Posts featuring Pablo Neruda

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 30, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Sofija Popovska

The latest in literary news from North Macedonia to the United States!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us from North Macedonia to New York with updates on literary festivals and fairs. From Jean-Pierre Siméon’s belief in the sustaining nature of poetry, to a celebration of the many languages spoken besides Spanish in Hispanic communities, read on to learn more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from North Macedonia

The conclusion of the 2024 Struga Poetry Evenings (SPE) brought conversations about the meaning of poetry nowadays to the foreground of the Macedonian literary scene. The festival’s main award, the Golden Wreath—whose recipients over the years include W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, and Ted Hughes—was awarded to French poet, writer, critic, and dramatist Jean-Pierre Siméon this year. In an illuminating conversation with the magazine Nezavisen (Independent), Siméon retraced the well-known, yet often forgotten, connection between poetry, longing, and change.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Ode to Wood” by Pablo Neruda

July 9, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Wally Swist

I carry around the world / on my body, on my clothes, / scent of sawmill, / aroma of red boards.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poem by the inimitable Pablo Neruda, translated from the Spanish by Wally Swist. Oscillating between the grand and the mundane, but never stinting on lavish detail, the poet draws an entire world out of his relationship to wood—the elemental matter from which so much of our world, from houses and coffins to ships and railroad ties, is fashioned. Dwelling in particular on the physical scene of trees being felled, Neruda not only pays vivid homage to the labor of woodcutting, but also illustrates the intimate connection between the world of human industry and the natural environment from which it arises—a connection that is more salient than ever, in our current age of ecological collapse. Read on!

Oh, how much I know
and recognize
among all things
wood is
my best friend.
I carry around the world
on my body, on my clothes,
scent of sawmill,
aroma of red boards.
My chest, my senses
feel impregnated
in my childhood
of falling trees,
of great forests
of future construction. READ MORE…

Against Containment, Attracting Meaning: Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and Katherine M. Hedeen discuss midnight minutes

June 6, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Pazen

. . . I don’t want any borders in poetry. I want to continue the lines, continue the poems, continue this flow. It’s a current of meaning.

In the roughly two decades since Víctor Rodríguez Núñez began writing the antinationalist salvo actas de medianoche and Katherine M. Hedeen began its translation, both have published numerous award-winning works and gained international recognition for their poetry and translations. But despite their acclaim and the widespread success of the poem in the Spanish-speaking world through various prizes and publications (Valladolid, Soria, La Habana), traditional English-language publishers resisted considering the poem and its defiance of  preconceived notions of Cuban and Latin American poetry—until this April, when the book-length poem, midnight minutes, was published in full with Action Books. 

Spanning over 2000 lines, midnight minutes challenges the formation of the traditional poem on the page and the formation of borders of all kinds. Rodríguez Núñez reinvents the sonnet as it curves between the rural towns of his life, from Cayama, Cuba, to Gambier, Ohio, where he lives together with Hedeen, embracing the night as homeland in “one long, dark breath.” Hailed as one of his most influential works in the Spanish-speaking world, actas de medianoche marked a new, experimental turn in both Rodríguez Núñez’s poetics and Latin American poetry overall, now extending into the English for the first time in full with midnight minutes. 

I interviewed Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez about the significance of the translation’s publication today, the contemporary long poem and sonnet in Spanish and in English, their influences from Cesár Vallejo to Pierre Joris’ translations of Paul Celan, and how Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez transform the poetic subject and the object of desire. 

The following dialogue has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Pazen (SP): You both have spoken about how, despite the impact of actas de medianoche in the Spanish-speaking world since its initial publication, presses in the United States were overwhelmingly resistant to publishing the English translation, midnight minutes. This was often because of how it defies preconceived ideas of Latin American, and specifically Cuban, poetry. Why do you think right now is finally when these translations are being published? 

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (VRN): Let’s talk a bit about why there was resistance. There is a problem with long poems. Many magazines don’t publish them. Each canto in midnight minutes has fourteen stanzas. The book has more than two thousand lines. And it’s not a book about any explicit Cuban-related theme. It’s not what somebody expects a Cuban poet to write about. 

