especially Pushkin there was hardly a Russian poet who did not use these words.
Award-winning poet Lan Lan is one of China's most well-loved female writers today. Her lyrical writings contain a sensual yet profound simplicity that often explores a specific emotion both in its purity and complexity. Considered one of the few contemporary women poets who've invented a new genre of romance poetry, she transcends the sentimental via a poetic imagination of dialogues between emotions, energies, and specific moments. Also known for their intriguing observations of nature and social realities, each of Lan Lan's poems are crafted in a specific architecture--both linguistic and temporal--that either dramatizes or challenges the contextual significance of the work. In addition to her poetry, Lan Lan's bestselling work includes children's literature and lyrical prose. Here we present a sampling of five poems--"Inside Eternity...," "Vérité," "Wind," "Wild Sunflowers," and "Untitled"--from Selected Works of Lan Lan, published in honor of her literary prize, the Poetry & People Award in 2009.
Danish | Denmark | Poetry (excerpts)
March, 2011Thomas Boberg is probably the least insular of contemporary Danish poets. A life spent travelling and residing throughout--especially--South America has earned him comparisons to César Vallejo and Nicanor Parra, as well as the translation into Spanish of his 1993 collection Vandbærere, which appeared in Peru as Portadoras de agua the following year. This in addition to several acclaimed works of travel writing has cemented Boberg's reputation as a kind of travelling man of Danish letters, hurling into the duck pond of his home country artistic impressions of a dizzying variety.
The book-length poem Hesteæderne (The Horse Eaters), in which the first of these poems appears, is a surreal and allegorical near-indictment of contemporary Danish society, peppered with references to T.S. Eliot, Karen Blixen, and Søren Kierkegaard, but served according to the strange, other-worldly recipe of Boberg's genius. The society he portrays--which is and is not contemporary Denmark--is a post-apocalyptic dystopia of rampant corruption, violence and moral degradation from which no one, it seems, is spared. "I write...because I won't put up with it," Boberg writes elsewhere, and The Horse Eaters is really a sustained, artistic manifestation of that impulse.
Although there is an evident affinity between Roald Mandelstam and Silver Age poets such as Blok, Gumilev, and Osip Mandelstam (to whom he bore no relation), his poetry differs from theirs in its distinctive syncretic imagery, vision, and intonation. Moreover, he is an existential poet and, as such, continues the highest traditions of the Russian poetry from Derzhavin and Tiutchev to Gumilev and Osip Mandelstam.
Kirill Medvedev, in a review of the third posthumously published book of Mandelstam's work, compared his poetry to the French les poètes maudits. But Mandelstam's lack of agonism, decadence, and narcissism resist that designation. It is notable that his closest friends were underground Petersburg artists of the so-called Arefiev circle, rather than literati.
Mandelstam's work was rediscovered by Mikhail Shemiakin, who published his poetry in the almanac Apollon-77, and K. Kuz'minskii, who published selected works in the anthology U Goluboi Laguny (At the Blue Lagoon). Kuz'minskii came to a contradictory conclusion: on the one hand, he regarded Mandelstam as peerless, but on the other hand, he claimed that the poet was a "typical representative of constructive eclecticism."
Grigori Dashevsky was born in Russia in 1964. He has published four books of poetry and a number of critical articles and translations from English and French. He was short-listed for the Andrei Bely prize. He is considered by many to be the youngest "classic" in Russian poetry. Appropriately, his poetry often utilizes rhythms found in Ancient Greek and Roman poetry. As the poet Elena Fanaylova writes, "Dashevsky's poetry approaches something biologically real, something that is mainly located outside of literature's administration. It approaches an impact. An experience. It recreates its power, evoking gratitude from those who still haven't lost the skill of poetic reading."
Leonid Schwab, a Russian-language poet, was born in Bobruysk, Belarus in 1961. Since 1990, he has lived in Israel. Schwab's poems have been published in a number of prominent Russian-language literary journals, both in print and online. In 2004, Leonid Schwab was included in the shortlist of the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize. In 2005, he published a book of poems called Poverit' v botaniku (To Believe In Botany). In 2008, together with Fedor Svarovskiy and Arseniy Rovinskiy, Leonid Schwab published a compilation of poems under the title Vse Srazu (All At Once). The book was very well received by literary critics and regarded as a manifestation of a new poetic trend, the "New Epic," which the authors define as "narrative texts with metaphysical content." As one critic wrote of Schwab's poetry, "his poems move in the rhythm of Pushkin's fragments. However, the plot doesn't form, instead thickening as a small cloud, changing as the air changes after the military curfew has been announced." Schwab's poetry does not yield to the habitual tricks of experienced readers. His distinct, deliberately impersonal style introduces the reader to fascinating and unfamiliar contexts, where all conventions of language and art appear fractured and yet not altogether abandoned.
