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.
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
March, 2011Anatoly Gavrilov's minimalist style is marked by extreme laconism and painstaking lexical and grammatical selection, which affords his stories a measure of heightened density. He belongs to what Osip Mandelstam called a "minor line" of Russian literature--the tradition that began with Nikolai Gogol, Evgenii Boratynskii, and Fedor Sologub, and continued in the twentieth century with Daniil Kharms, Leonid Dobychin, and Evgenii Kharitonov. While attention to word selection and style unites him with such Modernist master stylists as Bruno Schulz, Isaak Babel, and Vladimir Nabokov, his poetics are certainly more comparable to Kafka and Beckett. The marginally tragic-comical distance Gavrilov establishes to his narrators/protagonists is reminiscent of Robert Walser. Here's an excerpt from a recent review of Gavrilov's collection by Igor' Klekh (translated by Sasha Spektor):
"Gavrilov is a grotesque, hallucinogenic, extremely formal writer--somewhat in the tradition of French literature. The exquisite style together with the notorious atrociousness of the described subject, the absence of falsity--this is all that Gavrilov can offer to his real, potential, and hypothetical readers. The music that he, in his words, "hates," determines the construction of his texts. Rhythm is the main structural element of Gavrilov's prose. While the words can be chosen randomly, what's important is their repetition, each time performed with a precise degree of difference. This dance of the simplest words, the whirlwind of dance positions hypnotizes the reader."
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.
Austria | German | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2011Die Alaskastrasse is a road novel, a tale of men against men and men against women. It details conflict both exterior and interior; it takes an unsparing look at insecurity, lethargy, and boredom. It is suffused, in the words of one critic, with "an erotic pessimism." The unnamed narrator in an unnamed city quits his job as web manager at an Internet dating firm and takes a spur of the moment trip with his girlfriend to an unnamed island that ends badly, setting in motion a quest (the tip-off is the book's epigraph, from Walker Percy's Lancelot) for some sort of inchoate fulfillment. Die Alaskastrasse is a dark, funny, compelling, self-lacerating passion play, shot through with a coruscating moral intelligence.
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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.
Award-winning poet Lan Lan is one of China's most well-loved female writers today. Her lyrical writings contain a sensual yet profound simplicity that often explores a specific emotion both in its purity and complexity. Considered one of the few contemporary women poets who've invented a new genre of romance poetry, she transcends the sentimental via a poetic imagination of dialogues between emotions, energies, and specific moments. Also known for their intriguing observations of nature and social realities, each of Lan Lan's poems are crafted in a specific architecture--both linguistic and temporal--that either dramatizes or challenges the contextual significance of the work. In addition to her poetry, Lan Lan's bestselling work includes children's literature and lyrical prose. Here we present a sampling of five poems--"Inside Eternity...," "Vérité," "Wind," "Wild Sunflowers," and "Untitled"--from Selected Works of Lan Lan, published in honor of her literary prize, the Poetry & People Award in 2009.
Danish | Denmark | Poetry (excerpts)
March, 2011Thomas Boberg is probably the least insular of contemporary Danish poets. A life spent travelling and residing throughout--especially--South America has earned him comparisons to César Vallejo and Nicanor Parra, as well as the translation into Spanish of his 1993 collection Vandbærere, which appeared in Peru as Portadoras de agua the following year. This in addition to several acclaimed works of travel writing has cemented Boberg's reputation as a kind of travelling man of Danish letters, hurling into the duck pond of his home country artistic impressions of a dizzying variety.
The book-length poem Hesteæderne (The Horse Eaters), in which the first of these poems appears, is a surreal and allegorical near-indictment of contemporary Danish society, peppered with references to T.S. Eliot, Karen Blixen, and Søren Kierkegaard, but served according to the strange, other-worldly recipe of Boberg's genius. The society he portrays--which is and is not contemporary Denmark--is a post-apocalyptic dystopia of rampant corruption, violence and moral degradation from which no one, it seems, is spared. "I write...because I won't put up with it," Boberg writes elsewhere, and The Horse Eaters is really a sustained, artistic manifestation of that impulse.
Although there is an evident affinity between Roald Mandelstam and Silver Age poets such as Blok, Gumilev, and Osip Mandelstam (to whom he bore no relation), his poetry differs from theirs in its distinctive syncretic imagery, vision, and intonation. Moreover, he is an existential poet and, as such, continues the highest traditions of the Russian poetry from Derzhavin and Tiutchev to Gumilev and Osip Mandelstam.
Kirill Medvedev, in a review of the third posthumously published book of Mandelstam's work, compared his poetry to the French les poètes maudits. But Mandelstam's lack of agonism, decadence, and narcissism resist that designation. It is notable that his closest friends were underground Petersburg artists of the so-called Arefiev circle, rather than literati.
Mandelstam's work was rediscovered by Mikhail Shemiakin, who published his poetry in the almanac Apollon-77, and K. Kuz'minskii, who published selected works in the anthology U Goluboi Laguny (At the Blue Lagoon). Kuz'minskii came to a contradictory conclusion: on the one hand, he regarded Mandelstam as peerless, but on the other hand, he claimed that the poet was a "typical representative of constructive eclecticism."
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).