Poetry | Russia | Russian | United States
October, 2020“David and Orpheus” juxtaposes the archetypal musicians of Abrahamic and Graeco-Roman religion. David and Orpheus are paralleled throughout: via their instruments, harp and lyre; their certainty–David’s in his god, Orpheus’s in his art (their uncertainty is vice versa); their woodland location; and their situation just after a crossroads in their stories–David’s anointing as King of Israel, and Orpheus’s return from Hades. The paralleling also happens on a formal level: the pair occupy separate stanzas, but are united through rhyme, which operates across–not within–stanzas (I have replicated the rhyme scheme in my translation). But whereas David sees a future, embodied in the tradition-bearing “tree” of his people, Orpheus, having lost Eurydice, has a fatalistic disregard for life. This is reflected in the imagery of the second part: whereas David’s extends to the twentieth century through Christian imagery, Orpheus’s remains resolutely classical.
From a wasp trapped in a clock, “The Wasp in the Hour” spins an allegory of our implication in time. Kutik admits this is “a difficult poem”–its flow of images can be baffling. In part 1, the clock becomes a cuckoo, then a seed, while the wasp becomes a zero (a non-existent numeral on a clock); the Roman numerals on the clock face turn it into the shield which Horace famously dropped at Philippi, when the triumvirs defeated the Republican army; then the clock hands – which are also ancient arrows–turn into a sewing needle, moving time forward. In part 2, this needle is thread, which becomes Zeus’s golden rain, which impregnated Danaë; the clock becomes a spinning wheel, with the wasp a spindle inside it, and Zeus its thread; Zeus attempts to drown the clock, which is his father Cronus (Time), to avenge his siblings, eaten by Cronus; finally, the clock turns into a ball of yarn, and its hands are knitting needles. In part 3, this yarn is stripy socks worn by the wasp; the clock becomes a football, then semen, then a cup; the wasp is a zero again, and therefore “nil-time,” or our present, which is represented by open mouths (zeros); finally, the clock turns into a round table, then the firmament, then a person–and the wasp drowns in the cup/Time. Kutik’s ultimate message is that “living here means wasting Time,” and that “we must accept ourselves as numerals (‘golden tsars’) of a much bigger 'round table’ than a clock face, that is the sky itself.”
In “Cats’ July” Kutik looks into the dreams of cats and sees their great and terrible history before their decline into creatures of luxury. The domestication of the cat in Ancient Egypt is equated with first the seduction of Cleopatra and then the assassination of Julius Caesar. The final stanza is a feline Actium–the deciding battle of the Roman Civil Wars–with cats cast both as the fighting ships and as Mark Antony.
“In Memory of Anton and Allen” is Kutik’s obituary for his Persian blue cat Anton and his friend Allen Ginsberg.
- Georgina Barker
Pierre Reverdy (1889–1960) was a widely influential French poet and critic. Born in Narbonne, he moved to Paris in 1910 and began his life as a working poet, publishing his first book, Poems en prose, five years later. His subsequent works included La Lucarne ovale (1916), Les Jockeys camoufles (1918), La Guitare endormie (1919), Coeur de chene (1921), and Cravates de chanvre (1922), but it was his 1924 collection Les Epaves du ciel that brought him greater recognition. During this time he was a key figure in the avant-garde circles that developed Surrealism, Cubism, and Dada, and that included writers and artists such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Georges Braque. With Jacob, Apollinaire, and Vicente Huidobro, he founded the journal Nord-Sud in 1917.
Over time his writing became more mystical, and in 1926 he converted to Catholicism and retreated with his wife to a house near a Benedictine monastery in Solesmes. He lived there for the remainder of this life, writing poetry and criticism, and participating in the French resistance during the German occupation.
The poem featured here, “Locked Away,” is taken from the collection Le Chant des morts [The Song of the Dead], a sequence of broody philosophical poems which Reverdy wrote during some of the worst moments of World War II, and which were accompanied by original illustrations by Picasso when originally published in 1948.
