Ya Hsien wrote “Chicago” in 1959, along with several other “city poems” that reflect his backlash against the unrelenting ascent of industrialization. Through disjointing, violent, and often surreal imagery, Ya Hsien captures a dystopian vision of a Chicago that has been rendered “coarse” and “illiterate” by the steel heart of modernity. This is a poem that is framed by desolation, a poem about a city where love and poetry have become a matter of pressing buttons.
While translating “Chicago,” I mostly struggled with relaying the semantic meaning of particular words and phrases while trying to preserve the aural and thematic qualities of the poem. I often compromised on a semantic level by introducing new words into the poem. For example, I translated “橋” (bridge) as “station” so that it could rhyme with “desolation,” the way “文化” (culture) end-rhymes with “橋下” (below the bridge) in the original couplet. I also used “aromatic” to rhyme with “mathematics” to compensate for the end-rhyme between 星光 (xing guang, starlight) and 芬芳 (fen fang, fragrance) that is lost in my translation.
On a more thematic level--to retain the sense of ferocity conveyed by “狼” (wolf) in “狼狽” (a situation that is embarrassing, awkward, and perhaps even pathetic), I described the whistle of the steam engine as a “wolf whistle” to keep the “wolf” in the poem. This predator joins the other violent images in the poem (autumn being “electrolyzed,” the tender hands of angels “snapped off”) to represent Ya Hsien’s portrayal of a harshly industrializing city.
Ya Hsien had not been to Chicago prior to writing this poem, but he need not have; “Chicago” reimagines the heartbeat of the city with such strong sensory detail that it is as if Ya Hsien were imagining a new Chicago for us, one that is interlocked with his past, evolving in the present, and set in the future.
- May Huang
Johar Buang is a gifted poet who writes in Malay, the national language of Singapore. His works in various genres have won awards and received much recognition in the Malay Archipelago. "Love on Mount Palmer" is an important poem that narrates a nation that values progress and pragmatism, at times forcing other aspects of life to take a back seat. Progress is often arduous and competitive; and some things must be sacrificed. One wonders then where race, religion, and language stand, beyond the national pledge. Profoundly woven and succinctly depicting the journey of the Self in this world, the poem unravels the soul of a poet who espouses Sufi teachings but never ceases to share his concerns for worldly struggles. This poem transcends the subliminal realm of faith to seek refuge in one’s identity and physical existence on this earth. One feels the evocativeness of the words the poet uses to break silences that enable the reconciliation of past and present. The Scriptural references are juxtaposed with one of the most sacred sites in Singapore, the poet’s homeland. Set on a hill, the shrine of a faithful soul provides solace for a multicultural and multifaith society where the pursuit of success and wealth is depicted by many skyscrapers bearing the names of banks and housing an extensive list of major economic stakeholders. One wonders whether the highway was constructed around the hill instead of cutting across it as a mark of respect, or as the legends claim--no one can touch the revered one. In a competitive and at times ruthless race, faith and beliefs are put on trial. Will the tide of development be a threat to domes and mountains that are synonymous with spirituality? Or is the temple of God to be found in the Self? The poem seeks to enlighten and liberate us so that we can comprehend the Self first before we seek to elevate or bury God.
- Annaliza Bakri
The rich and varied poetic tradition of Ecuador is often overshadowed by that of its larger neighbors —Chile and Peru, in particular—and its contributions tend to go unrecognized internationally. In spite of this, or perhaps to a certain degree as a direct result of its oft-referenced “national inferiority complex,” Ecuador’s poets continue to produce outstanding, groundbreaking work.
At just twenty-three years old, Juan Romero Vinueza has already developed a poetic voice that is multilayered, intertextual, humorous, and deftly crafted. He began writing his first collection of poems, Revólver Escorpión (La Caída Editorial, 2016) at the age of 16, drawing on a wide range of influences, from Federico García Lorca to Nicanor Parra, and to some extent providing a response to the highly neo-baroque style of the generation of Latin American poets directly preceding him. The section of Revólver Escorpión from which these two poems are taken is entitled Vértigo sobre un paísaje andino (“Vertigo over an Andean Landscape”).
