Harriet: The Blog » Translation

So long and thanks for all the fish + a question about translation -- Barbara Jane Reyes

Barbara Jane Reyes — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:21:06 +0000

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.

Writing on the wall -- Abigail Deutsch

Abigail Deutsch — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:51:35 +0000

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.)

The poetry wall is an appropriately international effort. American poets Marie Howe, Yusef Komunyakaa, C. K. Williams, Bruce Weigl, and Mark Doty, many of whom write on social and political themes, contributed; so did the European writers Zafer Senocak, Tomaz Salamun, Vera Pavlova, and Ewa Lipska. My favorite piece of masonry is Pavlova’s conclusion:

Under 11/09/89,
my diary says:
“Natasha lost a front tooth,
Liza for the first time
stood up in her crib
on her own.”

You wonder: had the speaker not yet heard the news? Was she ignoring it? Did she not understand the significance of the day? Or is the point that the significance of such a day lies not in what newspapers report, but in what diaries record, and that these kinds of events are sometimes, but not always, distinct? And if they are, why, and how?

Speaking of “how,” Marie Howe—whose poems so gracefully insist on the ordinariness of the extraordinary, and vice-versa—writes that the wall went up, “and that was that. People / lived and died, and married.” She describes watching TV, and noting how Berliners “touched the faces of their loved ones / and ran their hands over their heads and hair.” Her intimate moments go public, like diary pages ripped out and blown onto the street.

The title of the work by Salamun, a Slovenian poet, is nearly a poem in itself. “Remembrance of a Yugoslav” could suggest that the poem features a Yugoslav’s reminiscences, or that the poem remembers a Yugoslav—a gesture, perhaps, toward the idea that since Yugoslavia no longer exists, identification as Yugoslavian survives only in memory.

Take a look, if you haven’t already. What do you think of the poems?

And how should I begin? -- Abigail Deutsch

Abigail Deutsch — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:15:55 +0000

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?

Let’s begin with the conservative translation project, guided by ten commandments of sorts. One warns against “emasculation,” urging translators to avoid “unisex, ‘gender inclusive’ language.” Socialist incursions into Biblical text present problems, too (in one edition of the Bible, they write, “the socialistic word ‘comrade’ is used three times”). The authors of the Wikipedia-style page detailing this undertaking anticipate some discomfort with their ideas: “liberals will oppose this effort, but they will have to read the Bible to criticize this, and that will open their minds,” they write.

In analyzing this project, where does one begin?

The first word of the first sentence of the first book of the Bible, naturally.

With Milton’s opening in mind, I decided to compare and contrast their version of Genesis 1:1 with the King James translation. The latter reads, “In the beginning God created heaven and the earth.” This makes sense; the first word of Genesis is “B’reisheet,” meaning “In the beginning.” The “Proposed Conservative Translation,” by contrast, reads: “God created heaven and earth in the beginning.” The site provides the following “analysis” as explanation: “The first word is God.”

All right. But it isn’t. Also, the explanation itself rings of the King James translation of the Gospel According to John (”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”). If only they could offer a Miltonic defense for the revision–something about Classical syntax, perhaps.

Moving on to the second word of Genesis. Over in the Low Countries, academic Ellen van Wolde is scrutinizing the Hebrew verb “bara.” She argues that it means not “created,” as traditionally understood, but “separated.”

According to The Telegraph, she based this conclusion on the observation that God always “created” in plurals: “God was the subject (God created), followed by two or more objects. Why did God not create just one thing or animal, but always more?” Genesis according to van Wolde, then, begins: “In the beginning, God separated heaven and earth.” The idea that heaven and earth predated humans appears in other ancient texts, she writes.

But let’s not dither. The third word of Genesis is Elohim, or God, whose details, physical and otherwise, have provided fodder for R. Crumb. While crafting his recent comic book Genesis, which hews closely to the King James text, he told Time:

He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face like my father. My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. And I thought, ok, there it is, I’ve got God.

(See picture at top.)

If this is getting to be too much, why not eschew that troubling sentence altogether? In his forthcoming tome A Literary Bible, David Rosenberg treats the Bible as a literary work rich with fissures and mysteries. Rather than insist on tidiness, as the conservative translators appear to, he delights in the work’s innate messiness. He writes:

The Bible is a deeply complex text, and its primitive passages are set in a sophisticated writer’s looking back, so it’s the wrong material for literal-minded comedians and artists, who are prone to react before they think. My translations, whether they render the Bible as strange or strangely familiar, engage the ancient texts in contemporary terms. I do not seek to embellish or alter the originals, but mainly to restore the original experience of reading them.

That original chaos, he suggests, is most generative.

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

Annie Finch — Mon, 11 May 2009 03:58:29 +0000

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

Margaret Rockwell Finch, 1961

working poet, entering and once winning the contests of the Poetry Society of America, whose meetings she brought me to as a teenager; typing drafts and final copies (with carbon copies!) on her portable typewriter; keeping green metal fileboxes recording submissions to magazines and contests.

Lately I realize how much of my own poetic destiny has been shaped by my relationship with her. I grew up on stories that ended up making a larger story whose outlines I can only now perceive. It was her mother, and her aunt, who believed in her as a poet from the beginning. When she enrolled in a class with John Malcolm Brinnin in the 1940s, she was told that her poetry was “too lacey and Millayish,” but she kept on her path undaunted, proud to be associated with Millay. She met my father at a lecture by Auden, suspects him of possibly “disappearing” her Millay collection after an argument early in their marriage, and stopped showing him her poems after he told her he thought she should write like T.S. Eliot.

