In Part I of Asymptote blog’s interview with Alex Cigale, Cigale discussed the roots of Russian Futurism, its modern inheritors, and politics at play in Russian poetry. Now he discusses his poetry and translations of Russian neo-futurist poets Serge Segay and Rea Nikonova. Read on for new poems by Segay and Nikonova, and to find out about Cigale’s Kickstarter campaign to finish exoDICKERING: Compositions 1963-1985, translated poetry by Serge Segay.
Posts filed under 'Poetry'
Interview with Alex Cigale: Part II
Featuring poetry by neo-futurist poets Serge Segay and Rea Nikonova!
Interview with Alex Cigale: Part I
"As is true for many of my current projects, for the first fifteen years of reading him, my feeling was: Untranslatable."
Asymptote editor-at-large and accomplished poet and translator Alex Cigale is hard at work on a forthcoming book of translations of neo-futurist Serge Segay’s poetry titled exoDICKERING: Compositions 1963-1985, and recently set up a Kickstarter campaign to help him finish his work. In part one of a conversation with Asymptote Blog, Cigale talks about the roots of Russian Futurism and its modern inheritors, politics at play in Russian poetry, and the unique challenge of translating a linguistic system that associates every letter of the alphabet with a feeling-sense (and a color!).
Translation Tuesday: Poems by John Smelcer
Featuring work by John Smelcer, who can read and write in Ahtna, one of the world's most endangered languages
Recipe for a Reztini
Two parts cheap gin or vodka
One part of your youth
Garnish with a strip of dried salmon or jerky
Shake it in the backseat of a Pontiac
doing 70 mph on Dead Man’s Curve
***
Asymptote’s 3rd Anniversary Celebrations in March and April (Plus: our New Events Page, with Multimedia!)
Check out highlights from our past celebrations in London and New York, and don't miss our upcoming events!
We’re thrilled to announce that Asymptote’s globetrotting third anniversary party, which kicked off in London and New York in January, will continue across five continents over the next month—watch our brand-new video trailer below for a taste, and don’t forget to RSVP at our Shanghai (March 29), Philadelphia (March 29), Berlin (April 3), and Sydney (April 11) Facebook Event pages, already live.
In case you can’t make it, don’t fret: we’ve launched a new Events page, where you can find photos, podcasts, videos, and dispatches of all the events we’ve ever organized, as well as an up-to-date pulse for all upcoming events!
In Review: “Word by Word”
"Saroyan’s comparison of his grandmother’s mustache to Stalin’s had to be blacked out by the editor in the whole print run."
Czechoslovak history is closely connected to language and culture; it follows that translation, in particular, is a mighty revolutionary tool in times of oppression…
The twenty-seven interviews with the oldest generation of Czech translators collected in Word by Word (With Translators on Translating) reveal the personal histories of the people who, for more than half a century, were the arbiters of the literary masterworks available to thousands of Czech and Slovak readers.
Translation Tuesday: A Poem by Biljana Stajic
This twisting narrative from Serbia delves into our deepest fears and anxieties
Tickets for America
I am walking down the street
someone is following me
the heart is beating
it is dark
no one around
dread all over
I shiver
getting near
I start to run
the front door is locked
I ring the intercom
keep running
just so I am not standing still
such darkness
such a town
Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Faruk Šehić
Reflections from Bosnia and Herzegovina on war and the modern world
die young and leave a beautiful corpse
thus spoke rockers
but this is another planet here
on Padež hill
eleventh day of duty goes by
the first after Smajo’s death
I just keep on repeating his name, I call out to him, I call him on the phone, as if he would answer. I have no words. The demons of death had been hovering around Szilárd for a long time. I was afraid of them at times—he certainly was not. He lived with them, but he did not feed them. READ MORE…
Arash Allahverdi’s “Shitkilling,” translated from the Farsi by Thade Correa and Alireza Taheri Araghi, is a powerful poetry standout in Asymptote’s Winter Issue. It’s seductive: inviting its readers to read, “to come and do drugs,” to submit to the poem’s provocations—and “as if semen drink the water”—the poem is a one-of-a-kind experience of the high and low, of the routine and the extraordinary. READ MORE…
بیژن جلالی
Bijan Jalali
با مرگ بگریزم
تا کهکشانها
زیرا با زندگی
راه چندان دوری
نمیتوان رفت
with death
i would elope
to the galaxies
because
thus far
my path
in life
is blocked
“Let’s go get some water,” said the man with a coarse salt-and-pepper beard, grabbing his parka from a hook on the wall behind the wood stove.
“Can’t we do it tomorrow morning when it’s light outside?” replied the son, looking up from the book he was reading and then looking out the frosted window. “It’s pitch black out there.”
“No. Let’s do it now. Grab your coat.” READ MORE…
Three days of national mourning were declared in Argentina to commemorate the life of poet Juan Gelman, who passed away at eighty-three on Tuesday, January 14th in Mexico City. Silvina Friera of Pagina/12 remembered the Argentine poet’s great contribution to Spanish literature, stating “we have lost a man who transformed wounds into memorable verses…an untamable voice, so close and so beloved, whose deep cadence crackled with an elegant and playful irony.” READ MORE…
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Havana, 1955) is one of Cuba’s most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers. Collections of his poems appear throughout Latin America and Europe, and he has been the recipient of major awards all over the Spanish-speaking world, most recently Spain’s 2013 Alfons el Magnànim International Poetry Prize for his book, desde un granero rojo (from a red barn). Known as a charismatic reader, he has been a riveting presence at most of the major international literary festivals for over a decade, having read in more than twenty countries. In the last several years, Rodríguez Núñez has begun to develop an enthusiastic English-reading audience as two book-length translations of his work have appeared in the UK, along with a chapbook in the United States, as well as poems in prominent American and British journals.
“Poetry needs experiment, philosophical reflection on its own material, rebellion, seeing itself as a task for readers,” argued Piotr Śliwiński in his 2002 overview of contemporary Polish poetry, Adventures with Freedom. “In other words, it needs Karpowiczs. Especially Polish poetry, dominated over the last two decades by Miłosz and Herbert.” As a translator, I often think of Śliwiński’s diagnosis, particularly when I need to disappoint my interlocutors with the news that I don’t translate Herbert, Miłosz or Szymborska. I don’t have to – they are synonymous with Polish poetry in English. But Karpowicz? How to explain, then, what poetry needs, if this name hardly functions outside Poland? Another challenge: how to present a poet Karpowicz tried to promote, both in the US and in Poland? If only I could say, “Krystyna Miłobędzka is one of the Karpowiczs…”