Borges, for instance, didn’t like Gabriela Mistral’s poetry. He didn’t like Federico García Lorca’s poetry. I am not in agreement with him in either case, but the reason why is compelling to me. He said that Gabriela Mistral was a professional Chilean. And he didn’t like Garcia Lorca’s poetry because he said that he was a professional Andalusian. “El andalus profesional, la chilena profesional.” I am not a professional Cuban. 

READ MORE…

Call for Submissions: On Palestine

December 6, 2023  |  in On Palestine  |  by Carol Khoury and Meghan Racklin

Submit your pieces on Palestine to the blog by January 31.

Palestinian Weather Forecast 

Gaza is answering Pablo Neruda’s question, from LXVI poem in Book of Questions:

In which language does rain fall
over tormented cities?

Listen closely:

Its first shower is in the language of semiotics: deafening whirs; shaking grounds; curling heads; thumping smoke; …
Then comes the downpour in the language of math: sequence of raids; multiplied fears; subtracted lives; divided families; added damages; …
Lastly, a never-ending chilling squall in the universal language—no not music—, that is grief: when the heavy blanket is uncloaked, the glacier proves to be thickening.

Since words are stifled by politicians at the desks of the international community, Gazans have to scream to protest Israeli collective punishment—like banning electricity and water supply to 2.3 million Gazans—to supply this year’s season of rain. 

Until freedom’s dawn breaks, take care to stay sane in the shelter-less, sealed-off, open-air prison. 

—Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, and ABC manager

These words from Carol Khoury set the tone for the Asymptote blog’s call for submissions for a series of posts focused on Palestine. We are seeking dispatches from Palestine and reflections on Palestinian identity and Palestinian struggle. We are particularly interested in pieces written by writers or translators, or pieces that take up questions about language and literature in relation to the current conflict and its historical roots.

Please send pitches or completed drafts to blog@asymptotejournal.com by January 31.

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 1, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by Andriana Hamas, Sofija Popovska, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Nairobi, and Kenya!

This week, our Editors-at-Large report on the literary scene, including literary festivals and debates about educational reforms. From a readathon in Kenya to the Struga Poetry Evenings in North Macedonia, read on to find out more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

The greatest literary event in North Macedonia, the Struga Poetry Evenings (SPE), began yesterday with the customary reading of T’ga za jug (Longing for the South), an iconic poem by the first modern Macedonian poet, Konstantin Miladinov. The first event of this year’s festival was the planting of a tree in Poetry Park to honor this year’s laureate and recipient of the Golden Wreath, Vlada Urošević. Previous recipients of this award include W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, and Ted Hughes, as SPE broadened its scope from national to international literature in 1966. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 14, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Julia Sherwood, Sofija Popovska, and Wambua Muindi

Literary news from Poland, Kenya, and North Macedonia!

In this week of updates on world literature, our Editors-at-Large bring news on an upcoming film adaptation of Władysław Reymont’s The Peasants, a monthly calendar highlighting African writers and literatures, and the most recent winner of the esteemed Golden Wreath in North Macedonia! From Asymptote contributors’ recent accolades to a brief look into Vlada Urošević’s poetry, read on to learn more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Poland

A film version of the modern Polish classic, The Peasants by Nobel-prize winning author Władysław Reymont, will hopefully hit the screens later this year, following a lengthy delay caused by COVID and the war in Ukraine. Those familiar with the Gdańsk-based filmmakers Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman will know that this won’t be your run-of-the-mill costume drama; the film uses the same painstaking hand-painted technique that the team pioneered in their earlier acclaimed short film Loving Vincent. Originally scheduled for release in 2022, the production of The Peasants came to a standstill, as twenty-three of the artists working on the film were Ukrainian and based in a studio in Kyiv. Interestingly, it is the film that we have to thank for the new English edition of The Peasants; since the existing translation published in 1924 was rather outdated, Welchman commissioned Anna Zaranko, winner of the 2020 Found in Translation Prize, to translate a couple of chapters for him and subsequently managed to persuade Penguin Classics to publish the complete novel, which is nearly 1000 pages long. 

