TRANSLATIONS
José Kozer’s ‘Wherein it is seen how buried always inside me is a Jew’ in English and Spanish
Wherein it is seen how buried always inside me is a Jew To howl out ballads, to hear plainchant up ahead, constantly, right to the end. To tread ears of corn on Judgement Day, and see wholegrain bread emerge from …
2 Translations of Robyn Rowland in Turkish
Gelincikler Meral’e Ne yaşlı erkeklerin kırışık yumuşak elleri – kâğıt gibi kolay yırtılan – ne de park saksılarının buruşuk çiçekleri. Laleler gibi dimdik, kendinden emindir Kırmızı Türk Gelincikleri alabildiğine parlak, kırmızı dört yaprak, bir de gözlerine çekili birer kara sürmedir …
3 Translations of Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas
Photograph from VDU Tenebrae When you arose from Tenebrae, And first opened your eyes You lay in Eden On the river shores of Hiddekel, Looking at your naked body, That had become word, the word I had to tell you. …
3 Poems by Uwe Kolbe
Photograph from BR Bayern 2 The First Encounter Aimless he wandered, that wide-eyed boy beneath the scorching sun the gods controlled. He said, Make summer mine! (They granted it – and how.) He didn’t know what hit him – Who’d …
3 Poems by Rabindranath Tagore
Sraboner dharar mato poduk jhore like the streams of monsoons let it descend this melody of yours upon my face upon my heart along with the light of the east let it arrive every dawn upon my eyes through the …
2 Poems by Alla Gorbunova
Sonata Out of a Tin 1 o lord, I call on thee out of a tin: make it blossom like Aaron’s rod like gardens in tin rays and maples. – I myself am made of tin and everybody around is …
3 Poems by Menno Wigman
Photograph by Dolf Verlinden Menno Wigman combines an almost classical aesthetic with contemporary sensibilities and rock-and-roll subject matter. Dense, metrical poetry about sex and vandalism, death and suburban garden centres. An essentially colloquial vocabulary raised to a higher level by …
5 Poems from Sergej Timofejev
He had a face that was in love, it was already time to admit that he was in love. In his hands was a long umbrella and from the windows the priests were observing him. The little girl was thinking …
2 Translations of Yang Lian
Yang Lian (b. Bern, 1956) grew up in Beijing. Trained in classical poetry by his father from childhood, he wrote classical poetry until the late 1970s when for the first time he encountered Western poetry in translation. He decided to …
Gig Ryan in Vietnamese Translation
Oppenheimer trước Ủy Ban Điều Tra Những Hoạt Động Phương Hại Mỹ Quốc Những câu hỏi của họ bắt đầu, rồi đến những giả định, tiếp tới là những giả thuyết Mỗi góc cạnh bị tránh né, bị đẩy tới. …
Phan Nhien Hao in English Translation
In the changed season I heard the season has changed the river is running this direction then one day the sea will enter the city I heard in the far places people had lit up the night with pleasure some …
5 Poems by Ардак НУРГАЗЫ in English, Chinese and Kazakh
Ardakh Nurgaz (Ардак НУРГАЗЫ） is a Kazakh poet, essayist, critic born in 1972. He graduated from university in 1995, and began publishing work in 1991. From 2006 to 2008, he was editor-in-chief of Foreign Literatures, a bi-monthly in Kazakhstan. He is now correspondent of The Alma-Ata Evening newspaper. He has published the poetry collections A Book of Pseudo Freedoms (2009) and A Collection of Humming Birds (in Chinese and Kazakh, 2012).
The Earth of Kashgar (translated excerpts of a long poem)
Other than the fact that Adili Adili Tuniyazi is a Uyghur poet, I know nothing more about him. But when I first read his work in Dangdai xianfeng shi 30 nian (Avant-Garde Poetry for 30 Years), I was impressed. The word zuguo (motherland) that he refers to frequently in his poem is so ambiguous that I suspect it’s not China proper.
