Charles Bernstein

Test of Poetry: Seven translations


 

Charles Bernstein, Norbert Lange (German), Ernesto Livon-Grosman (Spanish), Collective à Royaumont (France), Haroldo de Campos (Portuguese),  Leevi Lehto (Finnish),  Gizem Atlı (Turkish), and Carla Buranello (Italian)

A Test of Poetry

“A Test of Poetry” was written in 1992 and published in My Way: Speeches and Poems (University of Chicago Press, 1999). The poem is based on a letter from the Chinese scholar Ziquing Zhang, who translated poems from Rough Trades and The Sophist for Selected Language Poems (Chengdu, China: Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, 1993); quotations from the poems are italicized.  It seemed to me that Ziquing Zhang’s questions provided both an incisive commentary on my poems and also raised a set of imponderble yet giddy, not to say fundamental, translation issues. Several  poets have take up the task of translating this poem, and we here compile the results: Norbert Lange into German, Ernesto Livon-Grosman into Spanish, Collective à Royaumont dans le cadre de l’Atelier Cosmopolite into French (originally published as a pamphlet by Format Américain), Haroldo de Campos into Portuguese,  Leevi Lehto into Finnish, and Gizem Atlı in Turkish (orginally published in Buzdokuz).

Payam Hassanzadeh: Solidarity and Guilt

A Tribute to the Unacknowledged Legislators of the World

This letter and accompanying material must be read in the context of two related letters published here (11/18/22) and here (1/20/23). After the second letter was published Behnaz Amani was released from prison; our letter was used in support of this life-saving action. The participants have asked that I publish this new material. Our previous letters were written poets to poets, as is this one. Listen please to Behnaz Amani’s voice here and in the previous post. We are not talking about multitudes: we address the precarious situation of this one person, who cannot be conflated with anyone else and who is, above all, indispensable. ––Ch.B. 

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Graça Capinha on Régis Bonvicino's New Utopia

“what to tongues is denied”
a nova utopia [the new utopia]
by Régis Bonvicino (S.Paulo: Quatro Cantos, 2022)

Ezra Pound's name was the first to echo as soon as I started reading this book. Not because of his political options, since the new utopia is at the antipodes of Poundian fascism, but because this is the kind of poetry that the American poet wanted for his modern epic: a poetry that is "hard and dry". And, indeed, later in the book, in a poem about the emerging fascisms of the present day, Pound and his work are the object of reflection by Régis Bonvicino, the Brazilian author of the new utopia. Ironically, instead of the Poundian "make it new", the poem carries the title "Make it old" (101-104).

Witz: complete run on EPC

WITZ, edited by Christopher Reiner: complete run of pdfs
(click on issue number for pdf)