Posts filed under 'Poetry'

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Antti Salminen

October 21, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by José Luis Rico

Insurgent, effective, obedient stronghold... And we built it all.

This Translation Tuesday, we present fragments of poetry found embedded in text and in testimony, pried from their source and polished to a sheen. Two poems by Finnish poet Antti Salminen, translated by José Luis Rico,  “Autoethnographical Sketch of the Pipe” and “Reminiscence of Settlement History” , evoke a diamond mine deep in the Siberian hinterland, a cold hell: the frost, the sludge, the desolation of the frozen pit, the hasty brutish ingenuity of the Soviet mining engineers, and the miners’ deadly toil.

Autoethnographical Sketch of the Pipe, Fragment from the Second Chapter

Mir, Mirny, open pit mine, mineshaft. 62º31 45.95 N 113º59 36.74 E: funnel-shaped ravine and artificial crater, the abyss the last people dug for themselves.

A small airport with its brief runway on the massive mining landscape’s earthwork. A glider hangar. There, where a small mining town had been, now a silent, mossy, pebble beach made of cement. No building was left standing, the purpose being to render the place as repulsive as possible for at least a thousand years. The magnitude of the risk was unknown, but there was no alternative.

When the place was initially dug, says Junifer, the mining engineers melted the winter frost from the ground with turbojets. There’s no rush to go further down, we’re already at the bottom. Work continues underground, slowly. Now we work with our hands, in small gestures. The shovels are less than weapons, and the excavators sit idle like a mighty beast’s skeleton at an open-air museum.

The serpentine road leads downward to the funnel, down to the bottom, to the pond’s gravelly beach. The road is ridden with sinkholes, which are patched and driven over however possible. In the molten-ground season: sludge, sludge everywhere. From October to April the amount of ice is impossible. The struggle against the ground frost can’t be won. But when you live through a permanent sinkhole, you learn to harness gravity. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2025

October 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Dunsky, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, Sofija Popovska, and Timothy Berge

New titles from Haiti, Argentina, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Mexico, Taiwan, Hungary, South Korea, and Latin America!

This month, we bring you thirteen reviews from thirteen countries: a poetry collection that reimagines friendships with long-gone revolutionaries, a tender and incisive rumination on disappearance, the latest novel on the inexplicability of love from a Nobel laureate, a story of Silicon Valley-fueled descent, a compilation of Latin American feminist thought, and much much more!

duels

Duels by Néhemy Dahomey, translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Timothy Berge

Néhémy Dahomey’s Duels is set in 1842, thirty-eight years after Haiti’s independence—a storied liberation that came through one of the largest slave uprisings in history. France withdrew, but issued an absurd debt of one hundred and fifty million francs. Paying off a debt while attempting to modernize a new country was a tough balancing act, so Haiti imposed high taxes on its citizens and forced them into unpaid labor.

Duels takes place in Böen, a small town in the Cul-de-Sac Plain that evaded a census for several years. As a result, no one in the town had fallen victim to the government’s schemes—until a local official decides that he needs laborers for a new project. From there on, in the context of freedom, economic entrapment, and postcolonial growing pains, the events of Duels unfold. Nathan H. Dize’s translation reads like a yarn spun out by an old relative with a deft deadpan humor, aptly navigating the tense shifts between past and present, and generating a sense of perpetuity for these characters and their stories. Here, the historical and the contemporary connect and blur.

At the center of the story is a wealthy notary named Ludovic Possible, who runs a school in Böen—primarily with the motive of getting close to his illegitimate daughter, Aida. When a two-week long rainstorm hits the region, Aida’s mother, Gracilia, dies, and Ludovic reveals himself as Aida’s father, taking over her care. Yet, what truly drives Dahomey’s narrative is the tenets of community and storytelling. Ludovic falls in love with Gracilia because of the way she tells stories, and she passes these tales to Aida; before the child was born, Gracilia “. . . placed a hand on her lower abdomen and told her fertile ovaries the very first story she’d learned from her own mother, who’d learned it from her grandmother, who’d learned it from her great-grandmother. . .”—and so on, all the way back to their first ancestors. Fittingly, the story itself is about a chantrèl who was admired by all: “When she spoke, things would happen. When she made demands, people got to work. With her voice, the rapture caused men to fear for their own sanity.”

