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My Interview with David Constantine at Cerise Press
David Constantine is a wonderfully articulate poet with a scholar’s complexity of vision.We conducted this interview by email, and he was unfailingly generous with his time—as generousas Cerise Press was with space in their publication! You can read the interview here.Read More
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Poetry Makes Something Happen
Günter Grass at Home I suppose it’s appropriate that Poetry Month should witness the international furor created by the great German poet and novelist Günter Grass with his poem “What Must Be Said.” (So much for Auden and his assertion that “poetry makes nothing happen.”) There are now several translations of the poem available, each of which has something to recommend it; but this is my favorite as a whole, despite an awkward patch or two: WHAT MUST BE SAIDGünter Grass / Tr.Read More
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Tin Ear
Rimbaud (who did nothave a tin ear) It’s statements like this that drive me nuts—at least when I’m in a certain mood: The poem [Paul Schmidt’s translation of Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre”] starts with I drifted on a river I could not control. In the other of my most favorite translations, Samuel Beckett begins with Downstream on impassive rivers suddenly. Two magnificent and very different first lines, but rhythmically not that far apart. The statement is by Norma Cole, a widely-published poet and academic who teaches at the University of San Francisco.Read More
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Adios, Wisława Szymborska
“Poland’s 1996 Nobel Prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska, whose simple words and playful verse plucked threads of irony and empathy out of life, has died. She was 88. […] The Nobel award committee’s citation called her the ‘Mozart of poetry,’ a woman who mixed the elegance of language with ‘the fury of Beethoven’ and tackled serious subjects with humor.” More here. * * * Hiroshige Utagawa, “Evening Showerat Atake and the Great Bridge” PEOPLE ON THE BRIDGEby Wisława Szymborska(tr.Read More
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From that Wonderful Resource, the Poetry Translation Centre
Flute Player by Farzaneh Khojandi Where is the real bazaar?I want to buy an eyeful of kindness.I want to dress my soul in hyperbole.There’s a merchant who brings mea whole spectrum of leaping colourfrom the city of desires.But here at the bazaar at Khojand,faces are sour, talk is hotand I long for the cool sweets of Tabriz.Where is the real bazaar?The flute-player tells me:come with your ears used to insults,and listen to the light recite a prayer to the dark.Open your eyes used to pale shameand see the beauty of Truth.Where is the real bazaar?The flute-player is therecalling my heart…Read More
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Untranslatable
The Top 10 Relationship Words that Aren’t Translatable into EnglishRead More
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Play Misty For Me
I have to admit that I’ve often been baffled by Bei Dao‘s poems. It is impossible not to admire his biography, but his poetry—”misty” in Chinese—strikes me as cryptic in English. I’m not saying that his primary translators, Bonnie S. McDougall and David Hinton, haven’t done good work; I’ve always felt that the difficulties lay in Bei Dao’s work itself, and in the cultural/political context which no introductory remarks or footnotes, however assiduous, can provide.Read More
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A Walk with Leto and The Mathematician
Back in March I quoted a passage from Juan José Saer’s nightmarish novel The Witness, and since much of the poetry I chose to read in Mexico had an Argentine flavor, I decided to read another Saer novel, The Sixty-Five Years of Washington. I have to say that the book knocked my socks off, combining as it does a Rabelaisian gusto with a Beckettish humor and something of the obsessiveness we find in Robbe-Grillet.Read More
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Three Poems by Roberto Juarroz
One of the most intrepid translators of the mercurial Roberto Juarroz is my friend Mary Crow, whose selection of Juarroz’s late poetry was recently released by White Pine Press as Vertical Poetry: Last Poems. (Just an aside: White Pine Press is surely one of the country’s great literary publishers, and yet it seems quite a bit lesser known than Copper Canyon, Graywolf, or Milkweed.Read More
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Ángel González’s “Penultimate Nostalgia”
I didn’t post at all last week because we were in Mexico. I noticed there was no hue-and-cry! Nevertheless, I want to report that I read some wonderful books in swimming palm-leaf shade and the rustle of surf. Let me start with this poem by the great Spanish expatriate poet Ángel González, from a collection translated with great subtlety by E. A. Mares, Casí Toda La Música y otros poemas (in English, Almost All the Music and Other Poems). It’s pretty long, but I can’t resist sharing it: Penultimate Nostalgia The time for nostalgiahas arrived.Read More