Alexei Khvostenko (1940-2004) deserves a larger, "literary" audience, but his "outsider" status is unlikely to be reversed posthumously and outside the Russian context, requiring an appreciation of him as a multi-artist (poet, singer/bard, collagist/sculptor) and an awareness of his immense popularity as a persona non grata during the exhilarating cultural moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Soviet status quo was still in place but the liberating/decadent influences of the West had flooded in. Suspector (literally: "he who suspects") is the title poem of Khvostenko's first samizdat book (1965) at the height of the Khruschev "thaw” which was to be shortly followed by the suppression and stagnation of the Brezhnev years. These words were revolutionary, eliciting the disproportionate response from the authorities that made the Russian outsider bards Pop Icons. Khvost (his nickname means "Tail”) lived in Paris after his 1977 expulsion from the USSR.
Additional translations of Bei Dao's poetry by Clayton Eshleman and Lucas Klein may be found in Bookslut (September 2009); Jacket (Issue 38); and Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics blog (October 2, 2009). A set also will appear in a forthcoming issue of New American Writing.
All of the poems have been translated and published with the permission of the author.
Earlier translations of the four poems presented here appear in Landscape Over Zero (New Directions, 1996; translated by David Hinton and Yanbing Chen).
Arabic | Poetry | United Arab Emirates
October, 2009Thani al-Suwaidi was born in the United Arab Emirates in 1966. He has published two collections of poetry: Liyajiff Riq al-Bahr (So the Sea’s Foam May Dry Out, (Ittihad Kuttab wa-Udaba’ al-Imarat, 1991), and al-Ashya’ Tamurr (Stuff Happens, Dar al-Intishar al-Arabi, 2000).
His novella, al-Dizil (The Diesel) was published in 1994 by Dar al-Jadid in Beirut, reprinted in Baghdad in 2006, and then published in 2008 by al-Maktab al-Misri lil-Matbu‘at in Cairo.
Vyacheslav Vasilievich Semikin was born on May 23, 1937 in Leningrad, USSR. He attended Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) State University, majoring in Philosophy, but left in the third year without completing his degree. He worked as a stage assistant at the Lenin Komsomol Theater, now Baltic House, and toured with the company throughout what was then the Soviet Union. In 1978, Semikin was forcibly physically removed from his home, an ancient wooden wing of an old structure on the Canal Griboedov, near Bankovsky Most. The wing was demolished. This forcible eviction, coupled with his disillusionment with the University and general feeling that he could not express himself freely, solidified his disdain of the Soviet state and propelled him further into what was to become a solitary and isolated existence. All of these experiences heavily influenced his poetry. Semikin died in February of 1990, immediately upon his return to Leningrad from a trip to New York. Neither a member of the Writer’s Union, nor a part of the Leningrad Underground which would have afforded him the opportunity to publish in Samizdat form, Semikin was never published during his lifetime.
María Negroni has published numerous books of poetry, including De tanto desolar, Per/canta, La jaula bajo el trapo, Diario Extranjero, Camera delle Meraviglie, Islandia, El Viaje de la Noche, and Andanza, as well as novels, translations, and essays. She has won two Argentine National Book Awards, as well as other prestigious prizes and fellowships. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Héctor Hernández Montecinos was born in Santiago, Chile in 1979. His books of poetry that were published between 2001 and 2003 are collected in [guión] (Lom Ediciones: Santiago, Chile, 2008); [coma] (Lom Ediciones, 2009) collects his writings from 2004-2006. His other books include Putamadre (Zignos: Lima, 2005), Ay de Mi (Ripio: Santiago, 2006), La poesia chilena soy yo (Mandrágora cartonera: Cochabamba, 2007), Segunda mano (Zignos: Lima, 2007), A 1000 (Lustra editores: Lima, 2008), Livro Universal (Demonio negro: Sao Paulo, 2008, traducido al portugués), Poemas para muchachos en llamas (RdlPS: Ciudad de México, 2008), La Escalera (Yerba Mala cartonera: La Paz, 2008) El secreto de esta estrella (Felicita cartonera: Asunción, 2008), La interpretación de mis sueños (Moda y Pueblo: Stgo, 2008) y NGC 224 (Literal: Ciudad de México, 2009). He has been invited to present his poetry in Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru. Since 2008, he has lived in Mexico where he teaches, and directs a small literary press called Santa Muerte cartonera. He holds a doctorate in literature with a focus in art theory.