Maggie has always been stubborn about her poetry—and a good thing, too. Just this afternoon I suggested she add a “the” to the first line of her new poem beginning “Standing at window.” “Hmmmm …” she replied, and then told me that one of my sisters had suggested the same thing by email earlier in the day. Her tone made it clear she was unlikely to change it.

My mother has been writing since the 1920s, when she was too young to write and her mother had to write her poems down for her. But I published her first book for her, in the mid 1990s. Why hadn’t she taken her poetry further in terms of a career, I asked her years ago. She answered that as the mother of five children, she just hadn’t been able to maintain enough silence.

Maxine Kumin told me once, not too many years ago, that her mentoring energy now is reserved not for younger poets, but for women poets not much younger than herself. I understand this.

It’s mother’s day, and I’d like to pause to honor all the poetic foremothers whom we celebrate on the Wom-Po listserv—all the women through the centuries who managed to write, and sometimes to publish, in spite of everything. And I’d like to honor all the poet-moms, to name another listserv—the contemporary poets who are also mothers and still struggling with many of the same issues of divided loyalties, divided poetic identity, and divided attention that made being a poet so tricky for my mother. And most of all, I’d like to say Happy Mother’s Day to my first poetic influence, Margaret Rockwell Finch.

Margaret Rockwell Finch

THE SEVENTEENTH DAY OF MAY

Grow maples in me this grow-maple day;

I lie in the long chair and wait your coming.

Spin from branches heavy with fruit of leaves

My sudden seeds, my one-wings, turning, turning!

Leap in the wind that understands the life:

Land on on my leg and do not slide;

Catch in the ready furrows of my hair—I say

I have no pride.

For in me all the broad and murmuring branches

Wait but to hear it spoken.

The porch, the chair, the gutter will not take you.

But I am open.

Heads of life, stretched to the shape of flight,

Plunge to my upturned palm, and with good reason:

My earth, my rain, my sun, my shade will grow you.

Let your season bring me into season.

What Do You Know? -- Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:01:26 +0000

Judith Shklar introduced her book Ordinary Vices by saying, “It is only if we step outside the divinely ruled moral universe that we can really put our minds to the common ills we inflict upon one another each day.” I suppose poets these days aren’t supposed to put their minds to grand tasks – you know, it’s more like write a poem every day for a month. But since it’s not only National Poetry Month but National Uh-Huh month, I thought I’d post something, you know, deep.

Montaigne, whom Shklar mentions in that introduction, was famous for his skeptical remark ‘Que sais-je?” (’What do I know?’). He wasn’t a poet (though his best friend Étienne de la Boétie was), but like a poet, he was quite good at making big pronouncements. Take these, all nicely applicable to poets:

* Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.
* Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.
* If you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved.
* No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.
* Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known.
* Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.

What is it about the French that makes them able to come up with this stuff? In the April 2009 issue of Poetry – which is our annual translation issue - we’ve got a poem that seems to take up where Montaigne left off. It’s called “What I Know,” by Patrick Dubost, who has published more than twenty collections (including under the alias Armand Le Poete, a trickster alter ego) and several CDs. Trained as a musicologist and mathematician, he’s collaborated extensively with musicians, theater ensembles, and puppet theaters, and performs his sound poetry internationally. Here’s the poem in Fiona Sampson’s translation:

1. I know that language is within the world and that, at the same time, the world is within language. I know we are at the border between language and the world.

2. I don’t like phrases such as “nothing new under the sun” or “it’s all been said already.” I know that at every moment we could affirm: “everything is always new under the sun” or “almost nothing has yet been said of what could be said.”

3. I know that there’s no true coherence except in apparent incoherence. Every object clothes itself in chaos. To take shape, every thought must manage its own vagueness.

4. Among the obvious: I know that every human activity consists, one way or another, of battling death.

5. I know that time is bound up with space. Time is the shadow of space. Space the shadow of time. I know that we live in the shadow of a shadow and that it returns to the light.

6. I know that I know nothing about love.

7. I know that I live not in the world, but in the shadow of the world. I know that I go through the world the way an insect goes through its entire life in the shadow of a bank.

8. I know that nothing is simple. Or more, that what’s simple is never truly, never completely, so. I know that everything adds up and that every element of this total depends on the whole.

9. I know that everything around me is nothing but a mass of contingency. I know that every word props itself up on an immense architecture of contingency.

10. I know that thunder comes after lightning and sometimes, in my dreams, thunder precedes lightning. I know that to see its opposite simultaneously with every phenomenon you must widen your eyes.

11. I know that whoever finds himself loses himself a little.

12. I know that I love a woman enormously, but I don’t know which one.

13. I know that to talk is to walk a path with emptiness to the right and emptiness to the left. I know that nothing can grasp this path with two ends. I know that writing is talking in frozen time.

14. I know that the word “table” is like a thousand tables. That a phrase is like a thousand thousand phrases. And that thinking is a match for water sports.

15. I know that every authentic poet is in decay.

16. To read isn’t necessarily to analyze, is not necessarily “to understand.” At the swimming pool, we don’t ask the swimmer the composition of the water, the number and distribution of swimmers, or why he’s picked this date to go swimming. We don’t ask him to describe, in mid-crawl, the architecture or acoustics of the place, or to explain a bird trapped under its roof, or to do a better imitation of the progress of some Olympic seal. We don’t ask him to memorize opening hours or screw himself up by whistling from the bench throughout an entire race in butterfly stroke. No. Finally, we don’t ask him, before each dive, to bring up some secret meaning from the very bottom of the pool. No. We let swimmers swim. We let swimmers swim. And the swimming pools fill up.

