Benjamin Aisenshtadt (1921-1999) chose the pen name Benjamin Blazhennyi, "Benjamin the Blessed." In Russian the word blazhennyi can mean a freak, a jester, or a saint. The Soviet authorities treated the poet as a fool, a freak, an utterly unpractical person. Needless to say, none of Aizenshtadt’s poems was published until late 1980s. After the war, the poet was not allowed to finish his education because he was not a member of the Communist Party. Moreover, for his anti-social behavior he was from time to time put in a mental institution. Otherwise he worked in a facility for the disabled and took care of his wife, a disabled veteran of WWII. For the last 20 years of his life, he barely left his apartment in Minsk, Belarus. Beginning in the late 1980s, his poems started to appear in periodicals and immediately startled the critics who did not know how to classify them: Blazhennyi did not fit into any school or trend. It was well after the time of so-called perestroika when poets, critics, and publishers frequented his tiny apartment, taking interviews and asking for poems. This activity led to his books being published in Belarus, Russia, and Israel under the pen-name of Benjamin Blazhennyi (the Blessed).
It is notable that St. Augustine is called "Augustine the Blessed" in Russian. Therefore "the blessed" is a saint, the one who communicates with the Divine spirit. Blazhennyi's poetry is full of powerful images: it is both pious and iconoclastic, sacred and profane, tranquil and full of fury.
Benjamin Aisenshtadt was born in 1921 to a Jewish family in the small Byelorussian shtetl Kopys’. His father Michail was an unpractical man as well. As the poet wrote:
My father Michail Aisenshtadt was the biggest fool in town:
He claimed that wolf and lamb had soul.
He claimed that a mosquito and a fly had soul as well
He wore worn-out trousers and never learned to sell.
When a Jew was sorry for a wounded nestling of a jackdaw,
He did not need a store. Why would he need a store?
Before World War II, Benjamin finished one year of a pedagogical college, majoring in history. Since he had poor health, he was not drafted into the army. His family managed to escape to a small village in Gorky oblast (now Nizny Novgorod) where he taught history at a school. He discovered a rich library there untouched by Bolshevik purges, and began copying books into his notebooks. After the war, he visited his favorite poets, Boris Pasternak and Arseny Tarkovsky, in Moscow. Pasternak was reluctant to meet with young emerging poets, perhaps fearing the ungifted who had the nerve to get a reference to publishers from famous authors. After reading Blazhennyi’s poems, however, Pasternak not only welcomed him, but initiated a lifelong friendship and correspondence. Blazhennyi eventually wrote essays and memoirs about Pasternak.
- Ian Probstein
Roald Mandelstam (1932-1961), who died of tuberculosis and intestinal hemorrhage at the age of twenty-eight, was a gifted and singular poet who unfortunately was not published in his short lifetime. He called himself “the last poet on earth” in his last poem, entitled “Epilogue.” In fact, he was perhaps the last romantic poet, a sparkling splinter of the Russian Silver Age. There is an evident affinity between the poetry of R. Mandelstam with the poetry of the Silver Age—first and foremost, with the poetry of Blok, Gumilev and Osip Mandelstam, but Roald Mandelstam's work differs from theirs due to his unique syncretic imagery, vision, and intonation. Moreover, he is an existential poet and, as such, he continued the highest traditions of the Russian poetry from Derzhavin and Tiutchev to Gumilev and O. Mandelstam. He was one of the first postwar underground poets in Leningrad, a forerunner of the brilliant constellation of poets that included the so-called Leningrad Philological School, Leonid Aronson, Vladimir Uflyand, and Joseph Brodsky, as well as the poets of his circle, Victor Krivulin, Elena Shvarts, and many more.
