Salmon Poetry is to be praised for publishing this poetry collection in French with facing English translations by the author. Irish poetry in the main is conservative, clinging intensely to the legacy of Austin Clarke and, too often perhaps, the disquieting ruralism of Patrick Kavanagh. Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s Nobel Prize recipient, is a rural poet in this vein.

Irish poets who emigrated to Europe, to Italy, Spain or France or Germany, tended to stay there, sifting through the various literary influences impossible even to permit in Ireland in their time and producing a distinctly un-Irish literature. In spite of paid-for trips abroad in our own day, literary festivals worldwide and all kinds of access to non-Irish poetry, Ireland’s poets have continued to immerse themselves in the tried and true, such as Maurice Scully and Trevor Joyce being notable exceptions. This is not to say that European poets have not been translated and published here, both into Irish and English; there has even arisen, predictably, a ‘fashion’ for being associated with the ‘glamourous’ notion of translating, which has resulted in poets working from material already translated by others describing themselves as translators on book jackets, which I personally find abhorrent.

But a reluctance to indulge in serious translating and publishing translations continues to exist, in spite of the excellent efforts of the Irish Translators’ Association and small publishers such as Northern Ireland’s Lapwing Poetry. This is all very peculiar, considering that so many Irish novelists, for instance, are published in so many different languages around the world; only Dublin-based Lilliput Press has undertaken to a publish a novel in translation by a French writer.

Hélène Cardona is a US-based actress and translator whose work on both counts is wide-ranging and goes beyond her fine appearance in the movie, Chocolat. Her father, José Manuel Cardona, was also a poet. A first glance into this collection reveals the nuances and enigmas of the French language pitted against the equally nuanced English; if the reader is expecting straight meanings and an Anglo-Saxon basicness, he or she will be disappointed. One of the boons of this book is to distinctly define the borders of what language means and what it implies, and how language itself implicates the reader in its decoding. This is about imagism and unrestricted imagination, put plain; thus do the English poems read like interpretations of dreams, or dreams awaiting translation, rather than as black-and-white renderings of language and word-identity. Straightaway too the translator will have much to ponder on the use of the French language; ‘le songe’ rather than the more familiar ‘rêve,’ where ‘songe’ carries the implication of giving something consideration or thinking something through; or ‘âmes’ for selves, though its first meaning is souls. {It’s difficult too not to aline the French word here with ‘ami(e)’, meaning friend or even, coyly, lover.} Here we enter the realm of language-as-philosophy, something the French language takes too with relish. Translator and poet Willis Barnstone remarks in a jacket blurb on the ‘metaphysical experiences’ in the poems, but the metaphysics is arguably in the language already. Interesting in all of this to remember that the author wrote these poems in English and translated them afterwards, which leads one to ponder whether she thought in French while writing them originally in English. It is, however, inarguable, to my mind, that the poems in English are distinct and of themselves as against the translations into French; that is, a new poem is created in the translating, the moreso here because French is a uniquely tonic language, whose nasals, elisions and barely-breathed consonantly endings when required for rhyming purposes have no equivalent value in English. Only the French language here can, as it were, do justice to the French poem. Perhaps there is validity in the notion that poems cannot in a true sense accurately translated.

“Plonge au cœur de troisième œil, . . . .”

is infinitely more magical and song-like than

“Go deep into the third eye . . . . .”

in Cardona’s ‘A Mind Like the Sky’/'Un esprit comme le ciel.’ This value of sound in French allows a much greater leeway for creating the meaning and ‘spirit’ of a phrase than can readily be achieved in English.

With a short Prologue, the collection is cut into five distinct sections. One may suggest that, whereas Cardona is occupied extensively with the personal or family, she universalises her themes by permitting them to dream; to become transmuted into a universal Unconscious whose symbology is known to us. In this way we can interpret without difficulty poems that appear to be as different from our Anglo-Saxon derivatives as a Chagall from a Rembrandt. There are poems here that, of course, would do justice to a literary journal in England as well as one in France. But the total result in either case is a supreme summation of lived experience coupled with a determining of important life-metaphors in and through images; the poems are small abstract, or surreal, or impressionistic paintings, and we are free to ‘look’ at them without the restraint or demand of received ‘translatable’ understanding. How can one photograph a dream? Yet a painter has much less of a problem. Several of the poems make reference to the genre of journey upon which Cardona embarks and invites us to join, such as ‘Shaman,’ ‘In Dreams like Rain,’ (this last, translated as ‘En songes de pluie,’ might just as easily be translated back again as ‘Rain Dreams’) or ‘Dancing the Dream.’ The wonderful cover artwork by Jackie Morris depicts five archetypes, a swan, a horse, an owl, a fox and a wolf.

Irish poet Thomas McCarthy remarks in a blurb that Cardona’s work ‘travels across languages, in the manner of our own Micheál Hartnett, Paddy Bushe or, more lately, Fred Johnston,’ and I am grateful for and flattered by his mention. Language is an experience of travel, and certainly to employ two languages as gracefully and refreshingly as this collection does is to engage with a considerable poetic achievement of movement and reinterpretation. If this is a major introduction to Irish poetry of the work of Hélène Cardona, then we should embrace it and learn from it. This is a poet from whom we can learn to make the ordinary extra-ordinary. And if that is not the first essence of poetry, I do not know what is.

We would like to extend a special thanks to the extensive list of those responsible for making this series possible. In particular, Jan Wagner, Eirikur Orn Norddahl, Jan Pollet, Nikola Madzirov and Damir Sodan.

*****

An interview with Arnoud van Adrichem by SJ Fowler.

A poet whose inventiveness and incisiveness is architectural in its care – witty, adventurous, circuitous and at ease with its own intelligence, the work of Arnoud van Adrichem, one of the most remarkable poets and critics Holland has produced in the last decade, stands as an example of how international traditions, multiple languages and a shift in political culture, will not waylay a brilliant poet from writing brilliant poetry. If anything it will only add context to the work of a poet like van Adrichem, recognised across the Netherlands and beyond as one of the most considered and necessary agents for poetry currently at work, and with no sign of lagging. Editor of the international journal Parmentier and a specialist and translator of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, it is hard to look past Arnoud van Adrichem as a fundamental part of the future of Dutch letters. Another exceptional addition to the Maintenant series, edition #80, we are privileged to have his work translated into English for the very first time thanks to the generosity of the Nederlands Letterenfonds with thanks to Jan Pollet, Willem Groenewegen & Thomas Möhlmann

Picture by Jan Zandbergen.

3:AM: Without wishing to overly simplify, the political situation in Holland in the last decade can be seen as a marker for what might happen across Europe as conservative support swells against immigration, Muslim communities residing in Europe and so forth. Has the political change been reflected in the discussions and work of the literary community?

Arnoud van Adrichem: Your question ties in with a recent critique of contemporary literature which suggests that authors are going beyond postmodern irony in order to focus on moral or political dilemma’s. Some scholars and critics argue that after 9/11 there is a revival of notions like sincerity, authenticity and genuineness. Even if we are moving beyond postmodernism, its concepts are still present in discussions about literature. These questions were asked in two issues of literary magazine Parmentier: ‘Right’ and ‘Left’. Here we examined the extent of the connection between politics and literature. How do writers respond to the rise to power of a radical right-wing populist party like the Party for Freedom? Do they feel more or less obliged to protest in their writings, or do they hold to a strictly autonomous notion of literature? These questions yielded some interesting essays on the complex and ambivalent relationship between literature and society, of course without making definitive statements about the impact of the political change on our literature.

3:AM: Would you consider Holland a conservative country now?

AvA: It’s true that our country is led by a center-right or conservative minority cabinet of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy and the Christian Democratic Appeal, which is supported in parliament by the Party for Freedom to obtain a majority. But that doesn’t make Holland necessarily a conservative country. For instance, with 30 seats in the parliament – just one less than the Party for Freedom – the Dutch Labour Party is still the largest opposition party in the country, even though nowadays their popularity is decreasing. And according to even more recent exit polls the Socialist Party is the second largest party.