17. I know that I live and think inside a storehouse of books. Some recent, new, remarkable books, but in the great majority books which are decayed, moldy, have turned to the lightest heaps of dust. Only their metal frames and some fine particles of knowledge remain, unusable. Light from a few windows crosses the storehouse unimpeded.

18. Having found some daguerreotypes on the floor of an attic—portraits eroded by time and light—I know that forgetting is something enormous, that forgetting is our highest destiny.

19. I know that God doesn’t exist. That’s written everywhere in the storehouse—it can be made out through the portholes, too. I know that after death there’s nothing but death.

20. I know that, seen from the border between language and the world, the universe is in increasing entropy. But I no longer know what it is if I climb to the top of a tree (one of these trees on the border between language and the world), from where you can see far into language and far into the world at the same time.

21. Because I have scaled a tree, I know that beyond language is a huge plain, with dark flowers and little mazy footpaths.

As number three says, “Toute pensée, pour prendre corps, doit ménager sa part de flou.” Hey, good advice for poets!

Seven Contemporary Italian Poets (7/7) -- Linh Dinh

Linh Dinh — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 12:11:46 +0000

Alessandro Broggi, translated by Linh Dinh:
Field of Action
Giulio proposes a toast. Everyone drinks. Berta laughs and receives a slap from Carlo, who reacts immediately. The woman who owns the café doesn’t react, Berta laughs and Carlo gives her a kiss. Bernarda plants herself before Carlo, raises her underskirt with one hand and extends an open hand to him. She sits down. The owner brings her a cold würstel and slams it on the table. Samantha skips over to Carlo. Carlo shoves one hand between her thighs and spits at Berta’s extended hand. Gustavo observes with boredom Samantha’s lower belly, then gives her a coin. Carlo stands up and grins fiercely. The owner goes towards Carlo and without saying a word gives him a slap. Berta laughs and receives a slap also. Carlo takes Berta by the hair and drags her to Gustavo, holding her face before Gustavo’s fly. Berta nods in agreement and Carlo lets go. Gustavo stands up, says nothing and bites violently a piece of bread. The owner heads towards Carlo. The handsome man, meanwhile, fixes his gaze on the beautiful woman, without looking he slips a hand into a pant pocket and without looking extends a large bill towards Samantha. Carlo wants to grab the money but the owner is quicker. Carlo sits down, panting. Berta wants to console him but he moves away. The owner heads towards the table of the beautiful couple with their hands by their sides. Gustavo eats with increasing voracity. The handsome man makes a gesture of refusal with his hand, without averting his gaze from the beautiful woman. The owner sits herself at Giulio’s and Bernarda’s table. Gustavo begins to move, kisses Giulio on the mouth, the owner on the forehead and Carlo on the mouth and on the forehead. Carlo disgusted wipes his lips to clean them. Gustavo walks towards the table of the beautiful couple and punches him awkwardly, hitting him on the shoulder. The handsome man makes a gesture of refusal with his hand, without averting his gaze from the beautiful woman. As the man gestures, Gustavo grabs his hand and places it between his legs. The handsome man observes coldly and without particular interest how Gustavo excites himself with his hand. Samantha covers her mouth with her hands and leaps up hysterically. Carlo moves closer and administers a slap to the beautiful woman. The owner yanks the handsome man’s hand from Gustavo and places it between her legs. Bernarda sneaks forward, gives the handsome man a slap in passing and places Carlo’s hand between her legs. Giulio reaches them and kneeling before the group in action begs them to stop. Berta on her feet watches the scene coldy, making an enormous bubble with the gum she’s chewing, which finally explodes on her face. The beautiful couple are dragged to the ground and brutally undressed. Carlo indicates he wants to rape the beautiful woman. Gustavo removes the handsome man’s pants while guffawing. The owner lifts her apron and sits on the handsome man’s face. Bernarda positions herself behind Giulio and waits for his erection so she could exploit it for herself. By now the beautiful couple are completely buried beneath the others’ bodies. Finally blood begins to splash. Berta is still standing at the same spot and continues to make bubbles with the gum she’s chewing. The beautiful couple are eaten. Gustavo gives Carlo a blow to the head with a piece of meat. The owner then hits him with a thighbone. Giulio remains seated, distracted, playing with the remains of the cadavers. The owner strikes Carlo with a rib. Carlo reacts immediately. Berta removes her shoes and socks and wedges a toe into Carlo’s mouth. Carlo sucks and cries. One after another follows his example, while Gustavo observes the scene with irritation. Bernarda gives Gustavo a slap, who then licks Berta’s foot while whining. Samantha kisses Berta’s ass. Berta gives one of the skeletons a kick, sits at the table where the beautiful couple were and drinks their spumante. Giulio goes to Berta and hides his face in her lap. She pours on his head a glass of spumante. He slips to the ground wearily and lies there for a moment. Samantha reaches him and gives his hand a kiss, as if in reverence. Bernarda takes off a shoe and a sock, goes towards Giuolo and gives him a kick in the ass. Seeing him offended, she wedges a foot in his mouth. Berta lifts a bone to hit Gustavo, then suddenly stops herself and slowly lowers her arm. She falls on Bernarda and shoves her head into one of the cadavers. Berta lets go of Bernarda and straightens her own hair. Bernarda hides beneath a table and nuzzles up to Samantha. Berta and Gustavo follow suit, murmurring.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………
Alessandro Broggi was born in 1973 in Varese, and is the author of these poetry collections: Apprendistato (Eos Edizioni, 2000), Inezie (LietoColle, 2002; with a preface by Giampiero Neri, drawings by M. Morandini); lavori in prosa: Quaderni aperti (partially presented as an e-book for Biagio Cepollaro E-Dizioni, 2005); and total living (la camera verde, 2007). With C. Dentali, he edited l’Agenda Poetica di LietoColle (ed. 2003; with a note by M. Cucchi). He has also appeared in Verso i bit. Poesia e computer (2005) and Il presente della poesia italiana (2005). His poetry, prose, essays, interventions, as well as reviews of his works, have appeared in Almanacco del Ramo d’Oro, Bloc Notes, Hebenon, Il Segnale, La Clessidra, La Mosca di Milano, Nuova Antologia, Poesia, Sud, Testuale, among other places, and online at Poesia da fare, Dissidenze, Liberinversi, Microcritica, Nabanassar and Nazione indiana. Since 2004, he has been the editor of the poetry and cultural webzine L’Ulisse. He works as a writer and editor for Condé Nast Traveller, where he busies himself with the international art scene. Broggi also has an interest in contemporary music and sound art.

