Celebrating 15 YearsWords by SALLY BALL
Images by MICHAEL EASTMAN
Poetry
August 2020 Poetry Feature #2: Philip Nikolayev translates Alexander Pushkin
August 28, 2020
Poetry, Translation
Two poems by Alexander Pushkin, translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev
Table of Contents:
- Night
- The Burned Letter
Philip Nikolayev is editor of Fulcrum. His poetry collections include Monkey Time (Verse / Wave Books) and Dusk Raga (Salt).
Alexander Pushkin (1799-83) is widely regarded as the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature.
Night
It’s for you that my soft and affectionate voice
Disturbs at this late hour a silent night’s repose.
Where by my bed a melancholy candle glows,
My verse rushes along, burbles and overflows
In brooks of love, filled with you, and at last I see
Your eyes, out of the dark shining, smiling at me,
And finally my ear makes out the cherished words:
My gentle, tender friend… I love you… I am yours!
August 2020 Poetry Feature: Raisa Tolchinsky
August 14, 2020
Poetry
Poems by RAISA TOLCHINSKY
ON BOXING:
Table of Contents
- A Note by the Poet
- Circling the Ring
- Below the Belt
After training for multiple years with womxn boxers who had the Olympics on their minds, I began to grapple with the dynamics of control I observed within the spaces I encountered. These poems are from a longer series which ask: what does it mean to be a womxn fighter (both inside and outside of the ring) in a world still dominated by men? In what ways is the ring an escape or subversion of the power dynamics encountered outside of it, and in what ways does the ring reinforce or sanction manipulation, harassment, and abuse? Both of these persona poems are composite portraits, representative of the osmosis between bodies and narratives that occurs among close training partners. Though I didn’t have what it took to pursue a fighting career, these poems are a way of writing into the imagined life where I became a boxer instead of a poet & scholar. Through this work I am also asking: how does the poem function as a body? How does the page function as a ring?
—Raisa Tolchinsky
Anzhelina Polonskaya: Russian Poetry in Translation
August 13, 2020
Poetry, Translation, Uncategorized
Poems by ANZHELINA POLONSKAYA
Translated from the Russian by ANDREW WACHTEL
Translator’s note:
Recreating the poetry of Anzhelina Polonskaya in English is tricky because her favorite poetic trope is ellipsis, which is easier to achieve in Russian. Russian, as an inflected language (like Latin), can place words in pretty much any order within a sentence, and the poet can use case endings to indicate the relationship of nouns to each other and adjectives to nouns. When something is left out of a sentence, the empty space can be filled in by the reader. Thus, a Russian poem, at least grammatically speaking, looks like a Lego construction, from which many blocks can be removed without destroying the structure. By contrast, English translations in our (almost) non-inflected language are more like houses of cards – and when you try to remove pieces of the grammatical structure the whole thing tends to fall down.
July 2020 Poetry Feature: Steven Leyva and Elizabeth Scanlon
July 31, 2020
Poetry
New poems by STEVEN LEYVA and ELIZABETH SCANLON
Table of contents:
Steven Leyva
- Ear Hustle
- Gorgoneion: Ft Worth
Elizabeth Scanlon
- This Thing
July 2020 Poetry Feature: Loren Goodman
July 17, 2020
Poetry
New poems by LOREN GOODMAN
Please welcome back long-time TC contributor Loren Goodman.
Table of Contents:
—G-d in a Cup
—Dear Jeremy
—Due to the Light
—Dolphin Facts
Loren Goodman was born in Kansas and studied in New York, Tucson, Buffalo and Kobe. He is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he serves as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director.
Goddamn
July 15, 2020
Dispatches, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry, Poetry Recordings
Music by ABRAHAM KATZ
Northern Israel-Palestine
The chunk of the ball
On the cracked blacktop
And our torsos so covered
In sweat nearby the sea
Swells and the smell seeps
Into our hair and the air
George Seferis: Poetry in Translation from Greek
July 9, 2020
Poetry, Translation
Poetry by GEORGE SEFERIS
Translated from Modern Greek by JENNIFER R. KELLOGG
Poems appear in both English and Modern Greek
Translator’s Statement
These two poems by George Seferis explore the disorienting confusion and fear that arises from living through war and catastrophe. Seferis spent his life as a spokesman for the Greek state and Hellenic culture, working as a career diplomat and poet. He lived through the Balkan Wars, World Wars I & II, and the Greek Civil War as well as continual political crisis.
His poetry interprets Greece’s contemporary tragedies as the result of a mythical hubris, especially internecine murder in the heroic past. Bloodshed in the present is due to an endless chain of retribution set in motion by ancient Greeks who transgressed against the laws of nature, the gods, and the rights of their fellow men in pursuit of power and self-gain.
June 2020 Poetry Feature: David Mills
June 26, 2020
Poetry
New work by DAVID MILLS
Table of Contents
- Breath’s Breath: Japhet
- Talking to the Bones: Talking
- Long in That Late-Afternoon Light: Bukay
These poems are part of a series about slavery in New York City. The City is home to America’s oldest and largest slave cemetery—The Negro Burial Ground—which is located in Manhattan’s City Hall area. This slave cemetery (officially open between 1712-1795) contains 15,000 bodies.
Claudia Masin: Spanish Poetry in Translation
June 22, 2020
Poetry, Translation
Poems by CLAUDIA MASIN
Translated from the Spanish by ROBIN MYERS
Poems appear in both Spanish and English
Translator’s Note
When I translate Claudia Masin, I feel like I’m ice skating. This is not a foolproof metaphor, I know. But what I mean, mostly, is that it’s exhilarating. Her long, deft, elegant lines; her line breaks, both graceful and unpredictable; her limber back-and-forth between the broadly rhetorical and the minutely descriptive: all of this, all of her language, structure, and sense of timing, forms a surface, a gleaming expanse that I feel free—I want to feel free—to glide across. Fast enough for a sense of wonder, the illusion of ease; not so fast that I don’t notice what’s around me. Or beneath me: the inherent spookiness of ice, the shadows under the surface, the plants and creatures stilled but still living where we can sense more than see them.
