[»»]Kathleen Fraser in conversation with Sarah Rosenthal, 2007 “SR: Silence has been a central trope in your writing since early on. It carries a range of meanings, from erasure to grief and loss to the spaciousness of an open field. Perhaps we could trace some of the ways in which silence has come up in your work over time.” [»»]Alison Knowles in conversation with Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, September 2006. Alison Knowles is a visual artist known for her soundworks, installations, performances, publications and association with Fluxus, the experimental avant-garde group formally founded in 1962. [»»]Eleni Sikelianos, author of The California Poem, in conversation with Jesse Morse [»»]Catherine Wagner in conversation with Nathan Smith, 13 April 2007
Der Hammer, a publication from Vienna's Alte Schmiede, has just published this issue of German translations, including multiple versions of "Johnny Cake Hollow" – a preview of a book in the works from Edition Korrespondenzen, translated by Peter Waterhouse, Katharine Apostle and the Versatorium crew at the University of Vienna, Comparative Literature program. Video of our Alte Schmiede reading was posted her last month.
[»»]Jack Spicer’s The Book of the Death of Arthur, by Jim Goar [»»] Jack Spicer: Kevin Killian: Jack Spicer’s Secret [»»] Jack Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian. Reviewed by Mark Terrill.
Emilio Prados, left, & Federico García Lorca, Madrid, 1936
NEXT TO THE STREAM Dawn
Dreaming cowl, summer rain: where goes the cloud in which you were born?
Forest echo, heart of wind: where the voice that abandoned you in the sky?
Murmur of water among soft rushes: where goes the sparkle of your current?
Human body fleeting, slender reed: where did your shadow forget its nudity?
Beauty, solitude, silent contemplation: where is the true scent of your word?...
(The voice of God resounds against the age...) Where, does love hide its mystery?
ENCLOSED GARDEN
To better gaze upon the night, I am standing on the shore of my life.
Oh, how many captive stars!
To better gaze upon the night, I am standing next to the sleeping water.
Oh, how many captive stars!
To better gaze upon the night, I am standing with my back to the wind.
Oh, how many captive stars!
To better gaze upon the night, I am standing at the foot of a smile.
Oh, how many captive stars!
(Oh, how many captive stars at the bottom of my wound! Oh, how many captive stars crowning my death throes!...)
To better gaze upon the night, I am dreaming beside the sleeping water.
Oh, how many stars on the shore!...
To better feel the night I am going to pull its backbone from the fountain.
Oh, how many departed stars!
.........................................
(Silence stirs the branches... A jasmine falls onto the water...
Oh, how many stars in my soul!)
To better gaze upon the night, I am going to sleep on the shores of Nothing.
FINAL SHADOW
Night arises like a great wall of stone and time is pushing it without being able to demolish it... Stars hang on one side to sustain it: the sun, from behind, supports it with hands of glass; water makes itself into a flag and the wind a stanchion, to better defend it against its rival whose determination does not cease...
All changes its course; for night will not end unless it attains its destiny.
In front of its wall, raised on a cross, I await my fate: a gun shot in the silence, a target in my solitude that finally completes the mystery of so much vain searching for my name in my thought.
Above the wall of night, in the phosphorescence of sleep my finger moist with spirit is writing its sign...
-Although you don’t see my body its life is here, death: get here quickly, if you are to come. Spit on my chest and let your burning saliva melt me into the black lime of the shadow of the eternity that is now supporting me. Thus will I lose my name and, in losing it, I hope to attain what I do not find by thinking and is the cause of my thinking... In this sign I await you and the font for this sign is my complete knowledge. Here I am. Don’t doubt it any more. Punch me without mercy.
Night arises like a great wall of stone and time pushes against it unable to demolish it...
Faithful tree of truth, face to face with night, my body does not rest from waiting.
My eyes are now evening stars.
[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.1937, Edna Saint Vincent Millay published her translation of a poem by Prados, “The Arrival (To Garcia Lorca)” in SpainSings. Since that time, little attention has been paid to his work by readers of English. In Spain he is thought to be next to Lorca with respect to the depth of his song. Born in Málaga in 1899, he was a student at the Residencia where Lorca, Buñuel and Dali among others also studied. Later he studied philosophy in Freiburg. In the 1920s with the collaboration of Manuel Altolaguirre, he edited and published Litoral,a journal that helped to define the Generation of 1927 (Cernuda, Aleixandre, Guillén, Alberti, among others). A Marxist, he taught the sons of fishermen how to set type for Litoraland for Imprenta Sur. A platonic vision of homoerotic love seems to have been formative with respect to his personality. He was also reclusive and Solitude became his mistress. Prados died in exile in Mexico in 1962. His poetry reflects the loss of homeland and a beautiful gentleness of spirit.]
