Posts filed under 'Poetry'

Krumping in Translation: Interviewing Aditi Machado, Asymptote’s Poetry Editor

On reading translated poems: "It’s a dangerous, unsettling world—that’s why it’s fun."

Asymptote’s poetry editor Aditi Machado has curated across the gutter and five continents. In light of Asymptote’s July issue, I interviewed Aditi, and her responses run the gamut: what follows is an in-depth interview with insight into arranging an issue, poetry in translation, and embracing vulnerability when reading. 

Many think that reading poetry requires a specific literacy—is the same true for reading translation, or poetry in translation?

Reading anything requires specific forms of literacy, even reading a newspaper. With poetry, I think we’re less aware of skills we may already have or of those that may be gained. Additionally, we’re extremely sensitive about our lack in these skills—or, if we feel we do have them, we might be able to articulate how we learned them and how much further we have to go. It’s a special privilege, being literate about one’s literacy. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Poems from “Dickicht” by Ulrike Almut Sandig

"i will / act like only that flickering, fevered light / embroidered into the tips of the fir trees is real."

Although Sandig was born in former East Germany, one would not necessarily recognise that immediately from any outward aspect of her poetry. Rather it is present in occasional turns of phrase, and perhaps in a residue of longing for a disappeared world. On the one hand, her poetry deals in the recognisably real: from the city or landscapes of the south to the minutiae of the everyday. But hers is also a voice tinged with nostalgia and a sensibility for landscape that harks back to models from the past, a compass needle finely tuned to an existential north that is overshadowed by absence and loss. Her language reflects this dichotomy: splicing contemporary slang with snippets of children’s rhymes, fairy-tales, or quotations from a nineteenth-century canon with a telling irony. Hers is a quiet voice in many ways: without showy metaphors or obtrusive forms, but with a profound sense of music, as demonstrated by the fact that some of her poems appear with musical settings on her recent CD with musician Marlen Pelny Märzwald (March World, 2011). Dickicht (2011) takes us into a “thicket” that is at once the world, the psyche, and language itself. The poems explore language at its most slippery (testing out idioms, playing with the lack of upper case to exploit multiple meanings, riffing on the formal and intimate second person address). Many poems appear in opposing pairs and insist on the mutability of what appears to be stable polarities. And if the poems always seem to go in search of a self, a home, they are also simultaneously and teasingly aware that, as Sandig put it in a recent interview, “at its best a poetry collection becomes the place where you yourself can disappear.”

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Asymptote Summer 2014 Issue – Out Now!

Three cheers for great literature!

Hot off the e-press: Asymptote’s July issue is now live! The star-studded issue reads like a cool glass of water, and with good reason: the cold-as-ice cover is inspired by Latin America, currently in the dead of winter and the subject of this issue’s special feature.

Highlights in this Latin-American edition include writerly tributes to Osvaldo Lamborghini (by César Aira), Julio Cortázar (by Sergio Chejfec), and Gabriel García Márquez (by the legend’s very own Portuguese translator Eric Nepomuceno), alongside poetry from Chilean prizewinner Rául Zurita and fiction by Uruguayan author Cristina Peri Rossi. We’ve even got a video trailer for them!

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Translation Tuesday: Selections from Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem”

A new translation by John Gallas

“You cannot leave your mother an orphan.” Joyce

 

Not some other country’s sky,

Not some other’s housing wings –

I was there, with them, my them,

my own misfortunates.

 

An Other Introduction

In the ghastly years of the Yezhov Terror, I passed seventeen months standing, waiting in line outside a Leningrad prison. One day, somehow, someone “identified” me. And a woman behind me, her mouth blue with cold, who, of course, had never heard of me, started out of her numb and shared distraction, and said to me, quite close (we all whispered, there) :

Ah, can you write this ?

And I said, Yes.

And something nearly a smile slipped across her face, and made it one again.

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Translation Tuesday: Poetry by Nala Arung, translated by Tiffany Tsao

"Who would have guessed that love would collide / Into the wall that is FPI."

Efpei I’m in Love by Nala Arung

The cover of Efpei I’m in Love, a poetry collection by Indonesian writer Nala Arung, announces that it is “a book of tasteless poetry.” And it is apparent from the outset that its tastelessness operates on multiple levels.

Its title is deliberately lowbrow—a take on the title of the wildly popular teenage chick-lit novel, Eiffel … I’m in Love, published in 2001 and adapted for film as a romantic comedy of the same name two years later.

