Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes | Poetry | Serbo-Croatian
March, 2020Branko Ve Poljanski (1898–1947) was a leading figure in Zenithism, a 1920s avant-garde movement unique to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The movement was founded by Poljanski’s brother, the writer and editor Ljubomir Micić, and promoted through the journal Zenit, the press Biblioteka Zenit, and numerous exhibitions across Europe. Poljanski was the movement’s emissary in Prague, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris.
The central tenet of Zenithism was to attack bourgeois, western Europe through Micić’s concept of the “barbarogenius”—an archetypal, decivilizing figure pushing for the barbarization of a decadent Europe. Shades of this sentiment are found in the images of blood and barricades in Poljanski’s poems “Arise,” “Dusk,” and “Joyous Poem.”
A hallmark of the movement was its synthesis of futurism, expressionism, Dada, and constructivism into a pan-avant-garde aesthetic. Though Poljanski’s work best embodied the movement’s embrace of the various avant-gardes sweeping 1920s Europe, his poems are most rooted in expressionism, as evidenced in the melancholy-inflected poems “Eros,” “Longing,” and “At the Hair Salon.”
The untamed “Blind Man Number 52” and “Dada Causal Dada,” which first appeared in his single-issue anti-Dada journal Dada-jok (Dada-Nope) in response to Yugoslav Dadaist Dragan Aleksić’s one-off journals Dada Tank and Dada Jazz, best showcase Poljanski’s impish humor.
Our task as translators was to capture Poljanski’s tonal range, what made his work avant-garde for its time, and the spirit of Zenithism: in short, the essence of Poljanski’s poetics. The biggest challenge to this charge could be found in his shortest poem “Arise.” A literal translation of the poem’s conclusion is:
We build Balkan towers
Oh Europe
Your roads will crave the Balkan Man.
In the original, “Balkan Man” is Balkanac, a noun; however, it is rendered as a noun phrase in English. We felt that the repetition of the adjective “Balkan” somewhat flattened the language and tone of the lyric poem, an issue absent in the original. Also, to a present-day, American reader, the Balkan Man as a barbarogenius concept would be lost on its own, being divorced from its century-old milieu. We believe that our version resolves that problem by evoking a barbarian horde storming the bulwark of civilization, an image that would have been implied in its original context.
To date, these eight translations are the largest collection of Branko Ve Poljanski’s poems in English. The crush of the barbarogenius is at the barricades.
- Steven Teref and Maja Teref
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry
March, 2020The young Brazilian poet Yasmin Nigri’s critically acclaimed debut collection Bigornas ("Anvils") features 70 short and long poems from different moments in her career. The book is divided into four sections: “Yesterday’s Street,” “Receipts,” “Malevich Woman,” and “Anvils.” The first section, drawing on Rilke, comprises longer confessional poems that are both witty and anguished. “Receipts” is about writers and artists who impacted Nigri, including Angélica Freitas, Ana Martins Marques, and Alejandra Pizarnik; the section’s closing poem, “Death,” depicts the author’s mother, their childhoods, and their conversations. “Malevich Woman” is composed of poems that describe a love relationship between two women. The final section, “Anvils,” is composed of 20 hard-hitting short poems. The translations featured here are from the third section, “Malevich Woman.” The poems in this section range from lyrical to erotic, interweaving humor, antithesis, internet memes, and literary citations (the long line in “I Like the Desert,” for instance, was taken from the experimental Portuguese poet Herberto Helder) with social and ecological issues. In selecting and translating these five poems, I have tried to provide a brief window into the beauty and diversity of Nigri’s work.
