Poet and artist Nastya Denisova (b. 1984, Leningrad) lives in Saint Petersburg. Her poetry books include There’s Nothing (Nichego net, 2006), Incl (Vkl, 2010), and They Touched and Loved Each Other (Trogali lyubili drug druga, 2019). She co-edited the poetry anthology Le Lyu Li: A Book of Lesbian Love Lyrics (Le lyu li – kniga lesbiyskoy lyubovnoy liriki, 2008). In 2012, she participated in Riga’s Ambassadors of Poetry: North-South program. Her work has been anthologized in 12 Poets from Russia (12 poetov iz Rossii, Latvia, 2017), Windows on the World: Fifty Writers, Fifty Views (USA, 2014), and Tutta la pienezza nel mio petto: Poesia giovane a San Pietroburgo (All the Fullness in my Chest: Young Poetry of Saint Petersburg, Italy, 2015). Her writing has been published in many print and online journals, including Air (Vozdukh), New Literary Review (Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye), The Way Home (Put’ domoy), TextOnly, Colon (Dvoetochie), and elsewhere. As an artist she works in video, text, and image, and samples of her work can be viewed here: vimeo.com/nastyadenisova.
Scholar, editor, translator, and poet Dmitry Kuzmin (b. 1968) has translated poems from English, Ukrainian, and French into Russian, and his own poetry has been translated into over a dozen languages. His scholarship includes the textbook Poetry (Poeziya) (co-author, 2016) and a book-length study of one-line poems (2016). His two poetry collections are It’s Fine to Be Alive (Khorosho byt zhivym, 2008) and Blankets Not Stipulated (Kovdri ne peredbacheny, Ukraine, 2018). Kuzmin founded the Vavilon Union of Young Poets in 1989, and has been the head of poetry imprint ARGO-RISK Publishers since 1993. He is also editor-in-chief of the Vavilon internet project (www.vavilon.ru) and of the poetry quarterly Vozdukh (Air). Kuzmin has compiled several anthologies, most recently an anthology of present-day Russian LGBT writing in Spanish translation (2014). He has been awarded the Andrey Bely prize (2002), and It’s Fine to be Alive won the Moscow Reckoning award for best debut poetry collection. In 2014, Kuzmin emigrated from Russia to Latvia for political reasons and started Literature Without Borders, which fosters translation projects and provides residencies for poets and translators: www.literaturewithoutborders.lv/about. Kuzmin holds a PhD from Samara State Pedagogical University.
Gila Loran (Galina Zelenina) is a native Muscovite. She has published a prose collection, Freakipedia, or the Adventures of a Shard (Frikipedia, ili Pokhozhdenia oskolka, 2010), and three poetry collections: W (Zh, 2000), Voilà: A Genre Anthology (Voilà: Antologia zhanra, 2004), and A Cow Ate [the First Word] ([Pervoe slovo] syela korova, 2008). Zelenina is a historian and the author of From Judas’s Scepter to Fool’s Staff: Jews in the Medieval Spanish Court (Ot skipetra Iudy k zhezly shuta: prodvornye yevrei v srednevekovoy Ispanii, 2007), Judaism Two: Faces of the Renaissance (Iudaika dva: renessans v litsakh, 2015), and The Fiery Foe of the Marranos: Life and Death Under the Surveillance of the Inquisition (Ognennyy vrag marranov: zhizn i smert pod nadzorom inkvizitsii, 2018). She was editor and translator at the Gesharim/Cultural Bridges (Mosty kultury/Gesharim) publishing house and editor-in-chief of the website Booknik. She has also taught at Moscow State University, the Higher School of Economics, and the Russian State University of the Humanities (RSUH). Currently, Zelenina is Associate Professor in RSUH’s Center for Biblical and Jewish Studies and a Research Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation.
One day, a package appeared in my mailbox: brown paper-wrapped with a dozen mismatched stamps from a secondhand bookseller in Sweden. A surprise birthday gift.
With a little reverence and my heart making skippy hops, I opened it. Translated the epigraph, then immediately determined to translate the entire book. It seemed the poet was speaking directly to me and to my life--across oceans and decades, but there she was in my living room. Marie Lundquist and her 1992 debut collection I Walk Around Gathering Up My Garden for the Night.
Said poet Adam Zagajewski, “[Lundquist’s work has] the purity of the still-lifes of great masters . . . in them, we hear the world tremble.”
These taut, image-driven, aphoristic poems speak in a contemporary voice especially suited to the sound-byte era, and offer clarity and stillness in a frenetic world.
Lundquist has a cinematic eye, not surprising given her experience and interest in photography and dramaturgy. Some poems almost read as stage directions without dialogue. The poems regularly surprise, in quick turns of thought and image: one might suddenly stumble across Judas, a Greek frieze, firefighters, or an old-time circus troupe.
While the emotional terrain explored is intense, devastating even, Lundquist’s tone remains arms-length. The voice is calm but never seeks to comfort. She can be ironic but not cynical. Much of her work carries an erotic charge. Brilliantly, she appropriates scientific or pseudo-scientific language; with the stance of an anthropologist, she makes our own culture seem strange.