3:AM: This conservatism seems now to extend to the literary world as well. Is it true that all financial support for literary reviews will stop as from 2013 onwards?

AvA: Yes, I’m afraid so. This immediate cessation of all financial support means the end of most of the literary magazines in Holland, at least in their traditional printed form. The editors of literary magazines wrote a protest letter, co-signed by many Dutch authors and scholars, to the secretary of state Halbe Zijlstra – who strongly believes that his lack of knowledge of art helps him to make decisions. Hopefully the Dutch Foundation For Literature will find new ways of supporting at least some of the magazines. They are willing to make an effort and are exploring digital opportunities.

3:AM: Are these changes economic or ideologically motivated?

AvA: Probably both. Due to the ongoing financial crisis, cutbacks are inevitable and there’s no reason that the arts should be an exception. But the cutbacks on arts are disproportional. An act of ignorance and barbary. Some politicians consider art as to be a ‘leftwing hobby’, financed by hard working taxpayers. That point of view is of course strongly ideologically and strategically motivated.

3:AM: Could you outline your editorship of the literary review De Reactor?

AvA: I am one of the founders and editors of this digital platform for literary critics. We started this website mainly because we were a bit disappointed by the way traditional printed media review literature. De Reactor wants to give a new impulse to literary criticism for an audience of interested readers and critics. It’s essential that literary criticism once again becomes an important and authoritative component of our literature. Not just for criticism’s sake, but to warrant the vitality and liveliness of the literary system. In-depth criticism is a source of permanent reflection and renewal that reaches further than the sales talk and human interest stories that you often find in the traditional printed media. It’s also important that critics review books in the light of moral or political discussions.

3:AM: Your first collection Vis [Fish], was extremely well received. Could you outline its content?

AvA: One of the themes of Vis is the exploration of the impact of commerce and marketing on the human behavior. How do commercials and advertisements influence our thinking and acting? How are we are defined by the products that we buy? To which voices do we listen?

3:AM: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry seems to be a significant part of your expertise. How did this relationship begin for you?

AvA: With a mutual interest in theoretical concepts, politics, disjunction and the materiality of language. I’m not particularly interested in traditional expressive lyric sentiment, beautifully articulated by a ‘natural’ manifestation of a speaker behind the poem. I want to listen to language itself, which in a way functions as an organism. Second, for me it’s important that the reader plays an active role. I’m trying to make the reader participate in creating the meaning of the poem. For me reading poetry must be an event, a linguistic and rhythmic adventure which creates all kinds of new possibilities and opportunities.

3:AM: You have undertaken translations of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets too. How has this process affected your own work?

AvA: Yes, I translated work of poets like Ron Silliman, Leslie Scalapino, Tina Darragh, Lisa Robertson, sometimes in cooperation with the Dutch poet and translator Han van der Vegt. I don’t think these translations have a direct influence on my work, but making them sharpens me as a reader and hopefully as a writer as well.

3:AM: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry seems still to be determined in the US, in no way a sealed off movement. Is this true in Holland too, and Europe in general? Certainly its resonance in the UK continues, through the influence of the work of Tom Raworth and Allen Fisher.

AvA: There are some traces of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry in Europe. But let me focus on Dutch literature. You can find some bits and pieces of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in the poems of Samuel Vriezen, Jeroen Mettes, Alfred Schaffer and Ton van ‘t Hof. But it’s important to realize that there is no such thing as a typical or characteristic L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-poem.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
SJ Fowler is the author of three poetry collections, Red Museum (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2011), Fights (Veer books 2011) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA 2011). He is the UK poetry editor of Lyrikline and 3:AM. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and a postgraduate student at the Contemporary Centre for Poetic Research, University of London.

Mariela Griffor is the author of two collections of poetry called Exiliana and House. Born in Chile and unwillingly exiled in 1985, Griffor now lives in Michigan with her husband. Griffor is the co-founder of The Institute for Creative Writers at Wayne State and Publisher of Marick Press.

Who are the most interesting poets in Chile?

Regarding the new poets there are a tremendous and eclectic number of poets that are writing poetry in Chile today. Names that a short while ago were completely unknown now occupy an important place of my bookshelf like Andrés Anwandter, Elizabeth Oria, Rafael Rubio, Damsi Figueroa, Alejandra González, Rosario Concha, Gladys González, Pablo Paredes, Diego Ramírez Gajardo, Claudio Gaete, Germán Carrasco, Kurt Folch, Antonio Silva Fuentes, Javier Bello, Alejandra del Río, Andrés Paula Ilabaca, Héctor Hernández Montecinos and probably many more that I haven’t read yet. Among the most interesting to me and more recognized than ever before are Raul Zurita, Nicanor Parra, Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo de Rokha, Pablo Neruda, Rosamel del Valle, Humberto Díaz Casanueva, Eduardo Anguita, Carmen Berenguer, Jaime Huenun and Elicura Chihuailaf. Even Robert Bolano, who has recently become more well-known in the United States as a fiction writer, was an outstanding poet whose poetry fascinates me. He wrote poetry briefly because he could not make a living with it and needed to find a genre that could support his family. I believe that his poetry, once available to the reading public around the world, will match and eclipse the impact of his fiction writing.

What European poets are most influential? 

Hmmm, this is an interesting question, are you referring to the Spanish language ones or poets all over Europe? Regarding writers from Spain I would mention, off the top of my head, Miguel de Cervantes, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jorge Guillen, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Antonio Machado.

What U.S. poet/s are liked in Chile?

Many, especially Whitman, Frost, Bishop, Moore, Robert Hass, Philip Levine, Ann Carson, etc.

When did you begin to write in English?

I believe it was around 1998. I remember the poem I wrote, it was an important part of my development as a poet. I lived 13 years in Sweden but wrote only a few poems in Swedish. Actually I can write more Swedish now than when I lived there. Go a figure how the mind works! In any case the first poem I wrote in English was called The Rain and I knew at once that it had a remarkable effect on the reader/listener when I read it out loud to my classmates in Detroit. They were moved and I connected at a deeper level with my small audience. I write mostly in English and Spanish but I haven’t publish so much in Spanish as yet; that manuscript will be done this year. I have one more Spanish project in the works.

Do you translate? And how do you choose which poets or poems to translate?

I do like translating and the process of translating very much. I have translated works to and from English, Spanish and Swedish where my life experience resides. I think translations are an important part of our lives, and not only as writers. A global world will require more and more understanding of our neighboring countries and cultures than never before and more and more cultures will become our neighbors as communication shrinks distances. There is a risk of becoming very insular if we don’t open ourselves to the world. We must reach out to other lands and cultures and their literature to preserve a strong identity ourselves and a strong language that develops with the changing times. Some people worried, and rightly so, that if experience is not translated into the language of those who had it, and then translated faithfully to other languages, that experience may be lost to humanity forever.

As far as my choice of poets or poems to translate goes, this is more personal. I’m attracted to them based on their importance in understanding our own experiences, so sometimes they are poets/poems that address a situation I lived through or I recognize as my own in other languages. But language is sometimes a barrier, in the absence of translations, to that critical human outreach.

the Republic of Užupis exists independently in the heart of Vilnius…a bohemian port with its own mermaid and angel…home to artists and vagrants, gentry, moonshine, ravens, one buzzard, and pigeons, and especially to poetry…its Independence Day is April 1st…it once gave birth to a 300 kg egg…it predates and postdates the Known, the Unknown, and No-Nothing Worlds…its Vulgar Tongue is Užupisky… it is a sovereign nation with its own Constitution of which these are two of thirty-nine articles: “everyone has the right to hot water, heating in winter and a tiled roof”;  “everyone has the right to be idle.”

