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."
Grigori Dashevsky was born in Russia in 1964. He has published four books of poetry and a number of critical articles and translations from English and French. He was short-listed for the Andrei Bely prize. He is considered by many to be the youngest "classic" in Russian poetry. Appropriately, his poetry often utilizes rhythms found in Ancient Greek and Roman poetry. As the poet Elena Fanaylova writes, "Dashevsky's poetry approaches something biologically real, something that is mainly located outside of literature's administration. It approaches an impact. An experience. It recreates its power, evoking gratitude from those who still haven't lost the skill of poetic reading."
Leonid Schwab, a Russian-language poet, was born in Bobruysk, Belarus in 1961. Since 1990, he has lived in Israel. Schwab's poems have been published in a number of prominent Russian-language literary journals, both in print and online. In 2004, Leonid Schwab was included in the shortlist of the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize. In 2005, he published a book of poems called Poverit' v botaniku (To Believe In Botany). In 2008, together with Fedor Svarovskiy and Arseniy Rovinskiy, Leonid Schwab published a compilation of poems under the title Vse Srazu (All At Once). The book was very well received by literary critics and regarded as a manifestation of a new poetic trend, the "New Epic," which the authors define as "narrative texts with metaphysical content." As one critic wrote of Schwab's poetry, "his poems move in the rhythm of Pushkin's fragments. However, the plot doesn't form, instead thickening as a small cloud, changing as the air changes after the military curfew has been announced." Schwab's poetry does not yield to the habitual tricks of experienced readers. His distinct, deliberately impersonal style introduces the reader to fascinating and unfamiliar contexts, where all conventions of language and art appear fractured and yet not altogether abandoned.
Semyon Khanin, a Russian-language poet, was born in Riga, Latvia in 1970. His original works have been published in Latvia, Russia, Czech Republic, Germany, and Ukraine. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Just Now (2003) and Missed Details (2008). His poetry has been translated into Latvian, English, Czech, German, Italian, Swedish, Estonian, and Ukranian. He is a participant in the literary project "Orbita" (www.orbita.lv), and editor of the almanac with the same name. As the poet Yuliya Idlis writes, in Khanin's poetry "we see the process of an endless stratification of the lyric subject, the divison and the fragmentation of the "I" into tiny and often not quite anthropomorphic particles. At the same time, there's a constant search for wholeness, unending pursuit of the proofs of the subject's existence, a torturous struggle for self-identification."
Oleg Yuriev, a writer of poetry, prose, and drama, was born in Leningrad in 1959 and has been living in Frankfurt, Germany since 1991. During the Soviet era, he participated in Leningrad's unofficial cultural life (the "Kamera Khranenia" group). Since the late 1980s, his original works have been published and staged in Russia. Yuriev's plays and prose have been translated into English, German, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, and French, and performed in Russia, Germany, France, Switzerland, Poland, Czech Republic, Belarus, and Ukraine. Yuriev has had multiple publications in Russian, Russian diaspora, and German magazines. His poems have been translated into English, German, Italian, and French.
Publications include Two Short Plays (1990); the poetry collections Stikhi v Nebesnom Nabore (Verses in Heavenly Font, 1989), Izbrannye stikhi i khory (Collected Poems and Quires, 2004), and Frankfurtskii vystrel vechernii (The Frankfurt Evening Shot, 2007); the prose collections Progulki pri poloj lune (Walks Under the Hollow Moon, 1993), Frankfurtskii byk (The Frankfurt Bull, 1996); and the novels Poluostrov Zhydiatin (Zhydiatin Peninsula, 2000) and Novyi Golem, ili Vojna starikov i detej (New Golem, or the War Between Old Men and Children, 2004). He has seven books of prose in German translation, the last four published by Suhrkamp.
The signature tension in his poems is often derived from putting parts of the natural world--flora, fauna, changes of season, meteorological conditions--into positions of conflict, causing the texts to resemble a battlefield. This tension is mirrored by the intricate phonetic combat within the texts. The density and the dizzying succession of alliterations and consonances ultimately confer to Yuriev's poems a lightness that the translations featured here attempt to preserve.
In October 1947, Richard Strauss went to London, where Sir Thomas Beecham had organized a festival of his music. The British, so soon after World War II, were still suspicious of this German who had remained silent about the Nazis while surviving in the Third Reich. A young reporter asked the 83-year-old composer about his plans for the future. "Oh," said Strauss, "to die."
In this end-of-life state of mind, Strauss began work on his last work, the Four Last Songs (Vier letzte Lieder). He set the song cycle, which premiered only after his death, to verses written by two poets at a similar twilight stage of their respective lives, Hermann Hesse and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. Strauss's inspiration began with his discovery of Eichendorff's poem, Im Abendrot (At Sunset). Perhaps it was because Strauss and his wife had lived through a grim period of history over their fifty-four years of marriage that the composer was moved by the Eichendorff verse, which describes an old couple who've survived a life's journey through sorrow and joy. At around the same time, Strauss received a copy of the complete poems of Hermann Hesse, and Four Last Songs includes three of them: Frühling (Spring), September, and Beim Schlafengehen (When I Go to Sleep).