In 2021, one year after Zaranko won it, the Found In Translation Award went to Ewa Małachowska-Pasek and Megan Thomas for their new English version of Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz’s 1932 satirical novel The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma. They discuss the novel with Daniel Goldfarb in the first episode of his series of Encounters with Polish Literature. Now in its third year, this consistently illuminating series of monthly videos that Goldfarb has been producing for the Polish Institute in New York has clocked up twenty-six episodes so far. In Episode 2, which focuses on Andrzej Sapkowski, Goldfarb is joined by David French, who has translated six out of the fantasy writer’s eight novels in the Witcher series into English, as well as all three parts of his Hussite Trilogy. In the most recent Episode 3, Goldfarb and the scholar and translator Benjamin Paloff introduce Leopold Tyrmand, author of one of the great Warsaw novels and popularizer of jazz in mid-twentieth-century Poland, a transformative figure in Polish culture between the death of Joseph Stalin and the post-Stalin thaw.

There have been nominations and prizes galore for Asymptote contributors: Marta Dziurosz has won the First Translation Prize of the UK Society of Authors 2022 for her ‘truly astounding translation’ from the Polish of Marcin Wicha’s Things I didn’t Throw Out, sharing the prize with editors Željka Marošević and Sophie Missing. Mikołaj Grynberg’s heartbreaking collection of short stories, I’d Like To Say Sorry But There’s No One To Say Sorry To, translated by Sean Gasper Bye, has been named a finalist of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish literature (the winner to be announced on September 12). Olga Tokarczuk’s monumental The Books of Jacob in Jennifer Croft’s translation finds itself on the shortlist of the 2023 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Literary Prize alongside fellow Polish author Maciej Hen and Anna Blasiak, translator of his book According to Her (see interview). 

And finally, if you are a writer or translator with at least one published book, are currently working on a writing project, are interested in learning more about the Polish literary community, and have a connection with any UNESCO City of Literature outside of Poland, don’t miss the opportunity to apply for a two-month literary residency in Kraków (July 1 to August 31, 2023). The deadline for applications is April 23.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 24, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Nestor Gomez, and Peera Songkünnatham

New poems, book fair discussions, and online publications from Thailand, El Salvador, and Palestine!

This week, our editors from around the world report on an international poetry volume in support of human rights, an author talk between two Salvadoran poets, and an online exploration of the history of Jerusalem that includes a wealth of Palestinian literature. Read on to find out more!

Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand

Five Thai poems got a chance to shine in the company of poems in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Swahili. On June 15, the Human Rights Defenders Poetry Challenge, organized by Protection International together with its partners from ProtectDefenders.eu and the University of York, concluded with an awards ceremony and a booklet launch. As part of the #StayWithDefenders campaign, the challenge called on “all creatives, activists and advocates for human rights” to submit poems honoring those who “have suffered, succeeded, fought and fallen.” The top three winners were announced from a pool of thirty finalists, five from each of the languages. You can read the booklet here; every poem not originally in English is accompanied by an English translation. How nice it is for poets to slip through the political and poetical confines of their countries into an ad-hoc international space, at least virtually on Zoom and in translation.

“To be a poet in this country is like being in a cage,” stated Mek Krueng Fah about Thailand upon winning third place overall. His poem “Remember, we’re all by your side” (โปรดจำไว้.. เราต่างอยู่ข้างเธอ) manages to console even as it stares into an unrelenting bleakness: “On the road of fighters that will know no end, / The ones who came before lie dead, uncovered; / Their bodies caution ‘watch your step, my friend,’ / And nightly, to protect, their spirits hover.”

