Poetry (excerpts) | Russia | Russian
July, 2020In early 1937, during his third year of exile in the southern Russian city of Voronezh in the "black earth" region, Osip Mandelstam’s desperation grows as he becomes increasingly uncertain that he can save himself and his wife, Nadezhda. He has by this time learned about the purges and has heard on the radio news that Kirov's murderers had been "found"—the show trials were in full swing. The Great Terror is beginning as he completes the second of the three Voronezh notebooks.
- John High and Matvei Yankelevich
Argentina | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
May, 2020La llave marilyn was born on a Sunday, when the Argentinian poet Laura Yasan was thinking about killing herself. She had called a suicide hotline repeatedly, only to hear the message: “All lines are busy.” She remembered Marilyn Monroe, found dead in her hotel room, hand on the telephone. Instead of committing a parallel suicide, Yasan began to write what would become the first poem of llave. Read as a whole, the poems tell the disjointed story of a woman’s final moments before suicide, interspersed with oneiric scenes of urbanity and bursts of dark humor. Marilyn hovers throughout, not so much a companion as a symbol for her desperation. The collection is a solitary meditation on depression and isolation, yet its very existence, each poem a renewed attempt to establish communication, stands as a testament to one woman’s determination to stay alive.
Published in 2009, this is Yasan’s seventh book, for which she won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize. As a primarily self-taught poet, she developed a distinctive voice that does not fit neatly into a particular tradition of Argentine or Latin American poetry. In some ways she is the heir of Alejandra Pizarnik’s enclosed melancholy, but Yasan infuses this with a thread of playfulness: an enduring delight in the possibilities of language. It is this feature that presented me with the greatest challenge in translating Yasan’s work. I didn't make it past the title before encountering the multiplicity of meaning enfolded in her words. “Llave” seems at first to mean “key.” But in the poems its other meaning surfaces: a chokehold. By translating the title as “the marilyn hold,” I lost one connotation, but gained another: being stuck “on hold” when all the phone lines are busy. My aim throughout these selections was to leave open the rich ambiguities that define Yasan’s poetry, while reimagining in English its tension between the everyday and the strange.
- Phoebe Bay Carter
Mexico | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
January, 2020Paula Abramo’s poetry collection Fiat Lux, winner of Mexico’s 2013 Premio de Poesías Joaquín Xirau Icaza for the best book of poetry by a writer under 40, is a tightly woven cycle of poems evoking the poet’s ancestors, political refugees first from Italy and Eastern Europe to Brazil at the turn of the twentieth century, and then from Brazil to Bolivia and finally Mexico in later eras. At the same time, the book is a meditation on the act of writing poetry and bringing characters to life with fidelity and imagination.
I discovered Fiat Lux when Paula and I were both at the Banff Literary Translation Centre as translators (she translates, prolifically, from Portuguese to Spanish). During an evening we devoted to reading our original works, she read one of the poems from Fiat Lux, “In memory of Anna Stefania Lauff, match factory girl,” and its combination of imagery and narrative force blew me away. When I got to read the whole book, I saw how, throughout, the image of striking a match—whether to shed light, or start a fire—forms the hinge between the two themes of the cycle.
In its own unique way, Fiat Lux reminds me of Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulatica, my favorite historical/biographical poem cycle. It’s whimsical, committed, sometimes fierce, sometimes political, and always concerned with words, language, and languages.
I’ve found that I’m not alone in my enthusiasm for the book and the poet. In the Mexico City installment of the Words Without Borders feature series on "The City and Writer," writer and translator Lucia Duero, in answer to the question “What writer(s) from here should we read?,” selects a single poetry book by a living author: “Fiat Lux by Paula Abramo, a great story about the human journey and courage, marvelously captured in the poetics of everyday life.”