The Efpei that has displaced the original Eiffel refers to the FPI, or Islamic Defenders’ Front. A hard-line Islamic vigilante organization, FPI has gained national notoriety for using violence to enforce their interpretation of Islamic law. Its members often patrol areas for signs of un-Islamic activity, destroying property and beating up offenders. The organization has also attacked religious minorities, including Buddhists, Christians, and Ahmadi Muslims, whom they consider a heretical sect. FPI is certainly no laughing matter and hardly the stuff love poems are made of—or so it would seem until one reads the titular poem “FPI, I’m in Love.”     READ MORE…

Torquemada Paxman and the Poet-Heretics of the Catholic-Readers’ Church

"An educated amateur could judge a fiction contest and raise no eyebrows." Why isn't this true for poets?

“I think poetry has really rather connived at its own irrelevance and that shouldn’t happen, because it’s the most delightful thing,” said Paxman. “It seems to me very often that poets now seem to be talking to other poets and that is not talking to people as a whole.”

Jeremy Paxman has touched a nerve with his proposal to drag poets before a new Torquemada. But inquisitors toss accusations as predictably as tomatoes hurled by audiences. We poets learned long ago to perform behind thick glass barriers.

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Five poems by Darko Cvijetic

Translated by Mirza Purić

SORTIE AT DAYBREAK

You can hear the dreaming of a bird
The close-eyed water

Every moment a sound
A soundlet
Leaves the heart

The lamp dissolves the skin of someone’s shadow
By the chair leg

And you’re the eye of a calf

God may approach you

The Cantos inhabits
Ezra
Dead men have no mothers

(I’m feeling uncountable
relax relax darling
after all these years)

I’m pregnant she says

There is more
Soil in me than usual READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: from ALMA VENUS by Pere Gimferrer

The poem, a mosaic of voices: / All poems are a single voice / That murmurs words wearing makeup

Alma Venus, a long poem in two parts by Spanish and Catalan writer Pere Gimferrer, translated by Adrian West, is now available from Antilever Press. Gimferrer’s creative work appeared in English translation for the first time in Asymptote’s January 2013 issue, after which Adrian West began translating Alma Venus. Gimferrer’s work has been awarded the National Prize of Spanish Letters (1998), the Reina Sofia Prize for Iberoamerican Poetry (2000), and the Octavio Paz International Poetry and Essay Prize (2006).

From Alma Venus, First Book

Every poem has a single theme:

How the word says something else.

The sparrow hawk lives blind and serene

In the murk of the final words.

I walked on these streets in the years

When my youth was a dead she-wolf,

But they were unreal, not drawn out

Yet, or drawn out and entombed.

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Dispatch from Scotland’s International Poetry Festival

Editor-at-large Jasmine Heydari tackles Welsh poetry, language and war, and a Haggis breakfast in her dispatch from StAnza

Earlier this spring I attended StAnza, one of Scotland’s major international poetry festivals. After an early flight from Stockholm to Edinburgh, I boarded a bus taking me to the east coast of Scotland. The bus made its way through twisty and narrow roads, overlooking green hills on one side, while the other faced long, golden sand dunes and black rocks coated in seaweed. Two hours later, I arrived at the city of St. Andrews, or as the Scots say it, Saunt Aundraes, the home of the festival.

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Translation Tuesday: Short Prose by Oleg Yuriev

"Suddenly, the cow moaned like a door."

A sunny winter in Florence. 

Early morning—blue and gold, and

the black Florentine air—eeny meeny miney moe—has completely vanished from the city: and is now wrapping up and flowing down the hills that are more orbital than surrounding.

Above the hills—the still-white night sky slowly turns blue. And between the hills, red Tuscan brushwood burns, which will soon become gold…

The conjoined sky.

The mooing hills.

The well-defined valleys.

The cypresses are like folded umbrellas,

and the stone pines—unfolded.

Under the stone pines and cypresses, Italians brushed the drips from their gray hair in the rear-view mirrors of their own and others’ motor scooters and sang sweetly with voices as hoarse as though they had an Italian three-day stubble.

 

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Hebrew Poetry from Ron Dahan’s Collection “Youth”

Dahan's portrayals of war and daily life in Israel are stirring: precise yet deftly ambiguous, casual yet anguished

A soda machine burns outside a grocery store

and all the Pepsi and the Coke (diet, too) and the Sprite

Explode in all directions like grenades.

The village of Markabe is burnt and bombed like in a war movie.

And like in a war movie

there’s the guy who carries a heavy jerrycan on his back

and the guy with the cigarette between his teeth

and the guy called Nir

and the guy who’s going to die and doesn’t know it so he allows himself to reminisce about that time when

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Interview with Alex Cigale: Part II

Featuring poetry by neo-futurist poets Serge Segay and Rea Nikonova!

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.

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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!).

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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

***

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