All posts tagged: Poetry

Translation: Two Poems by Edith Bruck

By EDITH BRUCK

Translated by JEANNE BONNER

Poems appears below in English and the original Italian.

Translator’s Note

What I find indelible about Edith Bruck’s work is the subtle ways she introduces the topic of the Holocaust. A poem like “Pretty Soon” provides a glimpse of the author’s mindset – she managed to survive Auschwitz, and she hasn’t wasted a moment since her liberation as a teenager. She’s been incredibly prolific as a writer, and has traveled the world. But winning her freedom is an event forever married to the worst event ever: losing both of her parents in concentration camps. The challenge is to render that subtlety, which in the original is effortless. This is her life – it’s what she’s always known. 

This thematic back and forth is also present in “There Were Eight of Us.” There were eight of us – but not anymore. One brother was swallowed up by the Holocaust, to use a phrase Bruck often employs in other work.

Translation: Two Poems by Edith Bruck
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Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature I

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

By Li Zhuang, Cynthia Chen, Chen Du, Xisheng Chen, and Jolie Zhilei Zhou

Table of Contents:

  • Li Zhuang, “Fan Fiction”
  • Cynthia Chen, “When the TOEFL robot asked us to ‘Describe the city you live in,’ the whole room started repeating that question as if casting an aimless spell”
  • Yan An, translated by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen, “Photo of Free Life in the E-Era”
  • Jolie Zhilei Zhou, “Der Knall” 
Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature I
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Against This Earth, We Knock

This piece is part of a special portfolio about youth and contemporary culture in China. Read more from the portfolio here.
 

By JINJIN XU

 

              I try to feel this is home 1

                                         I don’t think

                                I am a foreigner 2
                                             I was not supposed to be      living 3

Against This Earth, We Knock
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Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature II

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

By WU WENYING, SU SHI, SHANGYANG FANG, YUN QIN WANG, and CAO COLLECTIVE

Translated poems appear in both the original Chinese and in English.

Table of Contents:

  • Wu Wenying, translated by Shangyang Fang, “Departure” & “Visiting Lingyan Mountain” 
  • Su Shi, translated by Shangyang Fang, “Return to Lin Gao at Night”
  • Yun Qin Wang, “The First Rain”
  • CAO Collective, “qiào bā”
Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature II
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September 2024 Poetry Feature

New Poems by Our Contributors MORRI CREECH, ELISA GABBERT, ANNA GIRGENTI, and GRANT KITTRELL.

 

Table of Contents:

  • Morri Creech, “The Others”
  • Elisa Gabbert, “A Hermitage”
  • Anna Girgenti, “The Goldfinch”
  • Grant Kittrell, “Losing It”

 

The Others
By Morri Creech

The children that I have never had follow me, late, through the vacant corridors.
They whisper there is still time, time for the quarter moon to nock its black arrow

September 2024 Poetry Feature
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August 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors

New Poems by Our Contributors NICOLE COOLEY, DUY ĐOÀN, and JOHN KINSELLA.

 

Table of Contents:

  • Nicole Cooley, “Covanta, A Detail”
  • Duy Đoàn, “Norepinephrine — “Suicides in Fiction Say Goodbye”
  • John Kinsella, “Before Eurydice Was Bitten”

 

Covanta, A Detail
By Nicole Cooley

The incinerator smoke an incision in the sky.
My daughter no longer small yet still I want to swallow her back into my body.
Sky a scalding.
My daughter asks me to stop saying, I wish this wasn’t the world you have to live in.
In my dream my girl is the size of a thumb I catch between my teeth.
Sky all smoke.
In the morning, men wearing masks drag our cans out to their truck.
In the morning, out the kitchen window, I wish the wide street rivered.

August 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors
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Daddyland

By CIGAN VALENTINE

I. 
In my dreams, I see our house,
Strong and proud like a monolith,
A monument to your mythology
Marked by the lighter squares of paint
Behind missing picture frames 
And slowly rotting walls. 
A hole in the drywall,
The ceiling falling through. 

Daddyland
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The Visual Poetry of Anzhelina Polonskaya

By ANZHELINA POLONSKAYA
Translated from the Russian by ANDREW WACHTEL

Poems appear below in English and the original Russian.

Translator’s note

Anzhelina Polonskaya frequently writes poems inspired by visual artists. These are not, however, ekphrastic renderings of an image in words, but rather a snapshot of the emotions that a given painter’s work evokes. In the poem “After Breughel,” published here, we need to ask, what precisely makes the text Breughelesque? To me, it is the anthropomorphized image of snow, with its dead white eyes in the first stanza, contrasted with the scarlet color (of blood, hell, the burning bush). This unsettling juxtaposition creates the Breughelesque landscape which has destroyed the artist, as in the painting Dulle Griet from 1563. But Polonskaya provides her picture without the scaffolding of a narrative, and, as far as the translator’s job goes, I needed to avoid explaining the poem, rather allowing the translation to be as allusive and mysterious as the original.  

—Andrew Wachtel 

 

After Breughel

Snow, listen up. Your eyes are dead.
We know full well we’re being led
like hostages of universal blindness.
Who are we, then? Unknown and homeless.

The Visual Poetry of Anzhelina Polonskaya
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July 2024 Poetry Feature: Megan Pinto

By MEGAN PINTO

Excerpted from “even in silence”

 

My father is perseverating, moving around the edges of rooms. On repeat, he asks, but how will
we pay for it? How will we pay for it? 

He follows me, my mother, then me, then my mother. Inside my childhood home, there are only
so many rooms. 

On Christmas Day, I bake a loaf of frozen bread. I feed slices to my father with my hands, then
catch each chewed up bit he pushes back out with his tongue. 

He is speaking.
I am numb.

July 2024 Poetry Feature: Megan Pinto
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Translation: to and back

By HALYNA KRUK 
Translated by LADA KOLOMIYETS

Poem appears below in English and the original Ukranian.

Translator’s note

Since February 2022, the metaphorics of Halyna Kruk’s poetry have undergone transformation on the way to nearing the genre of testimony. Kruk explains in her speech at the poetry festival in Berlin in June 2022 that metaphors have lost their power in front of what is actually experienced (Kruk, Halyna. “Krieg ist keine Metapher.” Zeit Online, June 18, 2022). The voice of the diarist of wartime has become the most important feature of literary expression. In her Berlin speech—just as in the poem to and back, written in spring 2022—Kruk warns the prosperous western world against erecting an emotional wall between Ukraine and itself. While addressing the Western audience, she tries to explain a painful feeling of irreparable loss—in our souls, in our culture, science, economy, industry, society —of men and women, someone’s parents, someone’s children, who were killed by Russia: “War creates a gap between those who have experienced it and those who are far from it; with each passing day of the war, I see that it is more and more difficult to explain to people from the outside what we feel here, on the inside. … Poetry acquires very peculiar forms—a spontaneous prayer, a stingy testimony, a lament or even a curse to the enemy. These are not the forms of poetry to which modern European culture is accustomed, they are functional and ritualistic, too primeval in their emotional coloring, too subjective, too pathetic, and intolerant” (Kruk, “Krieg ist keine Metapher”; my translation).

In her poem to and back Kruk writes about the unfitting of war in the eyes of Western world, even if the words for war may be found by survivors and those who have experienced it. Incompatibility of war and peace, of poetry and war calls for the memory to work in place of creativity. The healing power of poetry—as a witness of war crimes in Ukraine—is encoded in Kruk’s poems, written in the spring and summer of 2022.

—Lada Kolomiyets

Translation: to and back
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