Translation challenges include switching among the poetry’s various modes: narrative, introspective, biographical, at times philosophical, at times making use of cryptic but evocative bits of ancestors’ journals and handed-down lore. Also, the poet delights in surprising the reader with new meanings that playfully undermine what the reader has just constructed out of the line before, and these shifts need to be made to work in English syntax with equal measures of rhythm, comprehensibility, and surprise. Also, as a classics major in college and a literary translator by profession, Abramo naturally invokes the border-crossing and time-travel involved in telling family history by the use of multiple languages, including bits of Portuguese, Latin, and Greek. Since English is farther from Romance language roots than Spanish is, I have helped English readers by translating some of these phrases, while leaving others as they were.
The poems included here are numbers 2, 5, 6, 7, and 9 in the book, out of a total of 19.
- Dick Cluster
Poetry (excerpts) | Spain | Spanish
November, 2019An explosion of the microscopic and a journey into the post-apocalyptic, Pilar Fraile Amador’s Breach bears witness—to environmental destruction, climate change, exodus, war, and xenophobia. But more than catastrophe itself, these poems plumb our impulse to document the aftermath, the human mechanisms of testimony that make false claims at objectivity. On a surreal road trip through a world in flames, the poet encounters multiple supposedly neutral observers—scientists, mathematicians, documentarians, philosophers, an uncanny double of herself—and becomes aware of the inherent flaws and subjectivities in each attempt at understanding.
- Lizzie Davis
Catalan | Poetry (excerpts) | Spain
September, 2019I first encountered about a dozen poems of Gemma Gorga in an anthology of contemporary Catalan poets translated into English while I was at an artist’s residency in Barcelona. I was struck by the lucid transparency of her language and syntax as a means for revealing transcendent states. I spent the next few years translating her book of prose poems, Llibre dels minuts (Book of Minutes, Field Translation Series, Oberlin College Press, 2019). Yet I still felt compelled by the rest of her work, which makes abundant use of the verse line. Now I am translating poems from her six other books, and eventually newer uncollected poems, which I hope to edit and translate into a volume of her Selected Poems, tentatively titled Late to the House of Words.
The selection of poems here are all from her third book, Instruments òptics (Brosquil Edicions, 2005). Even its title underlines Gorga’s central preoccupation with poems as being themselves “optical instruments” that can help us see what even a telescope or a microscope cannot: that is, the workings of the human soul through memory.
Yet Gorga’s poems are obsessively focused on words themselves: their enigmatic palpability as well as their sound. Thus, in a poem such as “In Alphabetical Order,” Gorga finds the magic key to certain words by their proximity in the dictionary to others. There was no way to achieve in English the same effect that Gorga could do, where the search for “you” in the final line: (“tu, tul, tulipa, túmul, turment”) is constructed from the letters of tu (you), something I could only approximate in English and instead found myself compensating and resorting to homophony: “you: yarrow, yaw, yawp, yew.” In writing this introduction, I had a moment of translator’s regret. I believe that a translation is never finished, merely abandoned--to repurpose Valéry. I thought about changing the line to “we,” a word whose two-letter form earlier in our alphabet would have allowed me more room to do an analogous architectonic procedure, but at too great an expense to the sense of this crucial final line. For it is the very search for the Other through language that underpins the entire poem, and which forms part of Gorga’s lyric project. In many of these poems, even when they evoke solitude, there is the assumption of the other. In “Pomegranates,” the solitary act of peeling and extracting its seeds effects a powerful inversion of number and agency, where instead of the singular narrator eating seeds, it is the seeds of “Time” that “gobble us up.”
The poems comprising her “Book of Hours” are, of course, concerned with cycles of Time passing, of mortality. In “The Book of Hours: October,” for example, Gorga uses the season to allude to the Classical theme of souls falling like leaves, an image found as far back as Dante and Virgil. She transforms it slightly by comparing the leaves to angels falling, who are then able to escape from the endless repetition “to transport them to another/less painful dimension.” In the very act of creating these secular prayers, Gorga is able to achieve a momentary transcendence for herself and, by reading them, for the reader.
