#nyrb poets

[mioritic]

If they mean Romania, The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter by Matei Călinescu is in translation through NYRB.

Thank you! I've never read Matei Călinescu's own work, just some of his translations of others'.

Assuming that person meant Romania (where I live, granted, but I'm not Romanian), list incoming, off the top of my head:

Some Romanian authors I like and who have been translated:

Max Blecher is wholly unpopular in Romania, and died at 28, so did not write a lot... but he is my favourite Romanian author (or maybe just author in general). He was from Botoșani, a Jewish writer who suffered from spinal tuberculosis, which his writing mostly reflects. Despite being seemingly-unknown here he is one of the few Romanian interwar authors that been translated into English. His Întâmplări din irealitatea imediată is excellent and has been translated multiple times — it is available on the Internet Archive as Adventures in Immediate Unreality (trans. Jeanie Han). Inimi cicatrizate is also great, a novelized account of his time in a tuberculosis sanatorium, and is available in English as Scarred Hearts. There is also a film by Radu Jude based mainly on this book (with other writings), although it is a bit abstracted from the text and has a subplot about the rise of Legionarism etc. The Czech press Twisted Spoon has been working to translate Blecher's other writings to English and print them in very beautiful editions, with The Illuminated Burrow released last year and Transparent Body forthcoming. Overall: very sickly writings, very physical, often revolting, maybe akin to Bruno Schulz... I like Blecher a lot.

Paul Celan probably counts, as he was from Cernăuți, but he is not very popular in Romania and mostly wrote in German. I don't know too much about translations of Celan but Poems of Paul Celan (trans. Michael Hamburger) seems like a good place to start for a bilingual edition, and there's Breathturn into Timestead (trans. Pierre Joris) for his later poetry. Celan's Romanian language poems have also been translated (with facing Romanian text) as Romanian Poems.

Benjamin Fondane / Fundoianu I have not yet read much of, but his writings are available in English: NYRB published some of his essays as Existential Monday, and an anthology of poems as Cinepoems and Others.

Mihail Sebastian has been translated several times. I find his novels a bit wandering and aimless — which may be because he was very good at losing his manuscripts — but his journals are a must-read (I read them twice a year and always find something new). For novels, Women (Femei) is available through Penguin or Other Press; For Two Thousand Years (De două mii de ani) is available through Penguin; and Aurora Metro published a translation of The Town with Acacia Trees (Orașul cu salcîmi) a couple of years ago.

Some of those old fascist poets like Lucian Blaga, Octavian Goga, etc. are available in translation. As is national poet Mihai Eminescu. They are all perfectly readable. I like Eminescu's poem "Copii eram noi amândoi..." — in fact, many of these poets you can probably understand even through Google Translate. I scanned/uploaded a nice Eminescu volume illustrated by Jules Perahim here.

Authors that I like that have *not* been translated (or poorly translated):

Ionel Teodoreanu, who writes a lot of frilly things about children in Moldova growing up and being very elegant and charming and entering relationships with older men and dying ("toate cărțile lui sunt despre minori care fac sex"). I liked Lorelei, and I'm worming my way through La Medeleni. The latter has actually been translated into English but not only is it hard to find, it's nearly unreadable, and the person who initially released the translation was charged with all sorts of heinous sex crimes in Romania - great. Teodoreanu is hard to read as a foreigner and likely hard to translate, but I find him charming. His wife, Ștefana Velisar Teodoreanu, was also a writer in her own right... I have a couple of her books, but have only read Ursitul (a book about her relationship with Ionel, which I enjoyed reading and was very funny, but also one of the most violently lustful things I have ever read.)

I liked Marin Preda's autobiographical Viața ca o pradă, which I have been chipping away at translating myself. He is one of the few post-WWII writers I have read.

Throwing out some other standard names, on the off-chance they might have been translated: Camil Petrescu, Cezar Petrescu, Gala Galaction, Tristan Tzara, Ion Creangă, I.L. Caragiale, Panaït Istrati, Geo Bogza, Tudor Arghezi, Mihail Sadoveanu, Cella Serghi... and so forth.

Authors that I read and didn't personally like, or have not read at all, but are available in translation:

Norman Manea was too "post-communist irony and grumbling" for me, but his Captives was recommended very strongly to me several years ago, and most of his work is available in English. Mircea Cărtărescu and Herta Müller are probably in this same category, and their books are everywhere (in English too) but I've never read either.