Seven Contemporary Italian Poets (6/7) -- Linh Dinh

Linh Dinh — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 14:18:56 +0000

Michele Zaffarano, translated by Linh Dinh:

a prince
1
don’t be wolves
don’t be snakes
don’t cry for onions
let the fog cuddle you
let many mountains
let scorpions
bathe in your own tears
travel by ship
take little walks
sketch giraffes
swim breaststrokes
sprawl naked in the woods
running naked over meadows
play as they cuddle you
get dirty
sing
climb over meadows over vegetables
chase squirrels
lions tigers made of ceramic

2
take a cold shower
give many kisses on the mouth
go up trees
go to sardinia
cut the cake
eat cake with cream
don’t prefer mint
don’t let dying nature die
Saturday and Sunday
make a mess of your house
keep a warm bed
joke with flowers
with death that knows ugliness
forecast bad weather
feel yourself be taken for a ride
go to bed early
go by boat
eat spinach giving you iron
play alone
don’t throw tin cans but on the ground
move about by airplane
yank up the grass the violas
yank problems from your psyche
take a boatride
go up to saturn
3
sit on your words
watch the sea
watch plants die
frequent a swimming pool
stay in bed
sweat to make yourselves well
be more devilish than the devil
eat bananas not fishbones
stop pollution
replant knocked down trees
play with dolls
observe the sun the moon
then eat cooked apple cooked carrot
listen to the music of benedetto marcello
then listen to propellers too
go to the sea for the view
make friends give you gifts even dead ones
buys cds of tyrannosaurus rex
watch out for earthworms and birds
make flowers rot
don’t waste any part of the pig
don’t dirty the snow or other dirty things
don’t play the murderer
4.1
look at trees butterflies prickly grass yellow flowers
enjoy chocolate slide all the way down get sick
get yourselves some war night cream the sky
arm yourselves pop balloons nature’s in ruin
go to the zoo the museum go to the airport
travel by train work rarely stay out of the wind
motorcycle around don’t take the highway don’t ex-
pire as long as you could let loose dogs monsters witches
spoil your winter the cat alone swim
climb up high hills go down on a sled
pass through a fire the countryside
the chirping of birds flowering trees
4.2
argue divide up all the cheese that you have
watch skiing stars bathroom flowering cherry trees
be sad get beaten up eat vegetables
travel with dolls with skirts ride a bike around
all the animals that you have the adventures that you have
make a snake face a white-finned shark face
be a brick fish catch the catfish
the television’s on burglars are inside the house
make all the ruckus you want heard the Spring
act like monkeys cut fish with scissors
make holes puncture rafts and more be moles
scream in Italian ski stay home all day long

a red apple
1
to have a horse
to be small again
may it always be summer
may life be milder
than all the animals on earth
to be a rock
to go forward and back in time to see primitive men
to have a house made of olive trees
to go by horse
to sleep on a fir bed
to go to the sea
to go far away
to go live in america
to play blindman’s bluff
may meteorites not fall to earth
may life be made of beds only
to be a friend to all her friends
to live in an enormous house with a swimming pool
to be on a galleon forever
to be a peach tree
a fox
to fly
to learn all the languages
to be a squirrel
a horse
to go to the sun
2
to be an eagle
to not go to work
to look at mountains from afar
to be a tour guide
to look at castles
to look at cottages of millionaires
come look in my castle
to be a ghost without head leaving the grave
to be a ghost without head leaving to frighten
a star to be
to have a magic wand and make all sorts of magic
to go into space
to know german
to have a crocodile inside the house
to see men what things they use to eat
to see men what things they use to cut
to see objects
to become a high jumper
an airplane
to live outside with the flowers
to live on the bottom of the sea
to live in los angeles but also in san francisco
3
to see tarzan nude
idiot
to be seven again
waterfalls
an adventure
may it always be spring
to stay at home
may children not harm other children
may nature not be polluted
to throw myself from a waterfall
a magical horse
to go away to mexico
to run around with my friends all night long forever
to ride a dog
to go on a rainbow
to have a garden filled with flowers
a tiger with schiavona-like teeth
to be a snake in the jungle
to know how to tell stories
to be an archeologist
a mummie
to swim with dolphins
to play with dolls
may books be made solely with pictures
to live in a cottage in the woods
if only I wasn’t blonde with blue eyes
if only I had green hair with red eyes
to have a dog
to go on a tgv train
to be kidnapped by pirates
to have as your house the sphinx
to go on a time machine and see the jurassic period
and bring back some dinosaurs to cause much fright
4
to throw myself from a bridge
to be a king
to live on a farm
to have a tarantula or half a scorpion
to have half a scorpion and half a tarantula
to have a stall
to throw myself from a castle
to make five million a year
to be a bird
to go on a cruise
dog horse fairy sun
mickey mouse squirrel
cat a fish
a mamma bear
a bed
on the beach
a fish
me you and the sun
to play doctor
to be a missile
may it always be summer
to stay with my cat
may spring last a lifetime
to belong to a circus
if only dinosaurs were still here
to help animals
to have a telescope
to go to egypt
to go to my sister in munich
to stay in the jungle
to climb up trees without hurting myself
may all the people be alive
a bed of cedar
5
to go to china
have myself called mohammad
hero
to pilot an airplane
a boat
a world map from the 1600’s
an ice cream
to work to improve
to be small again
to be small
to be even smaller