- André Naffis-Sahely
Arabic | Iraq | Poetry | United States
October, 2020Faleeha Hassan and I have news we find exciting: she has signed a contract with Amazon Crossing to write a memoir for them entitled The War & Me, and she has written, and I have already translated, its first three chapters. The doorways to this opportunity for us were her novella Butterfly Voice, which I have translated but which we have not published, and my translation of I’m in Seattle, Where Are You?, the new memoir by Iraqi author Mortada Gzar, forthcoming from Amazon Crossing in April 2021.
- William Hutchins
Nali’s poetic oeuvre, or diwan, is one of the most significant works of Kurdish literature but has not previously been translated into English. In terms of matter and manner, his adaptations of the Classical Perso-Arabic ghazal emphasize sustained correspondence of sounds, usually as end-rhymes, in lines of consistent, equal length; each ghazal addresses a lover of unspecified, indeterminate gender, and closes with a parting signature by Nali’s poetic persona, signaling the poem’s end and reflecting upon the nature of the poem and its addressee. More than mere couplets, his paired lines constitute discrete poetic expressions in their own right, yet remain interdependent in relation to the ghazal as a whole. Every couplet sets up images in tension, emotions straining toward an articulation that seems always to elude reductive treatment. Our translations approximate the Kurdish rhymes with English assonance and half-rhymes, which, in English-language poetry, achieve a less heavy-handed, more palatable effect. We also endeavored to balance the feminine and masculine traits of the addressee, never explicitly indicating whether the Beloved is male or female, to preserve Nali’s deliberate ambiguity on this point. In keeping with this indeterminacy, the ghazal invites supple interpretations, capable of adapting the poem’s sequence of surprising imagery to apply to a human lover, a deity, a homeland.
- Haidar Khezri and Tyler Fisher
Kazakhstan | Poetry | Russian
July, 2020Oral Arukenova is one of a dozen talented Kazakhstani writers whose work I’ve had the pleasure to get to know over the last few years. I became acquainted with Arukenova and her writing when a colleague included her work in our proposal for an anthology of contemporary Kazakhstani women’s prose, recently the fortunate winner of a RusTrans grant for Russian-language fiction in translation. It was surprisingly easy to find enough good short fiction to fill the anthology–and once we had enough, I kept discovering more, all of it wonderful and diverse. I knew Oral as a Kazakh-language fiction writer who crafts stories that take an ironic approach to Kazakh cultural traditions and mores. Thanks to these two poems, I now also know her as a Russian-language poet. Her quarantine poems struck me for their raw, honest examination of the emotional states stemming from the ongoing virus-related quarantine in Kazakhstan’s cities. There, police have zealously enforced restrictions governing who can leave their house, making every visit to the park or run on the riverbank a stealthy act of sometimes desperate self-expression. The first, shorter poem strikes a quiet tone, full of a simple longing for air, beauty, and room, where the narrator wishes to speak and breathe freely, на родном–a phrase I’ve translated for the rhythm as “in my way,” but which usually means “in my native language,” hinting at the tension of multilingualism. The second poem is more of a sweeping survey of emotional types in the city, where people jostle each other in line at the store, plug away at their remote work in isolation, and trade tips for how to navigate an online portal to get their 42,500-tenge government assistance deposit (about $100). Here, paranoia, financial desperation, and even the boredom of a lonely translator (!) can be hidden away in quarantine as easily as a bruise under a face mask, and a snappy refrain can almost help us hold it all together.