Mircea Eliade, better known for his writings on religion, but also a novelist. I read Youth Without Youth and other novellas (translated by the above-mentioned Matei Călinescu) a few years ago. I'm not sure if his other work has been translated into English (La țigănci - "With the Gypsy Girls", Maitreyi/La nuit Bengali - "Bengal Nights", Romanul adolescentului miop - "Novel of a myopic adolescent", Domnișoara Christina - "Miss Christina", Huliganii - "The Hooligans", are all probably popular enough to have been translated....?)

Emil Cioran is widely-read and widely-translated, if you like aphorisms about suicide.

Liviu Rebreanu has occasionally been translated, but I still have never read him in any language... unfortunately. Gabi Reigh recently translated Cuileandra, and it was published through Cadmus Press. His Ion is standard reading, but I'm not sure if it exists in English (...?!)

Eugène Ionesco is another standard name but admittedly I haven't read anything of his since ninth grade.

There are probably several I'm forgetting that I like to read... but maybe this is a starting point?

(I don't really know why the only Romanian writers who get translated are interwar Jewish authors that almost nobody cares about in this country, or post-communist writers.)

#anonymous #ask

[metaphorformetaphor]

Nonetheless we must live through the winter before exile feel our way among these lunar embers in the fog toward those unrubied crowns.

 Claire Malroux, from "Octet Before Winter," Daybreak: New and Selected Poems (NYRB Poets, 2020)

#Claire Malroux #Octet Before Winter #Daybreak: New and Selected Poems

[lionofchaeronea]

Digging into a couple of works by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-73): The Blazing World*, a key text of proto-science fiction that I first read in a parageography** course over twenty years ago, as well as the Selected Poems (NYRB Poets). As a flamboyant breaker of boundaries (gendered and otherwise) and a speculative philosopher with a keen interest in atomism, Cavendish was well ahead of her time.

*Fans of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novel series will recognize the Blazing World as the home base of Moore's avatar Prospero.

**The geography of imaginary places. Easily the most fun course I took in college.

#personal #current reading #English literature #Margaret Cavendish

[grandhotelabyss]

If you haven't yet read it, the Edwin Frank interview in the point mag is up your alley, I think. Blake Smith, god bless him, might have steered me in the wrong direction about nyrb classics

Thanks! Yes, a lot of good stuff in there. I like how they start by talking about The Hall of Uselessness, also one of my favorite NYRBs. And then the last few answers: all the civilized, knowingly world-weary complaints (the novel is dead, the MFA programs are awful) at once uttered and dismissed as obvious, not worth repeating. (My case for the continued relevance of the novel is one neither the interviewer not Frank state, however: it's not for the present but the future. Otherwise how will our successors know we were here, how we lived?) I am still thinking about this, which is maybe too European for me:

Writers are not truth-tellers, they are witnesses to the event of their own gift, finally impersonal. Which consumes them. Which may sound romantic. It is, in fact, the least romantic thing in the world.

I like the part about Ulysses:

Ulysses is a place and climate and you have to allow yourself to live there to get a real sense of it. That’s one of the ways it’s essentially different from, say, Mrs. Dalloway, which remains a representation of experience, something that exists at an appreciable, ponderable remove. Ulysses by contrast is an experience in its own right and like experience remains in many ways private, to the author, to the reader: it’s not there to be made sense of entirely, though it is certainly there to enjoy and wonder at. Notoriously, Woolf hated the book—she thought it was, I’m pretty sure this is her word, “underbred,” pointlessly dirty and showy. Woolf thought it was offensive among other things that Joyce imposed his privacy on his audience. Pun intended.

A piece of advice I took to heart years ago came from the critic and poet Donald Davie, who said about Pound’s Cantos: Read them fast. Read them till patterns begin to form in the blur. Don’t nail down the references and try to add them all up.

Read it fast: as advice for Ulysses, this can't be overstated. (It's what Ellen Chandler tells Ash del Greco in Major Arcana: "I recommend just letting it wash over you the first time".) I'll have to try it with The Cantos someday. And, speaking of Pound, the passages on anti-Semitism, on Bellow and Cohen. And about how "the imaginative horizon of the modern world is female." And about the paradox of our inheriting an avant-garde tradition. And his statement, which I myself am always saying: "it's a stagnant period."