- Robert Smith
Germany | Kurdish | Northern Kurdistan | Poetry
January, 2020On October 13, just four days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tweeted his announcement of his pending invasion of Rojava, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, under the vilely euphemistic name Operation Peace Spring, I received an invitation to edit a new Google document from my friend and colleague Jiyar Homer, with whom I have been co-translating the short stories of the Kurdish polymath Farhad Pirbal. The note that accompanied the invitation was to the point: “Urgent translation.” Over the following days, we workshopped our translation of “The Tale of Hungry Dogs,” a short poem by the Ferîd Xan, a Kurd born in present-day Turkey. The poem, first published in 2006, seems as fresh as if it had been written that week. Indeed, the oppression and statelessness faced by the Kurdish people is not a new phenomenon—this is merely the latest chapter in a history of centuries of persecution and survival, as Xan suggests, “like a dog.” It’s our hope that this translation from the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish, spoken in both Rojava and Southern Turkey, contributes toward a collective remembrance of what continues to unfold in Rojava, now that the relentless news ticker has moved on. With over 150 civilians killed and over 300,000 displaced, the plight of the Kurds and Rojava’s other residents remains an urgent humanitarian crisis, and US betrayal of the predominately Kurdish peshmerga who served on the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State feels like just the latest kick to a gaunt but proud dog’s ribs.
- David Shook
Tatiana Oroño is widely acknowledged as an essential voice in contemporary Uruguayan poetry. I first became aware of her when I was in Uruguay in 2014, looking for poets to include in América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets. As I met with people, gathering suggestions for this anthology of poets under 40, her name kept coming up as someone—outside the anthology—that I just had to read. On that trip, I was lucky enough to meet Tatiana, who arranged for me to receive a copy of her book La piedra nada sabe. I immediately fell in love with her inventive, experimental voice.
Since then, we have met often and I have translated her poetry, publishing it in US and UK magazines such as Ploughshares, Guernica, World Literature Today, Stand, and the Western Humanities Review. We often meet in Montevideo at the cafe El Sportman across from the National Library, or for tea in her home in Malvin, a neighborhood of Montevideo long favored by writers and artists. I have been lucky enough to read her poems and poetic prose pieces ahead of their publication in her latest books, Estuario and Libro de horas, as well as her book-in-progress, Neblina, or—luckier still—to listen to her read them out loud to me.
Oroño’s subject matter is deeply felt, deeply personal to her, with poems about motherhood, the losses during the Uruguayan dictatorship of the 1980s, and, most of all, the natural world. A passionate environmentalist, Oroño finds her palate of images in nature. She is also a feminist and her poems show a consciousness of her own body, of being a woman in the pain and wonder of the everyday. But most of all, Oroño has a special awareness of language as a body of its own. Time and again she writes poems about poetry, poems that reclaim for poetry the power to give meaning to life.
- Jesse Lee Kercheval
This selection presents verses by Osip Mandelstam written in 1937, just one year before his second arrest and subsequent disappearance in a labor camp. The premonition of imminent death left its imprint on them. But these lines are not a cry of despair; rather they express recognition of the tragedy of being, concern for the preservation of Russia's cultural and moral heritage, and faith in the poet's mission.