Aida internalizes the story and, after her mother’s death, becomes the chantrèl. Armed with the tales passed down from her mother, the young girl builds and fortifies a circle of people who will come to care deeply about her, who will fight on her behalf. Building on the singular capacity of stories to bring people together, Duels captures their particular power within the historical context, demonstrating how the act of telling can frighten those in power and liberate those in captivity.

Whether against an elemental antagonist or a human one, the people in Böen unite to enact change through rebellion. As Duels connects the creation of such solidarities with storytelling, it also works to help the citizens of a tumultuous country imagine a future where violence, injustice, and exploitation no longer govern—necessary work for any nation undergoing immense transformation.

diving board

Diving Board by Tomás Downey, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses, Invisible Publishing, 2025

Review by Regan Mies READ MORE…

Deep Time Elegy: A Review of What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium by Kim Simonsen

September 25, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sayani Sarkar

[T]his is a book for readers who prefer elegy that is alert rather than ornamental.

What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium by Kim Simonsen, translated from the Faroese by Randi Ward, Deep Vellum, 2025

In seeking an entry into Faroese poetry, one should begin with Kim Simonsen, an award-winning writer and academic from the island of Eysturoy. Having been active for over two decades in conventional academia as well as in artistic circles, he is also the founder and managing editor of a Faroese press called Forlagið Eksil, and is the author of seven books as well as numerous academic papers. Hvat hjálpir einum menniskja at vakna ein morgun hesumegin hetta áratúsundið (What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium) won the M.A. Jacobsen Literature Award in 2014, and now, its translation by Randi Ward into English will be published by Deep Vellum in 2025. Written in free verse, the collection aspires to juxtapose the vast sweep of geology with the relative miniature of humanity, invoking the life cycles of organisms and landscapes whose timescales dwarf our own lives. Yet, the lyric centre of these poems is grief; the speaker has lost their loved one, and here measures their absence against the timelessness of eons. Divided into four parts, the book is also interspersed with illustrations from natural history texts such as Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705), Leopoldo Caldani and Floriano Caldani’s Icones Anatomicae (1801-1813), and Frederik Ruysch’s Thesaurus anatomicus primus (1701), among others.

READ MORE…

A Marred and Martyred Language: An Interview with Ahmad Almallah on Writing from the Borderlands

August 27, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

For you to understand poetry, you must see the human action it reflects and the one that gave it form on the page.

Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah’s second collection, Border Wisdom, is a searing love song of longing, memory, and language. It is a heart-wrenching evocation of the poet’s mother, Nawal, and of the poet’s own identity, familial lineage, and their occupied homeland. Woven with epigraphs from Ahmad Shawqi and Emily Dickinson, the collection propels itself smoothly between English and Arabic with erasure poetry, Arabic khatt, shape-poems, and English prose that chart the poet’s topographies of Philadelphia, Beirut, Vermont, and Bethlehem, along with the reimagined terrain of his mother’s Amman and al-Khalil. 

Border Wisdom pulsates with the poet’s estrangements: from his home, from his father, from the contours of his own memory. And echoing through as though an aftershock is a disclosure from the book’s last few pages: “Dear reader, I’ve been pretending all along to have a second language. Actually/in reality/basically/essentially/ I don’t know anything in Arabic.” 

In this conversation, I spoke with Dr. Almallah about Border Wisdom, mistranslations, and his labyrinthine poetics of negotiation between Arabic and English.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your second poetry collection, Border Wisdom, was published by Winter Editions in 2023. How did the poems in this collection come together over time? And what has the experience of sharing this work with the world been like for you?

