KR celebrates Women in Translation Month with micro-reviews of six new collections of poetry in translation. #WIT #KRTranslates —KH
Baiba Bičole. To Taste the River. Trans. Bitite Vinklers. Plamen Press. 2021. 150 pages. $17.00.
The collection begins mid-breath, mid-flow:
—and then I wanted to taste
the river
The words cascade down the page until the I becomes an oriole, crying out for rain. Baiba Bičole writes a world in which a man becomes a “student of birds” and “the earth is an ax / that splits off its children.” Here, mountains hasten while rivers sleep, and “the moon falls like a bursting apple.” The natural world bursts forth in these poems, but they are not your typical “nature poems,” treating it as a poetic object to be described; they are more internal than that, and more felt, in both the affective and sensual sense. But neither is the natural world reduced to a metaphor of the poetic subject’s internal state. Rather, inner and outer worlds are contiguous, entangled, mutually constitutive: a poem about a woman in thirst becoming an oriole crying out for rain is as much so the poem of an oriole’s becoming. Humans, seas, birds, dust, deserts permeate each other, and it is the poetic voice that allows for that permeability.
Bičole was born in 1931 in Latvia, which she left as a refugee during WWII. She has lived in the US since 1950. A resonant voice of her generation, she became known more outside of her native country than in Latvia, where her work was banned during the Soviet occupation. This collection, a bilingual edition featuring ink drawings by the author, is the first collection of her work to appear in English translation. The translator, Bitite Vinklers, selected work from across six different collections from 1969 to 2014. As she explains in her introduction, Vinklers arranged the poems thematically rather than chronologically. It is as much in the arrangement of the poems as in her translations themselves that Vinklers’ poetic sensibility comes through. Finding resonances in images of rivers and deserts, birds and suns; or in thematic concerns of distance and separation, mending and bridging, Vinklers’ arrangement (and I mean this in the orchestral sense) allow the poems to play off of and run into one another. As in the poem “separated,” which speaks of the “festering wound”
where a fence
springs up
to sever a path,
[ . . . ]
where between two thresholds
rises an impassable forest.
Which Vinkler then follows with “today:”
today
I am searching for thread,
to mend the tear,
stitch together
the separated
halves,
at a moment when it seemed
that I would rejoice—
when I understood
I would be weeping.
The first is from 1981, the second 2014. Placed side by side, the poet’s enduring concerns speak to one another across the pages and the years: what is it that separates us, and how do we mend? And what is there to be mourned even in the mending? —PBC
Nabaneeta Dev Sen. Acrobat. Trans. Nandana Dev Sen. Archipelago Books, 2021. 152 pages. $18.00.
Acrobat is the kind of poetry that brings new complexity to the world around it. Written by Nabaneeta Dev Sen in Bengali and primarily translated into English by her daughter, Nandana Dev Sen, Acrobat draws from sixty years of the poet’s work. Most of the poems are translated by the younger Dev Sen, some by the poet herself, one by the poet’s other daughter, Antara Dev Sen, and others were originally composed in English. Even this composition of the book speaks to a larger project of showing how complex the world of translated literature is. There is more to the work of a poet than its existence in the source language and target language, and the relations between poet, translator, and language can be much more intricate.
The translated portions of Acrobat, however, are deft and lyrical. The poems are full of emotion, and, despite the delicate work of translation, they give off a sense of ease and beauty. The younger Dev Sen says that her renditions “grew closer to English adaptations rather than clear-cut translations,” and the section titled “I Cage Language,” comes from a line that Dev Sen added to her mother’s poem in its English manifestation.
The poems themselves encompass many aspects of life, such as motherhood, daughterhood, love, youth, and death. Most are contemplative, reflections on a terrific and terrifying world, and the speaker within it. In “Be Quiet,” she writes: “Stop, stop this rush in my veins— / If I let my blood gush like the rains / It will flush away the whole universe.” The rhyme of the poem in the first two lines and the echo of the same long vowel sound in the third line iterate the intensity of what the speaker is trying to silence. The poem encapsulates the style of the collection: carefully constructed yet effortless in its execution.
Complementing her imagery and form, Dev Sen is a master of the short poem. In “A house, the color of pain,” she writes:
The house has become the color of pain,
I can’t return to that house again.
Turn the boat around, wind of my heart,
Blow to a different land, to another part.
The brevity of the poem makes it sound like a proverb, as though it has been refined over time and retelling into its perfect form. Whether writing in broad strokes about love and life, or writing about specific places, like the Ganges River, or contemporary politics and politicians, Dev Sen’s poems are profound and timeless. —CA
Bronka Nowicka. To Feed the Stone. Trans. by Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi. Dalkey Archive Press, 2021. 112 pages. $13.95.