N.B.EnclosedGarden,a translation of Emilio Prados’ Jardíncerradoby Donald Wellman is forthcoming from Diálogos / Lavender Ink . The poem, “Next to the Stream,” is going to appear shortly in the XavierReview.]
A medieval image of Geometry. Looks like the translator (she) to me...
I started thinking about Rita Copeland's book in remembering my experience in 2009 with Chus Pato and a few younger translators and poets in Galicia, translating poems out of English and into Galician, on Facebook! First, some Wallace Stevens—poet Oriana Méndez had felt on reading WS in English that the Spanish translations she had earlier read were inadequate—and as there were none in Galician, we made a couple. Then I turned to “Wooden Houses” by Lisa Robertson, which originally appeared in April 2005 in Jacket 27, and later was included in Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip. Just wanting to share Robertson's work in Galician. Chus Pato helped me immensely in my task.
“Wooden Houses” was written in Vancouver, Canada (forests, rain, a country of wooden houses), and became “Casas de madeira” (forests, rain, a country of stone houses), thus transferring not just the poem but the very materiality and vernacular of “wooden house.” A wooden house in Canada is everyone’s house. In Galicia, it is a garden house or chalet, or an alpendre, perhaps, a shed or shelter for tools. The poem is regal in diction, and its regality (and echoes of the rhetor) is at odds with the structure it assembles, which is that of the shaky, vernacular wooden house.
The poem works magnificently in Galician, thanks to Chus Pato, of course, but also perhaps because its relation with commonality is so different than in English. In translating it, I learn something about the sinews of the poem, something Lisa Robertson wrote into it but which is invisible when the poem remains in English, and which adds to its dignity. The dignity of a woman in grief.
And translation’s call inhabits the poem in its very sinews: to not die outside of love, and not judge.
Lisa Robertson’s Wooden Houses in Galician translation by Erín Moure with the help of Chus Pato, March and April 2009, Montréal, Lalín, Bucharest, Constanța.
Casas de madeira, por Lisa Robertson
Arranca unha obra que se chama Casas de madeira Explora varios graos de medo.
E é curioso que vostede non escollese unha imaxe laica Para Agostiño a tarefa foi igualmente imposíbel.
E dixemos, chegará un barco para levalo a Venecia E vostede é unha lei de linguaxe.
E a miña boca participou E nós démoslle a xantar morfina mesturada con mel.
E vostede é unha pintura contemporánea no salón E vostede é unha parede de terra.
E vostede é un calma ideolóxica E vostede está botado a buscar.
E vostede é encadrada só polas rigorosas perspectivas de albanelería E non é un instrumento neutro.
E vostede é pornográfico E vostede é a imaxinación da sociedade coma árbore.
E vostede é a muller axeonllada que manifesta algo de temor A muller mira con aprehensión ao espectador.
E vostede é o pronome de amor, desprezo, acusación, encanto Todo o que sabe sobre o animal pertence ao motín de amor.
E vostede é Torontos de árbores frías Onde irrompe o catálogo da mañá.
E vostede non morreu fóra do amor E non xulga.
E vostede cae a rolos agarrando ao que esvara O home á dereita foxe aterrorizado.
E vostede ve como morre un animal Ofrendando unha pinga inicial de voluptuosidade.
E vostede parece verter a auga de rosas Apoiado sobre árbores para descansar.
E vostede fala en follas Para coquetear e loitar e aplacar.
E vostede transfórmase nunha ela non sabendo o que está a suceder A muller ao seu redor pode estar axeonllada ou sentada ou ser simplemente debuxada fóra de escala.
E vostede é a última casa de madeira A moldura labrada inclúe as cabezas de cans.
E vostede non vai morrer Pero o azar vai sempre un chisco por diante.
E o seu fracaso é a miña lingua O efecto dramático está intensificado pola terra vermella brillante que se amosa a través das capas superiores.
E o seu corazón desprendeuse neste gran desexo de mirar Dentro da herba alta.
E os seus brazos gordiños sobordan das pregas douradas e rosas das súas túnicas Como nos antigos xéneros literarios.
Porque é un feito coñecido Os feridos caen cara ao punto.
Debido ao desexo mudo Vostede é o pavillón de teca.
Porque vostede quería ser afagado Vostede está retratado como a deusa do mar Tetis con dous dos seus cinco fillos.
O azar vai sempre un chisco por diante Pero sen escoller as súas propias circunstancias.
Baleirando o seu piso durante a estación de albaricoque Iso non era verdade.