First place went to “The Full Truth” (Ukweli Kamili) by Martin Mwangi from Kenya. The poem deftly impersonates the flippant attitudes of shrewd politicians who speak in half-truths: “Welcome, it is here that we will give you vegetable rice while we eat pilau rice / then if you complain we’ll say be thankful at least you ate. / However, for how long shall you live with these half-truths of at least? / I don’t know, answer that yourself.” Second place was awarded to María del Campo from Uruguay, whose “To Those Afraid of Windmills” (A quienes les temen los molinos) will make human rights defenders—“those who slip through the cracks and pose a threat to the wall as bridge, brick, step, door”—feel seen and touched. READ MORE…

Waldeen’s Neruda: Translating the Dance

March 6, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Jonathan Cohen

She understood the essential relationship between poetry and music and their common root in dance. This was her secret.

Yesterday’s Translation Tuesday featured Pablo Neruda’s “Coming of the Rivers” sequence in an astonishing and previously unpublished translation by Waldeen. How did Waldeen capture the voice and tone of Neruda’s poetry so accurately, and why have such elegant translations remained in obscurity for almost seventy years? Poet and translator Jonathan Cohen, a close friend of Waldeen, explains the history—and the secrets—behind her Neruda translations.

Waldeen von Falkenstein (1913–1993)—known as a dancer and writer by her first name alone—has yet to receive the full recognition she deserves for her work as a translator of Pablo Neruda’s poetry. The poetic achievement of her translations and their influence on American poetry merit more attention. Waldeen’s elegant renderings of poems that would form Neruda’s epic masterpiece, Canto General (1950), translations that she published in the late 1940s and early 1950s, introduced Neruda and his image-driven poetics to many readers. Among them were poets like the Beats looking for alternatives to the prevailing formalist mode of verse, who found in him, through her, a model poet.

Waldeen achieved fame in Mexico as the founder of modern dance there. In 1956, Diego Rivera, one of the principal gods of Mexican art, lavished praise on Waldeen for her contribution to Mexican culture (“In each of her dance movements, she offered our country a jewel”). His tribute to her appeared in a major newspaper of Mexico, where he went beyond his accolades of her dance work to also celebrate her as a poet-translator: “I can bear witness to this not only by the intensity of emotion I felt in the verses of this beautiful and admirable woman, but through the testimony, as well, of our Walt Whitman of Indo-America, Pablo Neruda, who wrote to her, deeply moved, after she translated poetry of his into English: ‘Waldeen, thank you, for your poems of my poems, which are better than mine.’ ”

READ MORE…

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.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

August 3, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Josefina Massot, Kelsey Woodburn, Lara Norgaard, Paul Worley, and Scott Weintraub

Our weekly roundup of literary news focuses on Latin America.

It was a busy week for literature in Latin America. Festivals, conventions, and prize ceremonies brought writers and translators together, and our team members are soothing our fomo with their reporting. Find the latest news about world literature on the Asymptote blog every Friday!

Lara Norgaard, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil:

The hottest summer I ever saw was the winter I spent in Rio de Janeiro. That is likely what writers and readers say as they flock to the tropical state for major literary festivals this July and August.

Brazil’s most important literary event of the year, the Paraty International Literary Festival (Flip), took place from July 25–29 in Paraty, Rio de Janeiro. The festival organizer, Joselia Aguiar, explains in an interview that this year’s edition focused on interiors—“love, death, desire, God, transcendence.” Aguair also sought to include other artistic genres at the event, inviting guests such as actor Fernanda Montenegro. Also in Paraty and simultaneous to Flip, a group of publishers hosted book releases and even more literary programming in an event called Casa Paratodxs.

READ MORE…

Meet the Publisher: Groundwood Books’ Patricia Aldana on Children’s Literature in Translation

February 26, 2018  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Sarah Moses

"The key—to have children be so entranced by the books they read that they will be a reader for life."