A bilingual edition of a book fittingly dedicated “To the Impossible,” Bronka Nowicka’s award-winning literary debut, Nakaarmić kamień (To Feed the Stone), is just as impossible to put down. Employing a Steinian language of childhood, objects, wardrobe, food, and sorrow, the deliciously bizarre prose poems of To Feed the Stone offer memorable images that are as tender as they are disturbing. Katarzyna Szuster’s enthralling translation follows the observations of a little girl filled with buttons (“I shove them in shoes, behind my shirt, some I swallow”), carrying a doll-like stone (“She’s afraid that it will die because it won’t eat”), constantly ambushed by the violence of objects:
The child’s going down to the river of the things, which accepts everything and will give up nothing. The objects are flowing. [ . . . ] Needles. A swarm of needles. Spools of thread. A thimble. Tables are dragging Sunday tablecloths behind them, the river is sucking starch out of them, diluting vodka, stealing bread. Dolls: whole, headless, clothed and naked ones.
In her translator’s note, Szuster reveals that the volume’s inquisitive child-narrator is “often referred to as ‘it’ ” in the original Polish. This adds a fascinating dimension of complexity to the poems when you consider intense passages where the little girl’s body could just as easily blend with various objects and/or their traits. The same goes for seasons like summer and Bronka’s many personifications of sorrow. For example, in the poem, “Stone,” sorrow is referred to as an “it” and the child-narrator is translated as “she”:
The job of sorrow is to come and be. Just that. The rest is up to you—if you embrace it, sorrow will fatten like a snowball. It will stick to every thought.
It’s summer now. The child is standing in the garden in awe of the world, which leaves her mouth open like steam. Sorrow is resting on the side. It’s not melting. Not even sweating.
The essence of the little girl often feels reminiscent of “steam” itself; a visible specter—an almost-invisibility. Whether you’re reading To Feed the Stone in the original Polish or the English translation, Bronka’s major focus is clear: how to translate sorrow. In regards to taste, sorrow can be sweet:
[ . . . ] the great-grandmother cut up the curtains and threw a bag of sugar into the fire.
sorrow can be salty:
Sucking on the salty knee, the child knows: the only thing that separates you from the world is the skin. Thanks to skin, you’re not swallowed up by the vastness of things.
Influenced by artists ranging from Herta Müller to James Joyce, Bronka’s English-language debut is an unforgettable feast for the senses. —PC
Mayra Santos-Febres. Boat People. Trans. Vanessa Pérez-Rosario. Cardboard House Press, 2021. 84 pages. $17.00.
Mayra Santos-Febres’s collection Boat People, translated by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, addresses the oft-undiscussed topic of undocumented migration in the Caribbean. In a numbered series of poems that are sparse and beautiful and rending, both in form and in content, Santos-Febres creates devastating narratives time and again. In the pages of Boat People, nameless individuals live and die by the sea, forced from dry land by structural inequality resulting from the forces of colonization, capitalism, et al. in search of some other dry land where perhaps something new could happen. And those new lives, too, are not without suffering:
you arrive in the city where you are lost
changed thinner
more glassy eyed
you become more accustomed to death
to engine noises
to clamor to the infinite din of cars like
sea innards
Nineteen poems unfold across the pages of Santos-Febres’ work before the final, twentieth poem crashes like a wave both violent and beautifully blue in its envelopment of the reader. This poem is peopled by “delegates,” “dissidents,” “fugitives,” “friends,” “traffickers,” “ex-slaves,” and others, all dancing beneath the sea, which (or who) is insatiable. And here, finally, there is the possibility of peace, even if dark:
come dance here in the deep
no need to dim the lights
to speak softly.
there’s no hunger here
and the dance never ends
all is supple
and inviting
it’s a question of letting go
let go completely
Throughout Boat People the sea serves as narrator, as constant, as a source of life and death, and remains ever-beckoning. It is a place between places, a respite from borders, which are a violent fiction making possible violent realities. For now, I’ll leave you with Santos-Febres and with the sea:
air is lacking
wanting
so the journey goes on
to the illegal city in the ocean’s deep.
undocumented alveoli
explode in melancholy song.
—ZCK
Andra Schwarz. In the Morning We Are Glass. Trans. Caroline Wilcox Reul. Zephyr Press, 2021. 144 pages. $16.00.
