Mence’s poems are ambiguously allegorical in the schematism and suggestiveness of their settings and situations: a house under attack by unclear or mystical forces; a garden falling into decay; a train ride that both connects people and separates them.
For her final project in the MFA program at the Art Academy of Latvia, the poet and visual artist Linda Mence created illustrations of the seventeen virtues who figure in the twelfth-century morality play Ordo Virtutum, by the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen. While working on this project, Mence realized that she found the human figure “uninteresting,” as she recently remarked in a casual conversation, and turned instead to abstract geometric patterns in order to represent the virtues.
Bridget Ryan: Hi everyone! You’re listening to Sounding Translation, a podcast featuring interviews with translators of contemporary poetry. I’m Bridget Ryan, Stonehill Class of 2023, and the producer of this podcast episode. In this interview with Teresa Villa-Ignacio, Haun Saussy discusses the origins of his motivation to translate Francophone Haitian poetry, which was to give the American public a more well-rounded and positive outlook on the Haitian community during the 1980s and 1990s AIDS epidemic and refugee crisis. Saussy also discusses the value of Haitian culture and history as well as the poetic styles and literary influences that inspired the poets he has translated, which include René Bélance, René Depestre, and Jean Métellus.
Bridget Ryan: Hi everyone! You’re listening to Sounding Translation, a podcast featuring interviews with translators of contemporary poetry. I’m Bridget Ryan, Stonehill Class of 2023, and the producer of this podcast episode. In this interview with Teresa Villa-Ignacio, Haun Saussy discusses the origins of his motivation to translate Francophone Haitian poetry, which was to give the American public a more well-rounded and positive outlook on the Haitian community during the 1980s and 1990s AIDS epidemic and refugee crisis.
In this interview conducted by Teresa Villa-Ignacio, the poet, translator, filmmaker, and activist Sarah Riggs recalls how, upon moving to Paris in the early 2000s, she began translating French poets including Isabelle Garron, Marie Borel, Etel Adnan, Stéphane Bouquet, and Ryoko Sekiguchi. Riggs also discusses how this translation work impacted her own poetry, including the books Waterwork (Chax, 2007) and Autobiography of Envelopes (Burning Deck, 2012), and describes opportunities for poetic translation exchanges she has facilitated through the organizations Double Change and Tamaas. The interview was recorded on June 8, 2013, in Paris.
Bridget Ryan: Hi, everyone! You’re listening to Sounding Translation, a podcast featuring interviews with translators of contemporary poetry. I’m Bridget Ryan, Stonehill class of 2023, and the producer of this podcast episode. In the following interview, conducted by Teresa Villa-Ignacio, the poet, translator, filmmaker, and activist Sarah Riggs recalls how, upon moving to Paris in the early 2000s, she began translating French poets, including Isabelle Garron, Marie Borel, Etel Adnan, and Ryoko Sekiguchi.
In this interview, recorded on October 14, 2013, in San Francisco, Kathleen Fraser describes to Teresa Villa-Ignacio her interest in and advocacy for the translation of women poets in her legendary 1980s and early 1990s newsletter, HOW(ever), as well as some of her own translations from the Italian.
Bridget Ryan: Hi, everyone! You’re listening to Sounding Translation, a podcast featuring interviews with translators of contemporary poetry. I’m Bridget Ryan, Stonehill class of 2023, and the producer of this podcast episode. In this interview, poet Kathleen Fraser shares with Teresa Villa-Ignacio the origins of her 1980s and early 1990s newsletter, entitled HOW(ever), which celebrated innovative women poets in what was then a predominantly male field. Fraser reads some of her poems, poems that impacted her writing, and poems that she translated from the Italian.
Panel of winners of el Premio Libro de Poesía Breve, 2011. Image from Hipocampo Editores, via Wikimedia Commons.
By the time Roger Santiváñez published his chapbook Symbol, which is often thought of as marking a turn in his writing toward a neobaroque poetics post-1991, he had come to live in the United States, where he has resided since.
Partial page from Sawako Nakayasu, "Selected Chronology & Notes" to the book "Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From"
When Sawako Nakayasu’s book Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From is acquired, some or perhaps most copies will include a pamphlet-style supplement entitled “Selected Chronology & Notes.” Apparently some copies do not include this extra. Yet the notes can be crucial to understanding individual poems in the book.
[The following is a segment of a longer “conversation” between me and Dorota Czerner, to accompany her translations into Polish of poems of mine from Poland/1931 and Khurbn, to be published in the journal Chidusz, in Wroclaw, Poland, later this year. The discussion of translation and reverse translation (into Polish and Yiddish) may be of particular interest here. (J.R.)]
Linda Mence’s Personification Allegories
Linda Mence, translated by Kevin M. F. Platt and Sintija Ozoliņa
Mence’s poems are ambiguously allegorical in the schematism and suggestiveness of their settings and situations: a house under attack by unclear or mystical forces; a garden falling into decay; a train ride that both connects people and separates them.
For her final project in the MFA program at the Art Academy of Latvia, the poet and visual artist Linda Mence created illustrations of the seventeen virtues who figure in the twelfth-century morality play Ordo Virtutum, by the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen. While working on this project, Mence realized that she found the human figure “uninteresting,” as she recently remarked in a casual conversation, and turned instead to abstract geometric patterns in order to represent the virtues.