Semyon Khanin, a Russian-language poet, was born in Riga, Latvia in 1970. His original works have been published in Latvia, Russia, Czech Republic, Germany, and Ukraine. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Just Now (2003) and Missed Details (2008). His poetry has been translated into Latvian, English, Czech, German, Italian, Swedish, Estonian, and Ukranian. He is a participant in the literary project "Orbita" (www.orbita.lv), and editor of the almanac with the same name. As the poet Yuliya Idlis writes, in Khanin's poetry "we see the process of an endless stratification of the lyric subject, the divison and the fragmentation of the "I" into tiny and often not quite anthropomorphic particles. At the same time, there's a constant search for wholeness, unending pursuit of the proofs of the subject's existence, a torturous struggle for self-identification."
Oleg Yuriev, a writer of poetry, prose, and drama, was born in Leningrad in 1959 and has been living in Frankfurt, Germany since 1991. During the Soviet era, he participated in Leningrad's unofficial cultural life (the "Kamera Khranenia" group). Since the late 1980s, his original works have been published and staged in Russia. Yuriev's plays and prose have been translated into English, German, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, and French, and performed in Russia, Germany, France, Switzerland, Poland, Czech Republic, Belarus, and Ukraine. Yuriev has had multiple publications in Russian, Russian diaspora, and German magazines. His poems have been translated into English, German, Italian, and French.
Publications include Two Short Plays (1990); the poetry collections Stikhi v Nebesnom Nabore (Verses in Heavenly Font, 1989), Izbrannye stikhi i khory (Collected Poems and Quires, 2004), and Frankfurtskii vystrel vechernii (The Frankfurt Evening Shot, 2007); the prose collections Progulki pri poloj lune (Walks Under the Hollow Moon, 1993), Frankfurtskii byk (The Frankfurt Bull, 1996); and the novels Poluostrov Zhydiatin (Zhydiatin Peninsula, 2000) and Novyi Golem, ili Vojna starikov i detej (New Golem, or the War Between Old Men and Children, 2004). He has seven books of prose in German translation, the last four published by Suhrkamp.
The signature tension in his poems is often derived from putting parts of the natural world--flora, fauna, changes of season, meteorological conditions--into positions of conflict, causing the texts to resemble a battlefield. This tension is mirrored by the intricate phonetic combat within the texts. The density and the dizzying succession of alliterations and consonances ultimately confer to Yuriev's poems a lightness that the translations featured here attempt to preserve.
In October 1947, Richard Strauss went to London, where Sir Thomas Beecham had organized a festival of his music. The British, so soon after World War II, were still suspicious of this German who had remained silent about the Nazis while surviving in the Third Reich. A young reporter asked the 83-year-old composer about his plans for the future. "Oh," said Strauss, "to die."
In this end-of-life state of mind, Strauss began work on his last work, the Four Last Songs (Vier letzte Lieder). He set the song cycle, which premiered only after his death, to verses written by two poets at a similar twilight stage of their respective lives, Hermann Hesse and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. Strauss's inspiration began with his discovery of Eichendorff's poem, Im Abendrot (At Sunset). Perhaps it was because Strauss and his wife had lived through a grim period of history over their fifty-four years of marriage that the composer was moved by the Eichendorff verse, which describes an old couple who've survived a life's journey through sorrow and joy. At around the same time, Strauss received a copy of the complete poems of Hermann Hesse, and Four Last Songs includes three of them: Frühling (Spring), September, and Beim Schlafengehen (When I Go to Sleep).
Strauss composed the Four Last Songs with Kirsten Flagstad in mind, and she sang the first performance on May 22, 1950, in the Royal Festival Hall, London, with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Paul Valéry was born 1871. Raised in Montpellier, he studied law there, then moved to Paris and began writing. He quickly became famous as a disciple of Stéphane Mallarmé. At the age of twenty-one, he experienced what he called an existential crisis, and six years later, he ceased writing for about twenty years, a period known as his "great silence." When he returned to writing, he produced La Jeune Parque and le Cimitière marin, two long poems considered central to French modernism. He also wrote essays and worked on philosophy of mind. Throughout his life, even during his silence, he conducted thought experiments in his Cahiers (Notebooks), using drawing and writing as research into consciousness. They are considered by some to be his greatest work. In 1925, he was elected to the Académie française, and in the late 1930s, he was appointed the first Chair of Poetics at the Collège de France. Though it cost him some of his professional distinctions, he refused to collaborate with the Vichy regime and the Nazis and continued to write and publish during the war, until his death in 1945. His unique position in France can be seen in the fact that he was never attacked by the surrealists.
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.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).