I'm not sure the conversation disproves Blake's point about the high-handed attitude with which a certain style of forgotten classic, often in translation, is suddenly forced on us—I don't need to see the hideous phrase "blue lard" again for a while—but it's good to know what a civilized sensibility lies behind the enterprise.

#edwin frank #nyrb classics

[tunabuddha]

#kenji miyazawa

[biblioklept]

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert (Book acquired, 26 Aug. 2023)

NYRB has a new one-volume edition of Francis Steegmuller’s translation of Flaubert’s letters. Their blurb: Here we have Flaubert’s youthful, sensual outpourings to his mistress, the poet Louise Colet, and, as he advances, still unknown, into his thirties, the wrestle to write Madame Bovary. We hear, too, of his life-changing trip to Egypt, as described to family and friends, and then there are…

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#Book Acquired #Francis Steegmuller #Gustave Flaubert

[seagoatdreamscape]

[nyrbclassics]

NYRB Fall Preview 2020: NYRB Poets

Our fall season includes two bilingual collections of poetry newly translated from the French, by Alice Paalen Rahon and Claire Malroux—both poets who occupy the space between two worlds, be they of language, nation, culture, sexuality, or philosophy.

Alice Paalen Rahon, Alice Paalen Rahon (September)

Alice Paalen Rahon was a shapeshifter: a surrealist poet turned painter who was born French and died a naturalized citizen of Mexico. Bicultural, bisexual, and fiercely independent, her romantic life included affairs with Pablo Picasso and the poet Valentine Penrose. This new selection of Rahon’s poems celebrates the visionary work of a woman who defied easy definition.

Claire Malroux, Daybreak: New and Selected Poems (October)

Claire Malroux holds a unique place in contemporary French poetry, with influences from both the French and Anglophone traditions—especially the work of Emily Dickinson. Her subtle, intimate poems move between an intense, abstract interiority and an acute engagement with the material world. This new volume is a bilingual selection by the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker.

#alice paalen #alice paalen rahon #alice rahon #claire malroux #poetry #french poetry #poetry in translation #surrealism #surrealist poetry #pablo picasso #valentine penrose #marilyn hacker #nyrb #nyrb classics #new york review books #nyrb poets #literature #books #fall 2020 preview

[kaggsy59]

"It is not exactly a book that I am looking at, it's a talisman." @NYRBpoets @maryanncaws #alicepaalenrahon #shapeshifter

“It is not exactly a book that I am looking at, it’s a talisman.” @NYRBpoets @maryanncaws #alicepaalenrahon #shapeshifter

I am very fortunate to receive on occasions review copies of NYRB releases; often these are specific titles I’ve asked for, sometimes they’ve been offered, occasionally they’ll be NYRB Originals rather than Classics. However, NYRB poetry titles have been appearing, which is very exciting and also something of a voyage of discovery! I did request “Magnetic Fields“, which was an excellent…

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#alice paalen rahon #mary ann caws #nyrb poets #shapeshifter

[citylightsbooks]

City Lights Bookstore’s Antiracist Reading List | UPDATED

Human creativity is integral to revolutionary resistance—the urgent plea, the silenced cry, the righteous rage. It is imperative that we educate and illuminate ourselves to deepen our commitment to justice and equity for Black people and all people of color, and to pave the way for radical systemic change.

***

Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Til to Trayvon Martin Edited by Philip Cushway and Michael Warr 9780393352733        Norton    Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? Mumia Abu-Jamal  9780872867383       City Lights  Invisible Man Ralph Ellison  9780679732761       Vintage A Black Women's History of the United States Daina Ramey Berry and Kali N. Gross   9780807033555  Beacon         W.E.B. Dubois' Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America   The W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts     Edited by Britt Rusert and Whitney Battle-Baptiste  9781616897062        Princeton Architectural Press Race Man: Selected Works 1960-2015 Julian Bond Edited by Michael G. Long  9780872867949 City Lights       Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot  Mikki Kendall   9780525560548       Viking The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration  Isabel Wilkerson  9780679763888       Random House

The Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas Henry Dumas 9781566891493   Coffee House Everywhere You Don't Belong: A Novel Gabrielle Bump   9781616208790 Algonquin  The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues Angela Y. Davis Foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley 9780872865808   City Lights   