- Sharon Dolin
Danish | Denmark | Poetry (excerpts)
February, 2019Mikael Josephsen gained recognition in the Danish literary market with his poetry collection BREAK (KNÆK, Gyldendal, 2016), in which he describes life in the various psychiatric wards he has inhabited. What reviewers seemed to like most about the collection was the simple, down-to-earth tone he used to describe his rather tumultuous experiences, and not least, as the title of the collection would suggest, his mental state when admitted. In Danish, as in English, the word knæk ("break") can refer to the experience of having a mental breakdown or to a line break in poetry. In fact, Josephsen's title is a direct reference to knækprosa, which translates as “free verse” in English. His poems are reminiscent of the confessional poetry of the 1960s and describe everyday activities in a matter-of-fact way. Though this is not uncommon in contemporary Danish poetry, what distinguishes Josephsen's poems is their setting, which gives them a certain edge and an element of surprise.
- Nina Sokol
Arabic | Poetry (excerpts) | Tunisia
February, 2019The four poems featured here are from Adam Fethi's 2011 collection The Blind Glassblower. I selected the shortest pieces because they condense the major aesthetic and thematic orientations in this volume of poetry. Adam Fethi's consistent use of prose poetry shows a subversive aesthetic stance that confronts the traditional Arabic poem. His texts offer a new arrangement of the poetic textual space wherein rhythm is not necessarily provided by rhymes, but rather created by the visual distribution of lines on the page, the flow and suspension of words, and a playful use of punctuation.
The Blind Glassblower is a chronicle of a poet's life and works. Blindness is used as an extended metaphor to refer to the poet's alienation from a world that claims sight but is completely deprived of insight. Fethi defines poetry as an act of glassblowing, referring, on one level, to poetry as a craft, an idea found in ancient Arabic descriptions of poetry as sina'a (craft, trade, profession). On a deeper level, the act of blowing refers to the divine act of creation. The Islamic story of genesis turns to God's enunciation: "I blow into him [Adam] from my own spirit" (Surat al-Hajar, The Stone). Adam Fethi departs from the Romantic image of the poet-prophet emphasized in Tunisian Abu al-Qasssim al-Shabi's work, to appropriate the divine creative gesture.
Written in a simple language, divested from embellishment, these four poems use the voice of a young girl, who represents innocence and the potential for wonderment. The figure of the child joins the metaphor of blindness to designate a poetic agency free from corruption and capable of innovation. The simple language, however, provokes deep thought and meditation. The three first poems create an eerie world wherein acts of writing and reading are fused. The poet/glassblower, who is engulfed by a hole or lost in a path not trodden, enacts the act of reading wherein the reader may also be engulfed by the poem.
Tunisian poetry in English translation is rather rare. My translation stems from the urge to provide more visibility to Adam Fethi's wonderful work, already translated into French and Spanish.
- Hager Ben Driss
Greece | Modern Greek | Poetry (excerpts)
November, 2018When I first learned that George Prevedourakis had written a take on Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” “America,” and “To Aunt Rose” set during the Greek financial crisis, I was taken aback. Not because it’s uncommon to find a contemporary Greek poet responding, in poetry, to iconic English-language poems (Elias Lagios’s 1984 Ereme Ge is a poetic synthesis of various versions of the “The Waste Land”). What struck me about Prevedourakis’ book-length poem was its inventiveness, its musical complexity—mixing theory with street urgencies and Joycean obscurities—in a way that defied, reconfigured, and retranslated Ginsberg’s poems into a faithful original.