– author, Kerry Shawn Keys, Užupis Ambassador to the World of Poetry, lives in Vilnius, a stone’s throw away on the Far Shore, where he found his way some years ago.

We tended purple irises each year
and pink peonies, with their lush petals
and heavy heads that showered water beads
that soaked my clogs after spring rains came through.
Marytė’s voice in the book, Straws and Shadows, Irena Praitis

Mid-Spring and the budding trees and birds of Lithuania are tangled in a mosaic with their distant relatives in Southern California, and a few cactuses and butterflies and telephone wires thrown in. Sitting on the back deck at Angie’s lovely home in San Diego, I have been thinking of the poems and fiction by the Korean novelist, Hailji (Rim, Jong-joo), who just visited Lithuania and the Republic of Užupis over Winter in a forlorn search for the smile of Julija that he hoped might be fluttering somewhere between the watering holes, of My Cafe and the Cactus, the former’s current alias. Rim used to haunt the dark streets and pubs hours on end, after that Cheshire grin. Besides writing novels and dabbling in film scripts for his novels, Hailji made his mark as a poet in a lovely little book, Blue Meditation of the Clocks, where time and a gun and clocks and snakes and virgins share the woof and warp of his Lila’s loom.

Where to begin? I suppose back in the early 90’s in the Mayflower dorms at the University of Iowa, where the International Writing Program (IWP) then interned its participants. Accomplished writers and tipplers and not so accomplished writers and tipplers have been coming to that font for over 50 years to cavort, to write a bit, and to get a taste of greasy, good old American fries. They stay about 2 ½ months and travel a bit around the States. “Rim” was among these elite. At that time I happened to be the American writer-in-residence for two Autumns running. I also served as Ombudsman, Ganymede with tequila, and pub crawling companion for this talented and very often delightfully dissolute batch of writers. While there, Hailji, whose English vocabulary was probably limited to about 1000 words ( Jerry Stern used to do a hilarious imitation of Hailji’s mantra, “in my country…”), decided to embark on his first book of poems – and he would write it in English, and I would be his guinea pig to applaud and tidy up the grammar a bit, including the “a’s” and the “the’s”. He soon finished a manuscript. It was, to say the least, quite unusual, and then the question arose as to what to do with it. I decided on the spot to resurrect my funky little press from the past, Pine Press, ISBNs and all. I don’t remember the exact count, but I think I printed about 800 copies, keeping half for myself to give away, and bestowing the other 400 on Hailji. He had suddenly become a poet; and I had suddenly become a patron of the arts. Here is an excerpt from the introduction to Blue Meditations…, followed by the first poem in the book:

“The poems have a kind of mechanical and Leibnizian universality about them. Unlike Melampus, Rim’s ears were never licked by any snakes, including those of his poems. Nothing organic here. No flesh and blood animal except Rim, himself. The words are about something else. There is a precision to them, the gears skirmish with Death, Time, and Kali. And there is a position, a kind of existential mythos, the human stance of the hands or the digits of a clock, a kind of mythical blending, maybe even a “happening.” I feel the weird haunts of Camus and Mishima as pentimenti housed in the poet. A week after his expulsion from the “Fox-Heat” bar in Iowa City for attempting to insult the bartender Ssaurabi fashion, I remember him saying, “Let’s go back. We will have an event.” He wanted his watch to go back in also, he wanted to take his allotted time back to the watering hole. By making up an “event,” a fight, a mythic happening, his time could be protected from passing Time. He could freeze it with an act, a stance, an architectonic set-up. Rim’s poems act in the same way. They are lyrics taken to the extreme – obsessional rhythmic repetitions, Annabel Lees as mute virgins, outside Time, inside the poem, outside the poet’s grasp, outside. The eternal nature of all this, however, gives everything the dull sheen of an incorruptible, cold icon.”

A Watch In My Dream

So many times, I’ve dreamed of a watch,
a watch with two or three hands, of course,
a watch like the dance of a snake, like darkness
on the night of the birthday of an old sawyer,
like death without survivors, like the nipples
of Marianne.

I think that I have the right to dream of a watch,
a watch with two or three hands, of course,
like everybody dreams of a frog,
a frog with four legs, of course.

It’s true, other days
I dreamed of other things,
some things sour, some blue.
But, one day, I decided to dream of a watch.

So many times, I’ve dreamed of a watch,
a watch with two or three hands, of course,
a watch like a cigarette burning itself,
like the debauchery of the clerk’s wife
in the stationary store, like the scale of vowels,
like a cold moon…
a watch that will kill me.

To make a long story a bit longer, Hailji soon returned to South Korea as a fashion model all decked out in a wardrobe chosen by the Russian poet, Mark Shatunovsky (who is also featured in the book in a poem titled The Night of Mark Shatunovsky). The third stanza from that poem:

During the night without night in his night,
my Russian friend Mark Shatunovsky
goes out to solicit a blue night,
a triangular night.
But nobody has an unmarred night
to rent him.

Well, both Hailji’s new, camelhair Pushkin wardrobe and his poetry were a hit. A very fine press decided to publish a Korean translation, and it was greeted with some avant-garde success. Shortly thereafter, I moved to Vilnius. Over the years, Hailji visited me and Vilnius and the Republic of Užupis many times, and soon started to write a screen play and script for a road movie that he entitled The Republic of Užupis that he envisioned would be produced in Lithuania. A well-known Korean film maker came to scope out the possibility of a film, but filming in the former Russian and Polish colony was not so cheap as imagined, and the project fell to the wayside. But a decade later the script had become a novel, and was translated into English, and soon thereafter into Lithuanian under the guidance of the Lithuanian poet and former Minister of Culture, Kornelijus Platelis.

This brings us to the Winter of 2013, and Hailji’s triumphal return for the Lithuanian launching of his novel at the Vilnius Book Fair. A heavy and hectic two weeks of readings and presentations throughout the country and, of course, a recitation at the Užupis Café, the heart of the poetry scene in the Republic. Julija’s smile remained wrapped in the clouds of his imagination, but Fortune smiled on us with an abundance of vodka and whiskey. And so it was a marvelous two weeks with a perilous and very eccentric teller of tales. To get an idea of this eccentricity, here is an excerpt from a short road-story, Orbit Kalnas, by an ‘Anon’ Lithuanian author. The lead protagonist is the culprit we are describing:

“In the end, it wasn’t such a bad trip. I took the bus straight to Nida. Lithuania is a land of fields, forests, heavy-air balloons, lakes, and beautiful lasses. I counted exactly 333 hitchhiking girls I would have died to pick up. I even tried telling the bus driver to do so, but he only understood German. So, no luck. When in desperation I designed an hourglass figure in the air (the perfect San Diego type), he stopped the bus for me to take a leak.  The consensus of the passengers was that I was diagramming my bladder. I went into the woods but there were so many mushrooms, and not wishing to offend Karangola or any of his possible offspring, I just pretended to pee. Soon I thought my bladder would indeed burst like a puffball full of beer. The other passengers must have thought I had prostate problems the way I was moaning and fumbling with the door of the WC. Or they might have thought I was too shy to squirt or take a dump in the woods. Unfortunately, the WC on the bus was locked. I was later told that most of the toilets suffered from leaks and that an extra yellow line had developed on the highway causing a lot of traffic chaos, and so a law had been passed to keep all bus WCs locked. It was a beautiful trip after the bus again stopped and I managed to relieve myself on the back tire, not even attempting the woods again. I had earlier been a little apprehensive when Neringa was referred to as a spit, but then had heard that a spit is a peninsula of sorts. It was late afternoon. The bus dropped me off in the center, and fortunately – I thought at the time – the Tourist Bureau was right there and still open. Mr. Indus hadn’t drawn me a map of Nida, and I had no idea in the world how to proceed to Orbit Kalnas.” Karangola is a Brazilian orixa; and rumors have it that Mr. Indus refers to the Lithuanian poet, Kornelijus Platelis.