No Fascist USA!: The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements Hillary Moore and James Tracy Foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley 9780872867963   City Lights The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander   9781620971932 The New Press Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds adrienne maree brown 9781849352604   AK  Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon   Translated from the French by Richard Philcox 9780802143006  Grove The Wretched of the Earth Frantz Fanon Translated from the French by Richard Philcox Commentary by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha 9780802141323  Grove Citizen: An American Lyric Claudia Rankine 9781555976903   Graywolf  How to Be An Antiracist Ibram X. Kendi 9780525509288   One World The Fire Next Time James Baldwin 9780679744726 Random House No Name in the Street James Baldwin 9780307275929   Vintage How To Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide Crystal Marie Fleming   9780807039847 Beacon The History of White People Nell Irvin Painter 9780393339741   Norton       Heaven Is All Goodbyes: City Lights Pocket Poet Series No. 61 Tongo Eisen-Martin 9780872867451 City Lights Afropessimism Frank WIlderson III 9781631496141     Liveright If They Come in the Morning . . . : Voices of Resistance Edited by Angela Y. Davis  9781784787691       Verso So You Want to Talk About Race Ijeoma Olua  9781580058827       Seal  Troublemaker for Justice: The Story of Bayard Ruskin, the Man Behind the March on Washington Jacqueline Houtman, Walter Naegle, and Michael G. Long  9780872867659       City Lights  We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide  Carol Anderson with Tonya Bolden  Foreword by Nic Stone 9781547602520       Bloomsbury Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You - A Remix of the National Book Award-Winning Stamped from the Beginning  Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi 9780316453691       Little, Brown Woke: A Young Poet's Call to Justice  Mahogany L. Browne with Elizabeth Acevedo and Olivia Gatwood Illustrated by Theodore Taylor III Foreword by Jason Reynolds 9781250311207        Roaring Brook  Betty Before X Ilyasah Shabazz with Renée Watson  9780374306106       FSG Clifford's Blues John A. Williams  9781566890809       Coffee House  Native Son RIchard Wright  9780061148507  Harper Perennial Training School for Negro Girls Camille Acker  9781936932375       Feminist Press They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays Hanif Abdurraqib  9781937512651       Two Dollar Radio Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption  Bryan Stevenson  9780812984965       One World    The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations  Toni Morrison  9780525562795       Vintage Oreo Fran Ross  9780811223225       New Directions Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches  Audre Lorde  Foreword by Cheryl Clarke 9781580911863        Crossing Press Ghost Boys Jewell Parker Rhodes  9780316262262       Little, Brown Monument: Poems New and Selected  Natasha Trethewey  9780358118237  Mariner  The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Peniel E. Joseph 9781541617865 Basic Dear White People Justin Simien Illustrated by Ian O’Phelan 97814769809 37 Ink Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas Edited by Sam Durant Preface by Bobby Seale Foreword by Danny Glover 9780847841899 Rizzoli Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers Stephan Shames and Bobby Seale 9781419722400 Harry N. Abrams Press In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition Fred Moten 9780816641000 University of Minnesota Press The Known World: A Novel Edward P. Jones 9780061159176 Amistad Counternarratives: Stories and Novellas John Keene 9780811225526 New Directions Beloved: A Novel Toni Morrison 9781400033416 Vintage The Bluest Eye: A Novel Toni Morrison 9780307278449 Vintage Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination Toni Morrison Vintage 9780679745426 Mumbo Jumbo Ishmael Reed 9780684824772 Scribner Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black Harriet E. Wilson Edited with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Richard J. Ellis 9780307477453 Vintage Burn This Book: Notes on Literature and Engagement Edited by Toni Morrison 9780061774010 Harper I’m Not Dying with You Tonight Gilly Segal and Kimberly Jones Sourcebooks Fire 9781492678892 The End of Policing Alex S. Vitale 9781784782924 Verso The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership Harold Cruse 9781590171356 NYRB Classics How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society Manning Marable 9781608465118 Haymarket From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 9781608465620 Haymarket Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Assata Shakur, and Mumia Abu-Jamal 9780936756745 Semiotext(e) Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom David W. Blight 9781416590323 Simon & Schuster Parting the Waters : America in the King Years 1954-63 Taylor Branch 9780671687427 Simon & Schuster Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 Taylor Branch 9780684848099 Simon & Schuster At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 Taylor Branch 9780684857138  Simon & Schuster A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story Elaine Brown 9780385471077 Anchor Angela Davis: An Autobiography Angela Y. Davis 9780717806676 International Publishers Co.   My Bondage and My Freedom Frederick Douglass 9780140439182 Penguin  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself: A New Critical Edition  Frederick Douglass and Angela Y. Davis 9780872865273 City Lights Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 W.E.B. Du Bois 9780684856575 Free Press