4 Melancholic Songs by Rubén Darío
Born in Nicaragua as Félix Rubén García Sarmiento, Rubén Darío (1867-1916) is one of the most famous and influential of all Latin American poets. Generally credited with initiating the modernismo movement, he has had a profound impact upon Latin American …
3 Poems by Lydia Daher
November the rain is falling these days like a superfluous statement probably in order to give the grey a reason to mirror itself once more and there i am sneaking around november puddles together with the light of a broken …
2 Poems by Ulrike Draesner
untitled alongside the field vor uns um uns a banquet row gravel, surfaces, one and a half yards wide your accuracy the lopsided slant of the road the usual 2.5% beneath a creamy sun’s frosty halo against the ascending turf’s …
2 Poems by Nora Gomringer
The Hunter You bring along cake and wine, happen upon the wolf. He opens his pants and says: Reach inside. And he’s standing close to your car window while he speaks and you pray that he may not realize that …
2 Poems by Suzanne Dracius
Suzanne Dracius is a prize-winning writer from Martinique whom the French Cultural Minister has called ‘one of the great figures of Antillean letters.’ She writes in French and peppers her work with Creole, drawing on themes of ‘métissage’ (refers to the blending of two distinct elements, in either a biological or cultural sense) and ‘marronnage’ (refers to the flight of slaves from their masters).
One Dozen Ghio: Translations of Ennio Moltedo
Image from Consejo Nacional del Libro y la Lectura Ennio Moltedo Ghio (1931–2012) lived all his life in the cities of Valparaiso and Viña del Mar, Chile. His friend, Allan Brown, says that poets like Moltedo may well be known …
Twilight to Dawn: Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire is, of course, a key figure in European literature, with a far-reaching influence – an example, in his life and in his poetry, of what it means to be modern. Les Fleurs du mal, his major work, was influenced by the French romantic poets of the early nineteenth century; it is formally close to the contemporary Parnassians, but is psychologically and sexually complex. ‘Dawn’ and ‘Twilight’ are from the ‘Tableaux Parisiens’ section of Les Fleurs du mal; this particular group of poems established Baudelaire as the poet of modernism, of the flux of urban life with its milling crowds and solitary individuals.
8 Poems by Gastón Baquero
Gastón Baquero by Eduardo Margareto Born in Banes, Cuba, in 1916, Gastón Baqero grew up in the countryside, a rural beginning that figures as one element in his, in many ways very urbane, poetry. He was part of the Orígenes …
3 Translations with Notes: Laforgue, Soupault
Jules Laforgue and Phillip Soupault are two poets with very little in common, especially when considering the early period of the former. Laforgue’s early work relentlessly circulates around an unremitting metaphysical anguish (the poet himself would refer to his ‘poèmes philo’), a sort of bent continuation of the Romanticism of a Lamartine, with the difference that if in Lamartine nature, rich as it is, is a site of absence, for the young Laforgue it is patent that nature has already kicked the bucket – so there are no verdant dales through which one might wander while pondering the retreat of the absolute: no site of retreat and meditation remains.
El Salvador Tragic: 10 Roque Dalton Poems from 3 Books
Roque Dalton | courtesy of Transparencia Activa As far as tragic poets’ stories go, Roque Dalton’s (El Salvador, 1935-1975) is perhaps the most tragic in Central America. In the 1950s as a Law student, he was the brightest of a …
Men Stink of Far Cities: Translations from Jean Mariotti’s ‘Sans Titre’
Born in Farino, New Caledonia, in 1901, Jean Mariotti became that island’s foremost author of poetry, novels … and one children’s book, Les contes de Poindi (his only published English translation). Much of his adult life was spent in Paris, but he often returned to his island home for years at a time. Please read Le roi Nickel: Jean Mariotti en Nouvelle-Calédonie, a terrific account of his life and work by Eddy Banaré (in French only).