……………………………………………………………………………………..
Michele Zaffarano was born in Milan in 1970 and now lives in Rome. His texts have appeared in Qui. Appunti dal presente, Poesia, New Review of Literature and in various anthologies. In 2007, La Camera verde in Rome published E l’amore fiorirà splendidamente ovunque (felix series) and Il culto dei feticci nell’Italia contemporanea. His translations into Italian of these French writers, Roche, Cadiot, Tarkos, Espitallier, Gleize, etc., have appeared in Testo a fronte, Nuovi argomenti, L’Ulisse, l’immaginazione and Exit. With Gherardo Bortolotti, he edits “chapbooks,” a series of experimental literature from France, Italy and the U.S. He is also a co-editor of GAMMM.

Seven Contemporary Italian Poets (5/7) -- Linh Dinh

Linh Dinh — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:03:43 +0000

Florinda Fusco, translated by Laura Modigliani:

0.1
I count the bones           now that you are almost close enough
           behind the glass pane           the hand pushes but does not reach
the body bent over to embroider a forest            with pins
                     steady, so as not to prick oneself
           wrinkles grow on the skin    like roots, trees

little by little I chop off my fingers
my tongue the other tongue

covered with moss
all the way to the throat

0.2
put a sky in my navel                      and I will give you all my
slumber
     the bones interlaced with iron threads                      the weight of the flesh
           pressed on the earth                       the hair grown into needles
examine the body splayed its imperceptible movements            the foot light as
air
                     I will not open my mouth of concrete
                   to say to you
                      come back later, it is always too soon

0.3
they told me the dead                         are present at the ceremonies
              they arrive on time            they are always behind you
the women wear big hats                and long blue gloves
they carry necklaces of white beads            inviolable like rosaries
                                  you don’t notice their light step
                                                        you don’t smell their scent among
the guests
                                                you don’t see their bare foot on the
marble
                                 the dead walk on the earth
they mingle in the hair
                                slide down the neck, between
                      the ribs, in the veins, all the way to
the nails of the foot
the day                                           they alight on the glaze of
the plates
                    or in the bottom of glasses
                      in silence we drink them

0.4
trunks of veins            grow over me            cross me
                      in the house there are neither stones nor bones
                                                        to form into toys
I loosen my braids                      to make a blanket to cover me
                I play by myself         plant nails into the earth
                        wait for the tree of the resurrected

0.5
an ermine         struck         at the center
of my forehead                 under the swollen skin
a trickle of blood        drips         down the body         to the feet
        as I embroider the skin                 held inside a frame
           the canvases ooze
faces of ancestors surface         from the backs of paintings
they stare at me they answer questions with questions and don’t ask for
answers
they tell me of a fragment of sky                      under the foot or
in the empty glass            of my felt blindfold stretched across my eyes
they do not make appointments so as not to meet me           they do not read me
their stopped watches            they do not invite me to the banquet of the
absentees
                     I measure the chest, the cavity,
            the depth of the scratch, the cracks of memory
I lay down my crowns                      of the queen of lost memory
                      there is no gauze for my carpet of blood

……………………………………………………………………………………………………

Florinda Fusco was born in Bari in 1972. Her books of poetry include linee [Lines] (Editrice Zona 2001) and il libro delle madonne scure [The Book of Dark Women] (Mazzoli 2003), illustrated by Luigi Ontani, which received the Premio Delfini. Her critical and poetic works have been published in various Italian journals and anthologies. Her work has been translated in English and French, and published in French and Canadian anthologies. She has translated from Spanish the work of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, which won a national translation prize (2004). She has published many essays on Edoardo Cacciatore and is working on a monograph of Amelia Rosselli.
Laura Modigliani lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her poems have appeared in such journals as MiPOesias, Promethean, sic, The One Three Eight, Poetry in Performance, and The Blue Jew Yorker, and her translations have appeared in Fascicle. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2007 and 2008. She received the Malinche Prize for Literary Translation in 2007 and the Jack Zucker Memorial Prize in Poetry in 2005 from The City College of New York, where she received an MFA degree in Poetry. She works as an Associate Editor at Weekly Reader Publishing.

