These poems belong to the latest period of Serhiy Zhadan's body of work. As the poet stated a few years ago, his oeuvre may be divided into two parts: 1) work written before the year 2014; and, 2) work written after 2014, the year war broke out in Ukraine. These poems deal with the eternal questions (and quests): home, exile, solitude, love, and faith. These poems also demonstrate unpredictable interactions between people and their native realms. This might be of interest to those who study how poetry observes and mirrors the shifts within a society going through very challenging and, at times, life-changing circumstances, but offers solace as well.
- John Hennessy and Ostap Kin
Ancient Greek | Fragment | Poetry
November, 2018This fragment, from the seventh century BCE, starts off as a typical warrior song. Like heroes from Homeric epic, the singer addresses his thymos, his heart—the seat of his emotion—asking for courage amid the battle. But then the poem turns to universals, the proper ways to behave in glory and defeat, in joy and in sadness, the importance of avoiding extremes—the last of which was commemorated upon the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “nothing in excess.” The fluctuating rhythm of human life that concludes the poem is ultimately what sets us apart from the unchanging gods. What starts as a male fighter’s self-exhortation ends as a poem that crystalizes what is both terrifying and beautiful in human life—all human life.
- Stephanie McCarter
As a translator of Krystyna Dąbrowska’s poetry, I’m fascinated by her ability to pinpoint aspects of our existence that are left unsaid or passed over in silence, with a keen eye toward subtle yet profound interactions between cultures. Her poems show a great interest in understanding experience from different perspectives and often depict moments when the self is made strange through contact with other places and people. I’m in awe of the way she can call my attention to assumptions about class, nationality, and religion in such short, image-driven poems.
I’m currently at work—along with fellow translators Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Karen Kovacik—on Dąbrowska’s Selected Poems to present a volume of her poetry for the first time in English. Dąbrowska is a worthy successor to the extraordinary poetic tradition of Polish literature. Nobel Laureates Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska are world famous, and new, surprising voices continue to emerge. Dąbrowska became a poet to watch with the publication of her second book, White Chairs, which won two of Poland’s top awards: The International Wisława Szymborska Prize and the Kościelski Foundation Award. The judges praised her poetry for its sensitivity to ephemeral qualities of our everyday life and ability to detail the world with a visual artist’s sensitivity.
With this project, I also aim to address the marginalization of Polish poetry by women both in Poland and in translation. As Karen Kovacik, editor of Scattering the Dark: An Anthology of Polish Women Poets, pointed out in 2015: “In seven recent anthologies, published in Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, women poets’ work comprised less than 15 percent on average.” As Dąbrowska’s work continues to develop in fascinating and unpredictable ways, it is vital that she get the attention and recognition she deserves in English.
- Mira Rosenthal
El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
November, 2018Claudia Lars (pen name for Carmen Brannon Vega, 1899-1974) is one of El Salvador’s most important and beloved poets. She is required reading in many Salvadoran schools, and several schools have been named in her honor. I first came to know her work in the 1990s, when I worked with a human rights organization in El Salvador: whenever I asked about poets, the reply included Lars, and I was delighted to discover that many of the Salvadorans I met had one or more of her poems memorized. As Stephen Tapscott notes, Lars was “a writer of integrity and continuity whose example and generosity toward younger writers, especially young woman poets, made her a beloved—and even symbolically maternal—figure in Latin American poetry.”
Born to a Salvadoran mother and an Irish-American father, she was raised bilingual, and she learned French in Catholic school. Her youth was spent in the Salvadoran countryside reading Shakespeare, Jules Verne, and Lorca. She eventually translated a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry into Spanish. Though she never traveled to Ireland, she retained a strong sense of connection to what she called “the land of my song.” Her “two bloods” (as Gabriela Mistral writes in a famous letter) became an important theme in her work. Over the course of thirteen volumes of poetry, her poetics expand from an early reliance on the sonnet, ballad, and lira to uniquely-voiced explorations in free verse.
