nice shoes he pointed to
my shoes i took them
off i know you he smiled
you’re a movie star i
smiled back camera
switched on he rolled his
eyes you can take a
picture of me i counted
the money out he put the
notes in his breast pocket
bowed briefly &
took me by the hand
where do you come from
READ MORE…
Posts filed under 'Poetry'
Translation Tuesday: “Barefoot Through the Temple” by Albert Ostermaier
a sticky pressure / on my soles crusted / animal blood ash red blossoms / charred at the edges
Translation Tuesday: Poems by Ronny Someck
"In his painted eyes you can see a whole herd, / the prey in his dream’s forever-forest."
Bloody Mary
And poetry is a gun moll
in the back seat of an American car.
Her eyes pressed like triggers, her pistol hair firing blond
bullets down her neck.
Let’s say her name is Mary, Bloody Mary,
words squeeze out of her mouth like the juicy guts of a tomato
whose face was knifed just beforehand
on the salad plate.
She knows that grammar is the police force of language—
her earring transmitter
detects the siren at a distance.
The steering wheel will shift the car from question mark
to period
when she’ll open the door
and stand on the curb as a metaphor for the word
prostitute.
In Conversation: Alex Cigale, Guest Editor of the Atlanta Review’s Russian Poetry Issue
An interview with Alex Cigale on editing the Atlanta Review's Russian Poetry Issue
I interviewed Alex Cigale, guest editor for the Russia issue of the Atlanta Review, to pick his brain about the editing process, the special issue, and the state of Russian poetry at-large.
Alex Cigale (former Central Asia editor-at-large for Asymptote!) has collaborated with the editors of the anthologyCrossing Centuries: the New Generation in Russian Poetry (2000), and more recently, the online Twenty First Century Russian Poetry (Big Bridge 16, 2014). Independently, he has presented a score of contemporary Russian poets to Anglophone readers. This year, Cigale was the recipient of an NEA in Literary Translation for his work with poet of the St. Petersburg philological school, Mikhail Eremin.
The Atlanta Review is known for its long-established and respected annual contest, offering publication in each of its fall issues, with a $1,000 top prize and 20 publication awards for finalists (including 30 merit awards for semi-finalists). In its 20-year history, it has published a long list of established poets, including Seamus Heaney, Rachel Hadas, Maxine Kumin, Stephen Dunn, Charles Wright, Billy Collins, Derek Walcott, Paul Muldoon, and so on.
PN: What did the Atlanta Review ask from you for its Russia Issue? How did you approach the editorship and solicit contributions?
AC: My directions were quite open: curate an 80-page section of contemporary Russian poetry. In every Spring issue, the Atlanta Review includes an international feature. In recent years, it had shone a spotlight on international hotspots (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, etc.) as well as on Anglophone or partly-Anglophone nations in the news (India, Ireland, and Scotland, the latter forthcoming in 2016).
While each is planned two years in advance, the editorial phase itself is quite brief: in my case, I only had this past late fall/early winter to work on the curation, so its contents were largely determined by what unpublished work in translation was available at the moment. As I noted in my introduction, above all else, the issue is a “slice of life”—what (primarily American) translators of Russian poetry are working on right now. The world of Russian poetry translation is a fairly small community, so I was able to put out early word of the issue on social media and correspond with nearly each translator personally to discuss their projects. READ MORE…
She died quietly, she died the death of those who love stubbornly, angrily, jealously, secretly, and
elephantishly. At a neighbour’s urge, she treated rheumatoid arthritis with crude oil. The therapy resulted in second-degree burns. On the inside of my eyelids I sketch her knees – two magical orbs of glass – and I rub them with devil’s claw unguent. Prayer and displeasure spill softly in the room in which we are alone and furtive, for
where, why, and for whom does the devil
make unguent from his claw? She died quietly, to render loud some mornings that had tumbled down and stuck into me like hedgehogs. I sketch those mornings as a
crooked bicycle tyre. I push the bicycle uphill into the whitish dawn, I hurry to spill before her the smell of the lead from the newspaper, the smell of the pastry which is a crumbled sketch of her face on the inside of my eyelids. The way I close the distance between us is like the way her eyebrows come together in a frown, she pushes hard sugar cubes into my mouth, and I buzz in the garden for hours and I sip the sap of a liquorice. I sketch her as READ MORE…
THE SPIDERS
To Odette Bost
Into the houses where children die
Go some very old people.
They sit down in the antechamber
Their sticks between their black knees.
They listen, nod their heads.