#reading list #city lights bookstore #antiracist

[dk-thrive]

I became aware of a certain banal truth, one that I had often doubted, namely, that I am a poet

The pendulum of prison time swings between agony and nothingness, but in Lubyanka time has other laws and moves in a different way. But books brought us back to life...I had a great desire to live because I found Nietzsche’s amor fati in every trifle in every book, even the pessimistic ones. The more pessimistic the book, the more pulsating energy, life energy, I felt beneath its surface — as if all of literature were only the praise of life’s beauty, of all of life...Books stimulated a keen desire for life, life of any sort, at any cost, to live and move with the Rastignacs, Rostovs, and even the heroes of Notes from the Underground...A second and opposite effect of reading was that it disordered a prisoner’s mental structure by causing him to experience two entirely different realities simultaneously: the world of books — free, full of movement, light, change, colorful, Heraclitean — and the world where time stood still, lost all sensation in captivity, and faded into a dirty gray. The sum total of both opposed effects worked to the investigator’s advantage because it disturbed the victim’s entire soul. But reading had the opposite effect on me. It marshaled my intellectual and spiritual resources and made me stronger. It truly was like touching the earth for Antaeus. No doubt that was because what I primarily filtered out from books, any sort of book, was the poetry they contained, and it was only in prison that I became aware of a certain banal truth, one that I had often doubted, namely, that I am a poet.

~ Aleksander Wat, My Century (NYRB Classics; December 31, 2003)

#prison #Aleksander Wat #books #reading #read

[litbits]

2017 Reading Round-Up: Top 5

1. Things I Don’t Want to Know by Deborah Levy (Notting Hill Books, 2013)

I don’t know why more people haven’t read this book. It’s the kind of book avid lady readers should be raving about to each other and reading reviews of in Electric Lit and the New Yorker to see what other smart women think of it. But no, it’s actually even hard to find in the U.S., and I haven’t talked to anyone who’s read it. (She’s much better known in the UK/EU. I picked up it up in a fantastic bookstore in Galway.) I read this slim book in one afternoon - it’s a long essay commissioned in response to Orwell’s own short essay, “Why I Write.” Levy’s work touches on the first taste and shock of injustice experienced in childhood (in apartheid South Africa, masterfully from a child’s point of view in all its complexity), the experience of motherhood post 1970s feminism, travel and becoming someone else while “away”, risk-taking, the desire to write, figuring out how to write as a woman. It made me cry in a deep and satisfying way (on a bus to Dublin, no less!) that was a relief.

2. Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey by Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2016)

These interviews and essays gave me that Emily Dickinson physical feeling of having the top of my head taken off, in particular the one that gives the collection its title. (“Frantumaglia” is Ferrante’s mother’s Neapolitan word for the mass of experiences and feelings that overwhelms and fogs the mind at times, the raw, wet stuff that writing is shaped from… I think). Particularly striking: her thoughts on the Dido myth and its relationship to women’s writing (Carthage originally intended as a city built on love); her mother’s work as a seamstress, how the dresses she made were and were not her; her exploration of her childhood violent wishes and feelings; the shifts in her motivations for remaining anonymous over time; thoughts on writing itself, what it means to be truthful when writing fiction.

3. Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh and L.A. by Eve Babitz (NYRB Classics, 2016 (reissue), originally published 1977)

Essays on 1970s L.A. by the anti-Joan Didion, voluptuous and exuberant Eve Babitz, born a Hollywood insider. She is also witty, erudite and snobbish in her own way, as she gives accounts of quaalude-fueled threesomes, and ending up in the most unexpected places, like a baseball game or San Bernardino, via her lovers. There are also her odes to other women, their talent and style, and her thoughtful takes on fame, addiction, and public image. Thank Goddess that NYRB brought her work back into print.