It feels important to bring Lars’s work into English. Beyond the remarkable language and the many worlds brought into view, these poems offer a fresh glimpse of a country many of us in the United States think we know. El Salvador has long been in the news, at first because of the brutal civil war and later because of the U.N.-brokered ceasefire and elections. More recently, violence (in particular gang violence) has garnered headlines. Through it all, the U.S. has played a devastating and disproportionate role, whether by supporting the military governments of the 1980s or by deporting gang members in the years after the war. While such developments have kept the country in our sights, I have always felt that it is too easy to attend to the disasters. We should bear witness to them, certainly, and Lars herself takes note (in a poem like “Crumbs”) as her country veers toward civil war. But the danger is that we let the catastrophes define the country and thereby narrow our sense of the world beyond our borders. What Lars’s work offers is a glimpse of a woman’s mind at work in the years before the tumultuous events of recent decades. Her concerns are worldly, spiritual, and lyrical; her verse offers the perspective of a poet who looks at the world around her—and into the future that is coming—with a longing and hopefulness that strike me as fundamentally and importantly human.
- Philip Pardi
Argentina | Poetry | Spanish | United States
November, 2018What makes Silvina López Medin’s poetry complicated is its philosophical, impressionistic, associative qualities. Often her language steers us away from noticing the despair behind her images by forcing us to work with nuances of abstraction. To some degree, translating the words suffices to render that complexity: present it as she’s presented it. But I have also tried to select words that point to what is missing. Often, López Medin’s poems are more about what is not there than what is there—the missing man, his missing eyes, the missing laughter, the touch that doesn’t happen. This, to me, makes López Medin’s poems consummately Argentinean: it’s a country where there is almost more missing than present, where the stifled voice rings after the spoken falls silent. André Lefevere wrote, “The word does not create a world ex nihilo. Through the grid of tradition it creates a counterworld, one that is fashioned under the constraints of the world the creator lives and works in, and one that can be explained, understood better if these constraints are taken into account.” López Medin creates a counterworld out of the one that exists, her world peopled by what is missing and the language that has survived people’s disappearance. If ever a country needed poets to create a counterworld from the language that has survived its violence, Argentina does.
- Jasmine V. Bailey
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry
November, 2018These short poems from Clarissa Macedo’s award-winning collection Na pata do cavalo há sete abismos (Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras, 2014) present a number of fascinating dilemmas. A literal translation would sacrifice the vitality of the verses, which, notwithstanding their lightness and intensity, contain a striking lyrical sadness. Yet to take excessive semantic liberties or change word order arbitrarily would deprive the reader of the stimulation inspired by Macedo’s unusual and often surprising choices.
In these translations, priority was given to structural elements and sound, focusing not on how long the verses would be in print but on their size and value in terms of breath. Rather than counting syllables, I tried to create lines that adhered to the originals’ weight, rhythm, and duration in order to suggest the successions of moods I found in the originals, which move agilely between pensive and galloping. In crossing the bridge, I tried to concentrate not on reproducing individual phonemes but on building holistic relationships between sounds that created similar sensations in English that the originals create in Portuguese.
- Robert Smith
Poetry | Portugal | Portuguese
November, 2018My main guideline for the translation process was the theoretical works of Haroldo de Campos, a Brazilian poet, translator, and critic who emphasizes that the structural elements of a poem-- rhythm, meter, assonance, alliterations, and so on--are as important as, and sometimes more important than, its semantic aspects. Here, I have tried to maintain the rhythm by giving the English translations a twist of Portuguese meter (which counts the number of syllables in each verse), compressing it when possible, but still maintaining the rhythm and other aspects.
- Alessandro Palermo Funari
These translations are born out of a fascination with Nikolaj Reber's poetry that began about ten years ago when I discovered his verses online at some Russian literary sites. Since then we've been in touch on and off. He is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting postmodern Russian poets. His voice is immediately recognizable, and my goal was to be as faithful to the original as possible in order to preserve his unique style and imagery. The two poems featured here, originally published in Going to downtown (2006), represent the aesthetics of Nikolaj Reber's poetry only to a certain degree, but I believe they give readers in English a good introduction.
