Harriet

Archive for the ‘Translation’ Category

Bhanu Kapil

BURN THIS

I threw the book into a dark garden and let it, all that winter, rot; retrieving it before the weather turned, to transcribe what was legible.  Though I considered burning it, I threw the notebook, instead, into the bin.  (Then, feeling guilty, plucked it out and put it in the recycling instead.)  Some notes on retrieval, on the circulatory and evolutionary intensity of “scraps“; of the notebook next to the book: the book that fails:

Anselm Berrigan

Hand of the grain the sand smote

The

Anselm Berrigan

With regards to the Crackademy

The top ten illnesses in our household in 2009 have been: roto virus, lyme disease, sinus infection, common cold, pink eye, swine flu, pink eye redux, occasional faint echoes

Anselm Berrigan

Nothing in that spam queue

It used to be the case that I’d type things up fairly quickly after getting them. Now I seem to want more distance between the accumulation of materials and their typing or arranging.

Anselm Berrigan

New Blank Document

I remember being lazy and stupid and nonetheless curious. I remember the Optionists, the Actualists, the Pre-Born Bag of Chipists, the Expos, and the Typing Wild Speechists. I remember white roaches

Edwin Torres

Señor Smith to you.

Write what you know. But I don’t know! The floor creaks when I walk up the steps, even when I’m not there. I am facing a national personality triage. The nation is not america but poesie, the personality is not body but name.

Barbara Jane Reyes

So long and thanks for all the fish + a question about translation

Dear readers of this here Harriet blog,

Well, looks like my time here has come to a close. It’s been interesting watching you all anonymously thumbs up and thumbs down one another. In all seriousness, thank you for reading my posts, and allowing me to introduce you all to some poets, poetry, and indie presses which may not have otherwise blipped on your radar.

I will be posting here every now and then; there have been books sitting in my growing “to review” stack, and I do mean to say a few things about a couple of them, namely these two:

INCANTATIONS: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women by Xpetra Ernandes / Xalik Guzmán Bakbolom / Ambar Past (Cinco Puntos Press, 2009).

KILLING KANOKO: SELECTED POEMS OF HIROMI ITO Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles (Action Books, 2009). You can read more about Ito here).

And this brings me to my question: how do you write about translated poetic work when you don’t read the original language, and when the original language is not included with the translated text (you know, like when you read Lorca, and the original Spanish is included on the facing page)?

That said, it’s back to my own cozy blog for me. Do come and have conversations with me there.

Abigail Deutsch

Writing on the wall

Berlin

White space criss-crossed yesterday’s New York Times opinion page like mortar. Uneven in length and width, stanzas gave the impression of crumbling brick. Poem titles appeared painted on, recalling graffiti.

In light of the endless debate over Whether Good Political Poetry Exists, the commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall with a wall of poetry–a throwback to the days when poems regularly appeared in newspapers–gave me a case of the grins. The poetry wall struck me as an editorial eye-roll, a visually complex, literarily ambitious “duh.” (Just the same, it’s worth bearing that debate in mind while reading these poems, which, like the rough-hewn wall, can feel uneven.)

Abigail Deutsch

And how should I begin?

crumb-genesis-page

In the beginning of Paradise Lost, Milton paints and points and dallies, filling eight lines with sorrow and hope and mountains and fruit, disobeying the strictures of English grammar in favor of the more contorted Latinate, including, even, an “or” in line seven that threatens to undermine his progress, such as it is, until, in the beginning of line nine, he finally delivers the phrase “In the beginning”—the first words of Genesis—and then the sentence continues for several more lines, such that “In the beginning” serves as a sort of hinge, swinging the reader backward into the book’s preliminary lines or forward, if he will, into what follows, itself functioning as a sort of “or,” an opener of possibilities, a poser of questions.

It’s not over yet.

As if in tardy celebration of Milton’s 400th birthday (which, you’ll remember from all the parties, was last year), scholars and graphic novelists and rightist revisionists have been reworking the Bible. Certain conservatives are seeking to reform and void the King James version, which they view as troublingly liberal, while a Dutch scholar investigates Genesis’s first verb. R. Crumb’s Genesis is forthcoming, as is David Rosenberg’s Literary Bible. You’re doubtless wondering, as I am: will any of these make the Good Book an even Better Book?

Annie Finch

Happy Mother’s Day, to Foremothers, Poet-Moms, and Maggie

Today I went to visit my mother, Margaret Rockwell Finch, who turned 88 a few weeks ago.  As always lately, she showed me a new poem.  Maggie was my first model of a

maggie_1961_1
Margaret Rockwell Finch, 1961

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Thom Donovan
Bhanu Kapil
Fred Moten
Craig Santos Perez
Sina Queyras
Sotère Torregian

STAFF WRITERS

Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share

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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010

Poetry Magazine

A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.

Chicago Poetry Tour

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Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker

Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker Fri, March 26th, 6:00 PM
Open Books
213 West Institute Place
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