100 Refutations | French | Haiti | Poetry
April, 2018Marie-Ange Jolicoeur (1947-1976) died at the age of 29 in Lille, France, having already authored four volumes of poetry, Guitare de vers (1967), Violon d’espoir (1970), Oiseaux de mémoire (1972), and Transparence en bleu d’oubli (published posthumously in 1979). According to Saint-John Kauss in La poésie féminine haïtienne, “She was, to the best of our knowledge, after Queen Anacaona, the second ‘cursed’ poetess in Haitian literary history.”
100 Refutations | El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Aída Párraga is a Salvadorean poet.
100 Refutations | Essay | Poetry
April, 2018InTranslation is proud to present 100 Refutations, the brainchild of author and translator Lina M. Ferreira C.-V. Over the next hundred days, we'll be publishing a daily poem from one of the countries recently denigrated by the president of the United States. Lina M. Ferreira C.-V. has been working tirelessly on this enormous project, with the help of several collaborators, since the president's comments in January. Her essay describing how she was spurred to action is featured here, with poems to follow in separate posts.
- InTranslation editors
Last September, I responded to a request to help translate a few poems for Dareen Tatour, then in her second year of house arrest in Israel. Since then, her friend and advocate Yoav Haifawi has managed to ferry a few poems out of her house and into my inbox whenever he manages to visit--some small comfort for Dareen as her Kafkaesque trial unfolds, with Israeli authorities warping the meaning of words and gestures to try and prove that poetic expression and a few shared images on Facebook constitute incitement to violence and support for terrorism. Unable to secure a clean verdict, prosecutors have instead prolonged Dareen’s detainment month after month, with no end in sight.
Themes of detainment and repression have been prominent in Dareen’s stanzas since even before her arrest, with a dual emphasis on the plight of Palestinians and the suffering of women in an oppressive society, along with a dedication to express herself despite all the obstacles in her path. In these unpublished poems, which speak to her trial as well as other injustices she has contended with, Dareen warns those trying her of the hypocrisy of their actions, and (perhaps in some distant future) reflects on the toll that the challenges of life have taken from her. As I translated each line, Dareen’s words reminded me not to despair in a world where injustice seems pervasive and remedies often seem beyond my reach--some days there is nothing for it but to produce something that gives us joy, even as we hope for and work towards a brighter tomorrow.
- Andrew Leber
Greece | Modern Greek | Poetry
March, 2018My translations of Yannis Ritsos’s postwar “Exercises 1950-60” chronologically follow Edmund Keeley and Karen Emmerich’s translations of Ritsos’s Diaries of Exile—a collection of poems written while Ritsos was a political prisoner during the Greek Civil War. Echoes of war, torture, and detention also litter “Exercises.” In this work, however, the references to atrocity are less immediate. Details like a sailor’s bobbing cap expose the essence of war in the everyday, rather than documenting the experience of detention, as the poems in Diaries of Exile do. Keeley and Emmerich note that Ritsos’s “I” withered during detention, his pronouns grew ever more collective, and his lines shrank. Formally, his “Exercises” are similarly impersonal and many are still short in line length. The difference in their construction is primarily conceptual, in that Ritsos, when writing these later poems, was consumed with what to say about atrocity.
Scholar and translator Minas Savvas once asked Ritsos whether writing, for him, was a means of survival. “It is a refuge and it is power,” Ritsos replied. “Power, moral, and intellectual power—that’s what good, fulfilling writing is, the power to shape words that open up new realities in the mind. That’s what has sustained me.” Martin McKinsey argues, in the introduction to his translations of Ritsos’s Late into the Night, that more than anything else a Marxist hope kept Ritsos alive, sustaining him through years of imprisonment and torture. Both writing and politics, then, ultimately determined Ritsos’s literary response to war. Like Paul Celan and George Oppen, Ritsos also struggled with how to respond, but unlike his contemporaries, Ritsos didn’t nearly sever the social contract with his readers. A Communist and leftist to the bone, Ritsos wrote instead toward revolution.