- Kimrey Anna Batts
José Asunción Silva (1865-1896) is credited, through his assimilation of elements of Symbolism and the work of poets such as Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe, with helping inaugurate Latin American modernismo. Silva was born in Bogotá to a wealthy family with a love of literature and a history of tragedy. At nineteen, he visited France, where he met the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, but was forced to return to Bogotá to take control of his father’s failing business. Unable to pay his family’s debts, he took a diplomatic post in Caracas, and in 1892 his sister Elvira died, occasioning the composition of “Nocturne III,” one of the most famous poems in the Spanish language. Silva is also the author of a novel, De Sobremesa, which was reconstructed after first having been lost in a shipwreck on his return from Caracas. On May 23, 1896, after a dinner party, he shot himself in the heart. He was thirty years old. The house where he lived in Bogotá is now the Silva Poetry House, a national monument and an important cultural organization that grants the José Asunción Silva poetry prize for the recognition of a lifetime of poetic work.
While Silva is Colombia’s most famous poet (he appears on the 5000 Peso bill), his poems are virtually unknown in the United States. These translations stay close to the overall sense of Silva’s poems, but nevertheless diverge and take liberties. Readers encountering Silva for the first time should note that that while many of these translations fulfill the mandate of translation as it is usually understood, some, such as “Nocturne III,” might best be described as collaborations. I’d compare them to the paintings of Glenn Brown, whose hallucinatory reworkings of old masters result in something both familiar and uncannily new. But while Brown might adapt, say, a Rembrandt—an image long established in the canon—Silva’s poems are not yet widely available in English, so comparisons can’t easily be made. I’ve taken the risk of introducing some of these poems into English in non-traditional translations because I’m hopeful that more normative translations of Silva will follow, but also because my original intention in translating Silva was more personal: I sought to engage, as an American of Colombian descent, on my own terms with the work of one of Colombia’s most important poets. I was pleased to find not the antisocial, “diseased” modernist many Latin American critics have dismissively accused Silva of being,* but, to the contrary, a poet whose work centers around the question of life—both life as such, in all its scintillation and strangeness, and the complex question of how to live. The questions Silva poses—whether poetry can be lived, whether the price of stability isn’t a forfeiture of life itself, and how life and the numerous deaths-in-life manifest themselves—are as urgent as ever. My primary objective as a translator was thus to convey the urgency and originality of Silva’s vision and the consistency of his thought.
* For an analysis of Silva’s reception in Latin America, see Alfreo Villanueva-Collado’s “Masculine Culture, Feminoid Modernism: José Asunción Silva and ‘El mal metafísico’” (Confluencia, Volume 19, Number 2). Villanueva-Collado looks at Silva and others to explore “the relationship between the paradigm shift called Modernity, understood as a national project gendered as masculine, and the concept of Modernism as a pathogen which feminizes culture,” and argues that “Such a relationship lies at the center of Latin American critical and cultural practice and, operating outside critical consciousness, still shapes and determines cultural and literary criticism, especially with respect to Latin American turn-of-the-century narrative production.”
- Robert Fernandez
The 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 title "The Graveyard by the Sea" suggests a poem in the style of Gray's "Elegy Written in a County Churchyard," a contemplation of the finality of death and the way it levels out the differences of fame. Superficially Valéry follows this pattern. Valéry's graveyard, like the one Gray describes at Stoke Poges, is the one at Séte (originally Cette) where the poet was born and where he is buried. It is also a poem about eternals; about death and deathlessness, but it is soon apparent that he is not concerned with pseudo-religious morals.
It is not easy at first (or dare I say it, even at second) reading to grasp clearly what Valéry means. Rather than using words to point up some moral, his language comes across as convoluted, seems to become incorporated back into itself, to be involved in itself like music. It can seem, in fact, meaningless. Rather than use words as signifiers, he uses them to compose sound patterns which draw the reader into a mise en scène, not unlike programme music. Valéry wrote:
"Literature interests me profoundly only to the extent that it urges the mind to certain transformations--those in which the stimulating properties of language play the chief part [...] The force to bend the common word to unexpected needs without violating the 'Time-honoured forms'; the capture and subjection of things that are difficult to say; and, above all, the simultaneous management of syntax, harmony, and ideas [...] are in my eyes the supreme object of our art."