Every time the child coughs
Their hands clutch their hearts
And make big yellow spiders
And the cough, rising through the furnishings,
Is shredded, listless as a pale butterfly.
They have vague smiles
And the child’s cough stops
And the big yellow spiders
Rest, shaking,
On the polished boxwood handles
Of the sticks, between their hard knees.
And then, when the child is dead
They get up, and go elsewhere…
Mother Earth
Mother earth, much trodden, sun-washed,
dark slave and mistress
I am, beloved.
From me, the humble and the sullen,
you burst forth—a powerful stem.
And like the eternal stars, and as the flame from the sun,
I circle in long and blind silence
through your roots, through your branches
and half in vigil, and half in slumber,
I search, through you, for the high sky. READ MORE…
In Review: Theo Dorgan’s “Nine Bright Shiners”
"Nine Bright Shiners is certainly one of the best new collections of poetry to have come out in the 2014-2015 (literary) year."
I first came across Theo Dorgan’s work in a charming anthology of art writing from the National Gallery of Ireland, Lines of Vision (Thames & Hudson, 2014). A group of acclaimed Irish novelists and poets wrote about which paintings had most affected them as artists. Dorgan chose an evocative little history painting by Ernest Messionier, Group of Cavalry in the Snow: Moreau and Dessoles before Hohenlinden (1875), depicting two of Napoleon’s generals contemplating their chances on the eve of the wintry battle of Hohenlinden in December of 1800. It’s an intimate scene, and its effect, as described in rapturous detail by Dorgan, especially its effect on the imagination of a young boy, is enchanting:
There’s a self riding down out of the picture, no two selves. One of them
stolid and wary, wondering what these damn officers are about to get
us into…my mind is full of the coming battle, my sympathies with men
breathing this cold air tonight who will not be breathing it tomorrow…
All this and so much more, so very much more, out of one small
painting—and I close my eyes for one brief instant, leaving the gallery,
not sure when I open them where I shall find myself, on a Dublin street,
so long familiar, or on a wooded slope with a sky fill of lead-heavy snow
above my head, hearing the creak of leather beneath me, feeling the
solid heat of the animal bearing me down off that crest towards some
tomorrow at once unknown, unknowable and absurdly unfamiliar.
Dancing with the child I was, cheating the monoworld. READ MORE…
Epic India in Verse
Reviewing Poetry of India: Anthology of the Greatest Poets of India, ed. Paul Smith (New Humanity Books, 2014)
A few months ago, a friend of mine who was curious about the nuances of Indian culture asked me to explain the artistic differences between North and South India. I realized it was a loaded question, and I could only give him a general overview of similarities and differences between north and south, Aryan and Dravidian, and Central Asian, Persian-Turkish influences versus Burmese and Sri Lankan. I felt I had a vague generalist understanding of my country of origin, though my answers seemed to satisfy him.
It is exceedingly difficult to encapsulate the cultural diversity of the Indian subcontinent, spanning across India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, with a cultural nebula across Burma, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. To travelers like the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang (the 14th century Central Asian [Uzbek] warrior), the marauder Timur (the subject of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine) and even Mohandas Gandhi, returning from years of living among the racist Boers of South Africa, India remained a baffling and exotic mystery to the intellect and senses.
Fortunately for us, a book like Paul Smith’s massive anthology, Poetry of India: Anthology of the Greatest Poets of India, gives curious readers of Indian culture and literature an adequate place to start. Paul Smith is an Australian poet and scholar of Indian and South Asian literature. He has translated the works of Rumi, Hafiz, and Nizami, as well as the works of various other Sufi and Persian poets. In this anthology, he delves straight into the complexities of Indian literature, Sanskrit poetry from South India and the Deccan states, medieval Tamil poetry, and poems by well-known nineteenth and twentieth-century poets like Makhfi, Ghālib, Tagore, and Iqbal.
Have I Taken Language as a Loan?
Shadab Zeest Hashmi wonders if language is "luggage," borrowed—or her very own
Home and flux mean the same in a land named after a severance, or the great “partition” of the subcontinent: a paradox of freedom-and-loss, umbilical-cord-and-scissors. Born in Pakistan, a country that emerged on the world map after the collapse of the British Raj and the largest mass migration in human history, “permanence” is forever in the shadow of exile.
If poetry seeks who we are, I’ve found myself searching in language, not land. Land, in its aspects worth remembering, becomes language. If I carry language, I carry land. What is exile, then, if not a road paved for poets, permanent wayfarers?