- Boris Kokotov
China/France | Chinese | Poetry
November, 2019Song Lin is the most open and self-effacing Chinese-language poet I have ever met. He suffered for democratic causes, and after two years of imprisonment, migrated to France, “flee[ing] with beautiful wounds.” This was something he stood up for and he simply did what he had to do, and then literally, with light-handed humor, moved on. He asked for no laurels for his civil disobedience. Once overseas, he did not dwell on nostalgia and his chosen isolation, rather, “the fugue marches on,” displacing alienation with an “encyclopedia of the sky.” He looked up and forward. Symbolist and Surrealist touches are increasingly evident in his poems, and forms like the couplet enter his repertoire, as he “turns sorrow into craft.” He did not look back and assume an “exile” label. In fact, he has no labels. His labels, or rather, labors, are words; his true struggle, “the tribulation of a word, until it spits you out.” The natural world is turned to; museums are visited; the circus becomes a gaze on the poetic craft; words become sperm whales; the bell is tolled in the ear; there is fainting; and there is fainting again. The agony of a poet wandering in words and worlds strikes:
the fallen, lifted by our hands, leaking through our fingers
that once belonged to the stars are sands that boil like tears
What better description is there for a poet that blows wounds into wonders! This dazzling, he leaves to these lines of gold. He lets others shine. Through his poetry editorship at the important literary magazine Jintian (Today), he has been bringing foreign and unsung works to Chinese readers. He was an early advocate for classical Chinese and translation. He champions underrepresented masters, aspiring young writers, and everybody else, except himself. “Strangled / by the umbilical cord,” he takes seriously where Chinese poetry came from, and cares even more about where it is going. In SONG Lin’s poems, the strange becomes stranger, the familiar turns familiar again, the quiet becomes quieter and explodes. With understated restraint and exploratory openness, this is a poetry that strikes and burns. It is perhaps safe to say SONG Lin is the last centaur of contemporary Chinese avant-gardists, a rare poet that straddles the liminal space of words and wounds.
- Dong Li
Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born in 1911 in Kala Qader, British India (present-day Pakistan). He studied Arabic and English literature at Government College and Oriental College. A dedicated member of the Communist Party, Faiz often found himself afoul of Pakistan's ruling elites, leading to his exile and imprisonment. While he primarily wrote in Urdu, with few exceptions of Punjabi, Hindustani, and Persian verse, Faiz's body of work reaches deep into the fecund linguistic soil of the Indian subcontinent to draw nourishment from Hindustani, Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962 and the Lotus Prize for African and Asian Literature in 1976, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize before his death in 1984 at the age of 73.
Faiz stands alongside Mahmoud Darwish (who recounts their shared exile in Beirut in Memories of Forgetfulness), Nazim Hikmet (whom Faiz translated into Urdu), and Pablo Neruda (a friend) as an iconic figure of twentieth-century world literature. Urdu idiom on either side of the India-Pakistan border has absorbed his poetry to such a degree that it’s not uncommon to hear people quoting him in everyday conversations. His ghazals have been performed by many of South Asia’s most prominent singers. Yet despite his popularity and international profile, Faiz has largely remained unknown to Western readers. “To have to introduce Faiz’s name” to Western readers, Agha Shahid Ali writes in a review of Naomi Lazard’s 1988 translation of Faiz’s work, “a name that is mentioned in Pakistan . . . as often as the sun is, seem[s] a terrible insult.”
In his essay “The Mind of Winter: Reflections of Life in Exile,” Edward Said calls Faiz a poet of exile, engaged in lending “dignity to a condition legislated to deny dignity—to deny an identity to people.” I have the difficult privilege of being an émigré. I migrated from Pakistan to the United States in 1998. My paternal and maternal grandparents migrated from India with my young aunts and uncles at Partition. Dissolution of “home”—a place of familiarity, kinship, and historical continuity—has been the defining experience of my life. And Faiz’s poetry, in no small way, has helped me grapple with a condition that is terrifying, liberating, and above all, fugitive from settled notions about identity.
- Umair Kazi
I met Yūki Nagae in Tokyo in July 2018, as part of a contingent of international poets invited by Shiga University Professor and scholar Rina Kikuchi to participate in a translation workshop and a multilingual performance in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara. Each of us was randomly paired with a contemporary Japanese poet, and Yuki and I were fortuitously conjoined.
Since most of us international poets did not speak Japanese and knew neither the logographic kanji nor the syllabic kana, we spent the first part of our time together groping towards a holistic understanding of how poetics are embodied both visually and lexically, and what our partner poet's aesthetic might be. Luckily Yuki does speak English and had translated her poems into the simple phonetic foxtrot that then became clay for my shaping as we conversed. Some words had multiple meanings and allowed for ambiguity and the language was left-branching, accumulating connotation very differently than in English. Those differences notwithstanding, I found that her mind actually worked similarly to my own, employing metaphors from geology and chemistry alongside a formal and playful experimentation. Many of her poems show the incursion of civilization into the natural world and the melancholy of machines. I saw the urbanism of Frank O'Hara and tinges of Neruda in her work, echoes of where the Chilean poet needed a break from "stone and wool, institutions and gardens, commodities, eyeglasses, elevators."