Her poems carry a sense of authority and urgency. The logic is sophisticated and clear, not a word wasted or poorly chosen. Each poem quietly accretes in a deep place and the reader ends the book feeling transported, a bit stunned even.
Though her voice is distinctly her own, at times I felt a kinship with Sexton and Szymborska. Or heard echoes of other Swedish poets: Tomas Tranströmer, Edith Södergran, Sonja Åkesson. Then there were moments when I could feel Lydia Davis and Herta Müller.
Strong praise attended the publication of this collection. The reviews frequently commented on her use of language, calling it “inventive,” “skilled,” “a sharp needle,” and “as clear as a running brook, characterized by sensualism and an elegant melancholy.”
Reviews noted the frequent shifts from the everyday world to the surreal and mythological. They lauded her treatment of such fraught topics as longing and shame, ambiguity around gender roles, the pull of memory and the problems of adult love. Her unique style was highlighted as well as her well-drawn and distinct imagery. Reviewers called the book “amazing,” and “fantastic.” Said Marianne Steinsaphir, “[Her] poems open up every time I read them, words that show the [possibilities] of language.” Said Eva Ottosson, “Her poetry… in short, is the kind you’d gladly get lost in.”
- Kristina Andersson Bicher
Cuba | Poetry | Spanish | United States
April, 2019“Poetry saved me from madness,” Jorge Olivera Castillo once said to describe his time in Guantánamo Prison. Between 2016 and 2018, the poet escaped what remained of his 18-year sentence by living in the United States, first as a writer for the Harvard University Scholars at Risk Program (where I met him) and second as an International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University. The poems featured here were written during the writer’s time in the United States, before he returned to Cuba at the risk of being incarcerated once again.
The primary tensions I see in Olivera’s poems lie between experiences of confinement and imaginaries of travel, evocative of the challenges of migratory communities (past and present), of Olivera’s own physically and psychologically traumatizing time in prison, and of his 1981 journey in a cargo ship to fight in the Angolan Civil War. The sincerity of Olivera’s poetry is reminiscent of Cuban journalist-poet José Martí’s Versos sencillos (1897), but also, more recently, of the works of exiled writer Enrique Labrador Ruiz (1902-1991). Even as they underline confinement, the poems reflect the motifs of transport, both under the auspices of continued captivity (to political regimes, nightmares, desire) and the hope for freedom.
While the difficulty of translating these poems sometimes sprang from their harrowing content and remarkable tonal candor, I took refuge in the poems' structures. Olivera’s lines are often jagged, some extending over the page and then followed by brief two- or three-word lines that appear to retreat into quieted, controlled thought, before extending again into rumination. The use of white space and the poems’ brevity speak equally to an aesthetic of erratically controlled speech marked with the quick imposition of silence. As with the queer Cuban poets Severo Sarduy and José Lezama Lima, the Afro-descendant poet’s works are reflective of concerns that Caribbean poets elsewhere share: the bounds between sea and land, land and body, dream and reality, and the myth of home faced with the reality of exile. In illuminating these bounds in “Endangered,” for instance, the poet’s voices leap between anthropomorphized depictions of the sun to “heaps of sand” embedded in a landscape of “hardened faces.” Indeed, it seems in Olivera’s poems that imaginaries of landscape are often more alive and animated than the bodies that navigate their place within it.
Written from Cambridge, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island, these poems are part and parcel of the ongoing work Olivera has taken up to share his memory of imprisonment and aspirations for uncensored speech and literary discourse in and about Cuba. When I served as an interpreter for Jorge Olivera—at a talk he gave at Harvard University—he shared these objectives with his audience while stating that one of the main poets that provided him sustenance in solitary confinement was a woman from Massachusetts who passed much of her life in solitude: Emily Dickinson.
As Jorge Olivera Castillo has just recently returned to Cuba, he seeks further opportunities to share his voice in English while building literary and political conversations on and beyond the island.
- David Francis
After Marina Tsvetaeva emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1922, she suffered from a sense of homelessness that left her desiring fulfilling relationships. As a romantic, Tsvetaeva felt the rift between reality and fantasy, body and spirit, thought and feeling. She felt an aversion to the physicality of the world, as this physicality was a barrier that prevented a direct connection to the essence of nature and those around her. Her feelings on love reflected this focus on spirit rather than body, as well as the desire for all-consuming love from one person to another rather than mutual love.
Living as a poet in exile, disconnected from her spiritual motherland and audience, Tsvetaeva often despaired in the 1930s that she had lost her creative abilities and was doomed to lose her lofty position as a poet. She relied on correspondences to establish a separate space for her to express intimacy and to escape the spiritual isolation she felt in her self-imposed exile from home. Her greatest inspiration throughout her life came from the intense, one-sided adoration she exhibits in her letters.
