Poetry (excerpts) | Ukraine | Yiddish
March, 2018The poems featured here are excerpts from Debora Vogel’s collection Day Figures (1930), comprised of 68 poems in total, arranged into four smaller collections: Rectangles (1924), Houses and Streets (1926), Weary Dresses (1925-1929), and Tin (1929).
The difficulty in translating these pieces lies in the fact that Vogel’s idiom is visual--she “paints” for her reader in a manner similar to Picasso, El Lissitzky, or Fernand Leger. Her cityscapes are filled with geometrical figures, colors, and numbers that are frequently repeated. Repetition, stark minimalism in vocabulary, and experimentation with syntax and punctuation are distinctive qualities of Vogel’s style.
At times certain words are repeated incessantly (“sticky,” “renunciation”), the reiteration of word combinations is identical (“sticky smell”), at other times these are slightly transformed syntactically, to underscore the significance of changes that occur even with the slightest modifications. This poses a challenge, since Vogel insists on a certain glossary that does not always allow for diversification. The synonyms, especially for adjectives in epithets, need to be chosen carefully: they cannot be too extravagant, and have to be limited. The approach to punctuation has to be balanced. At times the punctuation needs to be domesticated, at other times preserved, in order to keep the strangeness of the text. Vogel utilizes the colon in a different way than is accepted in English usage; the period is used when you might prefer a comma; and the comma is used when you would logically expect a period. Some punctuation marks, such as question marks, are absent. The word order needs to be rearranged at times, to reflect the English word order of a sentence, with the subject being in the first position, the verb in the second. Vogel’s articles in Yiddish do not always make sense in English, so I worked on them as well.
- Anastasiya Lyubas
Greece | Modern Greek | Poetry
March, 2018My translations of Yannis Ritsos’s postwar “Exercises 1950-60” chronologically follow Edmund Keeley and Karen Emmerich’s translations of Ritsos’s Diaries of Exile—a collection of poems written while Ritsos was a political prisoner during the Greek Civil War. Echoes of war, torture, and detention also litter “Exercises.” In this work, however, the references to atrocity are less immediate. Details like a sailor’s bobbing cap expose the essence of war in the everyday, rather than documenting the experience of detention, as the poems in Diaries of Exile do. Keeley and Emmerich note that Ritsos’s “I” withered during detention, his pronouns grew ever more collective, and his lines shrank. Formally, his “Exercises” are similarly impersonal and many are still short in line length. The difference in their construction is primarily conceptual, in that Ritsos, when writing these later poems, was consumed with what to say about atrocity.
Scholar and translator Minas Savvas once asked Ritsos whether writing, for him, was a means of survival. “It is a refuge and it is power,” Ritsos replied. “Power, moral, and intellectual power—that’s what good, fulfilling writing is, the power to shape words that open up new realities in the mind. That’s what has sustained me.” Martin McKinsey argues, in the introduction to his translations of Ritsos’s Late into the Night, that more than anything else a Marxist hope kept Ritsos alive, sustaining him through years of imprisonment and torture. Both writing and politics, then, ultimately determined Ritsos’s literary response to war. Like Paul Celan and George Oppen, Ritsos also struggled with how to respond, but unlike his contemporaries, Ritsos didn’t nearly sever the social contract with his readers. A Communist and leftist to the bone, Ritsos wrote instead toward revolution.
In “Exercises,” Ritsos’s voice is at once sodden and airy. Rocks are pensive, agency is limited, a star does not believe the man looking it in the eye, and one gets used to others “finding endless evidence against” him. These poems, however, remain hopeful.
Ritsos refuses to submit solely to the ills of war; rather, he infuses his poems with the smell of the sea, the sound of coffee being ground, the fluffiness of a woman’s smile. What shimmers throughout these micro-narratives is what I might label the celebration of simply living after torture and war. As bodies wash up on dark coasts in these poems, Ritsos does not forget to celebrate the meaning of life in the sparsest of gestures.
Seven years after writing these “Exercises,” Ritsos was again imprisoned for his political ideals. He kept writing. Although his poetry was often banned during his lifetime, today his writing is still sung by the left at protests, and it is this staying power that I turn to in his poems. As I read and translate Ritsos into the global unrest of the present, I find his refusal to turn away from the most horrifying and the most beautiful is exactly what makes his voice so necessary now.
