Posts filed under 'world poetry'

“Swarms touch the text where thought burns”: An Interview with Aiden Farrell on Translating The Vitals by Marie de Quatrebarbes           

September 10, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

The text is as bodily as the body is textual, their respective functions included.

The Vitals, written by Marie de Quatrebarbes and translated from the French by Aiden Farrell, examines the chasm of loss and desire to “conjugate the moments outside of me, spent so far from you, with this distance that is ‘I see’ and you who are ‘so far from me.’” Written in lyrical, diaristic fragments that take place between July and December, the poems certify de Quatrebarbes as a master of the short prose poetry form, which she imagines as nestled matryoshka dolls. Each poem is titled with the day of the month as the speaker lives her life and thoughts intrude. “Say again, do mourners have a singular?” asks de Quatrebarbes, as she lives and re-lives: “The day of his departure–the eye simply wanted to take stock.”

Farrell’s English translation is a deft reflection of the poet’s angular and defamiliarizing experiments with syntax, discontinuity, and memory; in this interview, I spoke with him on the ongoing process of translational work, its intersections with his personal writing, and the ways in which de Quartrebarbes subverts language.

Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation to you?

Aiden Farrell (AF): I like that you’ve framed literary translation as an act, because that’s exactly what it is, and any definition that tries to go beyond the action of translation has to be taken with a grain of salt—which is to say that translation is nothing if not a process, necessarily changing from project to project and from translator to translator.

A writing practice necessitates a reading practice; translation is both at the same time, and also not exactly, because when I’m reading to translate I’m not reading as I otherwise would, and when I’m writing my translation I’m not writing as I otherwise would, but I’m still doing both. To varying degrees, every poem I read asks me to reinvent the way I read poetry, and calls attention to my standards for reading, and then also for writing. The same goes for translating—I have to reinvent, surrender just enough of my instincts that I can be open to receiving what the original poem is giving me, but also hold on just enough that I can respond accordingly. I have to disappear so as to appear, only a second later. READ MORE…

“I will never die. I will dance. . .”: On Apotheosis of Music by Witold Wirpsza

July 10, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Katherine Beaman

Wirpsza’s work may provide some guidance as to what the artist’s role could be in the face of humanity’s darker moments. . .

Apotheosis of Music by Witold Wirpsza, translated from the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda, World Poetry, 2025

In the fourteenth century, writing from a state of political exile from Florence, Dante gave us an allegorical tour of the afterlife with an imaginary Virgil as his guide, presenting a cast of historical and mythic figures re-imagined. It isn’t hard to make the connection between him and the twentieth-century Polish poet Witold Wirpsza, who, as he contended with World War II and its subsequent outfalls, wrote from a state of exile in West Berlin and introduced his own cast of mythic figures: Dante, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Stalin. Now, from Frank L. Vigoda—the nom de plume of translator husband-wife duo Gwido Zlatkes and Ann Frenkel—comes Apotheosis of Music, a selection of Wirpsza’s cerebral and exuberant oeuvre in an indulgent, cheeky, rhythmic English, at times originating its own pleasant musicality. Where Zlatkes lends his native Polish perspective, Frenkel’s background in musicology allows for an execution of the musical structures and themes prevalent throughout Wirpsza’s work.

Born in Gdańsk, Poland in 1918 and educated in music and law, Wirpsza was drafted into WWII, held as a prisoner of war in a German camp, and, after initially being a supporter of communism following the war, eventually defected from the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR) in objection to its policies. After publishing an essay critiquing nationalist identities called “Polaku, kim jesteś” (Pole, who are you), he was banned from publication in his native Poland—a sentence that lasted until 1989, four years after his death. He then settled in West Berlin, where he lived for the remainder of his life; there, he brought works of Polish literature to a German audience and vice versa, translating works like a biography of Bach and a novel about Mozart from German into Polish.  READ MORE…

The Borders Project Reading: Atlanta’s Narrative Collective + Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop

August 15, 2016  |  in Dispatches  |  by Stacy Mattingly

The word “borders” could suggest both the presence and the absence of limits.

The Borders Project gave its first reading in Atlanta recently. A multi-genre literary collaboration between the Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop and Atlanta’s Narrative Collective, the project aims to examine all sorts of boundary lines—physical, temporal, emotional, relational, among others—and their implications. Eighteen writers and one translator came together to create work in two languages. In this essay, Stacy Mattingly, founder and co-founder of the two constituent collectives, follows the process to the Atlanta reading.

1.

The Warhorse coffee shop at Atlanta’s Goat Farm Arts Center is a long room with a garage door on one end and a wall of bookshelves on the other. Hanging from the ceiling in front of the books is a large screen. On it is the face of a friend of mine in Sarajevo. The background is a field of stars. Selma Asotić is a head floating in outer space, reciting her English poem “The Nation.”

“You are /everything which does not love me. / You are / the curse I hide under my tongue …”

Those present are fixated on the image. Some make references in jest to Star Wars. We take photos to post online for Selma and others. Danny Davis, the Goat Farm’s technical director, stands at a ladder positioned below a projector and tells us not to worry—that starry background will definitely be gone before our event.

I am just relieved all the videos from overseas are working.

My colleagues and I are doing a run-through of our reading for The Borders Project, a literary collaboration involving two writing groups—Narrative Collective in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop (SWW) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I belong to both, having launched SWW in 2012 and co-founded Narrative Collective with poet L.S. McKee in 2014.

READ MORE…