Ahmad Almallah (AA): The poems began to come together before and after my mother’s disappearance from this world. The world of borders did not allow me to be by her side in her final hours. It was in 2021; I was trying to be there for her but the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) launched a large operation to quell protests over kicking people out of their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, and Gaza ended up being hit the hardest as Israel was flexing its military power on innocent Palestinians as has been for seventy-seven years now.

At that point, I chose to leave the West Bank to be with my family in the US. A week after that I got news that my mother was no longer of the living. I was advised not to go back. I found myself flipping through the poems of Emily Dickinson and I happened on the line “there is a finished feeling at the grave.” It was then that I decided to go back to Palestine. The first thing that came to my mind when I walked into the room where my mother spent the final days of her life was that she was not dead. She had just disappeared. And the same thought stayed with me when I visited her grave. I wasn’t there to witness her body put in the ground. This is when I began to hold onto the idea of disappearance as an alternative to death. READ MORE…

To Keep the Shimmer Alive: A Review of The Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern

August 18, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Jordan Silversmith

To read The Gallows Songs now is to reclaim vision from algorithmic sameness, to practice freedom . . . as an event within language.

The Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern, translated from the German by Max Knight, introduction by Samuel Titan, New York Review Books, 2025

Christian Morgenstern’s name itself opens a door. The significance of his first name is clear enough, but it is his last—German for “morning star”—that bears the promise of light before knowledge, of awareness before the world hardens into habit. In The Gallows Songs, newly reissued by NYRB Poets in Max Knight’s classic 1963 translation, Morgenstern uses that dawn brightness to keep language—and thus perception—from calcifying, with a celebrated nonsense that is less escapist whimsy than a disciplined refusal of routine. At the heart of The Gallows Songs lies a paradox: it is the crimson thread holding the hanged man to the gallows pole, at once constraining and liberating, that gave Morgenstern permission to see the world as a new thing, with the freshness of something that will not be seen again. Laughing on the edge of death, Morgenstern turns the gallows itself into a perch to witness the world anew. READ MORE…

Transgressive, Phantasmagorical Banquet: A Review of The Minotaur’s Daughter by Eva Luka

August 13, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sayani Sarkar

. . . Luka's rendering moves beyond the Rilkean dream realm into a world of flesh and blood . . .

The Minotaur’s Daughter by Eva Luka, translated from the Slovakian by James Sutherland-Smith, Seagull Books, 2025

The Minotaur’s Daughter, the English-language debut of Slovakian poet Eva Luka, unfurls a tapestry of phantasmagoria, animism, resistance, and transgression. Born in 1965 in the town of Trnava, Eva Lukáčová’s career in verse began with the collection Divosestra (Wildsister), published in 1999, which was followed by Diabloň (Deviltree) in 2005 (upon which she began using the shortened version of her name), Havranjel (Ravenangel) in 2011, and Jazver (I-Beast) in 2019. The Minotaur’s Daughter contains work from the first three publications, compiling them in a immersive, wildly populated series that plunges their readers into a universe of vivid imagery and sensation.

From Divosestra, the title of a particular poem, ‘Diabloň’, became the title of Luka’s second collection; samely, ‘Havranje’ from Diabloň became the title poem of her third collection, from which the poem ‘Jazver’ (I-Beast) became the title of her fourth collection. This interconnectedness between the poet’s body of work reflects her continuity of themes and imagery—an ever-deepening quest to go into more complex levels of introspection. Prominently featuring various creatures and their biological transformations, Luka preserves throughout a distinct focus on water and the moist elements of body and nature. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “My Shadow Will Comfort You” by ariel rosé

August 12, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Frank L. Vigoda

in the fog I heard your / steps retracing the past / we spoke our mother tongues

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a nostalgic and impressionistic poem from Polish-Norwegian poet ariel rosé, translated from the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda. In “My Shadow Will Comfort You,” the speaker reaches across time to address a loved one, now lost to the past. Wandering through the valley of memory, they search for a connection that once defined their world. The ever-present fog impedes their vision, solidifying the elusiveness of what has slipped away. This lost bond transcends the individual, rooted in shared family history, language, and identity—a private world of meaning that bridged two souls. But the speaker remains suspended between past and present, longing to inhabit both at once, looking for a space between remembrance and the irrevocable passage of time.

