Hope: A Review of Faruk Šehić’s My Rivers

December 13, 2023 | in Reviews | by Michael Tate

From these unlikely pairings emerges a soul-shredding collection that is nevertheless immensely hopeful.

My Rivers by Faruk Šehić, translated from the Bosnian by S.D. Curtis, Istros Books, 2023

In his native Bosnia, Faruk Šehić is known for his poems and the regular opinion pieces he writes for the weekly magazine BH Dani [Bosnia-Herzegovina Days], but he first came to the attention of English-language readers with a novel, Quiet Flows the Una, published in 2016. A second fiction work, Under Pressure, followed in 2019, and both books were widely reviewed and praised for their poetic narratives—a difficult task when writing about the Bosnian War of the early 1990s. He achieved this by participating in, witnessing, and describing those events, restoring human dignity to the neglected living and the memory of the dead.

My Rivers is Šehić’s first collection of poetry to be translated into English, in an excellent rendering by S.D. Curtis. Here, the imagination and the presence of dignity continues simply and powerfully through his subjects and settings, crafting a postwar future shared by the survivors of all sides. The resulting collection is an act of amazing meliorism and reconciliation that summons the strength of the “Mangled Generation,” as they are known in former Yugoslvia. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Michael Tate

Language:

Bosnian

Places:

Bosnia
Una River

Writer:

Faruk Šehić

Tags:

Translation Tuesday: “Coming of the Rivers” by Pablo Neruda, exclusive translation by Waldeen

March 5, 2019 | in Translations | by Jonathan Cohen and Waldeen

You were fashioned out of streams / and lakes shimmered on your forehead.

Poet-translator Jonathan Cohen has recovered these stunning translations of Pablo Neruda’s poetry, made in 1950 by the extraordinary Waldeen. Who? Learn about her and the secret of her translations in Cohen’s essay, “Waldeen’s Neruda,” appearing on our blog tomorrow. Here, published for the first time in this week’s Translation Tuesday, is her rendering of the complete “Coming of the Rivers” sequence. Comprising five poems, the sequence comes from the opening section of Neruda’s epic Canto General titled “La lámpara en la tierra” (“Lamp in the Earth”) in which he celebrates the creation of South America.

Coming of the Rivers

Beloved of rivers, assailed by

blue water and transparent drops,

apparition like a tree of veins,

a dark goddess biting into apples:

then, when you awoke naked,

you were tattooed by rivers,

and on the wet summits your head

filled the world with new-found dew.

Water trembled about your waist.

You were fashioned out of streams

and lakes shimmered on your forehead.

From your dense mists, Mother, you

gathered water as if it were vital tears,

and dragged sources to the sands

across the planetary night,

traversing sharp massive rocks,

crushing in your pathway

all the salt of geology,

felling compact walls of forest,

splitting the muscles of quartz.

Spotlight on Indian Languages: Part I

January 19, 2017 | in Translations | by Niyati Bhat

The entire city was a river—impossible to find a shore.

We’re thrilled to present the first installment in a five-week spotlight on Indian languages, to compliment the Indian Poetry Special Feature in the new Winter Issue of Asymptote. For the next few Thursdays, you can discover a spectrum of new voices translated from different regional languages, which, in many cases, have never been featured on the blog or in English before. To kick things off, we have Niyati Bhat’s translation of Naseem Shafaie’s Kashmiri poem, “Tale of a City,” for you today.

Tale of a City

Those who lived by the river Vyeth, now naked,
are drowning in their shame today.
They, who wrapped themselves in Shahtoosh and Pashmina
and wore silk brocades from head to toe everyday.
A delicate thread of that vanity
slowly came apart.
The skies, too, loosened the reins, a little.
King Nimrod would’ve fled
at the sight of this spectacle.
It took one moment, just one
to wipe out the entire city.
Those who lived by the river Vyeth, now naked,
were stupefied.
No pillar, no mud wall to hold on to,
No one lending their arms across the window sill for rescue,
No one at the doorway to quench their thirst.
They were flooded over their heads,
The entire city was a river—
impossible to find a shore.
They, with empty hands and empty pockets,
had no coins to pay the ferryman
to take them across.
Nor any murmurs to console each other.
Those who lived by the river Vyeth, now naked,
used to be rich until yesterday.
Those who lived by the river Vyeth, now naked,
lived in palaces until yesterday.