Strauss composed the Four Last Songs with Kirsten Flagstad in mind, and she sang the first performance on May 22, 1950, in the Royal Festival Hall, London, with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Paul Valéry was born 1871. Raised in Montpellier, he studied law there, then moved to Paris and began writing. He quickly became famous as a disciple of Stéphane Mallarmé. At the age of twenty-one, he experienced what he called an existential crisis, and six years later, he ceased writing for about twenty years, a period known as his "great silence." When he returned to writing, he produced La Jeune Parque and le Cimitière marin, two long poems considered central to French modernism. He also wrote essays and worked on philosophy of mind. Throughout his life, even during his silence, he conducted thought experiments in his Cahiers (Notebooks), using drawing and writing as research into consciousness. They are considered by some to be his greatest work. In 1925, he was elected to the Académie française, and in the late 1930s, he was appointed the first Chair of Poetics at the Collège de France. Though it cost him some of his professional distinctions, he refused to collaborate with the Vichy regime and the Nazis and continued to write and publish during the war, until his death in 1945. His unique position in France can be seen in the fact that he was never attacked by the surrealists.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2010"We're going through some difficult times, as you surely know. Who can tell what the future holds for us, for you, me, the planet? Nothing's simple. Care for some water? No? As you wish. After all, if you'll allow me, I believe I can confide in you, a person in my position is very much alone, terribly alone, and you're some kind of doctor, aren't you?"
"Not really..." the Investigator murmured.
"Come, don't be so modest!" said the Manager, tapping his visitor on the thigh. Then he took a long, deep breath, shut his eyes, exhaled, and opened his eyes again. "Remind me, what's the exact purpose of your visit?"
"To tell the truth, it's not really a visit. I'm here to conduct an investigation into the suicides that have affected the Enterprise."
"Suicides? News to me... I've been kept out of the loop, no doubt. My Coworkers know it's best not to cross me. Suicides, imagine that! If I had been aware of them, God only knows what I might have done! Suicides?"
Basque | Novel (excerpts) | Spain
November, 2010When Liborio Uribe found out he was going to die, he wanted to see for the last time a certain painting of Aurelio Arteta's. He had spent his whole life in the deep-sea fisheries, plying the seas aboard the Dos Amigos and, like his son Jose, captain of the Toki Argia, was the hero of unforgettable stories that were subsequently forgotten forever. Years later and confronting that same painting, his grandson Kirmen, a writer and poet, goes seining through those family stories to write a novel. Bilbao-New York-Bilbao takes place during a flight between the airports of Bilbao and JFK in New York, and unravels the history of three generations of the same family. By means of cards, diaries, e-mails, poems, and dictionaries, it creates a mosaic of remembrances that together make up a memorial to a world that is nearly extinct, and at the same time a praise-song to the endurance of life. With this novel, Kirmen Uribe had a brilliant debut on the Hispanic literary scene. The work received the National Prize of Literature 2009, the Critics´ Prize 2008 in Basque language, the Ramón Rubial Foundation Prize, and the Booksellers Guild of Euskadi Prize. Considered to be one of the most outstanding innovators of present-day literature, Uribe delves into the waters of autobiography with a rich, complex, and evocative style that is truly moving.
Essays (excerpts) | German | Germany
November, 2010The entries that make up Dinge, die verschwinden (Things That Disappear) originated in part as columns that novelist, short-story writer, and theater director Jenny Erpenbeck published in the respected German daily, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. This work is a reflection on farewells, gathered under such headings as Men, A Simple Life, the Warsaw Ghetto, Words, Cemetery Visits, Garbage, and Memories. A blend of grief, melancholy, and humor, Dinge, die verschwinden assembles slivers of daily life into a portrait of the transience of life.
Austria | Essays (excerpt) | German | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2010The City: Discoveries in the Interior of Vienna
The City... is a collection of essays documenting Gerhard Roth's extensive exploration of the city of Vienna. He takes the reader behind the scenes of the Natural History Museum and the Austrian National Library. He reports on the extensive art and treasure collections of the Habsburgs, visits the Josephinum, the historic Vienna School of Surgeons with its Museum of Forensic Medicine, and the famous Clock Museum. Roth complements these essays, which explore humanity's fight against transience, with reports of his visits of the institutes for the blind and the deaf and the refugee camp of Traiskirchen. In these essays, he portrays the challenges facing humanity in a new global world.
The Plan
Dr. Konrad Feldt, a bibliophile and an employee of the Austrian National Library, discovers the theft of a rare handwritten Mozart musical score. The culprit, a fellow employee, hands over the score to Feldt and commits suicide. Feldt decides not to return it to the library, but to follow through with his colleague's plan to sell it to a rich collector from Japan. Under the pretext of a lecture tour, he travels to Japan to meet the collector. The rarity and value of the manuscript complicates the transaction, however, attracting criminals. And when Feldt arrives at the collector's shop he finds him dying, the victim of an assault. Feldt finds himself now a murder suspect. Embedded in the detective story plot are rich descriptions of the Japanese traditions, cityscapes, and landscapes, and the constant danger of earthquakes and volcano eruptions.
The Mountain
The journalist Viktor Gartner travels to Greece in order to write a story about the Greek Orthodox cloisters on the holy mountain Athos. The real reason for his trip however, is to find the Serbian author Goran R., whom he had met during the war in Bosnia and who is rumored to be hiding in the cloister Chilandar. Goran R. has witnessed a massacre similar to that committed by General Mladić in Srebrenica, and he fears for his life. Gartner's search for Goran R. is accompanied by a series of mysterious, disorienting, and ominous events. One of Gartner's contacts is murdered; others want nothing to do with him after they find out the real reason for his trip. The journey takes Gartner across the Balkans to Istanbul, where he finally is able to locate Goran R.
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