Mohamed Metwalli was born in Cairo in 1970. He was awarded a BA in English Literature from Cairo University, Faculty of Arts in 1992. The same year, he won the Yussef el-Khal Prize by Riyad el-Rayes Publishers in Lebanon for his poetry collection Once Upon a Time. He co-founded an independent literary magazine, el-Garad, in which his second volume of poems, The Story the People Tell in the Harbor, appeared in 1998. He was selected to represent Egypt in the University of Iowa's International Writing Program in 1997, and served as Poet-in-Residence at the University of Chicago in 1998. He compiled and co-edited Angry Voices, an anthology of offbeat Egyptian poetry published by the University of Arkansas press in 2002. His most recent collection, Lost Promenades, was published by al-Kitaba al-Ukhra in 2010.
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) is sui generis among French poets, although sometimes classified as a purveyor of "Symbolism." As the featured sonnet shows, his verse was tinted by the emphasis on spleen and ennui with which French poetry has been largely identified since Baudelaire's time. Reading "Angoisse," I got a funny feeling that, if Mallarmé had lived in the 20th century, he might have enjoyed getting drunk with the likes of Charles Bukowski. (Jenna Le)
Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855) is typically classified among the French Romantics. The narrowness of the gap between his birth year and death year can be attributed to depressive tendencies, which led him to hang himself, leaving a suicide note for his family: "Don't wait up for me, for this night will be a black-and-white one." Alongside his extraordinary poetry, Nerval should also be remembered for the tender affection he showed his pet lobster, Thibault. All crustacean-admirers cannot help but agree with his vehement declaration that "Lobsters are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don't bark, and they don't gnaw upon one's monadic privacy like dogs do." Nerval's sonnet "El Desdichado" takes its title from Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott's Romantic novel about the Crusades, in which "El Desdichado" is the alias adopted by the knight Ivanhoe after he is disinherited by his father for falling in love with the wrong woman. In Spanish, "el desdichado" means "the unfortunate one."
Poetry | Vietnam | Vietnamese
May, 2011Phan Nhiên Hạo's poems are "fueled by a mix of strife, hope, love, and futility," as he writes in Manufacturing Poetry. Phan writes elusive, surreal, yet emotionally charged poetry shadowed by his experience of growing up in post-war Vietnam and living in the diaspora. The six poems translated here, selected from his two collections in Vietnamese, Thiên Đường Chuông Giấy (Paradise of Paper Bells, 1998) and Chế Tạo Thơ Ca 99-04 (Manufacturing Poetry 99-04, 2004), exhibit the qualities that readers, critics, and fellow poets have admired about Phan Nhiên Hạo's work: a poetic idiom drawn from the cadences of ordinary speech and rhythms of everyday life; the way his seemingly smooth surfaces are punctured by arresting images, surprising phrases, and shocks of insight; the spectral presence of war and exile; his faithful acts of excavating buried histories and mourning the unmourned; the bluesy, melancholic, and ironic consciousness at the center and circumference of his complex and moving music. Unpublished and unpublishable in Vietnam, Phan Nhiên Hạo's poetry circulates underground, online, and overseas. Fortunately for English readers, his work is available in the excellent translations by Linh Dinh collected in Night, Fish, and Charlie Parker (Tupelo Press, 2006). I try my hand at translation here out of a creative and collaborative desire to respond to the call of the poems themselves. I hope this small clutch of poems by Phan Nhiên Hạo will do justice to his necessary poetry--or at the very least, shine a spotlight on an unnecessarily neglected poet.
(Hai-Dang Phan)
Since the 1980s, Yi Lu has established herself as one of the most widely-read female poets in contemporary China. Born in 1956, she has authored four books of poetry, including the award-winning titles See (2004) and Using Two Seas (2009). Known for an elegant and distilled lyrical voice, her poems are at once meditative and vibrant. Recent national honors include the Hundred Flowers Award and the Distinguished Literary Prize from the Fujian Province. Serving as an active theatre design artist at the People's Art Theatre in Fujian, Yi Lu is also ranked as China's preeminent national scenographer and stage designer.
Bai Hua is considered to be the central literary figure of the post-Misty Poetry movement during the 1980s. Born in 1956 in Chongqing, he read English literature at Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute before graduating with a master's degree in Western literary history from Sichuan University. His first collection of poems, Expression (1988), found immediate critical acclaim. A highly demanding writer, Bai Hua has a small but selective poetic output: in the past thirty years he's written approximately ninety poems, most of which command a large audience in his nation today. After a silence of more than a decade, he began writing poetry again in 2007. That same year, his work garnered the prestigious Rougang Poetry Award. A prolific writer of critical prose and hybrid texts, Bai Hua is also a recipient of the Anne Kao Poetry Prize. Currently living in Chengdu, Sichuan, he teaches at the Southwestern Transportation University.
Gellu Naum (1915-2001) remains one of the major European poets of the twentieth century. He started as an orthodox Surrealist, together with Andre Breton and Victor Brauner in the Paris of the 1930s (where he pursued a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne). After returning home to Romania, in the early 1940s, he embarked on a solitary and prolific career that kept his verse inexpugnable to the Communist regime's political agenda while continuously reshaping surrealism into a chameleonic complex oeuvre that absorbed popular culture and managed to fuse a wide range of styles and dictions. His highly influential work both encompassed and veiled political critique, Eastern and Western spirituality, occultism, literary tradition, and mordant oneiric ironies.
Polina Barskova is known as one of the best Russian poets of her generation. She has won a number of awards for her poetry.
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Known for his famous definition of Acmeism as "nostalgia (or thirst) for world culture," in the later poem of 1933 Osip Mandelstam wrote: "Do not tempt foreign tongues--attempt forgetting them, alas,/Because your teeth will never bite the glass," which seems to deny everything he believed.
Having gone through all the circles of earthly hell and purgatory and anticipating his own arrest and perhaps death, Mandelstam, nevertheless, claims that heaven is a "lifetime home" creating thus his own pattern of "Paradiso terrestre."
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The "Slate Ode" is one of the most esoteric poems in Mandelstam's creativity. The poet is known for his exceptional manner of hiding allusions and destroying bridges-associations.
Omry Ronen in his profound book An Approach to Mandelstam made diachronic and synchronic analyses of "The Slate Ode" and "January 1, 1924."(1) While restoring the bridges in these of Mandelstam's poems written in 1923, Ronen hit the right target and even created a kind of a history of the Russian verse from Lomonosov and Derzhavin to the twentieth century on the one hand, and connected Mandelstam's prose, essays, and poetry on the other, by thus achieving a striking and sometimes a superfluous effect as, for example, in his citations of the use of blazhen and blagosloven (blessed) in Russian poetry: since Derzhavin and especially Pushkin there was hardly a Russian poet who did not use these words.
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).