France | French | Italy | Poetry (excerpt)
January, 2020Monstres tièdes, Benoît Gréan's second volume of poems, was published in 2003 and has since been translated into Italian, Greek, and German. Behind the book's "splendidly oxymoronic" title, observes poet Valerio Magrelli in his introduction to the Italian translation, lurks "a direct heir of Lautréamont"; an heir sired on a matrix of characteristically French rigor and concision of form, in a book of 60--four groups of 15--very short, unpunctuated poems.
The cultural matrix for these four sequences is palpably Mediterranean, the two millennia of tension between pagan and Christian moralities, with their resultant space between "imperious desire" and its "cleavers," the "slight distance" between "desire and horror": the futile desires of the "tail-chasing" subject, of youthful beauty and the aging body's "well assigned wrongs."
In the long view the poet's long residency in Rome affords, the desiring subject "mammals on," in "high time to come late." The vignettes range between recognizably current urban realities and phantasmagoria under the "blue-green sun," told in the light of a "radiant doubt" that seeks to root out the vain fictions "chatty cadavers" tell well into the Beyond.
Just as this gallery of miniature grotesques ends with an emblematic "drunken widow," the dense verses themselves often ring changes on French words and phrases that survive in a single form. Thus, from the book's first poem, "à perte de": "à perte de vue" means as far as the eye can see; Gréan's final phrase, "à perte de mémoire" extends the phrase to mean as far as memory spans--or, simply, amnesia. "Peaux amères" is the title of the first group of poems, and the poet's method is also to scratch at, flay, stock expressions: to "strip the dead/ to dwell in words."
- David Jacobson
Mexico | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
January, 2020Adiós, Casilda! forms Part II of the Mexican poet Ivan Palacios Ocaña's Cosas inútiles y otras poemas ("Useless things and other poems"), published in 2018 as part of the reward for the author's having won the first UNAM Premio de Poesía Joven. Adiós, Casilda! deals with the aftermath of the poet's loss of his pet cat, the eponymous Casilda.
The poems make no attempt to conceal their family lineage: they are nieces and nephews of Frank O’Hara, Erik Satie, David Lynch, and haiku anthologies. They remind us that the pain of loss is tempered by the non-uniqueness of the missing, which is to say: none of us moves through a vacuum, and in returning to the poems and songs that formed those lost to us, we may find them again.
- Noah Mazer
100 Refutations | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
June, 2018According to Abraham Arias-Larreta in Literaturas Aborigenes de America (1976), “‘Chilam’ was the title given to prophets of the priestly caste of the Mayas. ‘Balam,’ which literally means ‘jaguar,’ was the name of the famous, and last, prophet before the European conquest. He was, precisely, the one to have foretold of the arrival of the invaders who would establish a new religion. When the sacred books of the Mayas from Yucatán were partially reproduced using the Maya language and the European alphabet, he was given the name of the great [biblical] prophet, Balam. Since then these [sacred books] have been known as ‘The Books of Chilam Balam.’”
100 Refutations | Mexico | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
June, 2018Gabriel Cantú Westendarp has published five collections of poetry, including Naturaleza muerta (2011); Poemas del árbol (2009); El filo de la playa (2007); El efecto (2006); and Material peligroso (2015), in which these poems appear. She has also published a novel called Hamburgo en alguna parte (2016). She won the Ramón López Velarde National Poetry Prize in 2012 for Material peligroso (2015). She also co-founded the magazine Otra Orilla and works at the Metropolitan University of Monterrey.
100 Refutations | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
June, 2018The Popol Vuh is a collection of mythic, legendary, and historical narratives from the K’iche Maya people, whose current descendants live primarily in Guatemala and the Mexican southwest. It is often referred to as both a historical account and sacred book. It has no single author and may be one of the most important documents to survive colonial cultural eradication efforts. Current copies of the Popol Vuh are taken from the transcription made by Fray Francisco Ximénez and, it has been theorized, an unknown native man who learned the Latin alphabet and then transcribed it from the recitation of an old Maya man.
100 Refutations | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2018According to Abraham Arias-Larreta in Literaturas Aborigenes de America (1976), “The Mayan Uinal was a period of 20 days, each of them with a different name. The Mayan year, or Haab, was composed of 18 Uinales and a final period of 5 days, the Xma Kaba Kin, nameless days.”
100 Refutations | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2018Nezahualpilli (1464-1515) was an Aztec poet. Second in fame only to, perhaps, Nezahualcoyotl, his birth and death are shrouded in myth. It is said that when he was a child, Nezahualpilli’s nannies witnessed him taking many different animal forms in his cradle. Regarding his death, his own descendant, the historian Ixtlilxóchitl, wrote that “he gathered himself in the innermost room of the palace, where pensive, sad, and tired of the grief of life, he ended his own….” (Fernando de Alva, “Ixtlitlxótchitl,” Obras Historicas, t. II, p. 328).
The translator of the featured poem into Spanish is unknown.
100 Refutations | Bolivia | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
April, 2018Mercedes Belzú de Dorado was born in La Paz, Bolivia in 1835, and died in 1879 at the age of 44. She was the daughter of the general Manuel Isidoro Belzú, a one-time president of Bolivia, and the acclaimed Argentine novelist, Juana Manuela Gorriti. She was a writer, poet, and translator of varied works, including those authored by Víctor Hugo, Lamartine, and Shakespeare.
100 Refutations | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
April, 2018The poem featured here was written by an unknown Guaraní poet.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
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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