Tracto ("Tract") is a tunnel-poem, a poem-stairway, an intimate passageway connecting one darkness with others, the origin of light from whence the poetic word, the very essence of language, is interrogated.
Corona Tallo Raíces ("Crown Stem Roots") represents, through the experience of disappearance--a death in the family, the cutting down of a poplar grove that shaded the river--a radical immersion in the landscape, a harsh geography that joins the everyday traces of life and death.
Born into the upper strata of Milanese society, Antonia Pozzi (1912-1938) was educated at the University of Milan, where she studied with the influential philosopher Antonio Banfi. Pozzi's privileged upbringing allowed her to become current with poets such as Eliot and Rilke in the original, but social and intellectual expectations were also a constraint, and she struggled to grow in confidence as an artist. In 1933, her family prohibited her from continuing to see Antonio Maria Cervi, her high school teacher of Latin and Greek fourteen years her senior, ending a six-year relationship. In December 1938, her health eroded by illness, and depressed by the pervasive effects of the increasingly oppressive Fascist regime, Pozzi ended her life by taking an overdose of barbiturates and putting herself to sleep in the snow beside the abbey of Chiaravalle in the newly industrialized outskirts of Milan, where she had been volunteering to help impoverished children. In her last letter to her parents, she explained that "part of my mortal desperation is due to the cruel oppression inflicted upon our faded youth." She was only twenty-six, unpublished, and virtually unknown, but the notebooks she left behind were filled with terse poems of astonishing power. Her work was soon published with an admiring preface by Eugenio Montale, but the sensuality of many poems was erased in her father's editing; the originals have since been recuperated. Pozzi is now placed by many alongside the greatest poets of her day. Her voice is solitary and unmistakable, offering an exceptionally open and intense dramatization of the crisis of the private, pacifist sphere in a time of rising ideological rigidity and aggression. Pozzi's poems constitute a continuous yet tenuous barrier of hope, a "gentle offering" to the reader, witness to the poet's "longing for light things."
Cuba | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
April, 2012The featured texts belong to assignments [tareas], an innovative long poem that has as its core the experiences of otherness, both in Cuba and the United States. assignments ponders the impossibilities of a stable identity, its infeasibility in space and time. On a formal level, assignments constitutes an homage to the number 7. It is made up of 21 sections, divided into 7 stanzas, with 7 verses each.
Just as Virgil's Aeneid represented Rome's answer to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, so was Gavin Douglas' Scots translation of the Aeneid in 1513 a rival's response to the English version published twenty-three years earlier by William Caxton. The first complete rendition of a classical text to be produced in the Scots vernacular, Douglas' Eneados represented, along with works by William Dunbar and Robert Henryson, the flowering of the golden age of the Northern Renaissance in Scotland. Douglas not only translated the epic poem with a careful attention to scholarly and artistic accuracy, but also added significant prologues to each of Virgil's twelve books. In the two prologue excerpts featured here (from Book One and Book Seven), Douglas first defends his use of the Scots language while blasting Caxton's earlier work, then settles down for a wintry physical description of his translation process. These prologues thus present a rare and fascinating insight into the growth of a poet and his language, literature, and culture, while also providing a thrilling opportunity to translate a translator.
The unspoken cliché that writing should reflect the world in accurate language unveils itself provocatively in Mexican poet Jorge Fernández Granados's poem "Principle of Uncertainty." Its speaker posits that to perceive something like truth in "unreliable hiding-in-plain-sight / reality" you have to witness, and do your best, because "(the closest) proximity or (furthest) / distance are the error / from which we love or judge."
Another unspoken cliché that the collection Principio de incertidumbre (2007) voices aloud is that poetry can speak the world at all, since writing ultimately is a translation of experience. Principio, Granados's seventh book, whose title I translate literally as "Principle of Uncertainty," wishes to suggest that this is not a treatise on Heisenberg, but rather an experiment with how his principle might work in poetry. Thus, we read the "hurried notes" of an observer faced with the uncertainty of knowing anything precisely. And knowingly, Fernández Granados's free verse of mostly unpunctuated lines that wobble between phrases and across line breaks expresses uncertainty, but in ways that lead the reader into surprising detours and notable arrivals.
In a seeming contradiction to the preceding, a matter of punctuation appears in the ars poetica, "F(l)echas en la noche / D(a)rt(e)s in the Night," which underscores the poet's denial that he can write at all, even while he writes. A parenthesis as lexical item opens a window for the use of the same variable in English translation: F(l)echas - fechas" almost mirror each other, as do "Da(r)tes - dates," with the minor enormity of the lazy "e" in "dartes," hence "da(r)t(e)s," a manuever almost compensating for the size differential between "flechas" ("arrows") and "darts." I have calculated that adding an additional "( )" to bound the "e" could be an intelligible, even an aesthetic choice, though I recognize it is a kind of error.
The real issue comes into focus in the variously stated refrain "no podría escribir" / "I could not write," the resulting clause of a statement contrary to fact: "As if there were in words something able /to translate it." The world, that is, and I couldn't, says the poet. But the implied meaning of such "if" statements is present tense, in other words, the poet "can't write," he can only "transcribe / excavate" what the lyric says in the end: "in the difficult words that are nothing / surely but inseparable shadows hard / ruins teeth or darts in the night / that project things / the singular things of this world..." all clarified in the light of another morning. Even though the meaning of the refrain changes in the course of the poem, I (am bound to) render it as written grammatically, and all the while know that its meaning is variable, uncertain, and significant. Though I have done my best, I am not able to translate it, I can only approximate it.
(W. Nick Hill)
Valerio Magrelli was born in Rome in 1957. He is the author of four poetry collections and has received the Mondello Prize, the Viareggio Prize for Poetry, and the Montale Prize. He is a professor of French literature at the University of Cassino. His poems have been widely translated around the globe.
Pakistan | Poems | Punjabi | Urdu
April, 2012Munir Niazi writes wistfully of the past, but he is also a poet of our times. He cherishes both the old and the new, and creates rhythms that evoke the feeling of being on the brink of a possible happy future that remains elusive. In addition to his specific family circumstances, Niazi's migration from East Punjab to West Punjab was a critical event of his early years and affected his life and work deeply. His imaginative world is a living lyric of warm relationships and moments of peace all too often shattered by conflict, violence, or indifference.
Marco Aurelio Ángel-Lara (Mexico, 1970) is a Mexican writer whose book of aphorisms, El atril de la luciérnaga, was published in 2011 by Arlequín. Marco has been anthologized in collections of Hispanoamerican poetry and awarded with poetry, essay, and short script international prizes. He obtained a Ph.D. in Critical and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He has taught philosophy and Latin American literature for several years at different universities in Mexico and Europe.
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
April, 2012As part of a collection of short stories in which each protagonist is presented with the opportunity to evaluate her life by what she has or what she perceives to be missing, "Ursula," occupying the imprecise realm between short story and novella, is a quiet story of the tension in a marriage threatened by personal goals and serves as a strong reminder that the seemingly small decisions are what come to define who we are and have the power to change the course of our lives.
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).