Ángel Escobar Varela was born in 1957 in Sitiocampo, located in Cuba’s rural eastern province of Guantánamo. As an adult he spent many years on the western side of the island in and around the city of Havana. The publication of a posthumous anthology in 2006 (Ángel Escobar: Poesía completa, Ediciones UNIÓN) symbolizes rising acclaim for his work. Escobar generated the complex field of his poetics out of numerous influences–his training in theater, wide readings in international literature, his autobiography, family trauma, and philosophical reflections on modern life, among other strands. Those who knew him late in his life also see the influence of his worsening battle with schizophrenia: many poems make reference to illness and endurance. They also challenge prevailing notions of rational conduct, and some commentators argue that the spatialization of the late poetry itself performs “schizophrenic” moves. Over the course of his career, Escobar’s articulations of suffering opened some of the richest veins in his poetry. He took his own life in Havana in 1997.
Born Aldo Giurlani to a well-off Florentine mercantile family, Aldo Palazzeschi (1885-1974) was educated as an accountant and trained as an actor. The author of colloquial, absurdist free verse parables of urban-bourgeois life, his early work anticipated Dada and the Surrealists. His novels, particularly Il codice di Perelà (Perelà’s Code, 1911; translated as Man of Smoke) and Le sorelle Materassi (The Materassi Sisters, 1934), were hugely successful in their time. Palazzeschi’s first book of poetry, I cavalli bianchi (The White Horses), was published in 1905 by Cesare Blanc–the poet’s cat, also the publisher of Lanterna (1907) and Poemi (1909). The latter volume includes “Chi sono?” (“Who am I?”), a pointed rejection of the then-dominant D’Annunzian model of bardic national hero that is still among the best-known twentieth-century Italian poems (Chi sono? / Il saltimbanco dell’anima mia; Who am I? / The acrobat of my soul). This was followed in 1910 by L’Incendiario (The Arsonist), published by F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist press, Poesia, from which this selection of poems is taken. With its irreverence, biting parody, and blithe nonsense, The Arsonist resembles works of Apollinaire and Mayakovsky still to come. In a series of grotesque allegories depicting contemporary urban-bourgeois life as timid, conformist, and squalid, Palazzeschi broadens his antic vision in colloquial, dramatic episodes dictated by the “saltimbanco dell’anima mia” (acrobat of my soul) of his prior volume: an exemplary gadabout, ironic boulevardier, and armchair provocateur who guides the reader around the dystopia and eventually disappears into a dilapidated rural castle retreat with a fictive family menagerie. Palazzeschi was a pacifist and political agnostic, and his satire does not spare himself; the poet is portrayed as a poor dunce whose folly nevertheless exemplifies the (pyrrhic) perseverance of individualism in an atmosphere of stultifying conformity. In 1914, Palazzeschi turned away from the Futurist ideology of violence as necessary ‘purification’ (as war had been described in the 1909 Manifesto of Futurism), broke definitively with Marinetti and the Futurists, and took a rare stand in favor of ‘neutralism.’ The poems of this literary hero of the Futurists, whom Marinetti had acclaimed as possessing “a fierce, destructive irony,” are laced with a pungent, subversive humor.
(Nicholas Benson)
Mohamed Metwalli was awarded a B.A. in English Literature from Cairo University, Faculty of Arts in 1992. The same year, he won the Yussef el-Khal prize by Riad el-Reyes 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 appeared (The Story the People Tell in the Harbor, 1998). He was selected to represent Egypt in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1997. Later he was Poet-in-Residence at the University of Chicago in 1998. He compiled and co-edited an anthology of Modern Egyptian Poetry, Angry Voices, published by the University of Arkansas press in 2002.
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.
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