In his review of Mandelstam's third posthumously published book, Kirill Medvedev compares his poetry to the French les poètes maudits. True, such poems as “My Friends,” “A Grim Guest,” or “Junkman” are akin to Rimbaud’s poems and Corbière’s “Night Paris.” There is an evident trace of antagonism and protest against the totalitarian system, against those who accept their slavery, but the rebel-poet calls his fellow citizens to revolt. Even alluding to Roman history, Roald Mandelstam draws parallels with his contemporary life. Mandelstam’s lack of agony, decadence, and narcissism distinguishes him from the French les poètes maudits, however. Among other distinctive features of Mandelstam’s poetry are his artistic vision in images and syncretic imagery revealing all five senses. As V. Kreyd mentioned in his essay of 1984, in Mandelstam's poetry “nature is spiritualized; there is no borderline between human nature, organic and inorganic nature" (Kreyd 22).*
He was rediscovered by Mikhail Shemiakin, who published Mandelstam’s poetry in the almanac Apollon-77, and by K. Kuz’minskii, who published selected works in the anthology U Goluboi Laguny (At the Blue Lagoon). From 1982 to 1997, four books of Mandelstam's poetry were published in Israel and Russia, including Complete Poems (St. Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh Publishing, 2006), which was compiled and edited by the poet’s sister, Mrs. Helene Petrov-Mandelstam. She and I are currently compiling a bilingual English-Russian edition of Roald Mandelstam’s Selected Poetry.
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* Kreyd, V. Zametki o poezii Roal’da Mandel’stama. (Notes on Roald Mandelstam’s poetry). Strelets 4 (1984): 22-24.
- Ian Probstein
Pilar Fraile Amador's Larva & Hedge is one of those rare collections that affects the reader by both attracting and repelling, that can simultaneously enchant and disturb. Fraile's poems mesmerize and sing; they weave captivating webs. But they are fascinating, too, in their potential for repulsion, in their willingness to inhabit the most unsettling of spaces. The force of the text, then--the way it acts upon the reader's interior--is twofold.
On the one hand, Fraile's poems are magnetic. They read like deftly spun incantations, sonorous lines draped over imagined topographies. But they derive equal force from their readiness to shock and disturb, to wield images that pierce a reader's repose and rearrange one's insides. The poems occupy both dreamscape and night terror; they caress and startle. They situate us in the space between our discomfort and enthrallment at the sight of blood. We cannot turn away.
That Fraile's text both attracts and repels is fitting. It is a collection that deals in dualities, juxtaposing the intimate and the collective, the strong and the weak, the human and the animal; yoking them together to call their differences into question. It is this gesture that begins Fraile's project of blurring lines and traversing borders.
The volume itself is binary, split into two distinct sections that function together. In Larva, Fraile explores the undercurrent of correspondence that exists unnoticed between human beings, the wellspring of the common subconscious. Here, individual and collective memories intermix and alter one another and the living can communicate with objects and the dead. The destruction of the 'I,' then, becomes a generative act that allows the other--or others--to pass into and expand an individual consciousness. Under these circumstances, the lines between past and present, between self and other, grow indistinct. The speaker is a secret essence that mediates the collective, a human distillate in the antechamber of life. The past never dies.
In the second section of the book, Hedge, the individual disappears completely. The poetic subject shifts to plural as Fraile reflects on what binds a community. While both halves of the volume are image-driven, the poems that constitute Hedge are more intricate than the preceding fragments, rich with sensory detail and of longer duration. They take shape as blocks of prose poetry that make use of repetition, compression, and fragmentation and fuse lines into paragraphs. This configuration yields both continuity and a useful sense of isolation: while each poem is visually cloistered as a block of text on its own page, the poems hang together with their consistent form as stages in a continuous meditation.
Fraile cites influences who move "in the border of the border"--from symbolists Baudelaire and Rimbaud with their intuitive associations, unconventional syntax, and indirect expression; to the surrealism of Lorca and Buñuel; to contemporary Spanish classics like Ullán, Valente, and Gamoneda. Her imagistic precision, along with stylistic choices like nonlinear forms and a disjunctive, multivocal timbre, demonstrate a desire to move in literary border areas and to create poetry that is unflinchingly exploratory.
- Elizabeth Davis
Argentina/France | French | Poetry
November, 2014After four decades of writing in her adopted tongue, Argentine poet Silvia Baron Supervielle's themes in Around the Void seem little changed, even if tinged more recently with a sense of impending mortality: always she finds herself at an existential precipice, with her mixed allegiances to her two languages as to her sense of place and belonging.