In “Exercises,” Ritsos’s voice is at once sodden and airy. Rocks are pensive, agency is limited, a star does not believe the man looking it in the eye, and one gets used to others “finding endless evidence against” him. These poems, however, remain hopeful.
Ritsos refuses to submit solely to the ills of war; rather, he infuses his poems with the smell of the sea, the sound of coffee being ground, the fluffiness of a woman’s smile. What shimmers throughout these micro-narratives is what I might label the celebration of simply living after torture and war. As bodies wash up on dark coasts in these poems, Ritsos does not forget to celebrate the meaning of life in the sparsest of gestures.
Seven years after writing these “Exercises,” Ritsos was again imprisoned for his political ideals. He kept writing. Although his poetry was often banned during his lifetime, today his writing is still sung by the left at protests, and it is this staying power that I turn to in his poems. As I read and translate Ritsos into the global unrest of the present, I find his refusal to turn away from the most horrifying and the most beautiful is exactly what makes his voice so necessary now.
- Spring Ulmer
Poetry | Spanish | United States
March, 2018I am a native English speaker who wrote these poems first in Spanish, then translated them into English. I’ve found this to be a fascinating experience, for it asked me to consider the confluence of the two languages in my head: how the languages feed and inform each other, how they share the same “author.”
In some ways, composing in one’s second language may help to serve the poem with happy accidents and inventions. On the other hand, such a project is problematic, especially when one’s native idioms, and cultural and cosmological orientations, may violate the second language--probably in ways that I’m not even aware of. For a poet in any language, the line between invention and violation is often diaphanous, ephemeral, nonexistent. Far from alleviating the inherent difficulties of the translator’s art, translating oneself introduces an additional range of issues.
The act of bringing the Spanish poems (back?) into English, translating my Spanish self to my English self, was intriguing. Poem by poem these selves may recognize each other clearly, or may find each other irritating strangers. Bringing the two into mutual awareness and respect took patience. At their best, the Spanish self and the English self feed each other’s poems with new surprises, shared discoveries.
This project has also expanded my understanding of what “translation" may mean or entail, and of the parallels between translation and revision. I was struck by the notion that all writing is translation in one way or another, starting with a rendering of the electric impulses of the neurotransmitters, a primal alphabet, perhaps.
I am deeply indebted to my colleagues Phillip Krumrich and Gustavo Osorio de Ita for their generous readings and responses to my efforts. Their caring expertise in both languages has been both instructive and inspiring.
- George Eklund
Latin | Poetry | Roman Republic
December, 2017Catullus’ poem LXVIII has perplexed many. It has survived in the MSS as one poem, but it seems to be two. In the first part, A, Catullus is in Verona and the poem is a verse epistle, a response to the request of his friend Manlius in Rome to send him the gift of a poem (possibly either one of his own or a translation from the Greek). Catullus is unable to write something original, as he is still mourning the recent death of his brother, and besides, he has left most of his books in Rome (so, probably, he has no Greek poem to translate).
The second and much longer part, B, expresses his gratitude to a certain Allius, who has lent him a house in Rome where he can pursue his love affair with Lesbia. At this point, she is still married to Metellus, so Catullus has to proceed with some caution. B contains a number of digressions, the longest being the legend of Protesilaus and Laodamia, which itself contains two further digressions, on his grief for his brother, and on a feat of Hercules and that hero’s apotheosis.
There are two issues:
- Is the poem in fact one poem or two?
- If the latter, is each poem written to a different person, or are Manlius and Allius in fact one and the same?
It seems clear to me that these are two different poems. They are apparently written to or for two different people (but see below), they describe two different situations, and they express very different moods. The clincher for me, however, is what they have in common: a passage in which Catullus mourns his brother. For Catullus to include two passages of identical or very similar wording in the same poem would be extreme carelessness.
