Stingy Kids

PEN World Voices: Poetry Reading

Blurry photo of Wayne Koestenbaum and Nicole Brossard reading "Transcreation." 5/1/09

poem to understand
how people bend
before an idea
their hair barely brushing the depth of silence

Poem(é), Nicole Brossard

5/1: After "Discovering Unbearable Truths," I headed to the Bowery Poetry Club for two events: Poetry Reading  and The Translation Slam.  This post will address the reading.  The slam requires it's own space (you'll soon understand).

What drew me to the reading, honestly, was the opportunity to hear Nicole Brossard, one of my favorite writers, read her work in person.  I've heard that she's a charismatic and dynamic reader of her own work and she did not disappoint.

My notes are very fragmentary.  I would jot down, quickly, a few observations or lines after each author finished reading.  Looking back on my notes, I find myself scratching my head.  Why did I write "nice belly"  with regard to Brossard?  I realize that most of my notes have more to do with the performance of the poems than what the poets actually read.  And what they wore.  Here you go:

PEN World Voices: Discovering Unbearable Truths

Uwe Kolbe and Uljana Wolf in conversation with Susan Bernofsky

I arrived late, after Uljana Wolf had read her poems, but in time to hear Uwe Kolbe read "Fathers and Sons."  The panel description tells us that "These two writers from Germany woke up one day to realize that their lives were built on some terrible lies. Uwe Kolbe discovered that his own father had been spying on him for the Stasi, and Uljana Wolf had a similar awakening. Find out how they put the truth of their lives back together, came to reinterpret their pasts, and how these understandings influenced their writing."  From this description, one can draw a connection to Kolbe's poem, even though it doesn't read explicitly autobiographical.  

Wolf and Kolbe offered reflections on their status as post-war writers, though they represent different  generations.  Kolbe was already an adult in 1989; Wolf, a ten-year old child.  Their perspectives and experiences may differ but they acknowledge that so much remains to be uncovered and understood with regard to East Germany, and their works respectively emerge from this desire to make sense of the past.  They continue to breathe the "air of suspicion," as Kolbe calls it.  At the same time, their work has also moved in other directions, to other times and places.

Q&A: An audience member was not pleased by what she perceived to be an evasion of the original topic.  "Can we address the topic of the panel?" meaning, I suppose, the personal 'unbearable truths' hinted at in the description.  I understand that hearing these personal narratives may have motivated attendance but the question also missed the point, which is how these true stories find expression in or shape their poems.  Someone at the festival said "poetry concerns itself with the truth."  This isn't a point I care to argue, but the panel highlighted a familiar tension between talkshow truth and partial truths.  How does poetry concern itself with what is unbearably or unbelievably true?  Maybe like this:

FATHER AND SON

Keeping the distance 
and staying close together 
with dangling arms. 
The father the uniform, 
the son with Rasta hair. 
The Father's got Prussia in his rucksack, 
the son on the surfboard 
towards the mouth of the river. 
The Father travelling, 
the son the internal emigration. 
The Father the letters, 
the son doesn‘t speak. 
Father, who takes it easy, 
son to his heart. 
Fighting each other without rules, 
more seriously than anytime at the playground, 
longer than lifelong. 
The Fathers never die, 
one hears since ears have existed, 
and seldom do the sons live.

© Translation: 2001, Sapphire/Ramona Lofton

What is the true story:  In 1989, after the Wall came down, some artists were "invited" to see their Stasi files.  It was discovered that the poet Sacha Anderson, a friend of many East German artists, had been a Stasi informant.  "Like a spider sitting in a net."

In 1992, Kolbe was able to read his file.  "[It was] like someone wrote you a biography, and autobiography, yet you had no idea."  He flipped through the pages, and came upon a few written in familiar type.  He recognized it as his father's typewriter print.  Kolbe was estranged from his father, and when he confronted him, his father defended his actions, claiming that the information he provided kept the Stasi from engaging in more extensive investigations.  "I defended you," his father said.  Another informer was a good, older friend.  According to Kolbe, that betrayal carried more of a sting.

Citing Gabriel García Márquez as an example, Kolbe remarked that "most of what 'real' literature is is telling your own story."  Post-war writers "are just telling their own story, coming from different places...east or west, or whatever." 

From where I was sitting, I had trouble hearing Wolf and didn't take as many notes when she spoke.  Her poems are wonderful, mesmerizing.  Here's a link to a few from DICHTionary, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.

Another mishmash

Maybe when I'm done teaching and fretting over my dissertation, I'll have the energy for a proper, narrative long post.  Here's another smattering of links, seemingly disconnected.

Vladimir Nabokov's "The Art of Translation," published in The New Republic in 1941, now available online.  I follow Words Without Borders on Twitter and received a link to this essay via a tweet.  I had read it before, and even have it in my files, but I really how WWB is using Twitter to bring good, thought provoking content on translation to its readers.

The pressing question "how did Sarah Hughes outscore Irina Slutskaya and Michelle Kwan for the gold medal in the 2002 Olympics?" is succinctly answered in this article (see the side bar for the details).

Wikipedia's list of "unusual deaths" is a major distraction.  Hypatia of Alexandria was flayed with oyster shells (though the word "ostrakois" may also refer to pottery shards).

I've been listening to Joni Mitchell's Clouds again.  

Some come dark and strange like dying 
Crows and ravens whistling 
Lines of weeping, strings of crying 
So much said in listening 

(from "Songs for Aging Children")

This 1970 profile of Mitchell provides some context for these songs.  My favorite quote: "Grass, it sits you down on your fanny."