4. Memoirs of Montparnasse by John Glassco (NYRB Classics, 2007, originally published 1973) - John Glassco

Nineteen-year-old Canadian bisexual Glassco sets off for Paris in 1927 with his school pal, to become a poet and burn through his father’s money. Publisher and writer Robert McAlmon takes them under his sordid wing for a long bender in Luxembourg and the French Riviera. Glassco chats with Robert Desnos, sasses Gertrude Stein, judges beefy Hemingway, and writes a little bad Surrealist poetry along the way. There’s probably a lot of bending of fact, as this was written decades later, but it’s entertaining and wonderfully written.  A fun, queer counterpoint to the hacky “Moonlight In Paris” view of Montparnasse in its golden age - the drag queen bars and lesbian literary circles, the roustabouts and pornographers, the would-be artists and dilettantes, who were also hanging around the cafes, never quite finding the time to work on their masterpieces…

5. Contempt by Alberto Moravia, trans. Angus Davidson (NYRB Classics, 2004, original 1954)

I felt so anxious reading this, it was a relief when it was over. The narrator just keeps fucking things up - it’s unbearable! Really masterful portrayal of an unreliable narrator. It reminded me of Lolita, a bit, in the way that the narrator is trying to elicit sympathy in his account, while unwittingly showing the ways in which he’s monstrous. There is also beautiful vivid imagery of the Italian coastline and Capri. I enjoyed the various characters’ ruminating on possible interpretations of The Odyssey, and how they informed the narrative.

#book list #alberto moravia #elena ferrante #deborah levy #eve babitz #john glassco

[metaphorformetaphor]

I saw you   I saw you in the distance in front of the wall   I saw the hole of your shadow on the wall   There was still some sand left   And your bare feet   Your footprints that went on and on   How would I have known you   The sky took up the whole background the whole space   At the bottom a little bit of land shining in the sun   And a little more space   And the sea   The star came out of the water   A ship passed flying low                                    A bird   The line at the horizon from which the current was coming   The waves laughed as they died   Everything continues   No one knows where time will stop                                  Or night   Everything is erased by the wind   We sing differently   We speak with another accent

Pierre Reverdy, from "That Memory," Pierre Reverdy (NYRB Poets, 2013)

#Pierre Reverdy #That Memory

[lionofchaeronea]

Current reading is the NYRB Poets edition of Vasko Popa (1922-1991), translated from the Serbian by the late Charles Simic. One of my goals for this year is to "read around the world" by exploring poetry in as many languages as I can. So far I have Hebrew, Italian, and now Serbian; next up are classical Chinese and Portuguese.

#personal #current reading

[glaucussubmerged]

War Song  Anne Carson ; NYRB December 20, 2018 Issue

1937 Beckett got stabbed by pliant spear of a stranger, one Paris night. Just missed the lungs. He, lean warrior, spent two weeks in hospital, descended upon by all the Joyces (James, Nora, Lucia) and some Becketts (mother, brother) and Suzanne, the girlfriend nobody knew about yet (not even Sam), whom he would marry fifty years hence with a flicker of shyness still in his eyes—no, I made that up. But what he does say, of the two ancient (Endgame) enemies: “that’s Suzanne and me!” Now don’t you wonder what remarks passed from Suzanne to Lucia or mother to Clov leaning over the bed in that battle-bright room? Well, it isn’t bright (battle) and no one is alive who remembers. Everything I can tell you about that room or those lavish souls is just my own fear of death blowing around on the floorboards. Blowing sand around. You know, in the old days, I, a poet, would lean back in my saddle, recite a poem of sublime sense, fill you with ferocity, then together we’d ride off over the black sand, past moonlit ruins, to our destination, with not a thought of food or drink, and if I, a poet, were asked for details of battle I’d quote ‘Antarah Ibn Shaddad*— “the antelopes sprinted right and left”— wondering could I smuggle a flicker of shyness into antelope eyes and parley my own death one more mighty moment.

* War Songs by ‘Antarah Ibn Shaddad, translated by James E. Montgomery with Richard Sieburth (NYU Press, 2018

#anne carson

[arablit]

Najwan Darwish and the Politics/Poetics of Translating Exhaustion

Najwan Darwish and the Politics/Poetics of Translating Exhaustion

By Khaled Rajeh  The ones hangingare tired. No image better captures the essence of Najwan Darwish’s poetry than that from the titular poem of his 2018 collection, Exhausted on the Cross (translated by Kareem James Abu Zeid, NYRB Poets, 2021). The unnamed “ones” are hanging from a crucifix, suspended indefinitely, stuck somewhere in between life and a death which never comes. They plead,…

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#Exhausted on the Cross #featuredAL2 #Kareem James Abu-Zeid #Najwan Darwish #Poetry #translation