Anna Piwkowska (b. Feb. 3, 1963) is a Polish poet, novelist, and essayist. The Dye Girl (Farbiarka) is her eighth published book of poetry, which revolves around meditations on love, death, mothers, and mythologies. Piwkowska graduated from the University of Warsaw with a degree in Polish language and literature, and her poems have been published in numerous leading Polish literary journals. She has received numerous prizes for her poetry and prose, most recently having The Dye Girl acknowledged with the 2009 Warsaw Literary Prize. She has also published a novel, and a nonfiction book about the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Though much of her poetry has been translated into German and Russian, most of it remains untranslated in English. Piwkowska currently lives in Warsaw.
The three featured poems borrow from the nineteenth century without obediently remaining within it. The author specifies that he is, as stated in "Borges spankspank," actually descended from the Cuban bandit Manuel García, who is also depicted in artwork displayed at Havana's fine arts museum. "Days of 1834" similarly draws on a compelling historical figure, this time a poet, flirting with the contours of his storyline. Under the surface of that poem, Flores speaks to another contemporary Cuban writer who is deeply interested in ruins—a "ruinologist," even—but who shall remain anonymous: Flores does not give permission to "out" the figures from contemporary island life who flit through this book. However, he tends to describe his poems as implicitly championing their existence in the face of a society that may at times discourage personal growth, change, or difference. "Germany, 1843" was supposed to be a poem about Nietzsche, but it uncooperatively turned into a poem about Hölderlin. Flores has decided that in the center it's also reaching toward Cavafy, and perhaps, toward ancient Greeks. (Kristin Dykstra)
Poetry | Spanish | United States
August, 2010Evgueni Bezzubikoff Diaz was born in Huancayo, Perú in 1978. He studied at the Colegio Salesiano and graduated from the Instituto Pedagógico Nacional Monterrico (IPNM) in 2000 with a degree in Education, majoring in the English language. He has lived in the United States since 2001, but wrote poetry well before his voluntary exile to this country, winning IPNM’s Primer Premio de Poesía, Libertad Bajo Palabra, in 2000. Cartas de Nueva York was published by Hipocampo Editores (Lima, Perú) in 2007. His new book, Crónica del Adiós will be published in 2010 by the same press.
I have a contemporary reaction to the life of Charles Baudelaire. I am reminded of Bob Dylan's "Yonder stands your orphan with his gun/Crying like a fire in the sun." Or of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Or I think of the joke between a friend and me that to "follow your bliss" may lead to homelessness. An adolescent genius, Baudelaire sometimes, like most adolescents, felt weary beyond his years. Seemingly willful and contrary—undoubtedly to protect his role as the soul in revolt—the poet setting out to make great demands on language was intently committed, it seemed, to a certain internal journey. While his biography has romantic connections with various women, you may read in his poetry that his essential nature was that of the poet, a life essentially of solitude, resisting the world.
In the process of translating, one finally walks into the poem as if into a house or a forest and looks around from the inside, because you cannot make the final transition from literal translation to new poem if you are not drenched in the presence and feeling of the original. (Perhaps my inflated language about this only expresses the joy I feel whenever pieces in the English counterpart little by little fall into place.) What a kick to have a dialogue with someone speaking a different language—in the case of Baudelaire, a dialogue across time. We hear Baudelaire colored by the style of English translation during each era since his death, and those past translations lose effect for me, and so I am motivated, as well, to let Baudelaire go on speaking as fresh as in his original by "refreshing" the way he is translated. (James McColley Eilers)
Aleksey Khomyakov (1804–1860) was a Russian religious philosopher, historian, economist, poet, painter, engineer, and inventor. He was the leader of the Slavophiles and promoted the idea of Pan-Slavism based on the principles of Orthodoxy. His early poems, created within the framework of romanticism, are concerned with the inner unity between the spirit and nature. Later he drew the most important source of his poetry from Orthodox Christianity. His theological writings influenced Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovyov. Khomyakov’s poetry remains largely untranslated.
Finnish search-engine poet Tytti Heikkinen is the author of two books, 2008's Täytetyn eläimen lämpo (Taxidermied Animal's Warmth) and 2009's Varjot astronauteista (Shadows From Astronauts), both from poEsia. Helsingin Sanomat nominated her first book for its book prize, saying in the accompanying review that her work "challenged poetry to a new level." Heikkinen uses new digital media to tackle issues of authorship in brave and often funny ways, and for this she has been critically praised.
Heikkinen's poems have a total effect at once light and devastating. They are overlaid with both a classic, quiet, characteristically Nordic dark, and a bloggy, confrontational, postmodern self-awareness. This duality is what first attracted me to Heikkinen's work, and it is also at the center of our collaboration, which goes something like this: Heikkinen sends me an enthusiastic email. I retreat to process the information quietly. Heikkinen sends me a pithy reply and tells me to get shit done.
Our correspondence has been reckless, wordy, occasionally drunken, and always passionate. It has become exceedingly clear that neither of us is perfect, but the poems stubbornly push past all personal matters, and what they invoke is pure.