About her change of language, she explained in a 1997 interview with the translator: "It seemed to me that I would never be able to find the thread, to achieve some kind of wholeness, if I kept writing in Spanish. But something very strange happened to me. Suddenly I found a terrain where I recognized myself and which was mine, where it was so difficult finding the word and the language that I wrote very short poems, very pared down. That's how I started to write these poems that are of such little means, I understood that this is exactly what I am, this sort of poverty of words, this fear of the language. I realized I had found something, a place that was mine. That poverty was like a mirror that was imposed on me. It wasn't due to French, from which I also wanted to remain apart, but to that distance between the language and me, which resembled the distance I wanted to exist around me, on both sides, a distance that obliged me to pare things down. That's how I became a writer in French. For me it was a discovery that has nothing to do with the idea of the past or the French language tradition."
Though she has visited her native Buenos Aires with some regularity over the years, it wasn't until 1997 that she returned as a writer--invited by the French embassy as a French writer who also spoke Spanish. And only in subsequent years has her work begun to appear in Spanish translation.
The following poems are the first two sections of Autour du vide ("Around the Void"), her eleventh book of poetry, made up of seven sections with ten poems each.
- Jason Weiss
Iran/United States | Modern Persian | Poetry
November, 2014Nader Naderpour (1929 -2000) was born in Tehran and received his early education in Europe. He returned to Iran to publish his first collection of poetry in the 1940s. In the later 1960's, he helped found "The Association of Writers of Iran and directed the literature department of the Iranian National Radio and Television Department. He fled the Iranian Revolution in 1980, living in France until the late 1980's, when he moved to the United States. Regarded as one of the leaders of the movement of "New Poetry" in Iran, he published ten collections of poems. Naderpour was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was awarded the Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett Grant in 1993.
- Roger Sedarat and Rouhollah Zarei
Gabriele Tinti is a writer fascinated by boxing. His micro-essays and dramatic reenactments probe our frayed tolerance for the cruelty of the sport in the modern era. With great compassion, Tinti sketches recent bouts and the stories of boxers that are at risk of perdition. Many of these boxers were badly used; their blood-sport struggle became passing entertainment. Tinti's stories of heroic and often tragic perseverance push us to contemplate social issues that engulf us well beyond the ring. This selection is taken from Tinti's All Over, published in 2013 by Mimesis Edizioni.
- Nicholas Benson
Classical Persian | Kashmir | Poetry
November, 2014No city's worth the name without barbers in it. And the citied societies of pre-nineteenth century Islamic civilization had them in plenty. But, as in pre-modern Europe, these barbers did more than cut hair. They also played medical roles. Islamic medical traditions were based on Arabic translations of the works of the ancient Greek physician Galen (d. 200 C.E.). They inherited from him their humoral physiology and an understanding of health as humoral balance. Cure lay in restoring lost humoral balance by draining the body of its excess humor. While learned philosophers and physicians composed medical treatises and qualified surgeons attended to the rich, people of more modest means typically resorted to barbers for everyday surgical operations like cupping, phlebotomy, circumcision, and cauterization.
They often did so at the hammāms or steam-baths that Islamic urban culture inherited in its earliest phases from Byzantium, baths that almost always featured barbers among their staff. Regarded as facilitating God's will that everyone be clean, steam-baths were considered vital to bodily discipline, health and ethical culture. Their attendant barbers consequently took on a simultaneously aesthetic and ethical-political role as divinely mandated beautifiers and doctors of bodies. This is the context for the constellation of images and associations Ghanī Kashmīrī invokes in his "A Masnavī Satirizing a Barber."*
The masnavī in rhymed couplets was the most prestigious pre-novelistic genre for narrative literature in the Persianate world. Ghanī gives the first 17 of his 28 couplets to a series of descriptions apparently extolling a certain barber for his simultaneously erotic, political, and medical powers. These 17 couplets ingeniously describe the barber's implements of trade in terms associated with the ghazal beloved: for instance, couplet 8 declares he never wets hairs on heads because hairs themselves melt from shame at his erotically narrow waist, here described as finer than a hair by conventional hyperbole; and couplet 9 metaphorizes the holes and curves of his scissors, respectively, as the beloved's eyes and brows.