- Shelley Fairweather-Vega
As the U.S. once again confronts its inability to fulfill its legal and moral obligations to all its citizens, it is perhaps a good moment to revisit Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem “Poet of the Ashes,” which Italy’s greatest 20th-century poet produced in the wake of his first visit to New York City in 1966, after being invited to appear at the New York Film Festival. He summed up his impressions of the city in an interview with the journalist Oriana Fallaci: “New York is not an evasion: it’s an engagement, a war. It gives you the urge to do, to confront, to change: it pleases you like the things that please you when you’re twenty.” Pasolini would later refine his thoughts in an essay published not long after his stay: “In America, even in my very brief stay, I spent many hours in a covert climate of struggle, of revolutionary urgency, of hope, reminiscent of the Europe of 1944 and 1945. In Europe everything is finished: in America you have the impression that everything is about to begin. I don’t mean to say there is no civil war in America, perhaps not even anything like it, nor do I mean to predict it: one lives there, however, as if on the eve of great things.” Excited by the Civil Rights Movement, Pasolini was pleased to discover that unlike in his native Italy, a desire for change still existed among the people. Pasolini’s entire life, after all, had been shaped by tyranny. He was born in 1922, when Mussolini's Fascists stormed to power, bringing three years of post-war revolutionary fervor to a complete halt and beginning a twenty-year-long campaign of tyrannical repression that drove the country’s poor and working classes into greater misery than ever before. “Poet of the Ashes” unpacks what Alberto Moravia meant when he called Pasolini a sentimental communist: in this poem we find the entirety of Pasolini’s life analyzed in what the poet himself called a “bio-bibliographical poem,” which discusses his childhood, his tortured relationship with his father, the death of his younger brother Guidalberto (1925-1945) during the Resistance in WWII, the roots of his political commitment, the failure of the post-WWII era to create real social change, his literary beginnings, and finally, his relocation to Rome, where he initially lived in the city’s poverty-stricken neighborhoods. The poem also discusses the trials and lawsuits that dogged Pasolini in his more successful years, as well as his artistic output. This complex narrative–or series of narratives–is interspersed with sharp commentary on his host country, the U.S., and his motherland, Italy. Readers will encounter references to Greek mythological heroes, the medieval Italian poet Tasso, the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the Soviet dissidents Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, and even John Lennon.
- André Naffis-Sahely
The translations featured here are the result of a collaboration between a poet (Don Boes) and a translator (Gaby Bedetti). Our project has been to translate a few poems from each of Meschonnic’s nineteen collections for a Selected Poems of Henri Meschonnic. We chose this sampling from that manuscript. These poems represent four of his nineteen collections: Puisque je suis ce buisson (Since I Am This Bush, Arfuyen, 2001); Tout entier visage (Whole Face, Arfuyen, 2005); De monde en monde (From World to World, Arfuyen, 2009); and L’obscur travaille (The Dark Works, Arfuyen, 2012). These four poems only suggest the richness, range, and intensity of his poetic output.
Until recently, only six poems from Voyageurs de la voix (Voyagers of the Voice) were translated in “Jewish Poets of France,” Shirim: A Jewish Poetry Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, Oct. 1988. Our English translations seem to be the first since then of Meschonnic’s diaphanous, stripped-down voice. As with the poems of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques Réda, the rhythm of Meschonnic’s poems exposes the subject. He follows Montaigne’s practice: “I do not describe being. I describe the passage . . . from minute to minute.” Untitled and unpunctuated, his poems are kin to W. S. Merwin’s “climbing out of myself/all my life.” Meschonnic writes, “I am not in what/I seek but in what escapes me.”
Our challenge as translators was to capture the continuous movement of the poems, a movement that suggests the possibility of passing energeia from subject to subject, of inventing within language new ways of being with oneself, others, and the world. Replicating this movement in English texts was difficult. We could hear and feel the rhythm of the French. We thought Meschonnic’s minimal vocabulary and relative lack of poetic features, such as images and metaphors (his poems are nearly adjective-free), suggested a somewhat clear path from French to English. We soon realized, however, that his rhythms and condensed language were in the service of mapping voices, not poems. His use of enjambment and only the most colloquial verbs and nouns made us take a hard look at individual words (no matter their simplicity), and therefore the world. In translating these poems, like Meschonnic, that accomplished innovator, we became “patients of life.”
- Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes
Eritrea | Italian | Italy | Poetry
May, 2020Ribka Sibhatu, one of Eritrea’s most indefatigable writer-activists, was born in Asmara in 1962, the year Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia unilaterally annexed the former Italian colony of Eritrea, triggering a liberation war that would last for the next three decades. In 1979, at the age of seventeen, Sibhatu was sentenced to a year in prison for criticizing the government, on false charges trumped up by an Ethiopian politician whom Sibhatu had refused to marry. Adopting a false identity, Sibhatu fled to Addis Ababa upon her release from prison and finished her education in the Ethiopian capital, where she later married a Frenchman, relocating to the latter’s native country in the mid-1980s. Once that marriage ended, Sibhatu moved again, this time to Rome, where she published her first collection of poems, Aulò! Canto Poesia dall’Eritrea (Sinnos, 1993), a volume of confessional lyrics written in both Tigrinya and Italian. Despite falling into various different genres—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—Sibhatu’s work essentially represents a reconstruction of Eritrea’s cultural heritage in exile. The poems featured here are drawn from a collection-in-progress.
- André Naffis-Sahely
I’ve “discovered” most of the contemporary francophone poets I’ve translated through reading their poems in anthologies, and feeling that I absolutely had to bring their work to the attention of an English-speaking audience . . . that their words were just too important to be heard only by French speakers. I felt this way when I was introduced to the Djiboutian writer Abdourahman A. Waberi while reading a wonderful anthology of poets from French-speaking Africa and the Arab world, edited by Patrick Williamson. But in the case of the author featured here, I was literally introduced to Louis-Philippe Dalembert by way of Waberi! It’s really not such a big world at all, as the pandemic reminds us.
Dalembert was born in 1962 in Port-au-Prince. He spent his early years living in a Haiti still under the totalitarian control of François Duvalier (“Papa Doc”), and was raised by his mother’s female relatives, including his no-nonsense, Bible-thumping maternal grandmother. His mother had to travel during the week to teach in the countryside, and his father, a school principal, died shortly after Dalembert’s birth. Dalembert’s childhood—especially his religious upbringing—infuses much of his writing: Old Testament references abound. One can also see in his work his literary influences, which include René Char, Paul Éluard, Nâzim Hikmet, and Pablo Neruda.
In 1986, Dalembert left for France, after studying literature and journalism and working as a journalist in Haiti, and he later completed his doctoral studies in comparative literature at the Sorbonne. A self-proclaimed nomad, he speaks seven different languages, and has lived and taught in such varied cities as Brazzaville, Kinshasa, Nancy, Berlin, Munich, Bern, Rome, Florence, and Jerusalem, with extended stays in South America and Africa. In addition, he served as a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he taught Caribbean literature, French film, and creative writing, as well as a Visiting Professor at Scripps College.
To date, Dalembert has authored six poetry collections, ten novels, three short story collections, and two essay collections. He is no stranger to the international stage, as his work has been translated into many different languages, including Danish, German, Portuguese, Romanian, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Edwidge Danticat, in her foreword to Dalembert’s first novel to be published in English, The Other Side of the Sea (2014), expressed surprise that it had taken so long for Dalembert’s prose to be translated into English. I’m surprised it has taken so long for Dalembert’s poems to be translated into English, and delighted to be the one to do so!
- Nancy Naomi Carlson
Iulia Militaru's poems combine different types of speech, from medical and philosophy textbooks to “newspeak,” witness accounts, police reports, obituaries, and other written forms. Militaru turns on their head concepts about what we know and accept as poetry, truth, historical fact, philosophy, and language. By juxtaposing a variety of speech fragments, Militaru creates a collage that forces us to look at the world with new eyes. The result is a text that draws surprising conclusions, points out hypocrisies and absurd realities, and laughs in the face of norms. The reader is left wondering what happened—but at the same time dazzled and wanting more.
- Claudia Serea
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).