This speaks to the interiority of Valéry's poetic process, He wrote: "Poetry has never been an objective for me, but an instrument, an exercise." The sound of the language is intrinsic to its imaging, its rhythm and this, of course, untranslatable."
Jacques Derrida wrote of Valéry's antagonism to Freud: "We will not ask what the meaning of this resistance is before pointing out that what Valéry intends to resist is meaning itself."
In the highly formal, mannered musicality of Valéry's verse the influence of Mallarmé is clear. In his Cahiers, Valéry notes that the programme of a poem is less important than its subject: By a programme he means a gathering of words and syntactical moments, above all "a table of verbal tonalities, etc." In his La Musique et les lettres, Mallarmé had said something similar:
"I assert, at my own aesthetic risk, this conclusion: [...] that Music and Letters are the alternate face here widened towards the obscure; scintillating there, with certainty of a phenomenon, the only one, I have named it Idea."
Coleridge thought "The French wholly unfit for Poetry" because "Feelings created by obscure ideas associate themselves with one clear idea." So, the translator is presented with a "feel" or "sound" rather than a story or logical structure to hold meaning together, and this makes the whole process almost impossible. It might explain why there are so few translations of either poet.
It is this "feel" that has to be caught and the meaning left to fend for itself.
In Terence Rattigan’s play The Browning Version, the student Taplow, after translating some lines of Aeschylus rather too fluently, is reprimanded: "You are supposed to be construing Greek, not collaborating with Aeschylus." I hope I manage to avoid Taplow's error and that my attempt here, insofar as it succeeds, is a collaboration with Valéry.
- David Pollard
Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean Sea and an autonomous region of Italy, perhaps best known in a literary sense for being the birthplace and home of Grazia Deledda, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926. But Sardinia was also home to a number of other intellectuals, writers, and artists, including Sebastiano Satta (1867-1914), a journalist and lawyer who is widely considered Sardinia’s greatest poet.
While working as colleagues in the now defunct but still singular international MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong, we visited the island in 2014 as part of a contingent from the university and as guests of Beyond Thirty-Nine, an independent arts and culture platform. Our trip took the form of an immersion in various aspects of Sardinian culture, such as the masked ritualistic dance of the Mamuthones and the canto a tenore or polyphonic singing of pastoral songs. We were also exposed to the work of the island’s great writers and artists, among them Sebastiano Satta.
A committed socialist in the vein of Pablo Neruda, Satta spent his life advocating for the island’s working class, while his poetry (such as Versi Ribelli and Canti Barbaricini) celebrated the island’s terrain, especially the mountainous wilderness of the Barbagia region. We were introduced to Satta’s work with the caveat that his particular music and use of local dialect made translating him very difficult. Taking that as a challenge, we set about trying to render his work in English while retaining some of the lyricism of the original. The following translations were composed in Sardinia and performed at the open air gallery of acclaimed sculptor Pinuccio Sciola.
- James Scudamore and Ravi Shankar
Arabic | Poetry | Pre-Islamic Arabia
February, 2017By name, the qaṣīda is scarcely known to Anglo-American readers. It therefore bears mentioning that the qaṣīda is an Arabic poetic form, in fact the highest classical form, and that it was taken up throughout the African, Indian, Turkic, and Persianate languages of the Islamic world. Into the poetic traditions of Europe and the Americas, the qaṣīda has not made much of a crossing, with the exception of the Spanish-language casida (which borrows the name more than it does the poetic form). Its lack of presence in the West contrasts with the seeming naturalization of the ghazal, an Arabic-native mode that (after Persian poets gave new formal features to it) has been adopted by Western poets since Goethe. The fact that the Arabic ghazal derives from the qaṣīda has done nothing to raise the ancestral form’s profile in Western poetics.
