[This obituary comes from Peter Gale Nelson. Listen to Keith Waldrop on PennSound, including my Close Listening conversation with him., & read some poems at his EPC page.]
For the launch of my collection, published by in Poland, I made a set of videos in Truro (Cape Cod) on August 22, 2020. I had to cancel my visit due to covid, although the literary festival was not cancelled and the videos were projected. My thanks to Kacper Bartczak for his translations, the capstone of years of correspondence; and to Susan Bee, video camerman.
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).
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.