The translations featured here began to take shape in the spring of 2009, and portions of the project are found or forthcoming in At-Large Magazine and PRECIPICe.
(Niina Pollari)
Minimalism? Stevens, “the nothing that is”; Williams, “a machine made of words.” Economy of means, focus on surfaces, concreteness, eschewing figuration, making silence and absence present, self-effacement, and the spareness of Suprematism. In the American context, Robert Morris, “Maximum resistance to…perceptual separation” inviting the viewer's participation and co-production in the creation of meaning. Donald Judd's “Specific Objects” and their “indeterminancy of arrangement” making for unclassifiable art “between” painting and sculpture, challenging the poetry/not poetry distinction, non-Art references and the use of industrial materials akin to citation, cliché, common speech, public announcement, advertising slogan, proverb, etc. But also Zen, a nearly spiritual pursuit, and human voice as sound sculpture. Not a movement: “Minimalism is not really an idea; it ended before it started” (Sol LeWitt). In the Russian context of the ‘60s and ‘70s, a resumption of the ‘30s generation's Absurdism, the naïve populist lyric of the war generation with its creation of a sphere for private utterance, a truly subversive act, parody of ‘50s Socialist Realism through coding, implication by omission, and ironic critique of the Soviet status quo. The emergence of Russian Conceptualism and so called SotsArt (Russian Pop Art). Yes Irony, but also pathos and a kind of aesthetics of exhaustion, both of the personal and of the historical kind. Minimalism: that legal definition of pornography: I know it when I see it. Enough said.
Yuli Gugolev was born in Moscow in 1964. He is a translator and the author of two books of poetry: Polnoe: Sobranie sochineniy (Complete: Collected Works; Moscow: OGI, 2000), and Komandirovochnye predpisaniya (Official Instructions; Moscow: Novoe izdatelstvo, 2006), which won the Moscow Count prize for 2007. In 2008, Gugolev was one of three poets invited to give a series of bilingual readings around the United States sponsored by the NEA and the Poetry Foundation in conjunction with the release of Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology from Dalkey Archives. He works in the regional division of the International Commission of the Red Cross in the Russian Federation.
Avrom Sutzkever, who died on January 20, 2010 at the age of 96, was the greatest postwar Yiddish poet, a prophetic survivor whose fate paralleled the tragedies and joys of Jews in the twentieth century. Raised in the brief but intense literary flowering of Vilna, he melted the printing plates of the city's most famous press into bullets for the guns of ghetto fighters. He witnessed the ghetto's destruction, helped to salvage the remains of the city's Jewish treasures, testified at Nuremberg, and immigrated to Israel, where he was at the center of rapidly waning high Yiddish literary culture. He founded and edited for some four decades the premier Yiddish literary magazine, Di Goldene Keyt. His poems depict his life not autobiographically, but auto-epically.
The dove of the Ode serves as a spiritual mentor to the boy-poet. The poem ends with the impassioned declaration of a secular-literary neomessianist: "Build, build the temple, build it with the sense of the sun!" It is a measure of the complexity of Sutzkever's Jewish poetics that he calls it a templ (a rarely used word in Yiddish), not a beyt-hamikdash. The third temple will be nothing at all like the first two.
Boris Karloff is the pen name of Dov-Ber Kerler, the polylingual and peripatetic son of the refusenik Yiddish poet Yosef Kerler. The two Kerlers are probably the only father-son team in postwar Yiddish poetry. The younger Kerler is known for his poetic and Yiddishist heterodoxy, his wit, and his openness to young talent. He is a scholar of Yiddish literary history at Indiana University.
Yonia Fain's odyssey is also emblematic of recent Jewish history. Born in Russia in 1914, he fled to Vilna, where he studied art and decided to be a painter. In 1939, the Soviets occupied the city; he fled again to Warsaw but was captured and imprisoned by the Soviets. He escaped to Japan via Siberia in 1941; the Japanese deported him to Shanghai, where he spent the rest of the war. After liberation he went to Mexico City, where he worked on murals with Diego Rivera. He has lived and painted in New York since 1953, publishing two books of poetry (the latest in 2008) and one book of short stories. His preoccupations are bleak and unsparing but offer the possibility of resurrection.
Poetry | Russian | United States
December, 2009Marina Temkina was born in Leningrad in 1948 and emigrated to New York City in 1978. She has published four books of poetry in Russian: Chasti chast' (A Part of A Part), V obratnom napravlenii (In Reverse), Kalancha (Watchtower), and Canto Immigranto. Temkina's first book in English, WHAT DO YOU WANT? (just out from Ugly Duckling Presse) consists of several texts made for installations or as part of handmade artist's books, and two poems translated from Russian (by Vladislav Davidzon and Alexander Stessin) accompanied by installation images and original drawings by the author. Many of her other poems have been translated by Alfred Corn. She is a past recipient of an NEA grant and a Charles H. Revson Fellowship on the Future of New York at Columbia University.
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).