Seven Contemporary Italian Poets (4/7) -- Linh Dinh

Linh Dinh — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:16:58 +0000

Vanni Santoni, translated by Linh Dinh:

Precarious Characters

Magdalene
“Five thousand years of history, an entire planet, and the nastiest things of all time happened a few miles from here, not even seventy years ago. Now, tell me why shouldn’t I fear the future?”
Elmo (July’s oldie goldie)
“Can we make love like we did at twenty-years-old?”
“That’s impossible, my treasure, not only because we’re 58, but also because at the time of our first intercourse we were twenty-two and not twenty. I remember it very well, that moment when I was twenty and dating a dear girl from Lucca.”
Vanni
Is in Stockholm.
Teodoro
Teodoro is timid and fragile, but is adapting well to life in the high-security C. Lombroso correctional institute: he keeps to himself, doesn’t draw attention, yet notices everything. Recently he heard strange sounds coming from under the mess hall, but hasn’t worked up enough courage to go down and investigate.
Penelope
Penelope sleeps more and more. When she was small, she already slept nine or ten hours a night. During adolescence, it rose to thirteen hours then appeared to stabilize when she was nineteen-years-old.
Instead, now that she is twenty-nine and lives alone, maintaining herself on profit from some real estate, she has become accustomed, within a few months, to sleeping eighteen, nineteen or even twenty hours a day. When she wakes up, Penelope is always in a great mood.

