At Asymptote, Three Reviews of New Books of Poetry in Translation
Asymptote brings us the latest titles in translation for June in a collection of short reviews.
"What’s New in Translation?" includes Hyesoon's Poor Love Machine (see our post on the Hyesoon folio here); and two other books, The Clouds by Juan José Saer, translated by Hillary Vaughn Dobel, Open Letter Books; and Algaravias: Echo Chamber by Waly Salomão, translated by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi for Ugly Duckling Presse. Looking at Salomão's, which won Brazil’s highest literary prize, the Prêmio Jabuti, Poupeh Missaghi writes:
The poems in the collection might have a semblance of clamor and messiness but they actually form a modern complex whole. They thread together and mirror many aspects of our human experience, such as the human fate, knowledge, creation, language, place, time, displacement, belonging, etc. delving into what, in all this, is understood or, for one reason or another, misunderstood or not understood at all.
From “THE TRUE STRUCTURE / OF NATURE,” (9) to a “locked poem” (13) to “jet turbines” and “scanners” (21) to “Dr. Martens” shoes to a “sexualized mother / joyful mother” (33) to “the burning of archives” (39) to a “déjà vu sensation” (57) to “gradual loss of hair” (71) to “Narcissus,” (85) to Paul Valéry, John Ashbery, and Wallace Stevens, and Sartre, they all sit together in the book to dig deep into many layers of our being in the world.
Salomão (1943-2003) was born in Jequié, Bahia, Brazil to a Syrian immigrant father and a Brazilian mother. Translator Maryam Monalisa Gharavi was born in Iran and became an immigrant herself at the age of seven. In an interview with Mirene Arsanios, Gharavi speaks about her first encounter with Salomão’s work when she lived in Brazil as a student:
“I was instantly drawn to his poetry, and ended up tracing his footsteps all over the bookstores and public squares of Rio de Janeiro where he would give huge outdoor readings. Poetry quite literally stopped traffic at the time.
There was something vibrant in Salomão’s work that drew people in, even though he was also accused of writing too intellectually.”
It is with this intellectual composed voice that is meanwhile intimate and vulnerable that Salomão contemplates the natural and the unnatural world. He deals, in Gharavi’s words, with “a conjugated and multivalent reality.”
Read on at Asymptote.