Ghanī devotes the remaining 10 couplets to describing his relations with the barber. These couplets play on the barber's dual role as hair-cutter and surgeon, ironically aestheticizing his grotesquely painful cupping and surgical operations as if they were the archetypal beloved's cruelty towards the lover.
Finally, a note on what is lost in translation: Ghanī excelled at īhām, the generation of poetic ambiguity. Couplet 10 that speaks of scissor-handles as "competition for the eyebrow" uses the word ham-chishmī, meaning "competition" but also containing the word chishm or "eye." Such linguistic play is as much a delight to the reader of the Persian original as it is the despair of the translator. Nevertheless, to convey the jogging rhythm of the original I have translated Ghanī's masnavī into rhymed English couplets, almost all in iambic pentameter.
* "Masnavī-i avval dar hajv-i hajjām," in Mullā Muhammad Tāhir Ghanī Kashmīrī, Dīvān-i ghanī (Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Arts, Culture and Literature, 1984), 244-245.
- Prashant Keshavmurthy
André Chenier is universally acknowledged to be the most gifted poet of eighteenth-century France. His masterpiece is The Bucolics, impersonal but moving and dramatic treatments of classical themes. The best known poem of this collection is "The Tarentine Bride," featured here. Like most of the Bucolics, it is composed in the Alexandrine couplets of rhyming hexameters perfected by Racine, but given a new flexibility by Chenier. I have translated them into their English equivalent, the pentameter heroic couplets that dominated English eighteenth-century verse. The French text can be found on line at Wikisource, le bibliothéque libre, Bucoliques, or Les grands poémes classiques.
- John Anson
Paol Keineg is a Breton poet and playwright. Though he lived in America for many years, he has now returned to Brittany, where he is recognized for both his earlier political work and for the lyric beauty of his poems. One reviewer wrote of his 2005 book Là, et pas là: "A world rich with diverse identities, feats and defeats, from savagery to civilization and back, a poetry of secrets as much as cries. And if the whole point is to stay in the world without getting angry? The strength of his work doesn't ask us to obey" (Claude Lalande, Le Nouveau Recueil, translation my own). The title of his 2012 book Abalamour is a microcosm of these qualities--abalamour in the Breton language means "because," the beginning of a reasoned argument, but in French abalamour sounds like "à bas l'amour"--down with love.
Like Pessoa, he uses heteronyms to create, in his words, "a liberating effect under certain circumstances." Poems in Abalamour are written under the names "Chann Lagatu" and "Yves Dennielou," suggesting lineages and family histories in addition to the author's own.
In the title poem, Keineg draws on Breton, French, and American allusions. Instead of footnoting, I have included a few glosses here. Part of this poem takes place in North Carolina (where Keineg was a professor at Duke for many years). The poem refers to a Breton story about the figure of Death who drives from town to town at night in his carriage. The wheels of the carriage make a squeaking noise ("wik-ha-wak") as he passes through to collect the dead. The other Breton reference in the poem is to al leur nevez--a party where neighbors dance on a new threshing floor to tamp down the dirt and make a good surface for the grain. Kiez ar bed means "bitch of the world" in Breton.
- Laura Marris
The poems in Smugglers, including those featured here, move through rapid historical shifts and meditations on personal experience, exploring the depths and limits of comprehension through the people and geography of the Balkans. Ultimately, Debeljak's urban imagination creates a mosaic--intimate and historical--of a vanished people and their country. Every poem in Smugglers is 16 lines long (four quatrains, a common form for Debeljak). This structural regularity is reinforced by a commitment to visual balance, with each poem working as a kind of grid into which the poet pours memories and associative riffs.
Other translations from Smugglers have appeared in Asymptote, Barrow Street, Guernica, The Iowa Review, The Literary Review, and other journals.
- Brian Henry
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).