Francois
The sweet wind of Provence caresses each day Francois’ old, apparently sunbaked, yet perfectly functioning body. Sometimes it blows away his blue felt beret.
Claire died thirty-three years ago. Their son, Jaqui, nine. Francois has never been interested in anything since youth, it appears.
But he has, truly, one passion: to stay alive. He measures the temperature, the wind, the sun, his nutrition, heart beats, complexion, blood pressure, cholesterol level. A hundred and six years old. In good health. Francois laughs under the March sun.
Zippo
Zippo is a clown in the Mariposa circus. His real name is Guglielmo Diné. Gugliemo has killed his cousin and two other pieces of shit over money. Has raped his sister and caused a miscarriage with his kicks. When Guglielmo is Zippo—one hesitates to say—he’d feel an infinite tenderness at the sight of children laughing at his skits.
Ilaria
Ilaria is totally in love with her guy! Pages of her diary are filled with this notion! She has even started a blog to scream about her love to the world! They met two weeks ago! The day before yesterday they got together! They kissed! His name is Mauro! She wrote “Mauro” on her backpack!
Tomorrow Llaria will discover that her guy has a prosthesis of plastic and aluminum in place of his lower right leg, and will become speechless.
She’ll ask herself if all of her love was located in that piece of Mauro right there, and she’ll feel infinitely empty and shitty.
Ugolino
Today, for some reason, the servants bought for Ugolino a milk chocolate with a filling. Ugolino hates that nougat filling. He’ll stay in a bad mood for days. At this moment, Ugolino is digging the nougat from the chocolate with a silver spoon, while screaming unmentionable insults towards Switzerland.
Galatea
Galatea is a normal girl. She’s five-feet-seven, a brunette, with brown eyes. Neither beautiful nor ugly. Neither brilliant nor an idiot. Neither good nor evil. She likes the singers Battiato and Carmen Consoli, the books of Milan Kundera, Hello Kitty accessories, decoupage. She studies physical therapy and plays volleyball.
Her father, one of the greatest literary figures of his epoch, cannot resign himself to the quiet normality of Galatea, and has begun to suspect that she is not his daughter.
Tano
Five feet eight inches, 170 pounds. Black hair, black eyes, dour. A hint of a beard, a few light wrinkles around the eyes. Forty nine years old, married, without children. A bypass. Tano is a taxi driver.
Mirella
Mirella feels vulnerable, and entrenches herself behind heavy makeup, boots from Max & Co., suits from Prada for the career woman, hair done every week, long and stringy and colored “hazelnut haze #06.” Mirella is in love with a cashier at the corner pastry shop, a chubby, timid punkette.
Antonietta
Antonietta staggers into the toilet of the fashionable club where she has gone tonight. She is beyond drunk and cannot find the bag of cocaine in her purse. She turns towards the mirror and notices a wrinkle that has never been there. Soon she will vomit with remarkable grace, considering her condition.
Markus
Markus wanted so much to be a vigorous, ruddy country boy. Instead, he’s an emaciated artist, drug addict and snob.
Federico
Tonight Federico roused himself and finally took the fluorescent spray paint bought a few weeks earlier, went before Lidia’s house and wrote on the asphalt “My pearl fogive me.” Without the R. What nerves.
Hellen
Hellen makes stickers. She designs them by hand, scans them, converts them into vector graphics then prints them on shiny paper. She always carries at least ten in her back pocket to stick onto street posters, pub bathrooms, walls of the metro stations. Sometimes when she’s home and it’s icy outside, she would go out with a small knife, scrape ice from a poster to plant a sticker, then quickly go back inside. In this period Hellen is making stickers of rabbit.
Alberto
The way Alberto uses the expression “starved to death” would outrage even a Nazi, but it’s nothing compared to the way he uses, from youth, “beaten dog.”
Marguerite
Maguerite will be married in April. In recent months, it so happens that she’d think, more and more, about an adolescent love affair (if such a brief, unconsumated episode could be called that) with a growing nostalgia.
This anguish installs itself in her mind, grows, makes itself large, enormous. It encompasses and illuminates the past, explains the present, obscures the future.
Marcello
Marcello watches his son being transfixed by the Playstation, and for a moment was lost in thoughts remembering all the games he played as a child on the street, the same street right outside. How he initiated soccer and tennis matches, races, made bicycle tracks on the hillocks, poked into hornets’ nests, got into fist fights with children from the other side of the avenue, placed firecrackers inside mailboxes, and how fearful he is now of letting his own son leave the house for 10 minutes, alone.
Marcello turns off the Playstation by instinct, but does not have the courage to say “Go out!” to the sitting boy who watches him in astonishment, pissed off, and so he turns the game back on and apologizes.
Mara
Mara is the most active of activists. She organizes participates leads occupies manifests informs. Once Mara threw a rock at the window of a temp agency. The rock bounced back without leaving a crack on the window. Mara felt both mocked and relieved. Mara hides from everyone the fact that she’s super rich and says that the apartment she lives in on Campo de Fiori is rented.
Barozzo
Barozzo, baron of Montamaro, sent for three hundred Swiss mercenaries to defend his fiefdom from hostile neighbors. The Swiss arrived and saw that the fiefdom was vulnerable yet prosperous, so they promptly sacked it, raped whoever was rapable and laid siege to the castle. The castle’s weak defense was breached after three and a half hours, and the siege concluded with them drinking wine from cracked casks and sodomizing the baron amid loud laughter.
Roberto
“You’re in your thirties, pig!” This hateful phrase wakes Roberto up every morning (at noon), screamed from the efficient throat of his energetic mother. Roberto already hated to hear such words when he was twenty eight, so we can figure what he thinks of them now, being thirty four.
Wu
Yesterday the sergeant asked Wu what is the soldier’s occupation; Wu answered “to kill” and he was punished. Today, to the same question, he answered “to die” and was again punished. Wu runs in the mud and tries to works his imagination since tomorrow he will be forced to guess again.
Tazio
Tazio is a good-looking guy, with dark skin and hair. When Tazio meets a girl, the first thing he makes clear is that he has a glass eye. Sometimes he even shows up for the first date with an eye patch. Even if it becomes the center of attention for the evening, his empty eye socket doesn’t usually create problems. Tazio is always marveling at how little it has damaged his sex life.
Carmine
Carmine manages a small bookstore. He defines himself as an eclectic anarchist liberal, without being any of them. Carmine is bald with a thick reddish beard, smokes toscanelli and gitanes, and will never order a book if you ask him to do it. Certain mornings he puts on an old head band like Bjorn Borg’s and goes running in the country.
Gianna
Gianna bought a timeshare in Baleari. He has only been there but once, alone.
Simona
There are four types of birth: from an egg, from a matrix, from a miracle, from heat and humidity. And yet Simona appears to have come from dryness, from a shell, from a morning sleep, from paper.
Diana
Among all the tall girls, over thirty, with a helmet hairstyle from the 20’s, never absent from an art opening, Diana is the one who soaks up the most prosecco.
Marinella
A twenty-nine-year-old archeologist, Marinella cheats on her man frequently, keeps her hair nearly shaven and dresses like a kraut on vacation.
Sergio
In the last month Sergio has come to understand:
1) if he reads few poems he will have difficulty writing them well.
2) to make a fool of yourself cooking fish is easier than it seems.
3) Florentinians, including himself, are absolutely wicked.
4) there are even those who could use Post-it in a sensible way.
Francesco
Suddenly, Francesco loses the notion of what is appropriate. He asks an acquantaince the whereabouts of the man’s “hideous mother,” insults with an evil relish other people’s physical defects, and asks a woman on the street if she wants to, by chance, “look at a prick.”
Nastassja
Five feet ten, one-hundred-and-one pounds, blonde, green eyes both malicious and vulnerable, Nastassja was a poor yet emerging model until a poker, hurled by her live-in lover, struck her on the mouth, broke her front teeth and busted up her lower lip. Nastassja has not returned to Poland to see her grandparents.
Simona
If you live at 8 Brothers Roselli Street, you’d know Simona’s singing, which rises high and gorgeous each evening at 7 o’clock. Many of the newest tenants believe that Simona is that cool and lanky woman who always leaves early in the morning, but they’re wrong: she’s actually that chubby one who brings the cats the leftovers each evening.
Rudy
Rudy, six-feet-seven of boyishness, red hair and a regular face, carries buckets of cement.
On Saturdays, Rudy dances, drinks and snorts way too much; sometimes he would leave the disco alone, without telling his friends, and flee down the highway.
Mary-Ann
Mary-Ann is that small, fierce doctor from England in the emergency department of Pisa Hospital, all curly hair and freckles. Once, alone in the morgue, under the trembling chemical of the neon light, Mary-Ann gave a long kiss to a corpse.
Roberto
This summer Roberto bought a late-model telephoto lens from Canon. To try it, he decided to take some distant shots of his three-year-old son playing on the beach.
Someone saw him and thought he was a pedophile: Roberto barely escaped from the lynch mob, and lost both camera and telephoto lens.
Roberto doesn’t take photos anymore, not even in the winter.
Erika
Almost everyone remembers Erika for her huge tits rather than her many virtues. Above all else, Erika is afraid of spiders trapped in the bathtub and has an obscure fascination with seeing, or better yet, with not seeing, the fake glasses made of blue plastic on the little round carpets at Ikea.
Gano
“Misfortune in love does not make census-based distinctions.” This sentence, read in who knows which comic book, returns to Gano’s mind today as he masturbates while sitting on the floor, in the living room.
Faustina
Faustina, a little old lady with red-tinted hair nudged by white, is only a retired cleaning lady, but you won’t find on this earth a more absolute concentration of virtues. All of her children, inexplicably, are petty and cruel.
Garuda
Garuda is an invincible monster with fangs sharper than a tiger’s, moreover it’s faster than a leopard but stronger than an elephant, moreover it’s invisible, moreover it spits fire like a dragon but hotter, moreover it eats men and mountains and seas, moreover its horns are of diamond, moreover its roar kills, moreover it has eyes that hypnotize, moreover, moreover, moreover…
Ottavia
The amount of makeup foundation on Ottavia’s face, this evening, is such that it creates the impression, on kissing her cheeks, of a velvet couch covered with dust from half a decade in an attic.
Saburo
Saburo is a forty-year-old South American with curly long hair and a broken nose. When he was in Copenhagen, he made chairs out of scrap metal from the naval shipyard. Here in Florence he doesn’t know what to do. Occasionally, when there’s enough time and wine, Saburo’d tell a long story that takes place in Ulan Bator, Caracas and Osaka, from where he got his Japanese name.
Urbano
When he knew he had cancer, Urbano bought a pistol. “For when the suffering is intolerable,” he has solemnly said to himself this solidly-built man. Today, when he watches the crowd from the balcony, Urbano has a strange light in his eyes.
Azzura
An angel when she sleeps, a cat when she stretches, a piece of shit at work, an ice box under the blankets.
Franco
Always surrounded by his employees, Franco is the owner of an awful buffet right downtown. When the chicken salad goes stale after days, he adds more mayonnaise.
Wolf
The slogan will be: “Surveillance cameras at the police station, screens at the squares.”
…………………………………………………………..
Vanni Santoni was born in Montevarchi in 1978 and now lives in Florence. He is the author of Personaggi precari [Precarious Characters] (RGB 2007), which started as a blog, and Gli interessi in comune [Common Interests] (Feltrinelli 2008), a novel about drugs, sex, alcohol and boredom among a group of teen boys growing up. It made a splash upon publication. Santoni is the founder of SIC – Scrittura Industriale Collettiva [SIC – Industrial Writing Collective], and writes for Italy’s leading newspaper, the Milan-based Corriere della Sera.