What really helped me polish these translations was performing with Yuki at a launch event for the Tokyo Poetry Journal. She is an amazing performer who has developed an improvisational poetic style that she terms "Steric Poetry," and her work involves movement, intonation, and a responsive fusion of dance and utterance. Seeing the physicality of that work on stage helped me channel the final forms in English. Yuki's translations of my poems were published in one of Japan's most important contemporary poetry journals, Gendai-shi-techo, so I am very pleased that we are able to share two of her poems in English here.
- Ravi Shankar
Latin | Poetry | Roman Republic
September, 2019The ecstatic cult of Cybele or Cybebe, the Great Mother, was originally based in Phrygia (northern Turkey) and particularly associated with two mountains, Ida and Dindymus. In 204 BC, during the Second Punic War, it was brought to Rome, where it flourished despite legal restrictions. The priests, known as Gallae--who in Catullus’ time were still foreigners--frequently castrated themselves out of devotion to the goddess.
There are various versions of the myth of Attis and Cybele. In this one, Attis is a young Athenian of good family, who falls victim to the cult of Cybele. With a band of like-minded companions, he takes a ship to Phrygia, and, upon landing, castrates himself. We may assume that his companions do likewise. They then set out for the goddess’s shrine on Mount Ida. Upon arrival, exhausted, they fall asleep. The next morning Attis wakes up alone--his companions seem mysteriously to have vanished but this reinforces the dream-like effect--and bitterly regrets his rash action. It is too late.
The original uses a meter called Galliambic, which was associated with the worship of Cybele. I have used terza rima (and at one point rhyming triplets) as I find its rapid movement from stanza to stanza particularly suitable for narrative verse. I break away from it in three places: lines 16-45, where I use short irregularly rhymed lines for Attis’s ecstatic exhortation to his companions; lines 73-103, where I render Attis’s long self-recriminatory soliloquy in rhyming couplets (heroic or not!); and, finally, I revert to short, irregularly rhyming lines in the coda (129-137), a prayer to the goddess from Catullus himself to turn her attentions elsewhere.
In this poem Catullus explores the ancient fascination with, and distrust of, ecstatic cults. Like Euripides’ The Bacchae, it strikes a very modern chord.
Also very modern is the concern with gender identity. It is interesting that Catullus, many of whose poems are expressions of erotic love, has chosen a protagonist who has deliberately castrated himself as an expression of his hatred of Venus. Does this somehow express his own desperate desire to be without the sexual urge that has brought him so much trouble? Or is it that his romantic obsession has--according to traditional Roman thinking--unmanned him, a victim of love in a macho society? And, paradoxically, in this act of sexual renunciation there is a frenzied eroticism, the ultimate masochism.
Even deeper is an almost existentialist panic over the loss of his own identity as a person. If he has lost his identity as a man, then who or what is he? Notice the repetition of "I" in the soliloquy.
- Ranald Barnicot
Friedrich Chernyshev (b. 1989) studied at the Donetsk Medical University in Ukraine and currently lives in Kiev. He is an LGBTQI activist and coordinates the transgender program for Insight, a Ukrainian LGBT community organization. His translations from German and Ukrainian have been appearing since 2013 in TextOnly, Air (Vozdukh), and elsewhere. His own poems were first published in the gender issue of ’Nother Man – ’Nother Woman (Yshsho Odin — Yshsho Odna) of Almaty, Kazakhstan. You can find his work on textonly.ru, litkarta.ru, and polutona.ru, and you can read (in Russian) about his coming out on upogau.org.
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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