If you happen to be participating in The Sealey Challenge, wherein the literary community is encouraged to read a book of poetry everyday for the month of August, then the following is a guide to translated collections that might help you meet your mark, curated through Asymptote‘s annals of world literature. And if not—consider picking up one of these authors or text anyway, for within these works are brightnesses of spirit and sensuality, ranging journeys through landscapes and psychologies, and the courage of witness and words. These bold and wondrous works show that if you want to know a language, you should seek the knowledge of its poets.
We read widely to nurture our wonders—this much is true for all of literature, but is underlined especially when reading poetry. As the particular challenge of translating this tempestuous and evasive craft continues to unfold across the pages of poets and translators around the world, the growing numbers of collections that come to meet our shelves and hands are a testament to an endless dialectic of what Kenneth Rexroth called “imaginative identification”. The translation of a poem starts with wonder, with the identification of a gleam at the centre of the words, and a fierce urge to protect it. When this intensity then survives the removal of its own language and finds an exacting home in another, the result is just as wondrous. So much is left behind in translation, this much is true and shall always be true, but what remains constant is this sense—of awe, of the sense of something having opened up, of breathlessness in front of beauty, in front of truth. It arrives with a different music, in a different voice, but it was struck with the same spirit.
In the many poets and collections that we’ve covered at Asymptote, the work always identifies with the precise tenet of poetry to be close to its language. In German poet Kathrin Schimdt’s Twenty Poems, translated by Sue Vickerman, reviewer Andreea Scridon describes how “the two poets meet in their exigency and perspicacity, their quintessentially European writing towards a determined and defined idea.” Similarly, in Chinese poet Yi Lei’s collection, My Name Will Grow Wide Like A Tree, reviewer Marina Dora Martino notes translators Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi’s efforts to “open Yi Lei’s private world to the possibility of dialogue.”
Some translators work closely with their poets, in constant exchange and negotiation. Filip Noubel notes how in Taiwanese poet Amang’s Raised by Wolves, translator Steve Brandbury was careful to consult the author, ensuring that she “understands the various options I have for representing that in English.” Their collaboration defied limits, resulting in “a humorous approach to these seemingly insurmountable obstacles.” Other translators do not possess such luxuries. Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds, the translators of Swiss poet Gustave Roud’s Air of Solitude and Requiem, had to work without insight from the originating mind, the poet having passed in 1976. Nevertheless, reviewer Sarah Moore exalts the work as a “powerful, superb translation from one of Switzerland’s greatest poets of the twentieth century.”
So much of the importance in these texts lies in introducing the works of vital figures in movements that changed the world. In Alice Paalen Rahon’s Shapeshifter, translated by Mary Ann Caws, we see a collection that sheds light on a multi-faceted Surrealist, whose literary output had previously been overshadowed by her achievements in visual art. As reviewer Georgina Fooks states: “. . . with the arrival of Shapeshifter, we can gain valuable insight into this remarkable poet who was one of the best of the Surrealists, despite the lack of wider recognition.” Another Surrealist giant, Giorgio di Chirico, is revived in poetry by way of translator Stefania Heim; in his collection, Geometry of Shadows, reviewer Garrett Phelps identifies “a visual mind orienting itself toward the written word: a promiscuous use of strong imagery, and waves upon waves of metaphors at the expense of a more nimble and protean style.” Also defying any singular definition is Russian sculptor and founder of Russian Conceptualism, Dmitri Prigov, whose defiant and liberated poetics have reached the Anglophone by way of Simon Schuchat and Ainsley Morse in Soviet Texts.
Through the work of such poets, we can see the ways in which the writers, thinkers, and challengers perform their vital role as witnesses of their time. As Laurel Taylor asserts in her review of Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s You Can Be the Last Leaf: “Words within and about war function as powerful political weapons, bandages, sirens, and songs, all in one.” Translated by Fady Joudah, this urgent collection is defined by its courage of “someone writing to the collective trauma of the Palestinian people.” Also fortifying this ongoing necessity to speak and amidst conflict and erasure is Russian poet Pavel Arseniev’s Reported Speech, a work that, as reviewer Paul Worley intimates, “articulates intimate, defiant, and at times desperate responses to a world in which culture seems to be increasingly prefabricated, predetermined, and designed to numb the mind and soul.”
Amidst poetry that is peripatetic, wandering, and searching, there is a sense that writing is both an act of catharsis and an act of memorialisation. In Abdulla Pashew’s Dictionary of Midnight, translated by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse, the exiled Kurdish poet gives his homeland a place to rest, to be thought of. As reviewer Jacqueline Leung tells us, Pashew’s work is “to voice what the people cannot put into words, to commemorate—bringing back to mind poetry’s origin in traditional oral recitation—and to provoke.” This provocation is also threaded through Fabián Severo’s Night in the North, translated from the Portuñol by Laura Cesaro Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval. Severo’s decision to write in Portuñol, a language active in the border region between Uruguay and Brazil, is evidently political from the poems in this collection, which is “a testimony of the experience of living on the border, on the edge of the world in this liminal space.”
In fact, language may never not be political. Evidenced by the anthology Poems from the Edge of Extinction, a gathering of works written in endangered languages, the poets included are all operating with an intense awareness of their disappearance, culminating in “a rallying call for the continuation of endangered languages, as well as for the endurance, recognition, and necessity of poetry as an art form.” Many of these languages are indigenous, lost to the physical and psychic violence of colonialism. Another collection that details this battle is Enriqueta Lunez’s New Moon/Luna Nueva/Yuninal Jme’tik, a trilingual work translated from the Tsotsil by Clare Sullivan. Laid out in a way that treats all three languages with equal importance, Paul Worley comments on how this text is “asserting the sovereignty of Indigenous languages in dialogue with English and Spanish.”
Other languages also allow for other modes of experimentation. Demonstrated by Nanni Balestri’s radical, digital poetics, recombination and permutation both disrupts traditional modes of repressive thinking to allow for new imaginations to proliferate. MARGENTO describes the poet’s collection, Blackout, translated from the Italian by Peter Valente, as evidencing an “unrelenting focus on the radical movement and related events, expanded by an inclusive, democratic perspective that invites diversity and a discordance of viewpoints and voices—all of which is eventually turned on its head, political stance included.” In Chinese poet Xi Chuan’s collection, Bloom and Other Poems, the poet borrows and operates with other genres to, as Shawn Hoo states, “harness both the suggestive power of the fragment and the system of the long poem to create something at once poetic and essayistic.” The result, related into English by Lucas Klein, is a masterful creation of confluences and juxtapositions.
Though physical landscapes create moving, vivid settings for these poets, a psychogeography is also always working with the eye to give emotional heft and weight. In Chameleon | Nachtroer by Charlotte Van den Broeck, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, the Belgian poet uses her language to “turn her suspicion into a curious exploration of the emotions that language shapes beyond physical reality.” Equally plumbing the depths of the mind is Alejandra Pizarnik’s The Galloping Hour, wherein the Argentinian poet’s French works are translated expertly by Patricio Ferrari and Forrest Gander. As reviewer Rachael Pennington tells us: “Here, readers must give themselves over to the poet’s innermost desires and obsessions and in doing so make a choice: ‘choose silence or dream.’”
Each poet and collection listed here opens up an avenue into their minds, their intelligences, and even their language, their nations. It is the most formidable form of travelling—and all it takes is the opening of a single page.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet and editor. The chapbook, How Often I Have Chosen Love, was published in 2019. The full-length collection, Then Telling Be the Antidote, is forthcoming in 2022. shellyshan.com.
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