It is quite possible that Manlius and Allius are the same. The two different names may be the result of textual corruption ("Mallius" also occurs). Alternatively, Catullus may have decided to hide Manlius’s identity by giving him a false name. After all, Metellus was a powerful man; aiding and abetting Catullus and Lesbia in their adultery was not without risk.
Catullus LXVIII, whether one poem or two, is a rather disjointed affair with its many digressions and clumsy transitions. Still, the strength of feeling throughout and the many beautiful passages make it well worth translating.
- Ranald Barnicot
Classical Persian | Iran | Poetry
December, 2017These poems are selections from an ongoing project to translate Hafez’s collection of ghazals. Rather than attempting in vain to recreate the form, turns of phrase, and connotations of the fourteenth-century Persian, these translations aim instead to give the English speaker a taste of the experience of reading the original. Hafez’s ghazals span the sensual, social, and spiritual, with radical, anti-conformist social critique nestled amid reverence in equal part of the lover and of God. Despite the tightly structured meter and rhyme of each ghazal, and a complete lack of classical enjambment, scenes and perspectives shift erratically at the level of the individual line. These translations aim to preserve the evocative power of the spaces that open up between each such unit by linking disparate images in a contemporary voice.
- Patrick Sykes
Takarai Kikaku was a Japanese haikai poet and among the most accomplished disciples of Matsuo Bashō. His father was an Edo doctor, but Kikaku chose to become a professional haikai poet rather than follow in his footsteps. Kikaku's poetry is known for its wit and its difficulty. Whereas Basho, especially in his later years, focused on the countryside and espoused an aesthetic of simplicity, Kikaku preferred the city and the opportunities it provided for extravagant play. He also preferred a more demanding form of poetry, one laced with wordplay, allusions, and juxtapositions of images that defy easy explanation. At the time of his death, he was perhaps the leading poet in Edo (today's Tokyo), which then had a population of around one million, making it perhaps the largest city in the world at the time.
- Joshua Gage
Jun Tsuji’s mother was born in Edo--old Tokyo--to the mistress of a daimyo advisor. His father, a one-time government official, came from an affluent farming family in Saitama. Tsuji grew up prosperously until the age of thirteen, by which time his father, prone to illness and bad business bets, and his mother, prone to lavishness, had squandered the family’s money. Tsuji thus ended his formal education, and began a lifelong course of self-study--reading broadly, taking night courses in English, working menial jobs, socializing and playing his flute on the streets of Asakusa, a neighborhood historically renowned both for its religious institutions and festivals, and for its entertainment offerings (revue shows, cinemas, theatres, bars, nightclubs, hostess clubs, and brothels).
Though perhaps most famous for his seminal influence in Japanese Dadaist circles, Jun Tsuji was, at different times in his life, infatuated with Christianity (during his stint in Sunday school as a boy) and, later in life, with German philosophy and Buddhism. In the early 1920s, just before the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, Tsuji encountered Dadaism and did much to popularize this European school of thought across Japanese intellectual and artistic circles, christening himself “Japan’s first Dadaist,” a title more fairly belonging to a group of publishers and writers, including, most crucially, the poet Shinkichi Takahashi (1901-1987), with whom Tsuji had a supportive relationship that soured over time due to Tsuji's zealous support for German philosopher Max Stirner’s egoist anarchist philosophy--which Takahashi dismissed--and to Takahashi’s gravitation away from Dadaism toward Zen Buddhism and a life of productive domesticity with his wife and two daughters. While hospitalized for alcohol-induced psychosis in the 1930s, Tsuji came to embrace his own brand of Buddhism, inspired by Shinran, founder of Jōdo Shinshū, a rival sect to Zen (now one of the most popular in Japan), which bears a degree of similarity to Christianity in its belief in a savior, grace, and a world beyond this life.
- Ryan C. K. Choi
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).