- Spring Ulmer
Poetry (excerpts) | Slovene | Slovenia
March, 2018Slovenian writer Aleš Šteger has published seven books of poetry, three novels, and two books of essays. A Chevalier des Artes et Lettres in France and a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, he received the 1998 Veronika Prize for the best Slovenian poetry book, the 1999 Petrarch Prize for young European authors, the 2007 Rožanč Award for the best Slovenian book of essays, and the 2016 International Bienek Prize. His work has been translated into over 15 languages, including Chinese, German, Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, and Spanish. He has published four books in English: The Book of Things appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 as a Lannan Foundation selection and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award; Berlin, a collection of lyric essays, appeared from Counterpath Press in 2015; Essential Baggage, a book of prose poems, appeared from Equipage in England in 2016; and the novel Absolution appeared in England in 2017. He also has worked in the field of visual arts (most recently with a large-scale installation at the International Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India), completed several collaborations with musicians (Godalika, Uroš Rojko, Peter N. Gruber), and collaborated with Peter Zach on the film Beyond Boundaries.
Poetry | Spanish | United States
March, 2018I am a native English speaker who wrote these poems first in Spanish, then translated them into English. I’ve found this to be a fascinating experience, for it asked me to consider the confluence of the two languages in my head: how the languages feed and inform each other, how they share the same “author.”
In some ways, composing in one’s second language may help to serve the poem with happy accidents and inventions. On the other hand, such a project is problematic, especially when one’s native idioms, and cultural and cosmological orientations, may violate the second language--probably in ways that I’m not even aware of. For a poet in any language, the line between invention and violation is often diaphanous, ephemeral, nonexistent. Far from alleviating the inherent difficulties of the translator’s art, translating oneself introduces an additional range of issues.
The act of bringing the Spanish poems (back?) into English, translating my Spanish self to my English self, was intriguing. Poem by poem these selves may recognize each other clearly, or may find each other irritating strangers. Bringing the two into mutual awareness and respect took patience. At their best, the Spanish self and the English self feed each other’s poems with new surprises, shared discoveries.
This project has also expanded my understanding of what “translation" may mean or entail, and of the parallels between translation and revision. I was struck by the notion that all writing is translation in one way or another, starting with a rendering of the electric impulses of the neurotransmitters, a primal alphabet, perhaps.
I am deeply indebted to my colleagues Phillip Krumrich and Gustavo Osorio de Ita for their generous readings and responses to my efforts. Their caring expertise in both languages has been both instructive and inspiring.
- George Eklund
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry (excerpts)
March, 2018Losango Caqui (1926) is one of Mário de Andrade’s poetry collections published within the period of Brazilian Modernism. This slender volume is situated in an important phase of rupture, written and published in between his two most influential poetry books—Paulicéia Desvairada (
Paulicéia Desvairada, published in English as Hallucinated City (trans. Jack E. Tomlins, 1968), is often critically placed within the Anthropophagy theory, inspired by the native indigenous Brazilians, who were known to have practiced cannibalism on their war captives as a means of absorbing the strength of their enemies. Subverting the idea of the indigenous as being colonized, modernist narrative portrays the indigenous as the powerful ones, therefore able to devour and synthesize diverging sources, digesting what’s European not out of subjugation but in order to create something better.
Losango Caqui ("Khaki Diamond") is, in many ways, a continuation of some of the same themes and avant-garde formal ideas from Hallucinated City. Andrade’s use of free meter introduced revolutionary European ideas into Brazilian poetry, which was previously strictly formal. At the same time, his focus was slowly shifting to a more nationalistic agenda. In this book, one can foretell the author’s subsequent turn to primitivism, as his exploration of national identity would consolidate itself in his following poetry volume, Clã do Jabuti(1927).
My intent while translating these poems was to further explore the ambiguity of Andrade’s poetic discourse, as well as the harlequin’s conflicting views on urbanization, multiculturalism, immigration, and colonialism, amongst other things.