Hailji, early on in the 2nd Millennium, Vilnius. Photo by Kerry Shawn Keys

And now what follows is an excerpt from the novel, The Republic of Uzupis, where the deadpan almost miniaturist style contrasts so much with the almost surreal and flamboyant poetry of the Blue Meditation of the Clocks. What they do have in common is a kind of grey and sinister sheen:

“And where is your final destination?”

“The Užupis Republic.”

When this response was relayed to them, the two agents once again conferred, this time at some length, and then appeared to reach a decision.  After one last directive to the woman they left.

The young woman produced a form and asked Hal to sign it, and when this was done she stamped his passport.  “We are admitting you for forty-eight hours.  If you are unable to exit the country in that time, it’s your responsibility to report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs authorities who deal with foreign nationals; the address is here,” said the woman as she returned Hal’s passport along with the form.

After thanking her, Hal was proceeding toward the arrival area when she asked him one last question.

“The Užupis Republic?”

“That’s right.”

“Where is that, anyway?”

Hal looked dubiously at the woman without answering.

After changing money Hal left the terminal with his overcoat draped over his arm.  It was snowing and there was a sodden chill to the air.  Hal quickly donned the coat.  It was stylish and of high quality but looked too lightweight for the severe winters of this country.  Evidently Hal didn’t realize what winter was like here.

The plaza outside the terminal was nondescript and there wasn’t much activity.  It reminded Hal of a train station you might find in a small city in the countryside.  A file of yellow taxis, a dozen or so, awaited fares, and a short distance off, a blue metro bus sat idling; there were no other vehicles.  The plaza had turned into a sheet of ice, and beyond it spread a grove of birches.  Hal looked as if he didn’t know what to make of it all, as if he had never seen such a small, unprepossessing international airport.

“Where are you going?”

One of the taxi drivers had approached Hal, a man who looked to be in his mid-forties at the most but whose hair had already turned white.  His English was passable.

“Užupis,” said Hal.

“Užupis?” said the taxi driver, as if he had never heard the name before.

“Yes, the Užupis Republic.”

“Užupis Republic?”  The taxi driver looked even more puzzled.

Hal produced a postcard and offered it to the driver.  “Here’s the address.  I think maybe it’s not so far from here.  Because the postmark is Vilnius, Lithuania.”

Hailji is due back in Vilnius and the Republic this Autumn to explore once again his idea of filming a road novel here. With the book as the groundwork and Hailji’s persistence, it seems this time around we may have a film in the works.

During my recent visit to the States, I got the sad news that the very much esteemed and important Lithuanian poet, Marcelijus Martinaitis, had died. He was 77. Marcelijus Martinaitis had been a professor of Lithuanian literature at Vilnius University since time immemorial (very unusual in Lithuania for a poet to be a professor and also teach writing), and had been quite active in the upheaval through which Lithuanian won its independence from the Soviet Union. A risky business back then, and so, besides being respected as an accomplished poet, his activity during the last throes of Russia’s occupation gained him much admiration. He was also much beloved by his students, and one in particular, Laima Vince (Sruogonis), an American poet and professor who has translated  a considerable amount of Martinaitis’s poems. And they are fine, carefully wrought translations. White Pine Press under the direction of Dennis Maloney has recently published Martinaitis’s K.B. Suspect. Like his earlier book, Ballads of Kukutis, it is masterpiece in its own right in the lineage of such great masters as Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito, and in a small way to Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. The lead narrator is a kind of persona of many a citizen of these parts – one foot in the Soviet Union of old, the other in the strange new world of ‘post-independence’ Lithuania ( though independence is a tricky term when globalization, Russia, Guilt-mongers, the European Union, shale-sharks, and PC ideological and cultural control are breathing down your neck, and many in the countryside are more dependent on alcohol and unemployment than hope of a better future).

Here is a poem from K.B. Suspect:

K.B.: Trash Angels

At dusk
they suddenly appear out of nowhere –
as if from a painting by Bosch, as if from the beyond,
or from a world of shadows.
Surrounding the dumpsters, they go to work,
their arms sunk in up to their elbows,
as if looking for signs of life
above a butchered beast:
for lungs, the heart, the liver.

Who is this trash-pickers’ community?
The Starving? Bums?
Alcoholics? Former hot-shots?

They work slowly, concentrating,
until they’re replaced
by stray cats
sitting a bit off to the side.

They pull things out and stuff them into sacks,
what’s still usable, what can still be civilized.

All the rest, they throw back –
torn family albums a book without a cover
a canary in a plastic bag ragged
suede gloves shreds from a ballroom gown
splinters of cut-glass drafts of poems
dentures a collection of old postcards
an invitation to a celebration
election promises of politicians
a torn in half wedding photograph –
everything already anesthetized:
hopes trust appreciation
mourning intrigues pride
turned to garbage…

As if they were the last judges,
angels from the world of shadows –
alongside the dumpsters, furiously sorting
bringing history to a close.

translation, Eugenijus Ališanka and Kerry Shawn Keys

photo of Marcelijus Martinaitis, photographer unknown

Another book of immense popularity in Lithuania was his much earlier (1977), Ballads of Kukutis. Here, Marcelijus Martinaitis follows the voice and character of Kukutis around Lithuania. K is the wise fool or rustic in the tradition of the Third Brother. Here’s a poem from this:

Kukutis’ visit in Vilnius

– How big Vilnius is!
At one end a stork perched on its leg,
at the other – one hears rat-a-tat-tatting!
On one side folks cut rye,
on the other –
bound sheaves,
on one side –
a child cries,
on the other –
wipes his eyes;
on one –
somebody sings,
on the other –
the accompaniment …

How big Vilnius is!
Like so it spreads over the fields of Lithuania:
through Dubysa,
through Luokė,
through Žematija,
till it ends up at the sea!

translation, Kerry Shawn Keys and Eugenijus Ališanka

I often lend out KB and believe it gives some excellent insight to anyone thinking of coming to Lithuania – a few weeks ago, the poet Heather Thomas was prepping with it for her travels here to participate in the Poetry Spring Festival. Lee Sharkey also had a copy squirreled away in the forests of Maine. Certainly, I hope to have a few of these poems featured in the summerliteraryseminars (SLS Lithuania) this summer. Below, one more poem of Marcelijus Martinaitis from KB. All of these were co-translated for a gallery exhibit of Lithuanian poets that will travel from the National Gallery in Vilnius to Leipzig, Glasgow, and elsewhere in the second half of the year when Lithuania holds the presidency of the European Union.

Seen Somewhere

People say that they ate each other up.

Gingerly when young
they devoured each other with their eyes,
especially him:
her lips, cheeks, breasts.

Later impassioned
they fastened lip to lip –
clear to their brains,
blending into one body,
over and over, insatiable.

It was called love,
until life befell them:
suspicion, poverty, discord.

Old folks
they gnaw away at each other – until the bone:
out of habit, loneliness,
not knowing what to do,
already deaf.

While life ebbs away,
they nag and gnaw from morning till night
bodies eroded by time –
like old coats
shackled together.

Neither one takes its eyes from the other:
jabbing blunt dull looks
already almost past death
at the gates of the hell.

translation, Eugenijus Ališanka and Kerry Shawn Keys

What better way to end Dispatch 2, than to come full circle with a Užupis Republic poem about its native tongue that was first spoken in the Republic in honor of Hailji on his recent visit there along the Vilna River which borders the Republic, shortly before St Patrick’s Day when the waters flowed green, and a couple of months before April 1 when all of us bohemian Užupis Fools come out to play:

Užupiškey

stonewalls do not a prison make
nor steely barbs a cage
– Dick Lovelaced

I speak Užupiškey.
Sometimes I speak firewater or whiskey.
I used to speak Anglitzkey
’til I lost the keys
to my native language tree.
Heaven and Hell are my linguae francae.
I also converse my Cuntree Tis of Thee
and stutter a Tarzan-Lootoowishkey.
Everyman knows of the Man without a Country
and so in precaution I speak pure polyphony
talking my head off daily
to Everywoman whose nothing to me.
Nightly, I invoke a femme fatale’s hospitality.
As payback, mostly I speak Purgatory
or mime the silence of Eternity.
But today, sentenced by the testimony
of my jailbait-Muse’s jealous treachery,
I languish in solitary
confined to this soliloquy
in my tongue’s unfettered Užupiškey.