 

After Beckett

You see, I’m a dream
collector, you’re a water
carrier and the fog is dense
in the valley I hear someone
knocking
knock
knock
no
it is just a memory
I want to be in many nows at once
I heard the unspoken words
I looked for the dear face

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2025

August 11, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eric Bies, Justin Goodman, Mathilde Hjertholm Nielsen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Palestine, France, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Bulgaria, Japan, Canada, Cuba, Argentina, Slovakia, and China!

This month’s round-up of newly released titles spans twelve titles across twelve countries. We’ve got a profound and lucid collection compiled of diaries from the genocide in Gaza; a readdressing of womanly sacrifice in the domestic realm; an Argentinian novel reinventing the history of Italy’s famed “Park of the Monsters”; the long-awaited esoteric and experimental tome from German writer Michael Lentz; essays and textual riches from the father of surrealism; and much, much more. . .

9781917093064

Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Nahil Mohana, Sondos Sabra, Ala’a Obaid, and Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Basma Ghalayini and Ayah Najadat, Comma Press, 2025

Review by Justin Goodman

Similar to the intimate testimonies of Atef Abu Said’s Don’t Look Left and Plestia Alaqad’s The Eyes of Gaza, Voices of Resistance compiles the diaries of four Gazan women, tracing their thoughts as they mourn their martyred, fear their decimation, celebrate the Palestinian people, and sacrifice meals for the sake of birthday pastries. Together, Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid highlight what Gillian Slovo describes in her introduction as both a beauty “in [their] honesty and spirit” and a horror as they gain “a whole new vocabulary for describing the sounds of different bombs.” This latter is compiled by Mohana in a list running half a page long, as she distinguishes the subtleties between “Bouf” (aerial bombing) and “Dddof” (artillery shelling). Most importantly, however, she adds: “. . . we have begun to lose our hearing.”

READ MORE…

Beyond that Southern Sky: An Interview with Seo Jung Hak and Megan Sungyoon on the Korean Prose Poem

July 17, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Wouldn’t it be enough for poetry to remain as something that doesn’t really serve any function, something without a definite meaning?

Appearing first in its Korean original as 동네에서 제일 싼 프랑스(Seoul: Moonji Publishing) in 2017, The Cheapest France in Town (World Poetry Books, 2023) is avant-garde poet Seo Jung Hak’s second collection, and his debut in the Anglosphere. To me, as a writer and reader of prose poetry and its permutations from the Arabic qaṣīdat al-nathr to the Japanese sanbunshi, Seo’s writings move with the silken grace of the Korean sanmunsi tradition. Forged by turn-of-the-century poets like Han Yong-un, Jeong Ji-yong, and Joo Yo-han, the sanmunsi found fertile ground when Ivan Turgenev’s ‘Threshold’ was rendered into the Korean as ‘Munŏgu’ by the poet and publisher Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, published in the October 1914 issue of the literary journal Ch’ŏngch’un (Youth). The sanmunsi later became, as The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry notes, a ‘notable . . . form, redolent of the aestheticism then intriguing Korean writers’.

Seo Jung Hak reimagines the sanmunsi through ‘paper box’ poems and absurdist tales, crafting language and aesthetics to uncover the poetic in the mundane and to confront globalisation’s homogenising agenda. His translator, Megan Sungyoon, frames his work as a recycling of ‘the rhetoric of outdated ideology and bureaucracy, late capitalism and unrelenting consumerism, and hyper-commercialized culture industry to make an ironic patchwork of languages of the past and present’. 