- Ana Paula
Norway | Norwegian | Poetry (excerpts)
December, 2017Anne is a long poem, or a "bullet-pointed novel," as Paal-Helge Haugen calls it. He writes in his “Note to Self” (in the final pages of Anne) that the book should be constructed collaboratively by its author and its readers. He goes on to explain that he has termed Anne a bullet-pointed novel because it is made up of poetic sections and sections of found text; Anne is not meant to be either cohesive or complete. (These sections of found text range from Bible citations, hymns, medical text and documents, excerpts from children's textbooks, and public records.)
The book follows Anne as she goes from being a girl to a young woman,while also showing her declining health due to tuberculosis. It is set in Norway around the beginning of the twentieth century.
This is perhaps Haugen's most well-known book of poetry in Norway, and it was very well received upon publication in 1968. It was one of the first books where Haugen explored his interest in using religious texts in his creative work. It's an important book because of its experimental and collaborative nature. U.S. readers of Roland Barthes will recognize some of his philosophy in Haugen's approach and thoughts about the relationship between reader and author. What U.S. readers will not be familiar with is the landscape and culture on the west coast of Norway, which Haugen describes beautifully. Norwegian and Scandinavian literature has been gaining popularity in the English-speaking world, through authors such as Karl Ove Knausgård, Tomas Espedal, and Kjell Askildsen, and I believe the time is right to introduce this iconic Norwegian poet.
Haugen is similar to famous Swedish poet and Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer in his evocative but unadorned language, as well as the investigation of and engagement with the unknowable and transcendental, visible in Anne when Haugen explores her feverish dreams, inner longings, and experience of disease, in part II of the book.
The number that follows each excerpt is the number of the page on which it appears in the book.
- Julia Johanne Tolo
Italian | Italy | Micro-Stories
December, 2017Superwoobinda is a collection of "micro-stories" (or "polaroids," as the author calls them) written by Aldo Nove. At the time of its publication in 1998, it was extremely popular--some call it a cult book--and played an important role in the Young Cannibals Italian literary movement. The Young Cannibals wrote about the reality of Italy during that period in an exasperated way (often with the inclusion of brand-name consumerism, hyper or surreal violence, and black humor). They were highly influenced by Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction (1994).
Superwoobinda depicts the Italy of the 1990s, an Italy that is marked by consumerism and an unnatural relationship with television. Silvio Berlusconi, a millionaire business and media mogul, has recently been elected prime minister. Italian television has been privatized, Berlusconi owning three out of the seven national TV channels, thus creating the Italian commercial TV empire. Nove chose to use the language of television in his writing—to highlight the absurdity, the horror, of a reality mediated by it. There are many different styles found here, often with repetition and syntactic disruption, and the fragmented stories mimic the rhythm of flipping through channels. There is a conglomeration of voices and perspectives, the sad and disturbed characters disconnected from one another, and from themselves, all brainwashed by the TV and its advertising.
Superwoobinda is an extreme and exaggerated social commentary. Its stories are both comic and tragic, scandalizing and iconoclastic, and they have an overload of lurid content (be forewarned). What follows is a selection of eight of these stories.
- Hope Campbell Gustafson
Belgium | French | Song Lyrics
December, 2017For this labor of love, I set ambitious goals: to translate 50 songs, preserving Brel’s meter and rhyme schemes, as well as the essence of his imagery, moods, and caustic humor, without ever being a slave to the original lyrics. That is, I put lyricism and naturalness of phrasing ahead of word-for-word equivalency. I chose a mix of songs that have not been translated before and songs that have poor English versions. I am currently translating all the songs on his famous last album, which he recorded in secret shortly before his death.
- Michele Herman
Latin | Poetry | Roman Republic
December, 2017Catullus’ poem LXVIII has perplexed many. It has survived in the MSS as one poem, but it seems to be two. In the first part, A, Catullus is in Verona and the poem is a verse epistle, a response to the request of his friend Manlius in Rome to send him the gift of a poem (possibly either one of his own or a translation from the Greek). Catullus is unable to write something original, as he is still mourning the recent death of his brother, and besides, he has left most of his books in Rome (so, probably, he has no Greek poem to translate).