Photo of the Vilna River, bordering the Užupis Republic, Lily Neill from FB

“Verde que te quiero verde. Verde viento. Verdes ramas.” Can you spot the mermaid?

She wandered down from near the Vilnius airport with a Mexican poet, Zorro, and now lives in that little alcove above the Vilna:

“Sobre el rostro del aljibe se mecía la gitana. Verde carne, pelo verde, con ojos de fría plata.”

We would like to extend a special thanks to the extensive list of those responsible for making this series possible. In particular, Jan Wagner, Eirikur Orn Norddahl, Jan Pollet, Nikola Madzirov and Damir Sodan.

*****

An interview with Emanuella Amichai by SJ Fowler.

Perhaps Emanuella Amichai represents the ethos of the Maintenant series more succinctly than any of the other 78 poets that have gone before her. The question of what is poetic is akin to the question of what is European. Both are fluid, unanswerable, and all the more essential for that unresolvability. Working in the medium of moving image, of dance, theatre and film, she has taken groundbreaking strides towards what can only be called a video poetry, a form of visual poetry. Working in tandem with some of Europe’s finest writers, including Jan Wagner, she has shown her absolute control of both mediums, both poetry and film, and using the grammar of motion to remarkable poetic effect. If this places her outside the poetic mainstream, what might be deemed The definition of a poet, then the fact she is the daughter of one of the 20th century’s greatest poets firmly roots her back into the tradition of European letters. For the 79th edition of Maintenant, Israel’s Emanuella Amichai.

Photograph by Amnon Winner

3:AM: Is there a wider medium of video poetic, or interpretations of poetic via the moving image in your opinion? I.e. are your projects something that you think will grow, the collaboration of poets and film makers?

Emanuella Amichai: I believe that collaborations between artists from different forms could be a very interesting and inspiring process in general. Since I think that different art forms are actually different approaches to experience, and sharing these different approaches can be a very enriching experience. But collaborations really depend mostly on the chemistry between the artists involved whether it is a poet, a film maker a dancer or a director.

I believe there can be a very wide and inspiring collaboration between poetry and film, as seen in some of the shorter films which concentrate on poetry as a visual medium like Cocteau’s “Blood of a Poet,” and Buñuel-Dali’s “Andalusian Dog” . I find some similarities between film and poetry: catching a feeling or thought and giving it a word or an image, but there are also differences between the two: film is basically a narrative artform, it may have a poetic form in it, but the classic form is narrative, where as poetry can be more open in structure, moving from different emotions, thoughts in a more associative manner. In film, words are usually used to describe the action that is seen, and in poems the words are the action itself.

Of course there are exceptions (Tarkovsky’s films are a good example of a poetic formed film, and I find David Lynch’s films very poetic as well) and there are narratives in poetry of course , but in poetry just like in a short poetry film, it is more concentrated both in length and in its dramatic development.

I find that poetic forms exist in many different art forms: theatre, dance, film, photography and more. It could be a shot in a movie, or the way a dancer is moving, the way a light falls on a body on stage etc … It is a bit difficult to explain exactly what a poetic form is and there is no clear answer, I think, but I would say it has something to do with showing or hinting towards the invisible, visualizing the invisible, even the metaphysical. I feel that this expendable form allows room for associative ideas, a bit like dreaming a dream. Film is known to have the psychological effect of a dream process, yet most of our dreams are non verbal or use very little words, and do not have a typical classical narrative to them. I find this poetic form interesting for me to work with on film or stage, and I find it very inspiring. So yes, I hope it will grow and I believe that it could be very interesting and very rewarding for poets and film makers to collaborate. And for poetry to collaborate with different art forms as well.

3:AM: Could you detail and describe your collaboration with Jan Wagner in Berlin?

EA: I met Jan Wagner through a very interesting project. The Literaturwerkstatt in Berlin created a beautiful and unique international festival held once every two years, that is all dedicated to poetry in film. It is called the: “ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival”

They produced for the 5th Zebra festival, in 2010, a very interesting workshop called “poetic encounters”. Three contemporary Israeli video artists (Avi Dabach, Joshua Simon and myself) and three contemporary German poets (Jan Wagner, Daniel Falb and Monika Rinck) met to a creative process in order to produce scripts and create poetry films in six days.

At the beginning of the process, I was asked to choose a poem from a large range of contemporary German poets. I looked through the poems and when I saw Jan Wagner’s poems I knew that this will be interesting to work with.

The poems had something very visual and concrete and at the same time very open to visual interpretation and were inspiring for me. The poems had a sense of visual sensibility in them, like a very precise and clean detailed photograph. At times I felt I could literally see and feel them both visually and emotionally. And they had a sense of compassion and humor which I found very inviting. I wrote Jan and we began writing each other. It was quite an open creative process: I sent Jan drafts of the script and he sent me his opinion and thoughts.

It was very interesting. And I must say Jan was a very good creative partner, and very open minded to my ideas and to the process. We met face to face in Berlin when the workshop began, and Jan came to visit the set. It was a very interesting and challenging process.

3:AM: Does your work emerge from initial concepts and grow in the making, or do you storyboard and choreography, facilitating your edit afterward primarily?

EA: I usually have a solid choreography and story board or scenes before I begin any project, this allows me to be open and flexible and to change or improvise on set if needed.

3:AM: Your father’s reputation is so immense and continues to grow, how has his presence in the world of poetry affected your artistic pursuits?

EA: Well here is a small story of one of his affects: I have been dancing since I was 5 years old, but my first dance memories were with my father… I remember us dancing to classical music in our living room, those were great dramatic dances with a seeking prince, played by him and a lost princess, arole played by myself… I remember those dances very clearly.

I grew up with a father who was a poet and was also an extremely talented poet. He was 54 when I was born, so I knew him also as a known and appreciated poet. I guess I grew up experiencing art as fulfilling and rewarding. And yet since my father stayed a teacher his whole life, I also understood that being an artist is being able to be creative in many different aspects, like one should also have a stable independent occupation in times of need. My father said many times that for him, writing poetry is a hobby, and that he wants to keep it as a hobby so he will not have to write in order to pay the bills. And yet i saw how my father would perceive reality with an artistic way, he was writing the way he was talking about everyday things: by metaphors, they were very natural to him, with humor, and with imagination.

So I grew up seeing that ones artistic passion can become a way of life, and that reality hides in it a whole world of feelings, smells, memories, pictures, color, movement and thought. Ironically, Most of my works are non verbal: dance, physical theatre, videodance and poetry video. My recent stage work “The Neighbors Grief is Greener” is a non verbal physical theatre work that has just won best choreography and stage movement design in the national contemporary theatre festival in Israel (and also won best actors in the “Valise” international festival in Poland.) It is a sequence of stage moving images that correspond with clichés of the 1950 as perceived through TV shows, cinema, advertisement, fashion music and more. The process of the work started with images of a beautiful woman in a kitchen lying in on the ground. And I began writing this image as a script although it was all movement based. It was a real interesting process for me. Describing movement by words. In the end it turned out to be a stage piece, but it is very cinematic in its style and form.

3:AM: You worked in tandem with your father’s pieces I believe, how was this process?