I came to America as a college student. In Passage Work, the first series of poems I completed as my senior thesis at Reed, I wondered: why write in English, the language of the colonist? Have I taken language as a loan for poetry? Have I betrayed Urdu? In these earliest poems, I call language “luggage,” a historical-personal luggage, both burden as well as reason for being. READ MORE…
Translation Tuesday: “The Seafarer,” from the Book of Exodus
Translated from the Old English by Spenser Santos
The Seafarer
May I utter truth for myself,
to say of trials, how in the times of toil
I often withstood wearisome times,
bitter breastcare, how I have bided,
come to know on a ship, abode of much care,
the terrible seawave’s rolling often held me there,
anxious nightwatch at the boat’s prow,
when it pitched against cliffs. Pinched by cold
were my feet, frostbound
with cold fetters, there the sighs of care
were hot around the heart; hunger tore from within
the mereweary mood. That the man,
to whom the most pleasant on earth befalls, knows not
how I, wretched and sorrowful, on the ice-cold sea
dwelled in winter in the paths of an exile,
bereft of beloved kinsmen and
hung with icicles; hail flew in showers.
There I heard naught but the sea to roar,
the frigid wave. Sometimes the swan’s song
did I take for entertainment, the gannet’s cry
and curlew’s sound for men’s laughter,
the seagull’s singing for mead.
Storms there beat the stony cliffs, where
the tern, the icy-feathered one, answers him,
very often the eagle screamed round about,
the dewy-feathered one; not any protecting kinsmen
could comfort the wretched spirit. READ MORE…
Weekly News Roundup, 10th April 2015: BTBA vs. VIDA vs. IFFP?
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Happy Friday! The time has finally arrived for the Best Translated Book Award longlist… After weeks of blog- and social-media hype, both the fiction and poetry longlists have been announced, and we can’t say we aren’t impressed! The lineup includes, among others, several Asymptote friends, like Faces in the Crowd author and blog contributor, Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli, blog interviewee and Translation Tuesday featurette Danish author Naja Marie Aidt, deceased Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal (featured in another Translation Tuesday dedication), Chinese interviewee and Nobel-deserving Can Xue, and many, many more. It’s definitely worth taking a peek through the list—I’ve no idea how the judges managed to narrow it down (at Three Percent, Chad Post laments the books he thought would make it—but didn’t), nor how they’ll be able to pick a winner from such a strong group. READ MORE…
from YOUTH
The way the snow falls
and covers the plain
that’s how I grew up
at the hearts of your eyes.
*** READ MORE…
Life in Grinding Years: Latvia in Transition and Translation
A conversation with Amanda Aizpuriete, Latvian poet and translator
Amanda Aizpuriete is a mystical poet. In conversation this past fall, she told me she writes “about places I haven’t been, lives I haven’t lived.” We met in Jurmala, a place whose name literally means “seashore” and which comprises a string of resort towns halfway between Riga and Kaugari, where Aizpuriete has lived all her life. Her mother was entitled to military housing there. Her children went to the same school she attended as a child. “I have lived through the most dramatic changes,” Aizpuriete says, who was born in 1956 and has published collections of poetry while Latvia was under Soviet control to the present.
“There was only one publisher at the start, and an ‘inside’ review was of the greatest importance.” She explained this meant a critique and recommendation of a prospective book by a well-known writer.
Aizpuriete studied philology and philosophy at the Latvian State University from 1974-1979, as well as at the M. Gorky Literature Institute’s Translation Seminary in Moscow from 1980-1984. Through this time, she met translators from Ukraine and Azerbaijan and discovered what she describes as “great writings,” just opening up to publishing in the mid-eighties when Gorbachev entered power. First to translate this work into Latvian, she interviewed Josef Brodsky a couple of years after he’d won the Nobel Prize, and translated his play Demokratija into Latvian with his collaboration. “This was a beautiful episode, done through relationships,” Aizpuriete says. As poetry editor for the magazine Avots (Wellspring) in the mid-eighties, Aizpuriete was able to see the debut of banned Latvians, those it was not possible to publish earlier. READ MORE…
Happy friday, translation friends! We frequently post all sorts of dispatches on the blog—when the Asymptote family stretches far and wide to connect with other readers all across the globe—but rarely does our team encounter literature under threat. Here’s a report on the Karachi literary festival, in which the Guardian contends that “books really are a matter of life and death.” (they aren’t elsewhere, either?!). And in Egypt, good news for freedom of the press: a high court has granted bail to two Al Jazeera journalists. And Guernica reports on another country in conflict struggling to find voice on the international stage: Syria in image. READ MORE…