Some obscurity in the matter is only natural. In modern Arabic, the word qaṣīda refers to a poem of almost any kind. Classically, however, it is a monorhymed suite of three or more thematic movements of no fixed length. The requirement that a qaṣīda be polythematic holds for the earliest sixth-century (CE) examples as it does for Arabic qaṣīdas of a thousand years later. The present qaṣīda is in four sections:
1. Amatory prelude (called in Arabic nasīb): verses 1-6
2. Wine song (khamriyya): verses 7-25
3. Travel exploits (raḥīl): verses 26-40
4. Praise of the patron (madīḥ): verses 41-58
There is a lot to say about all these sections, as well as their composer. Al-A‘shā (who died around 629 CE) was a pioneer of Arabic wine song, a mode already well developed in this poem. For their description of the blue-eyed tavern keeper and his milieu, the wine verses are of high literary as well as sociological interest. The ethnic alterity of the wine-seller remained a topos of Arabic bacchic verse (as in the poems of Abū Nuwās), and of historical drinking practice too.
One element of the travel section calls for comment because it is so typical. This is the description of the she-camel on whose back the poet’s heroic journey is made. For the raḥīl to be devoted to camel-description is common, and so is the likening of the camel to one of Arabia’s ungulates--whether a gazelle, an onager, or some other antlered beast of the wild. These subsidiary descriptions can run so long and deliver so much pathos that the camel is forgotten entirely. Once you become familiar with the trope of cross-species simile, it is an unbewildering source of charm. But no degree of familiarity voids the question: what motivates the persistent comparison of the domesticated camel to a hunted beast of the wild?
I leave the question open to workers in the growing field of Animal Studies. I also leave aside the political circumstances of the poem, beyond noting that it finds its dedicatee (a prince of pre-Islamic Yemen) at some odds with other members of the Ḥimyarite ruling class. (Line 44’s mention of Ḥimyar’s failure to guarantee a water supply may reference the early-seventh-century collapse of the dam of Ma’rib, which is mentioned in other poems by al-A‘shā, and in the Qur’ān at Sūrat Sabā 34:16). Al-A‘shā’s relationship to Salāma Dhū Fā’ish was one of propagandist to patron, and far from exclusive. In fact al-A‘shā is reckoned as the first Arabic language artist to turn praise-poetry into a professional career.
All but a very few of the editorial and interpretive decisions made in this translation are based in the commentary of Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā, the late-ninth-century grammarian of Kufa better known as Tha‘lab (“The Fox”). Tha‘lab presents variant readings for about half the poem’s verses, whose number and sequence vary from manuscript to manuscript; over these and other textual issues my translation passes in silence. In Tha‘lab’s collection of al-A‘shā’s verse, this poem is number eight.
- David Larsen
Andrea Chapela is the daughter of a physicist and a mathematician, so she naturally studied chemistry. Luckily for me, she’s also a creative writer. The exciting thing about the poems in Fundamentals of Applied Chemistry is that they are a scientist’s exploration of life and relationships through poetry—and at the same time, a poet’s exploration of life and relationships through chemistry! Not only that, but they’re funny, cutting, insightful—and a lot of fun to translate. Ars poetica as lab report? Breakup poem as description of Bond Theory? I’m in. I think I learned more scientific terminology via translating these poems than I ever did in my high school chemistry class! To her credit, Andrea is also a patient teacher and was very helpful in talking me through the structural ideas guiding many of these poems. Though I don’t think intimate knowledge of the laws and structures she references is necessary to reading these poems, her explanations and diagrams were helpful in making sure I translated in such a way as to convey the overall metaphors. Andrea is an accomplished fiction writer, and these poems indicate she has a bright career as a poet as well.
- Kelsi Vanada
Latin | Poetry | Roman Republic
February, 2017These five poems are all directed against Lucius Gellius Poplicola, who, according to Valerius Maximus, was accused of incest with his mother and plotting his father’s murder (evidence that there is such a thing as the Oedipus Complex, in some people at least!). He was, at any rate, renowned for debauchery and promiscuity. It will not therefore surprise us that he earned Catullus’ extreme animosity as yet another of Lesbia’s sexual partners. He was later to become consul in 36 BC and command the left wing of Antony’s doomed fleet at the Battle of Actium in 32 BC.
We who love Catullus love him as much for his viciousness as for the tenderness Tennyson ascribes to him!
- Ranald Barnicot
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).