- Boris Kokotov
In 1938 and 1939, Marina Tsvetaeva was living in Paris with her son; her husband, Sergei Efron, who had fought with the White Army during the Civil War, had returned to the Soviet Union as an NKVD agent. Tsvetaeva and her son would follow Efron back to the Soviet Union in 1939, where it seems Tsvetaeva knew she was unlikely to survive, and where she would die in 1941. Tsvetaeva’s years in Paris were marked by almost complete isolation, these last years even more so, and it seems that at this time she knew she would not publish again.
It was within this context that Tsvetaeva wrote “Poems to Czechoslovakia,” a sustained sequence responding to the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The cycle is an impassioned outcry, condemning fascism and affirming the resilience and promise of human life and collective human struggle. It is also grounded in personal experience, political events, and an awareness of Czech history, landscape, and culture: Tsvetaeva had lived in Czechoslovakia during the first years of her exile (her son was born there in 1925), and her poems convey a sense of identification with this country so often marked by country-less-ness. The poems draw on images of the Czech national revival movement and the Czech national anthem, and often address specific political events, sometimes including quotes from newspaper articles or references to news photographs, such as the photograph taken of Hitler in a window of Prague Castle. “Poems to Czechoslovakia” is one of Tsvetaeva’s greatest works, varied yet integrated in tone and formal approach, speaking both to a particular historical moment and to larger questions of freedom, belonging, and survival.
Curiously, most significant translations of Tsvetaeva’s work, such as those by Elaine Feinstein or the recent edition by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine, include just a few poems from the cycle. These translations also remove Tsvetaeva’s references to specific events; for instance, both Feinstein and Kaminsky/Valentine remove the quote from a newspaper article (“The Czechs came up to the Germans and spat”), with which Tsvetaeva prefaces “Took,” the sixth poem in the second half of the sequence. These elisions take the poems out of their context, but they also obscure the fact that Tsvetaeva was not just writing passionate poems of protest; she was also and deliberately grounding her poems in real events as they occurred.
As a translator my intention has been to correct these redactions, by considering the sequence as a whole and staying as true to the original as possible, including notes where historical and cultural references might present confusion. This translation is part of a larger project to bring Tsvetaeva’s politically oriented poems into English at a moment when the sharpness of her perceptions, and the fierceness of her reply, are acutely relevant.
- Margaree Little
Giovanni Quessep has been influenced by Colombia’s most important poets from the first half of the 20th century, such as Aurelio Arturo and León de Greiff, with whom he was personally acquainted and developed an important friendship. In the sixties, he worked as an editor at the legendary Mito, Colombia’s highly acclaimed philosophical and literary magazine created by Jorge Gaitán Durán, and in the seventies he co-founded Golpe de dados, a poetry magazine recognised throughout Latin America as one of the most important poetry publications of the past and current centuries.
Quessep’s poetry is nourished by his personal experiences growing up on the Colombian Caribbean coast; by his travels through Italy, where he fell in love with the work of Dante Alighieri; and by his knowledge of the vast tradition of Spanish poetry, particularly the poets of the Spanish Golden Age and Ruben Darío, one of his most important literary references. A descendant of Lebanese immigrants, he is also deeply acquainted with Middle Eastern poetic traditions, and specifically with the work of poets such as Omar Khayyam, Farid Uddin Attar, and Ferdowsi, who have also greatly influenced his work. Quessep’s poetry is the result of an improbable mixture of faraway elements that come together to create a unique voice both indisputably Colombian and universal.
I started working on this project in 2015, with Quessep's permission, and I have been collaborating with Ranald Barnicot since the beginning of this year, following the advice of some editors who told me that my translations could benefit from a collaboration with a native English speaker, preferably a poet or poetry translator, as Ranald is, and they certainly have.
- Felipe Botero
It has been a privilege and a challenge to work with Felipe on these richly allusive, mysterious, deeply felt and moving poems. I feel that Quessep exemplifies Eliot’s First Voice of Poetry. The poet is primarily addressing himself in the hope of working through profound, personal, and painful issues. Perhaps we are left feeling that we have not completely understood, but, in Eliot’s oft-quoted and memorable words, poetry can communicate before it is understood. Indeed, perhaps it is impertinent to suppose that we have a right to complete understanding.
- Ranald Barnicot
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.
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