In this interview, I spoke with Seo and Sungyoon, both in Seoul, about the sanmunsi, The Cheapest France in Town, and the ways in which one can resist linguistic homogeneity.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Jung Hak, can you take us through the years between 1999—when the earliest poems in The Cheapest France in Town began taking shape—and 2017, when the collection was first published? What was your process while putting these poems together? 

Seo Jung Hak (SJH): I have been writing poems since 1991. It took me a few years to publish my first poetry collection, and eighteen more years would pass until I published my second. Personal things happened in the meantime; I got married, had a child, wrote poems on commission for literary magazines, earned some money, bought a car, lost someone, and played lots of video games. Indeed, these things are not very interesting to talk about. My personal history may mean something to me, but not to most of the people reading this interview. I’ve just lived along the currents of the world, with enough swinging and swaying. READ MORE…

Singing, Electric, Body: A Review of bruno darío’s Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation

July 16, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Daniel Yadin

The glee and daring of darío’s style, his technicolor whiz-kid pyrotechnics, induce an especially poignant and headlong involvement. . .

Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation by bruno darío, translated from the Spanish by Kit Schluter, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025

Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation is bruno darío’s mesmerizing monument to literature. Published as a tripartite collection by the Brooklyn-based Ugly Duckling Presse, it is both a posthumous triumph and an instance of translation as friendship, as a kind of company-keeping in one’s journey across states. When the Mexico City-based darío wrote these beguiling poem sequences during his twenties, he was suffering, then living, then dying of brain cancer, which ultimately killed him at the age of twenty-nine in 2022. The accomplished translator Kit Schluter recounts in his introduction that he was a good friend of darío’s (who insisted on presenting his name in lowercase since the laws of publishing would not allow him to publish wholly anonymously); the two of them, Schluter writes, “had become friends the way poets working in different languages so often do: by translating each other’s work.”

The Lantana trilogy, 153 English pages in all, recounts the doomed, fatal, gorgeous love story between one speaker, “the Inconsolable,” and his beloved, the terrific and terrifying Anfitriona, who kills herself in the first part of the sequence, “feast, fright,” then stays silent in the second, “airsickness,” as the Inconsolable writes letters about her, his life, and his work. Finally, in the third section, “raze,” she is able to speak a bit before the voice of Gravity—the gravity that pulls her deeper into the earth, into her final destination as earth—takes the final word.

There are several paths into darío’s work; I’ll start with Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass is referred to frequently throughout the book, the magnum opus of the poet of the body facing the cryptic missives of a young poet approaching death. “I sing the body electric,” darío quotes in English in one of his poems, and he does—he sings the body electric, but he sings the body as it disappears from the realm of bodies past, the body as it crumbles or effloresces into the realm of the intellect and the image. These, more than the flesh, are the guarantors of eternity, and darío takes us on a tour of the seam between them and the real.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Danae Sioziou

July 15, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Panagiota Stoltidou

the locking of the door, the alarm, / and my own passage from fire to ice.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems from the Greek writer Danae Sioziou, translated by Panagiota Stoltidou. In the first, “Athenian Days”, we’re transported into the commotion of daily life in the Greek capital. Sioziou balances familiar images (insects, breakfast, untrustworthy-seeming people you encounter in the streets) with a more mystical register: “kaleidoscopic / entropies, shells of dreams”. In a melancholic voice, the city hints at an inner vitality, buried by long years of decay.  The second poem, “Tropicalities”, is a philosophical meditation on paradoxes, and impossibilities reminiscent of Heraclitus. Various objects are listed in turn, but they are defined by their inability to fulfill the functions for which they were designed. In contrast, time’s incessant march seems all-powerful.

Athenian Days

Athenian days: flirtations
of cockroaches and shady characters,
eggs sunny side up, totems, kaleidoscopic
entropies, shells of dreams.

I know nothing of rising
stars, the eye is fixed on the first
hour, I am the center of the city,
the bustle, you say, of the here and now.