Seven Contemporary Italian Poets (3/7) -- Linh Dinh

Linh Dinh — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:14:21 +0000

Marina Pizzi, translated by Laura Modigliani:

Four Poems
the hours excised, eroded
one day I’ll go from one thing to another
or with handkerchief on wrist
with vermilion forefinger to ask you again
pardon for the mile just gone
*
awful rag the farewell
in grape must that boils without intoxication
the elevator of solitude that ascends
to a deaf landing, an incomplete floor,
to what’s funny for those still without
care givers, living dead.
vast tax vast this arrogance
of the die cast of the veto against the neck
fit for a collar without being walked.
*
the elastic forehead for watching God
from this shield of harangue.
insolence of action the nativity of the sea
backwashes under the arcades
nervous tic of lovers, love to be remade

from “Under the Acorns of the Oaks”

“I have conquered the empire of an attic”
Fernando Pessoa

no longer wanting to commit
the dragging on still does not mutiny.
it is not the full grave under scrutiny
nor the idol of birth without sunset.
the dip in the path shall find paradise
under the acorns of the oaks.
*
not reaching the soil nor the air
the hangman’s chrysanthemum.
the observatory of the forehead
is unfit as a lookout
against all the bullets.
since yesterday the dunes of motherhood
rest wisely, they know the time
of buoy, the burned satchel scored
by the harangue of the prosecutor without embers.
*
with throat consumed the ringed compendium
this rough-hewn fence
scarlet in the midday morning
tumult of vetoes dacha without food.
skip the snack on the river banks of expiration
of the firearm of the chimney that berths
path of the concrete foot.
lower than me is not possible
if not in death of twin dog
of the fortunes that all undo it
scrawny, meat-packing district, roof
that breaks with the straw:
useless the bonfires made perhaps for mercy.
*
concealed in the mother’s chest
forum of moonless father
asks now for an angle of bread
a necessary taste against the wall
of gods endured…
laughed the beautiful dialect just yesterday laughed
when august was spent on the roof
of the wafers of the sun, wafers.
old fashioned at the bar aisle
pays centesimal minutes
minuscule murderous evils
cries and chides in the death of the space.
*
the bivouac shall mourn the slope of the scattered
to the inert preserves to the absence of beauty.
has to release a wild goat’s trill
gullible still of having the choice
between one pebble and the other and a protocol.
has to release a slope of stagnation
a dull matter date and desert.
disheveled hovel comatose chimney
hum a refrain for all of them
the tortured hoards of fog…

…………………………………………………………………………………………………
Marina Pizzi was born in 1955 in Rome, where she still lives. She is the author of Il giornale dell’esule [The Exile Diary] (Crocetti 1986), Gli angioli patrioti [Angelic Patriots] (ivi 1988), Acquerugiole [Drizzles] (ivi 1990), Darsene il respiro [Let Yourself Breathe] (Fondazione Corrente 1993), La devozione di stare [The Devotion to Being] (Anterem 1994), Le arsure [Burning Heats] (LietoColle 2004), L’acciuga della sera i fuochi della tara [Evening Anchovy and Burning Vetch] (Luca Pensa 2006). Three of her unpublished (on paper) manuscripts could be found online, at these websites, Sconforti di consorte, Brindisi e cipressi, Sorprese del pane nero. Widely published in journals and anthologies, she has been translated into Persian, German and English. She is also a co-editor of the journal, Poesia, and the litblog, La poesia e lo spirito.
Laura Modigliani lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her poems have appeared in such journals as MiPOesias, Promethean, sic, The One Three Eight, Poetry in Performance, and The Blue Jew Yorker, and her translations have appeared in Fascicle. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2007 and 2008. She received the Malinche Prize for Literary Translation in 2007 and the Jack Zucker Memorial Prize in Poetry in 2005 from The City College of New York, where she received an MFA degree in Poetry. She works as an Associate Editor at Weekly Reader Publishing.