Groundwood Books is a Toronto-based publisher of children’s and young adult literature. The press was founded by Patricia Aldana in 1978 and almost from the start has been publishing Canadian literature alongside titles from around the world in translation. Groundwood’s catalogue includes books from Egypt, Mexico, and Mongolia, to name a few, and the press is particularly interested in publishing marginalized and underrepresented voices. Though Aldana sold Groundwood to House of Anansi Press in 2012, she remains active in the area of children’s literature. She is currently president of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) foundation and collaborates with the China Children’s Press and Publications Group, where she is responsible for bringing international literature to Chinese children. In an interview that took place in Buenos Aires during the TYPA Foundation’s workshop on translating literature for children and young adults, Aldana spoke with Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, about the qualities she looks for in books for children and the challenges of translating for young readers.

Sarah Moses (SM): When did Groundwood Books begin publishing children’s and young adult literature in translation?

Patricia Aldana (PA): Quite early, by 1981, I started doing translations of books in French from Québec. There were subsidies for translation from the Canada Council, which made it easier—especially novels. I was also going to Bologna and selling rights, and there I started finding books from other languages that were interesting to translate.

The Canadian market was quite healthy at that time and you could bring in books from other countries. But in 1992 provincial governments started to close down school libraries which affected the entire ecosystem of the Canadian market  and we had to go into the U.S. market directly and publish books there ourselves. A lot of our authors were known in the States because we had sold rights to them, to compete with the U.S. giants and to differentiate ourselves from them as by that point they had virtually stopped translating anything—we seized the opportunity to publish translations for a much bigger market. The Canadian market had deteriorated to such a point by then that it couldn’t really justify publishing a translation—other than of a Canadian author from Québec.

READ MORE…

In Conversation: Natasha Wimmer on Teaching Translation

October 30, 2017  |  in Asymptote for Educators, Interviews, Profile, Translator's Profile  |  by Lara Norgaard and Natasha Wimmer

Teaching translation feels like I’ve been lifting weights, and then I go to my own translation and it's like, whoa, these weights are so light!

What does it mean to teach translation? Many translators are self-taught, having honed their skills in careers as writers or editors, academics or language experts. But some universities in the United States also offer seminars in the craft of translation. The teacher-translator, then, takes on the unique challenge of developing new pedagogy for a field in flux, one that exists at the intersection of language study, theory, and the instructor’s own experiences in the creative practice of translation.

Today, translator Natasha Wimmer sits down with her former student and Asymptote Editor-at-Large in Brazil, Lara Norgaard, to discuss her approach to teaching translation. 

Lara Norgaard (LN): How did you begin teaching translation? What made you interested in education?

Natasha Wimmer (NW): Princeton approached me, actually. I had never taught a class. Not only that, but I also only have an undergraduate degree, so I had never even taken a graduate class. I was a little bit nervous about taking the job. A few years later I started at Columbia. In that case, I did a panel discussion with the other Bolaño translator, Chris Andrews, and the department heads enjoyed the discussion, so they asked me to teach.

LN: Was there a particular class you took or text you read that influenced the way you approached teaching for the first time?

NW: I actually imagined the course as the class I wish I’d taken before I became a translator. I had no formal education in translation at all. I had never taken a translation class and, in fact, I hadn’t even read anything about translation until about eight years into my translation career. When I was asked to give a talk about translation, I realized I had avoided reading about translation because I was afraid that I would discover that I had been doing it wrong, or that maybe I would mess with the instinctive approach that had somehow been successful so far. But then I found reading about translation really stimulating. I discovered that, not surprisingly, there was a conversation about the questions I had and about the things that I hadn’t articulated but had been working through as a translator.

I worked really hard the first year I taught the Princeton class. I spent a few months just reading translation theory and translation essays for material that I thought was interesting and put together a reading list. The first semester I taught at Princeton was very experimental. In retrospect, I’m surprised I survived. The format of the class changed a lot from the first year to the second.

READ MORE…

Voices from Elsewhere

December 11, 2013  |  in Multimedia  |  by Zack Newick

The Archives of the 92nd Street Y

Recently Manhattan’s peerless and endlessly vibrant 92nd Street Y released thousands of recordings of events held there over the years in honor of the institution’s 75th anniversary. I have only just begun to delve into the trove of offerings, but I have the following recommendations to make —

READ MORE…