Xenial pois clara Digo a miña queixa.
Digo a miña queixa Digo a miña queixa.
Participei na transacción salvaxe Que arde para volver a vostede.
É pura superficie Empurra directamente cara ao autor da súa dor.
Eran as 3:04 na mañá Como inventou vostede o verao nun texto que descubrín na súa gabeta no verao de 1998.
Ou unha muller na que todo o seu ser semella cantar sexo Un home ensina ao seu amigo.
Ás veces as máis amplas denominacións afógannos tanto que só se pode ir máis ao interior Supoñendo que unha designación teña un interior.
O tecido está atado para revelar a súa figura As pregas suxiren as curvas duna moza.
O tecido é sílabas e soños nunha distante colonia As partes da vida non están ocorrendo en tándem.
Entón verao Este material está conciliado co azar, que é amplo.
Para facer lívida unha filosofía Axudabámolo a vostede a soltar o alento.
Se o amor vén coma un rapaz con membros de nena Vostede está atrás e entre Cristo e a adúltera, testemuñando.
Vostede está abrochado na miña verdade Unha muller nova mira abertamente fóra da imaxe.
Vostede é a claustrofobia da imaxe No seu pico unha parella fita o ceo acugulado de alustros.
Vostede é o ritmo extenuante do tedio versus o uso do corpo Vostede é a choupana seguinte tamén.
As figuras representan as catro idades do home Vostede chama a isto pasividade.
Vostede deixou os libros que estiveron arredor de vostede e de min apertando o seu corpo Acompañados pola cidade.
Está deitado coas súas feridas Vostede ve a precisión da distante cidade a través dos arcos da ponte.
Vostede ve o espeso cabelo das mulleres atado con fitas de cor, as súas sandalias complicadas e os rebentos de oliva Vostede pon o seu pene suavemente na vaxina da actriz.
Vostede zumba e fai clic Participou na transacción salvaxe de negación.
Vostede é casas de madeira transformadas en pisos e restaurantes A súa respiración fai zoar a casa de madeira.
Four women poets in Jacket 33
Kathleen Fraser, Alison Knowles, Eleni Sikelianos, Catherine Wagner
[»»] Kathleen Fraser in conversation with Sarah Rosenthal, 2007
“SR: Silence has been a central trope in your writing since early on. It carries a range of meanings, from erasure to grief and loss to the spaciousness of an open field. Perhaps we could trace some of the ways in which silence has come up in your work over time.”
[»»] Alison Knowles in conversation with Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, September 2006. Alison Knowles is a visual artist known for her soundworks, installations, performances, publications and association with Fluxus, the experimental avant-garde group formally founded in 1962.
[»»] Eleni Sikelianos, author of The California Poem, in conversation with Jesse Morse
[»»] Catherine Wagner in conversation with Nathan Smith, 13 April 2007
Attack of the Difficult Translations
Der Hammer, a publication from Vienna's Alte Schmiede, has just published this issue of German translations, including multiple versions of "Johnny Cake Hollow" – a preview of a book in the works from Edition Korrespondenzen, translated by Peter Waterhouse, Katharine Apostle and the Versatorium crew at the University of Vienna, Comparative Literature program. Video of our Alte Schmiede reading was posted her last month.
pdf of the 8 page folio here
The young Jack Spicer
in Jacket 37
[»»] Jack Spicer’s The Book of the Death of Arthur, by Jim Goar
[»»] Jack Spicer: Kevin Killian: Jack Spicer’s Secret
[»»] Jack Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian. Reviewed by Mark Terrill.
Emilio Prados: Three Poems from The Enclosed Garden
Translation from Spanish by Donald Wellman
NEXT TO THE STREAM
Dawn
Dreaming cowl,
summer rain:
where goes
the cloud in which you were born?
Forest echo,
heart of wind:
where the voice
that abandoned you in the sky?
Murmur of water
among soft rushes:
where goes
the sparkle of your current?
Human body fleeting,
slender reed:
where did your shadow forget
its nudity?
Beauty, solitude,
silent contemplation:
where is the true
scent of your word?...
(The voice of God
resounds against the age...)
Where, does love
hide its mystery?
ENCLOSED GARDEN
To better gaze upon the night,
I am standing on the shore of my life.
Oh, how many captive stars!
To better gaze upon the night,
I am standing next to the sleeping water.
Oh, how many captive stars!
To better gaze upon the night,
I am standing with my back to the wind.
Oh, how many captive stars!
To better gaze upon the night,
I am standing at the foot of a smile.
Oh, how many captive stars!
(Oh, how many captive stars
at the bottom of my wound!
Oh, how many captive stars
crowning my death throes!...)