The second and much longer part, B, expresses his gratitude to a certain Allius, who has lent him a house in Rome where he can pursue his love affair with Lesbia. At this point, she is still married to Metellus, so Catullus has to proceed with some caution. B contains a number of digressions, the longest being the legend of Protesilaus and Laodamia, which itself contains two further digressions, on his grief for his brother, and on a feat of Hercules and that hero’s apotheosis.
There are two issues:
- Is the poem in fact one poem or two?
- If the latter, is each poem written to a different person, or are Manlius and Allius in fact one and the same?
It seems clear to me that these are two different poems. They are apparently written to or for two different people (but see below), they describe two different situations, and they express very different moods. The clincher for me, however, is what they have in common: a passage in which Catullus mourns his brother. For Catullus to include two passages of identical or very similar wording in the same poem would be extreme carelessness.
It is quite possible that Manlius and Allius are the same. The two different names may be the result of textual corruption ("Mallius" also occurs). Alternatively, Catullus may have decided to hide Manlius’s identity by giving him a false name. After all, Metellus was a powerful man; aiding and abetting Catullus and Lesbia in their adultery was not without risk.
Catullus LXVIII, whether one poem or two, is a rather disjointed affair with its many digressions and clumsy transitions. Still, the strength of feeling throughout and the many beautiful passages make it well worth translating.
- Ranald Barnicot
Greece | Modern Greek | Short Fiction
December, 2017This short story is one of thirteen that appear in Konstantinos Poulis’ acclaimed fiction debut Ὁ Θερμοστάτης [Thermostat] (Melani Editions, 2014). Poulis and I met on the remote Aegean island of Icaria in the heady Greek summer of 2015—the summer of the “Greferendum” and capital controls, when the fate of Europe seemed to hang in the hands of a tiny nation on the continent’s margins. When I passed through Athens on the way back to the United States, I made a point of stopping by Poulis’ favorite bookstore, Politeia, to pick up a copy of Ὁ Θερμοστάτης. On the plane ride home I read “The Leonardo DiCaprio of Exarcheia” and quickly realized that, without knowing it, I had just met one of the country’s most unique new creative voices.
Today Greece is best known for an illustrious antiquity and ongoing financial crisis. Traces of both appear in the stories collected in Ὁ Θερμοστάτης, yet in oblique and unexpected ways. In «Θρίαμβος» [“Triumph”], the narrator recounts a memory of how one teacher, a philologist, handled an awkward classroom moment by asking a student to read out loud from a piece of pornography—pornography written in the most elevated Greek literary style. In «Νά πῶς μὲ λὲν ἐμένα!» [“That’s what my name is!”], a man frustrated by his inability to understand conversations about the economy sets out to educate himself through impenetrable financial news articles—only to find true satisfaction between the covers of a poetry anthology.
But while these stories were written during the Greek crisis, they are not motivated by or about the crisis. They are stories, above all, about imagination, in the broadest, most thrilling and even perilous (as in the case of “The Leonardo DiCaprio of Exarcheia”) sense of the word. Throughout the collection, Poulis himself also imaginatively experiments with literary form: «Ἑνάμισι τετραγωνικὸ μέτρο» [“One and a half square meters”] is as short as the space it describes is small. In both architecture and dialogue, the stories also bear signs of their author’s decades spent as a theater practitioner: fresh from his degree (and to his mother’s dismay) Poulis first earned money by putting on impromptu performances in front of Athens’ Monastiraki metro station.
As the first piece in the collection, “The Leonardo DiCaprio in Exarcheia” is in many ways programmatic. Its main character, Takis, is a boy with a dream. But it is a wild, insistent dream that soon takes a life of its own—and Takis’ life along with it. The story steadily transforms into its own kind of dreamscape, its contours shaped by a narrator who, through digressive anecdotes and first- and second-person interjections, lures the reader into a contract of complicity in Takis’ fate. For unlike Takis, who is at first exhilarated, then baffled and imprisoned by, his dream, both narrator and reader know from the start that “this is just how dreams are—a land where 1 + 1 = 5 and dogs recite Milton.”
- Johanna Hanink
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