The hour of twilight begins now that we grasp it as if
something fell between us somewhere cats caterwaul
we traipse for hours within ourselves final things
and the question what holds us here, why do we stay
in this place voices become lost the paths disappear
nothing will remain of us except this poem
in the mind of the other a search for certainty and
whether it can carry us over the downslide into open light
In her introduction, Caroline Wilcox Reul writes that the natural settings in Andra Schwarz’s poetry “represent a place where one can pursue wholeness.” Reul also notes that “searching allows a sensual knowing; that the heart of our memories lies in the elements of a space […].” This poem, to me, exemplifies these thoughts on Schwarz’s complex relationship to space: The hours of twilight take on an almost physical quality, asking the reader to accept that time, although transient, can represent place. The questions “what holds us here, why do we stay” point to what comes after we leave: What remains of us in a place, and what remains of a place in us? These questions require an analysis of both place and person—a manifestation of the wholeness that Reul mentions in her introduction.
This poem in particular made me pause after reading it. The genius word choice (“somewhere cats caterwaul”) and the rhythm (especially in the first four lines) brought me back to this poem as I was reading through the rest of the collection. Additionally, the italicized clauses that pervade the collection present the most difficult challenges when translating, but Reul crafts these phrases into lines that are moving, meditative, and memorable. Whenever I think back on this collection, my thoughts will automatically turn towards these italicized lines; not only because they are essential for understanding Schwarz’s poetic landscapes, but also because—simply put—they are my favorite moments within the collection.
During the last lockdown in Germany, I read Schwarz’s poetry for the first time. The opportunity to revisit her work in Reul’s English has been a great joy; I can see in each and every verse Reul’s attention to her personal poetics, which culminates in an astounding collection. I cannot wait to read more from these poets! —KD
Ma Yan. I Name Him Me: Selected Poems of Ma Yan. Trans. Stephen Nashef. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021. 147 pages. $22.00.
These selected poems by Ma Yan (1979-2010) bear witness to the everyday contradictions of love, suffering, and vulnerability. Revealing a commitment to the edges of multiple social realities, the poems simultaneously feel strange and familiar. Maybe it is the occasional unexpected torsion of their directions, but Ma Yan’s subtle shifts of tone lead to pleasurable encounters with judicious language and imagery. In the poem “Television,” for example, the poet describes an apparent scene in Beijing where the agency of butterflies, wind, and trees are reflected in urban nature:
Sunlight in mid-spring and
roadside trees smothered in dust
say hello to each other.
Elsewhere the poems register a reflective gaze with such taut images that crystalize affect as in the poem “Sunday, I sit on glass”:
Sunday,
I sit on glass, on a wing without edges . . . I think back
to words said while afraid and paper-thin passions. What won’t melt
remains hard; shadows can’t rub its corners away.
These lines are representative of Ma Yan’s compelling collusion of the abstract and concrete, of rich observational images that are deployed tersely as if language itself must be both economical and notional. Such an approach to language leads to wonderful descriptions and metaphors such as the “swift-vanishing shadow is a cool fish” in the poem “Stranger.” Translator Stephen Nashef notes Ma Yan’s “ecstatic freedom of thought that is nonetheless chained to certain unsurmountable issues to which it cannot help but return,” an accurate summary of the higher level challenges that Ma Yan’s work presents. But this freedom of thought also represents the joy of the unanticipated, where the poet’s unregulated expression delivers fanciful moments to the reader, which the final poem of the collection underscores:
We board the rollercoaster and fly into the future,
tickets pinched in his and my hands,
a sampan flying into the future
on the bouncing waves of my fearless imagination.
Indeed, this translation reveals Ma Yan’s brilliant imagination, one that is certainly fearless and immeasurable. —OT
Clara Altfeld works as an education coordinator in Austin, Texas.
Phoebe Bay Carter is a translator from Arabic and Spanish and a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
Zoe Contros Kearl is a writer based in Vermont. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from New York University’s Gallatin School.
Paul Cunningham is the author of the The House of the Tree of Sores (Schism2 Press, 2020). He is also the translator of Helen Österlund’s Words (OOMPH! Press, 2019). He is a managing editor of Action Books and co-editor of Radioactive Cloud. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia.
Kraig Davis currently lives, works, and translates in Hamburg, Germany.
Katherine M. Hedeen’s latest translations include from a red barn by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and prepoems in postspanish and other poems by Jorgenrique Adoum. She is a Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, a Managing Editor of Action Books, and the Poetry in Translation Editor at the Kenyon Review. www.katherinemhedeen.com.
Orchid Tierney is poet and scholar, currently living in Gambier, Ohio, where she teaches at Kenyon College. She is the author of a year of misreading the wildcats (Operating System, 2019). www.orchidtierney.com.