Kleftiko (Panoptikon Editions, 2013) is over 40 pages long, and has been adapted for two different theatre productions in Greece. The name "Kleftiko" a syllabic rhyme of “Ourliachto” (Howl) in Modern Greek, yet as a body of work, Kleftiko also sustains a structural rhyme with Ginsberg. In an inversion of the syntax of the iconic opening line of “Howl,” Prevedourakis begins: “I saw the best generations of my mind / destroyed by frivolous logic / hysterical, naked, and in debt / left to crawl the Balkan streets at dawn, searching / for ways to pay a necessary fix.” It’s clear from the beginning that this isn’t simply a re-staging, the way a production company might re-stage Twelfth Night as a non-binary post-apocalyptic Western. Everything is different, and what might seem familiar or recognizably Ginsberg—a sequence of repetitions or fragment of litany—is made unmistakably new.
My challenge then, as an American poet translating a Greek poem cast on an iconic American poem, has been to negotiate Prevedourakis’ original voice with that of the Ginsberg I know from my native English, and the Ginsberg I gradually recognize, through layers of filtration and synthesis, in Prevedourakis’ Greek. It is a translation of a radical translation and, I hope, in its own particular way, a faithful original.
- Brian Sneeden
Old English | Poetry (excerpts)
August, 2018We know the Old English poem “Wulf ond Eadwacer” due only to its survival in the Exeter Codex, the largest existing anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry, which dates back to the 10th century. Since no original manuscript for the poem exists, the date of its composition, its provenance, and even the identity of its composer are all unknown. Even within the poem itself, ambiguities abound: the identity of the speaker is unknown, while the relationship of the speaker to both Eadwacer and Wulf, the poem’s setting, and its narrative content are all subject to conflicting interpretations. The prevailing interpretation of the poem’s narrative is as a love triangle in which the unnamed speaker (represented as “&” in my translation) is separated from her lover, Wulf, by threat of violence from Eadwacer, who is commonly viewed as either her husband and/or captor. However, the poem has also been interpreted as a riddle, a ballad, a wen charm, an elegy, and a beast fable. As Peter S. Baker notes in “The Ambiguity of Wulf and Eadwacer,” half of the poem’s nineteen lines “pose lexical, syntactical, or interpretive problems” [1].
But the challenge of interpretation is only part of what makes “Wulf ond Eadwacer” an anomaly. The poem is also formally radical, both for its departures from Anglo-Saxon prosody, and for its inclusion of elements like repetition and refrain, which were uncommon in Old English poetry. For this, and other reasons, some scholars even believe that this compellingly mysterious lyric poem might itself be a translation from the Old Norse [2].
As the act of translation cannot be divorced from interpretation, the enigmatic nature of “Wulf ond Eadwacer” would seem to begird the translator, to restrict the approaches, strategies, and outcomes available to her. Indeed, it seems sensible to decide what a thing is and what kind of effect it should have on the reader before translating it. But the reader should not have to pay for the translator’s convenience, and perhaps the least faithful translation of this enigmatic, polyvalent anomaly of an Old English poem that might have been born Scandinavian in the first place would be to present it in the absence of its complexity, to pin the poem down to a singular interpretation, to lock it into a linear narrative that it never loved.
The translation featured here aims to release the poem back into its radical complexity—to restore the lacunae, the indeterminacy, and the strangeness that makes the Anglo-Saxon version of “Wulf ond Eadwacer” so haunting. Using fragments of the original Old English both to re-acquaint the reader with her etymological roots and to make her a bit of a stranger in her own language, these translations embrace the proto-feminist, disjunctive voice of the original poem so that its enigmatic nature and plurality can fully be explored for the first time.
[1] Baker, Peter S. “The ambiguity of ‘Wulf and Eadwacer.’” Studies in Philology, Vol. 78, No. 5, Texts and Studies, 1981.
[2] Danielli, Sonja. “Wulf, Min Wulf: An Eclectic Analysis of Wolf-Man.” Neophilologus, Vol. 91, Spring 2007: 505-524.
- M.L. Martin
100 Refutations | Chile | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
June, 2018Sor Tadea de San Joaquín (1750-1827) was a Catholic nun and writer during the Chilean colonial period. She is regarded as the first woman poet of Chile.
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).