EA: My father died when I was 21 ,and his poems were actually a way for me to read about him, learn about him and in a way to talk to him. So I felt quite naturally to work with them. It was both very personal and challenging. I felt very free to interpret it in my own way, not only because he is my father, but also because the poems are very inviting and very open. They have the great qualities of musicality, movement, imagination and form.

A poem is a very concentrated art form and can be very intense, and precise, i do not have to understand it immediately and yet If I feel I understand it, it is enough for me to start working with it. Sometimes a poem can put into words a feeling or a situation in a way that is so clear that I feel gained a new emotion or memory. I also feel that way when reading my fathers poetry, I find his work very inspiring and very rich in form and content.

Since I come from the visual arts, visiuals is usually the first form that comes to mind while reading poetry. It does not have to be a concrete image but it is usually a moving image. Sometimes the image is all that is needed for me in order to begin the process. Yet sometimes I can read a poem, and when finished reading it I feel that it this poem should stay as poem. Sometimes the effect a poem can have is so intense that it is almost metaphysical and I feel that the form is complete for me.

3:AM: Has it been an advantage for you to come from the family of such an illustrious poet?

EA: Since my father was so known and loved I think he was basically fulfilled and he passed that feeling to his children. He received a lot of love and respect towards his art and I believe it made him feel more fulfilled as a person, and there for as a father, he was a very kind, calm and loving father. So that was quite a big advantage… and we were abroad quite a lot, living in N.Y.C while he was teaching there in the N.Y.U., so I experienced the world at quite an early age and it was a significant experience for me as a child.

And yet, although he was successful, he was in a way very modest, unlike the cliché of the miserable moody egocentric poet, he was a family man, and was really a kind and warm person, his inner world was of course very intense, but as a child I never noticed it he was a father waiting for me after school with a warm lunch, and taking me to my ballet classes. I remember my father was very open minded and was very gentle towards his children’s decisions, (although like every parent he wanted them to have a good job and to be happy ). He was writing because it was his way to experience his reality, and that, I believe, is a true artist. So I am thankful that I grew up in a open minded, liberal house, and that I saw that being an artist can be fulfilling. Professionally speaking, in my artistic work, it could be an advantage and a disadvantage: advantage since I am his daughter, people are more curious to see what I do, the disadvantage is because people naturally tend to compare…

3:AM: What is your opinion of contemporary Israeli poetry? Is there room in Israel for experimental or innovative work in poetry, literature and beyond to a notable degree?

EA: I think that there quite a few talented contemporary poets in Israel, and there is room for experimental work in poetry. But I would not say it is too popular in Israel. There are independent poetry publishers and quite a few experimental poetry events such as “spoken word” evenings that are multidisciplinary events with experimental poetry readings, video art etc. and quite a few collaborations between poets and painters, musicians and video artist’s even heard there is a group of poets writing together. Experimental work in poetry, im quite sure, could produce interesting work if its good…

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
SJ Fowler is the author of three poetry collections, Red Museum (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2011), Fights (Veer books 2011) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (Anything Anymore Anywhere press 2011). He is the UK poetry editor of Lyrikline and 3:AM, and curates the Maintenant reading series alongside the interviews. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and a postgraduate student at the Contemporary Centre for Poetic Research, University of London.

IT WAS MAY DAY IN PARIS…or WAS IT ONLY THE IMAGE?

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

“Une petit(e) Piece Dieu Nous Benisse.” A coin—a little coin, God Bless us. I noticed that her sign said bless “us.” Not bless “you.” And she did pray for us both.

It hasn’t been an easy spring. Not in Paris. Not in so many, too many, places. The days have stayed cold for too long, and the blossoms have been too late. One waited for flowers. One waited for joy. And the word “austerity” was/is familiar as day old bread and homelessness on so many streets. The graffiti on a wall of the Place Maurice Chevalier (named for that songster of everything charming and French, he who thanked heaven for little girls, and flowers…) the wall seemed to me to say it all. “Non au traité de l’austerité!” No, to the treaty of austerity. But who is/was listening? Will austerity help/ Will one little coin?

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

In France, far and wide, May 1^st is the day for buying lilies of the valley. Muguets,  they are called, here. Every city and village corner has a street seller, permitted on that one day, to sell on the street without any permit, and everyone goes home with the little white coral bells upon a slender stalk, which the old children’s round proclaimed could only be heard when the fairies sing. I dutifully bought and carried my own.

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

It had been proclaimed, once upon a time that: The workers of the various nations shall organize the demonstration in a manner suited to conditions in their country. 
—Resolution introduced by Raymond Lavigne, International Socialist Congress, Paris, July 20, 1889  

But it was May Day 2013 at La Bastille and the old workers watched and watched the world today…Europe, today… and I watched them, wondering.

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

I went to La Bastille, that once-upon bastion of Parisian revolutionary history. To watch the day unfold. La Bastille, where a few days more than one year ago (May 6, 2012)—people raised torches and danced in the same square to applaud the election of François Hollande, their new French Socialist president, whose popularity has dramatically diminished in a single year. While the whole of Europe is not faring well under the global crisis, France is no better an icon of success and its president is not working miracles.

(May 6, 2012/election day) Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

On May 1^st 2013, I went to La Bastille, that place that was once used by the former kings of France as a prison. That place that Louis XIV had used to imprison upper class French who had angered him. That place that became known for political protests throughout ensuing histories in Paris. On the days of major events, La Bastille is where Parisians gather. That place where immigrant Parisians gather. That place where global politics and local politics may meet.

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

 So it was May Day 2013. Elsewhere, there were bombs and wars and drones and somewhere, I wondered—might there be dancing? And—What I found fascinating was that here in Paris at least, yes, there was dancing. And there was this: the Marxist slant of the May 1^st holiday was there, but overshadowed by and linked to the workers of the Arab worlds, and to the workers of the Turkistan worlds, immigrants, now French, as much or even more in evidence—than to the the old traditionally Socialist countries. As though it was they—who have taken up the cause of the downtrodden—and it was they, the Syrians and the Iranians, and the Communist Turks, from that other world by birth, who live in Paris and are struggling alongside the many to survive this spring, they were ones who were each and all bidding for recognition by dancing, and bearing flags and  chanting their deepest cultural connections to the salt of the earth. (So to speak.) I wondered if that was and is significant. I wondered—about how the grand economic compass has shifted.

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

I wondered about the older world and the new, the older icons, and the new, the older marchers and dancers and revolutionaries, and the new, the older coin of the realm—so to speak, and the new. I wondered about what one can think of as old—and what, new. What—as winter, and what—as spring, what—as growth, and what—as decay. I watched, I gathered images to help me understand, and to send to you as my letter from Paris, this spring.  I wondered who must pray for us, and who must/or/will dance. I wondered who is crying “may day,” in its other sense—and how soon the spring will be warm. And I still do.

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

Photo © Margo Berdeshevsky

And who must be blessed? And whom shall we pray for, on a May Day, on all the May Days, now and to come? I ask, very quietly. In Paris. In the spring of 2013.

with much care, as ever,

Margo

MARGO BERDESHEVSKY:

http://redroom.com/member/margo-berdeshevsky

 Amazon Author page: 
http://amazon.com/author/margoberdeshevsky

Judy Halebsky’s book of poems, Sky=Empty (New Issues, 2010) was chosen by Marvin Bell as the winner of the New Issues Prize, a first book award, and was also a finalist for the California Book Award. With a collective of Tokyo poets, she edits and translates the bilingual poetry journal Eki Mae. She lives at Ocean Beach in the outer edges of San Francisco and teaches at Dominican University of California.

***

Who do you consider to be some of the best contemporary Japanese poets currently living today?