To better gaze upon the night,
I am dreaming beside the sleeping water.
Oh, how many stars on the shore!...
To better feel the night
I am going to pull its backbone from the fountain.
Oh, how many departed stars!
.........................................
(Silence stirs the branches...
A jasmine falls onto the water...
Oh, how many stars in my soul!)
To better gaze upon the night,
I am going to sleep on the shores of Nothing.
FINAL SHADOW
Night arises
like a great wall of stone
and time is pushing it
without being able to demolish it...
Stars hang
on one side to sustain it:
the sun, from behind, supports it
with hands of glass;
water makes itself into a flag
and the wind a stanchion,
to better defend it
against its rival
whose determination does not cease...
All changes its course;
for night will not end
unless it attains its destiny.
In front of its wall, raised
on a cross, I await my fate:
a gun shot in the silence,
a target in my solitude
that finally completes the mystery
of so much vain searching
for my name in my thought.
Above the wall of night,
in the phosphorescence of sleep
my finger moist with spirit
is writing its sign...
-Although you don’t see my body
its life is here, death:
get here quickly, if you are to come.
Spit on my chest
and let your burning saliva
melt me into the black lime
of the shadow of the eternity
that is now supporting me.
Thus will I lose my name
and, in losing it, I hope to attain
what I do not find by thinking
and is the cause of my thinking...
In this sign I await you
and the font for this sign
is my complete knowledge.
Here I am. Don’t doubt it any more.
Punch me without mercy.
Night arises
like a great wall of stone
and time pushes against it
unable to demolish it...
Faithful tree of truth,
face to face with night, my body
does not rest from waiting.
My eyes are now evening stars.
[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE. 1937, Edna Saint Vincent Millay published her translation of a poem by Prados, “The Arrival (To Garcia Lorca)” in Spain Sings. Since that time, little attention has been paid to his work by readers of English. In Spain he is thought to be next to Lorca with respect to the depth of his song. Born in Málaga in 1899, he was a student at the Residencia where Lorca, Buñuel and Dali among others also studied. Later he studied philosophy in Freiburg. In the 1920s with the collaboration of Manuel Altolaguirre, he edited and published Litoral, a journal that helped to define the Generation of 1927 (Cernuda, Aleixandre, Guillén, Alberti, among others). A Marxist, he taught the sons of fishermen how to set type for Litoral and for Imprenta Sur. A platonic vision of homoerotic love seems to have been formative with respect to his personality. He was also reclusive and Solitude became his mistress. Prados died in exile in Mexico in 1962. His poetry reflects the loss of homeland and a beautiful gentleness of spirit.]
N.B. Enclosed Garden, a translation of Emilio Prados’ Jardín cerrado by Donald Wellman is forthcoming from Diálogos / Lavender Ink . The poem, “Next to the Stream,” is going to appear shortly in the Xavier Review.]
Wooden Houses: Wallace and Spitin and Daranur and me
I started thinking about Rita Copeland's book in remembering my experience in 2009 with Chus Pato and a few younger translators and poets in Galicia, translating poems out of English and into Galician, on Facebook! First, some Wallace Stevens—poet Oriana Méndez had felt on reading WS in English that the Spanish translations she had earlier read were inadequate—and as there were none in Galician, we made a couple. Then I turned to “Wooden Houses” by Lisa Robertson, which originally appeared in April 2005 in Jacket 27, and later was included in Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip. Just wanting to share Robertson's work in Galician. Chus Pato helped me immensely in my task.
“Wooden Houses” was written in Vancouver, Canada (forests, rain, a country of wooden houses), and became “Casas de madeira” (forests, rain, a country of stone houses), thus transferring not just the poem but the very materiality and vernacular of “wooden house.” A wooden house in Canada is everyone’s house. In Galicia, it is a garden house or chalet, or an alpendre, perhaps, a shed or shelter for tools. The poem is regal in diction, and its regality (and echoes of the rhetor) is at odds with the structure it assembles, which is that of the shaky, vernacular wooden house.
The poem works magnificently in Galician, thanks to Chus Pato, of course, but also perhaps because its relation with commonality is so different than in English. In translating it, I learn something about the sinews of the poem, something Lisa Robertson wrote into it but which is invisible when the poem remains in English, and which adds to its dignity. The dignity of a woman in grief.
And translation’s call inhabits the poem in its very sinews: to not die outside of love, and not judge.
Lisa Robertson’s Wooden Houses in Galician translation by Erín Moure with the help of Chus Pato, March and April 2009, Montréal, Lalín, Bucharest, Constanța.
Casas de madeira, por Lisa Robertson
Arranca unha obra que se chama Casas de madeira
Explora varios graos de medo.