And if I saw you yesterday, my little light-eating
nightmare, boomerang, brought back
from nothing, shining messenger,

you, moon, I remain dead
only in terrible depths does the drowned
tree of life shine within me.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2025

July 14, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Anna Mebel, Jason Gordy Walker, Jordan Silversmith, and Kaelie Giffel

Newly released titles from Morocco, India, Norway, Haiti, Spain, Austria, Argentina, Egypt, Brazil, Germany, and Chile!

This month, we’re delighted to present eleven titles from eleven countries, including a lyrical litany of dreams from a Nobel laureate, a psychologically thrilling fiction-study of domestic violence and complicity, a rollicking novel on poverty and police repression in a Brazilian favela, a sharp and surrealistic collection that deeply probes the connection between death and poetry, and much, much more. . .  

1

Writings on Translation by Abdessalam Benabdelali, translated from the Arabic by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jordan Silversmith

“What is at stake in translation,” Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali writes, “is the strangeness of the other.” In Writings on Translation, a slim but resonant volume translated with clarity and philosophical sensitivity by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Benabdelali argues not only that translation is foundational to the development of Arabic and European thought, but that it constitutes a mode of ethical relation—a hosting of the stranger.

Composed of essays selected from two earlier Arabic-language works, this collection positions translation not as the failed transfer of meaning between stable tongues, but as a generative rupture in the myth of linguistic purity. Echoing Derrida and drawing on classical Arabic poetics, Benabdelali deftly critiques the nationalist drive to see language as a closed identity. “The instrument of translation is a living language,” he writes, “and its mirror is condemned to be broken.” It is in this shattering that thought is permitted to migrate.

What emerges then is a meditation on translation as both inheritance and resistance. Benabdelali revisits the Abbasid-era Bayt al-Hikma, critiques 18th-century French Orientalism, and confronts the ambivalence of Arabic literary modernity, where some authors write in expectation of translation while others fear its erasure. His essays resist binary framings of colonizer and colonized, instead advocating for a polyglossic hospitality in which meaning is always provisional and always in motion. 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…

Portrait of a Faceless Man Without a Country: A Review of Alparegho, Like-nothing-else by Hélène Sanguinetti

June 25, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Christopher Alexander

Alparegho disarms its readers with a forceful and muscular language that tenderly rips through.

Alparegho, Like-nothing-else by Hélène Sanguinetti, translated from the French by Ann Cefola, Beautiful Days Press, 2025

Today is the day! “It’s today, / great day! / Let’s shake sheets out / the windows, / smash panes and  / replace them, / empty drawers, pockets, / shelves. / Great day!” Hélène Sanguinetti’s collection, Alparegho, Like-nothing-else breaks through walls, those we erect with mortar and brick as well as the more insidious ones we draw in our minds and on the Earth. Through Ann Cefola’s translation, Alparegho effortlessly draws readers into a patchwork of vignettes that question the solidity of home and country, suggesting that these supposedly immutable objects are heavy burdens; we would be better off leaving them by the wayside. In seven chapters, the poet increasingly brings to bear the oppressive characters of the nation-state and the domestic sphere, shattering their hegemony in a sweeping motion that sweeps her readers from one scene, one place to another, looping us back and around.

Sanguinetti’s long poetic career has exhibited a practice that moves between polyphony and plasticity, and the resultant sense of vertigo disorients the internal compass as one move forward through this collection, which incorporates elements of fables, dreams, and songs to disenchant its readers from the sorcery of capitalism and authoritarianism. Alparegho opens with a potent symbol of the weight of home on our backs: a snail creeps through the dark of the night of the house, leaving a trail of slime. From there, the author slyly and gradually suggests that the rooms of the house, or the lands of the king, are interchangeable squares on a chessboard, abstract concepts just as much as lived environments. Here, home is neither comfortable nor cozy, but a rotting mess, slowly caving in. READ MORE…