The biggest struggle for an English speaking readership is the tiny portion of new writing that makes it into translation. Yuka Tsukagoshi, whose work I greatly admire and translate, is doing exciting work influenced by multiple strands of modern and contemporary poetry including surrealism. Jeffery Angles has done excellent translations of poetry by Takako Arai and Hiromi Ito. Sawako Nakayasu and Eric Selland are compiling an anthology of modern Japanese poetry in translation. Poet, Alan Botsford does a wonderful job at the editor of the bilingual poetry journal, Poetry Kanto. These are just a few places to get started with contemporary Japanese poetry.

You’re originally from Canada and lived in Japan for five years. What brought you to Japan? Can you give us an overview of the poetry that you studied in Tokyo?

I had moved to California for graduate school and was reading Jane Hirshfield and Robert Hass. I wanted to learn more of the poetry forms and aesthetics that shape their work. Jane Hirshfield’s Ink Dark Moon offers translations of court poetry or waka. These are short poems with syllable count phrases of 5-7-5, 7-7 generally about refined subject matter. Many of the poems are about longing and waiting for a lover to visit.

Renga or linked verse extended the waka form into a collaborative poetry activity. Poets would take turns writing the 5-7-5 or 7-7 links. The poem could go on for hundreds of verses. The first verse is called the hokku and it is in 5-7-5. This hokku developed into a poetry form on its own, and is now called haiku. Early haiku poked fun at the court class and court poetry by using vernacular language and common images. Basho elevated haiku and brought a poetic sophistication to the form while maintaining the colloquial language and everyday images. Hass’ translated volume, The Essential Haiku has haiku by Basho, Buson, and Issa. These translations inspired me to study Japanese literature.

Of course, once I was living in Tokyo, I became involved in contemporary poetry as well. I attended a reading series where poets would read their entire poetry book in one night. I also went to haiku events and participated in a group gallery show where we composed a ren-shi (free verse version of renga) together. I met Tokyo poets and we started a bilingual journal called Eki Mae (or In Front of the Station).

You also translate Japanese poetry. How do you choose which poets or poems to translate?

I’m drawn to translation because I want to access the poems. I translate the work of two contemporary poets, Yuka and Akutsu Ayumi. I also translate some haiku within my own writing. Mostly, I have come to translation through some connection to the poems in Japanese that I can’t find in English either because the poems are not translated or because my experience of the poem in Japanese is different from existing translations.

Is there a certain challenge to translating Japanese poetry that may not exist in translating texts in other languages?

Translation is always hard. There’s the written language and the cultural knowledge that shapes how we assign meaning to words. What is assumed knowledge for some audiences is different for other audiences. In terms of the challenges of translating from Japanese as compared to other languages, I do think there are different distances among languages. The distance between two languages lessens if they share some linguistic commonality (such as Latin or Germanic roots) or aspects of a shared cultural knowledge (such as a Judeo-Christian heritage). I struggle not only with understanding the poem in Japanese but in re-creating it in English within its own frame. For example, a repeated image in Yuka’s work is a rice field and, in particular, reflections on the water in a rice field. When I write ‘rice field’ does the reader in North America get an image of a field with standing water that on a bright day can reflect the sky? I don’t know. It wasn’t an immediate image for me.

Do you ever collaborate with others?

Yuka and I work together in a collaborative process. We bring different points of view and have spent hours at a diner called Jonathan’s (with a free drink bar) going over a thousand possibilities in a translation. It’s also a process of trust almost like spinning while holding hands. We both need to lean out and give weight to create the new poem without falling.

What’s your process of translation like? 

For translating Yuka’s poems, I start with reading the poems and seeing what poems might work well in translation. While I work closely with Yuka, I start by reading the poem on my own and developing my own relationship with it. I’ll then make a gloss of the poem by translating phrases and parts of lines literally. I use various dictionaries to come up with the gloss. Then, I’ll start to write lines of the translation from a sensory understanding of the poem.

One of the struggles in translating from Japanese is trying to preserve the order of the lines and phrases. To re-create the order of the source poem risks the English translation having a disrupted grammatical flow. I weight this with the importance of sequence and the location of images within the poem.

After I have a working draft of the translation, I’ll share it with Yuka and we’ll begin a long collaborative process of going back and forth about lines break, word choice, and punctuation. She usually favors a more literal translation than I do. I often stress creating the effect of the original poem in English over preserving specific literal meaning.

Has translating the works of other poets affected how you write your own poetry?

Poetry writing and learning a language are entwined in my work. There’s the continual making of meaning, the disruption of meaning, and the searching for failed equivalences. For my translation of haiku, my process is generative and often results in multiple possible translations of a particular haiku embedded into a larger poem. There’s a point in translation where I’ve internalized the poem that I am trying to translate. From there, I can write a translation into the form of the source poem. Sometimes, I want to write that poem into a new shape and that’s what I can do in my own work. Most often, I do this with Basho’s haiku. My poem, A Breaking Word, translates Basho’s frog pond haiku. I quote from three different translations of the haiku (by Robert Hass, Alan Watts, and Allen Ginsburg.) Lines in the poem describe some of the ways that it is difficult to translate the haiku. So, in a way, my newly generated poem opens up Basho’s haiku and reveals some of the intricacies of translation for an English speaking readership.

Interview conducted by Masashi Musha

We would like to extend a special thanks to the extensive list of those responsible for making this series possible. In particular, Jan Wagner, Eirikur Orn Norddahl, Jan Pollet, Nikola Madzirov and Damir Sodan.

*****

Lalucq’s poetic inquiry was inspired by an exhibit of Augustin Victor Casasola’s photographs of the Mexican Revolution. The entire sequence of nearly 40 short poems meditates on a single image from that exhibit, a photograph in which a little-known Zapatista lieutenant, Fortino Sámano, nonchalantly smokes his last cigar moments before his death by firing squad. How is this frozen moment altered by our knowledge of what proceeds from it? What does the photographic image “say” about the man, Fortino Sámano? How does the image interrogate the viewer—what can she say in response? And can the image be captured by “the long / unwound ink of words,” even as these words dismantle themselves? These questions are among Lalucq’s meditations, in a poem that escapes genre expectations, overflowing into the realms of philosophy and new media theory. The photograph itself is absent from the book; instead, the reader must rely on its “translation” from visual to poetic image.

In the second half of the book, Nancy contemplates Lalucq’s poem and, through it, the poetic image and its linguistic medium. Nancy’s beautiful commentary, often highly lyrical, reflects on “the darkness in the middle of meaning.” Just as the photograph of Sámano is forever still (the “spilling over” of the execution forever suspended), so also, says Nancy, the poem is always on the edge of meaning. Language, he writes, deconstructs itself “like the poem tumbling down its own scaffolding.” Yet, even while language is like a “flint” that chips at the poem, so also the poem sharpens language. Together with Laluq’s sequence, Nancy’s meditations on the poetic image, so often themselves expressed through metaphor and image, make for a highly pleasurable read that leaves us—poets, scholars, and all lovers of language—with much to think on.

Gallais and Hogue’s translation manages to capture much of the nuance and musicality of the original. The original text poses the extraordinary challenge not only of Lalucq’s experimental poem, but also of Nancy’s close reading of that poem. The close reading of any poem, of course, cannot be applied meaningfully to its translation because etymologies, sounds, figures of speech, and other aspects of the language are altered. However, Gallais and Hogue perform the balancing act of addressing the demands of both poem and commentary with admirable dexterity. Lalucq’s léger liséré du sang, for instance, becomes the well-wrought “light brim of blood.” And for Nancy’s observation on the repeated accents—accents aigus—of that line, Gallais and Hogue find a satisfying substitute in the alliterative, doubled plosives of “brim” and “blood” in the (unaccented) English.

The translation abounds with such elegant solutions to some of the book’s knottier challenges. Often, where exact sound or word play cannot be recreated in the English, Gallais and Hogue compensate for it by new assonances, internal rhymes, or homophonic resonances. Nancy’s Cést la langue qui défaille, le langage qui faute becomes in Gallais and Hogue’s hands “It is language that falters, language at fault.” Here, while the complexity of langue—meaning both “tongue” and “language”—has no English equivalent, the sonic echo of “falters” and “fault” rings out instead.