E é curioso que vostede non escollese unha imaxe laica
Para Agostiño a tarefa foi igualmente imposíbel.
E dixemos, chegará un barco para levalo a Venecia
E vostede é unha lei de linguaxe.
E a miña boca participou
E nós démoslle a xantar morfina mesturada con mel.
E vostede é unha pintura contemporánea no salón
E vostede é unha parede de terra.
E vostede é un calma ideolóxica
E vostede está botado a buscar.
E vostede é encadrada só polas rigorosas perspectivas de albanelería
E non é un instrumento neutro.
E vostede é pornográfico
E vostede é a imaxinación da sociedade coma árbore.
E vostede é a muller axeonllada que manifesta algo de temor
A muller mira con aprehensión ao espectador.
E vostede é o pronome de amor, desprezo, acusación, encanto
Todo o que sabe sobre o animal pertence ao motín de amor.
E vostede é Torontos de árbores frías
Onde irrompe o catálogo da mañá.
E vostede non morreu fóra do amor
E non xulga.
E vostede cae a rolos agarrando ao que esvara
O home á dereita foxe aterrorizado.
E vostede ve como morre un animal
Ofrendando unha pinga inicial de voluptuosidade.
E vostede parece verter a auga de rosas
Apoiado sobre árbores para descansar.
E vostede fala en follas
Para coquetear e loitar e aplacar.
E vostede transfórmase nunha ela non sabendo o que está a suceder
A muller ao seu redor pode estar axeonllada ou sentada ou ser simplemente debuxada fóra de escala.
E vostede é a última casa de madeira
A moldura labrada inclúe as cabezas de cans.
E vostede non vai morrer
Pero o azar vai sempre un chisco por diante.
E o seu fracaso é a miña lingua
O efecto dramático está intensificado pola terra vermella brillante que se amosa a través das capas superiores.
E o seu corazón desprendeuse neste gran desexo de mirar
Dentro da herba alta.
E os seus brazos gordiños sobordan das pregas douradas e rosas das súas túnicas
Como nos antigos xéneros literarios.
Porque é un feito coñecido
Os feridos caen cara ao punto.
Debido ao desexo mudo
Vostede é o pavillón de teca.
Porque vostede quería ser afagado
Vostede está retratado como a deusa do mar Tetis con dous dos seus cinco fillos.
O azar vai sempre un chisco por diante
Pero sen escoller as súas propias circunstancias.
Baleirando o seu piso durante a estación de albaricoque
Iso non era verdade.
Xenial pois clara
Digo a miña queixa.
Digo a miña queixa
Digo a miña queixa.
Participei na transacción salvaxe
Que arde para volver a vostede.
É pura superficie
Empurra directamente cara ao autor da súa dor.
Eran as 3:04 na mañá
Como inventou vostede o verao nun texto que descubrín na súa gabeta no verao de 1998.
Ou unha muller na que todo o seu ser semella cantar sexo
Un home ensina ao seu amigo.
Ás veces as máis amplas denominacións afógannos tanto que só se pode ir máis ao interior
Supoñendo que unha designación teña un interior.
O tecido está atado para revelar a súa figura
As pregas suxiren as curvas duna moza.
O tecido é sílabas e soños nunha distante colonia
As partes da vida non están ocorrendo en tándem.
Entón verao
Este material está conciliado co azar, que é amplo.
Para facer lívida unha filosofía
Axudabámolo a vostede a soltar o alento.
Se o amor vén coma un rapaz con membros de nena
Vostede está atrás e entre Cristo e a adúltera, testemuñando.
Vostede está abrochado na miña verdade
Unha muller nova mira abertamente fóra da imaxe.
Vostede é a claustrofobia da imaxe
No seu pico unha parella fita o ceo acugulado de alustros.
Vostede é o ritmo extenuante do tedio versus o uso do corpo
Vostede é a choupana seguinte tamén.
As figuras representan as catro idades do home
Vostede chama a isto pasividade.
Vostede deixou os libros que estiveron arredor de vostede e de min apertando o seu corpo
Acompañados pola cidade.
Está deitado coas súas feridas
Vostede ve a precisión da distante cidade a través dos arcos da ponte.
Vostede ve o espeso cabelo das mulleres atado con fitas de cor, as súas sandalias complicadas e os rebentos de oliva
Vostede pon o seu pene suavemente na vaxina da actriz.
Vostede zumba e fai clic
Participou na transacción salvaxe de negación.
Vostede é casas de madeira transformadas en pisos e restaurantes
A súa respiración fai zoar a casa de madeira.
Os seus fracasos xa non son sagrados.