In 1936, Baron Anatoly von Steiger, a young Russian émigré, sent her a book of his poems from a sanatorium for tubercular patients in Switzerland. They had met briefly at one of her poetry readings but Tsvetaeva could not fully recall their meeting. However, as a young poet of noble descent, ill and lonely, Tsvetaeva immediately developed a maternal love for Steiger as she fabricated an ideal romantic image of him. In her first letter to him, excerpted below, Tsvetaeva assumes the maternal role and makes clear her desire for this “enclosing and embracing” love, this filial relationship with her young, ill poet. It is over the course of the following two months, after receiving Steiger’s initial correspondence, that she writes the cycle, Poems to an Orphan. Tsvetaeva recreates her former creative power by immersing herself in this constructed romance. She fills the space around the heroine with images of an imaginary lover, while dissolving herself into nature, embedding her own emotions into the natural world around her.
After this cycle, Tsvetaeva wrote only a few more poems before her return to the Soviet Union and subsequent death. Given the significant role that correspondences, particularly with Boris Pasternak, played in inspiring Tsvetaeva’s poetry throughout her life in exile, this last relationship with Steiger was her final attempt to connect with what she felt was her former self.
- Tara M. Wheelwright
Born in rural Shandong in 1973, the national award-winning poet, essayist, literary critic, and editor Duo Yu co-founded the prominent “Lower Body” Movement based in Beijing during the early 2000s. Among his multiple books of poetry and prose are Meanings Annoy Us (2004), Chasing Butterflies (2009), and The Last Darkness (2013).
Middle Scots | Poetry | Scotland
February, 2019It’s not that some issues never change (the same central “y” in misogyny and gynecology, hysteria, and hysterectomy). It’s just that we haven’t rid ourselves of them yet.
Readers will, I hope, forgive me for translating the satire with sincerity and the sincere poem as a satire. I don’t mean that quite literally, of course. But whereas James VI’s “Satire” needs little subtlety to update its conclusive gendered vitriol, and is thus rendered as closely to the original as the simple modernization of its beast-driven vocabulary encouraged, William Dunbar’s “Praise” is of the more insidious kind: equally objectifying, but lovingly so, or so he thought. Dunbar’s 500-year-old homage is entirely innocent of intentional malice, and thus doubled my challenge to present it "strictly" as written, a hymenal hymn, while also nudging at all the obvious institutionalized sexism we see through his eyes but below our own critically furrowed brows (a task made easy by such woefully applied descriptors as “things” in line two, or his unquestioning assumption that pain should be a natural part of procreation for femme folk).
Additionally, the savvy reader will note that I strayed perhaps a bit farther overall in my version of Dunbar than of James, not out of personal egotism, but simply because Dunbar is universally acknowledged the superior poet, and thus deserved a bit more reward in his rendering. (I pray I did not plunge fully overboard in anyone’s estimation.) The pairing of the two poets, separated by almost a perfect century of life, is simply an exercise in examining the ongoing binary portrayal of cis-women by cis-men as being saints or shrews, ideals or irritants, but never as autonomous equals capable of their own self-identification and empowerment. As a cis-man myself, of course, I still can’t make that call on behalf of women—but I can, as I hope I’ve done here, call out my fellow men for their faults, no matter how vivid or visionary (or vile) the verse.
- Kent Leatham
In Stella Díaz Varín’s poems, woman speaks. She speaks as god, as wife, as mother, as poet; she “intone[s] the song of love” and slices society into fine, jagged pieces. She calls to the reader as her confessor, her disappointing lover, her jailer, her child. She asks, flatly, insistently, what choice is hers—“What do you all want me to do with these materials. / Nothing. Except write melancholy poetry.”
Díaz Varín’s materials—her experiences, her words—were vast, and she wrote the poem featured here, “The House,” for her 1959 collection, Time, Imaginary Measure. The book title is apt: her voice is atemporal, daring us to keep her to her generation. Such verse opens itself generously to translation into American English, which prefers directness, wants us to lean in and tell all.
In her introduction to the Collected Work, Chilean poet and academic Eugenia Brito wrote that Díaz Varín’s speaker is a sacred, pagan, archaic figure, one that expresses the poet’s own “fiebre de malestar cultural y de locura reparadora, intuitiva, poética.” This is the motor of her poetry— a fever caused by both her cultural malaise and her intuitive, poetic, healing madness. In translation, the challenge is to let the poems be mad, let them resist sense, without exaggeration or imprisonment.
- Rebecca Levi
Latin | Poetry | Roman Republic
February, 2019Since 17th-century England, why has Catullus been the most translated of Latin poets? In great part, it’s because of the diversity of his poetic subjects, the virtuosic variety of his metrics and poetic forms, the richness and range of his tone and diction. All true, but what imbibes a reader of Catullus most is his ardency. No matter the theme or person or event or other subject of a poem, Catullus seizes it and holds fast with a grappling hook until he yanks the poem out from its watery depths for conspicuous display. Whether, in a given poem, he writes charmingly, hatefully, tenderly, invectively, humorously, erotically, or obscenely, the resulting poem is a huge and conspicuous spear-nosed marlin. I can’t think of another poet from any age or culture, except Shakespeare, who is more remarkable for repeatedly and variously marking the reader’s mind and heart.
- Stanton Hager
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).