There are moments, though very few, when the poeticism of the original is sacrificed to accuracy, when I wanted a greater musicality in the translation. Consider Lalucq’s rather fluid  afin qu’ils/ n’introduisent pas leur patrimoine génétique, which in its English version becomes the more mechanical “so that they/ can never introduce their genetic code.”  However, any objections I might have about these rare moments are satisfied by the book’s afterword in which the translators explain that their choices were often guided by a consideration for the living authors, who preferred “exact translation” whenever possible.

In his meditation Nancy writes “I must understand that, in effect, the poem—and this is why it overflows—makes us speak more than it says.” There is much to be admired in Gallais’ and Hogue’s thoughtful and well-crafted translation. If Nancy’s commentary on the poem is one response, Gallais and Hogue’s translation is another, highly compelling one that has much to say about the elusiveness of meaning and the generative power of the poet’s language.

Photo by Michelle J. Wong

G.A. Chaves (Costa Rica, 1979) is the author of Cuentos etcétera (stories, 2004), and Vida ajena (poems, 2010). He has translated an anthology of poems by Robinson Jeffers and Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky. He has also edited the selected poetry of Costa Rica’s Carlos de la Ossa.  Poetry International’s Managing Editor Jennifer Minniti-Shippey was excited to interview him about contemporary Spanish-language poetry, his work as a translator, and everything in between. 

In your opinion, who are the most interesting poets writing in Spanish today?  What sets them apart, and makes them must-read poets?

Among the ones I know best, I think that Fabio Morábito (Mexico) and Rafael Courtoisie (Uruguay) are both major poets with very distinctive voices. Morábito has a reportage kind of immediacy to his language, whereas Courtoisie is a ceaselessly experimental virtuoso.

I recently discovered the poetry of another Mexican, Luis Felipe Fabre. His poems seem to be capable of making old tricks (like rhyme) useful and fun again.

In Spain, I like the variety of Juan Carlos Mestre’s work. He’s densely personal, yet not confessional; and strongly social, though not quite political. He seems to me a modern-day John Donne: everything he sees becomes poetry.

Javier Payeras (Guatemala) is an incredibly inventive poet with an amazing eye for dramatic details.

There are two Costa Rican poets who I think we will keep reading for many years: Silvia Piranesi (a tropical Samuel Beckett, with a vengeance) and Klaus Steinmetz (a poet who understands that intelligence is not the negation of intense feeling). When I read Steinmetz and Piranesi I have to conclude that, yes, there are still things that can only be said through poetry, and that the medium of verse is not only valid but also very necessary.

There are two other Costa Rican poets that make me feel that the place I inhabit is worth writing about: Luis Chaves (no relation) and Alfredo Trejos. Their poems are as familiar to me as the city I live in.

What European poets are best known or loved by their Spanish language counterparts?  And what American poets?

I feel like all I can do here is name-dropping. While all the major names (Ginsberg, Ashbery, Celan, Szymborska, Enzensberger, Pavese, Bonnefoy, Transtromer) are well-known, I think people look for stuff everywhere and their writing is proof of that. I think that not many people know Don Paterson and Jürgen Becker, which is a shame. But maybe I’m just hanging out in the wrong neighborhood.

Translators who work with Romance languages often wrestle with capturing the musicality of those languages in English, with its more limited range of rhyme.  When you translate poems from English into Spanish, what is your process?  What poets have been “easiest” to translate into Spanish?  And who have been difficult?

I think this is a mistake. We all despair too quickly when our target languages can’t quite reproduce the fixtures of the original, and end up thinking that our native languages are somewhat inept. The reason why Spanish, for example, gives the impression of being rhyme-rich is because it is completely regular in its five vowel sounds. An “o” will always rhyme with an “o.” That’s why “rezo” and “mozo” can pass as rhymes. But I think every writer with a good sense of prosody will tell you that this is a limitation. English is so maddeningly irregular that it could rhyme the Spanish “rezo” with the English “wrestle.” More than a limitation, I think that’s a blessing.

When you translate poems from English into Spanish, what is your process?  What poets have been “easiest” to translate into Spanish?  And who have been difficult?

I no longer think there are “easy” poets to translate. Just to give you an example, when Alí Calderón, the editor of Círculo de poesía, a poetry magazine in Mexico, contacted me to request some translations of mine to publish, I went to my book shelf and picked what I remembered was a straightforward, no-nonsense poet: Ilya Kaminsky. I was in the middle of other projects and preparing a trip abroad, so I was trying to keep it simple. I did the translations quickly and sent them off, and only later, when I started translating the rest of Dancing in Odessa, did I realize what I had gotten myself into: Kaminsky is so nuanced, so weirdly chanting in his poems… I had completely failed to capture this the first time. It took a lot of humbling work to turn his poems into a worthy Spanish text.

So far, Stanley Crawford’s novel Log of the SS. The Mrs. Unguentine is the hardest translation I’ve done. It’s only a hundred pages long, but it took two translators to do it. I was functioning mostly as a consultant to Andrea Mickus, the other translator on the project, but it was a very demanding and exhausting job all the same.

How does working as a translator influence your own poetry?  What can young poets learn by translating the work of other writers?

I started translating out of sheer necessity to learn how to write. You often hear from writers this old piece of advice about re-typing the great works of the masters to let that energy enter your system. Well, I don’t much care for energy, but I have learned technique from doing this. You have this powerful Robinson Jeffers lyric in front of you, and then you have this flabby little joke of a story in Spanish, and you wonder how are the two related? Little by little, you learn to pay closer attention to the original’s technique, and you get to use that in your own writing. Ultimately, translation teaches one how to read, and that’s essential to good writing as well.

***

Five Poems by G.A. Chaves

Desayuno, by Juan Gris

(MoMA, 2008)

(for Julio Acuña, in memoriam)

Terracotta is the color of origin;
and grey, the color of Juan.
We are what we eat:
earth, letters, wings, and ash.

(Winter’s colors
should be primaries:
in the beginning were water and ashes.)

We are always a beginning, Julio:
we’re a table set with the tools,
smoking, peaceful,
that give way to another dawn.

*

Chaves, Portugal

Life that breaks me against its hard angles,
(life, eroded, without the faith of my dead),
life, intermittent, with uncertain steps,

the life of my poems, the life of silence…
the evident life—as Melcion Mateu said—
seems a little strange and distant in this fire

that sometimes I call sky and others cielo and now céu.

*

Foncebadón, Camino de Santiago

When we’ve lost the fear
of not hearing more than our own pulse,

and only the dust of our steps
remains between the stumps of dry grass,

the stone fences grow weak, unreal,
and the hermitage fills with overwhelmed flies.

(This silence seems poor
but took centuries ripening.)

*

Idaho, 1997
for Olga Ruiz

Olguita sent me a petal in her letter and asked me to check if there are flowers where I live or if the sky is like the one over her house but here I only see snow and the night sky is the same with its stars and its blackness is broader than ever sometimes I lose sight of the moon but I don’t get sad because her petal doesn’t fade and I reread the letter where Olguita wrote life looks so beautiful at our age while I wait to leave this house and return to my own and see the whole flower planted below the narrow sky and the lovely Olguita imagining everything and writing me letters.

*

Catullus XCVI

(for Carlos de la Ossa)

Because some joy must come with this
interior, artificial winter,
where we keep lovers and friends
who with time we’ve lost,
let’s not mourn the time spent
while in our skin their memory remains.

Let’s leave with our souls,
if it’s the soul that survives,
if so much strength and cold
hasn’t changed it into an animal.
Be happy in your bones, Carlos;
use them up until the world cannot weigh them down.

Translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Minniti- Shippey