Passover

Nathan Englander, author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and The Ministry of Special Cases, is working on a translation of the Haggadah.  In an op-ed recently published in the New York Times, he offers readers a tantalizing glimpse:

Were it our mouths were filled with a singing like the sea,
And our tongues awash with song, as waves-countless,
And our lips to lauding, as the skies are wide,
And our eyes illumined like the sun and the moon...

There's more but we'll have to wait.  

Latset!

Latset! An Anthology against the War in Gaza is currently available as a free pdf download (Hebrew only).  In Hebrew, "latset" means "to leave, get out" and is used in this context as an imperative.  The anthology represents a collaboration between poets and visual artists, some of whom may be familiar names outside of Israel.  The work of the poet Aharon Shabtai, for instance, has been widely translated.  I'd also like to highlight the participation of the poets Salman Masalha, Rami Saari, Merhav Yeshurun and Efrat Mishori.  The anthology, Mati Shmuelof writes, "has been prepared with great urgency and rage, at the outbreak of the war, as an act of emergency protest."  It is also, "a collaboration of hope."  A number of journals came together to put together this anthology, including Daka, which I wrote about in an earlier post.  For those who don't read Hebrew, here's my translation of a poem that I thought was particularly outstanding:

She was killed in Gaza

by Roni Hirsch

Maybe I was killed today

I do not know

there were discrepancies

in the international news reports

maybe I was killed today in Gaza

my family and I embraced and watched the blue sky

afterwards we scattered, maybe it happened then

and maybe we were still together

I went back to the past

the war was still before us

I do not know

in which one I was killed

maybe it was World War II

and Italian planes bombed Tel Aviv

To connect

Literary Schadenfreude (via Gothamist)

Poet Clive James wrote a poem in which he gloated over finding a competitor's book in a remainder bin.  Honestly, though, the best place to find contemporary poetry books is the 50% off stacks at The Strand.  The last time I was there I found a number of fantastic and current books of poetry but I'll resist naming names just in case being remaindered or discounted hurts anyone's feelings.  One book was dedicated by a young author to a Major Poet.  Even more devastating was the discovery of a personal letter penned by the author (in blue-tinted calligraphy) nestled within the pages of this book.

 

Nobel to Salinger?  Nah, He's American.  (via Gothamist)

Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which administers the Nobel Prize in Literature, got a lot of flack for stating that U.S. Literature was "too isolated, too insular."  He then went on to say that "[t]hey don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature."  That much is true.  Translated literature makes up a pathetically small percentage of book sales in the United States.  U.S. literature, on the other hand, is widely translated into other languages.  I think that next year's prize should go to a translator.   

A Conversation with Shirley Kaufman by Eve Grubin

"I began to know Hebrew poets through my work in translation. A small group of English speakers—writers, translators, and teachers at the Hebrew University—met together twice a month to read the work of John Ashbery.

There was also an Israeli poet who was translating Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror into Hebrew, and he needed some help. We all wanted to keep up with what was happening in English and in translation, as well. That group went on meeting and reading for years."

First OSU Ph.D. in Yiddish studies a trailblazer in field by Jennifer Hambrick

I came across a very interesting profile on Colleen McCallum-Bonar, a scholar of Yiddish literature and possibly the only African-American working in this field.  In the article, she discusses her research interests and also addresses the issues of race that pervade this field of study.

Her doctoral dissertation, “Black Ashkenaz and the Almost Promised Land: Yiddish Literature and the Harlem Renaissance,” compares the Yiddish-language poetry of Jewish immigrants to America and the poetry of African-American writers between 1915 and 1935....

Some of the themes that recur in the Yiddish-language writings of authors of the period, such as Jacob Glatstein and Leivick Halpern, include the idea that African-Americans and Jews in America have a mutual understanding of their histories of oppression at the hands of a white majority.

“Authors say that blacks are our brothers in arms essentially, that we have this kind of shared experience in terms of being in the U.S., being poor in the U.S., being minorities in the U.S. and being mistreated in the U.S.,” McCallum-Bonar said.

Silent Story: One Process for the narrative arc in chapbooks

Poet Justin Evans on narrative arcs in poetry collections:

[A] narrative arc is more than a hook upon which to hang your poems. Poetry at its very center must remain, as my friend and mentor Dave Lee has said, a participation sport. It is not, as the Moderns would suggest, art for art’s sake. The audience is not superfluous. Poetry must be shared, and in that sharing, a story is the poet’s best bet. As each poem tells a story, it only makes sense that a chapbook consisting of a small suite of poems be more than a gathering of good poems. There must be a reason all of these poems are in one place.

To accomplish a successful narrative arc, I advocate the hidden narrative--- the story only the poet knows....use it during the writing of poems for a chapbook and then destroy it, revealing only that information you the poet deems absolutely necessary. So construct a narrative just for you. Don’t draft the narrative because that is prose, but always have the entire story in your conscious thought while writing the poems.

And saving the best for last---

Diagramming Sarah Palin (via Slate)

Kit Kats and Jellyfish

A couple of months ago, the on line and print journal Zeek: A Journal of Jewish Thought and Culture created a partnership with Jewcy, an entertainment and media company.  The print journal will continue to come out twice a year, but here on out on line content will be presented in more of a blog form.  This new format gives Zeek "a more flexible web presence."  I've published several translations of Israel literature in Zeek (see left sidebar for links) but my first translation to appear in Zeek @ Jewcy is the prose poem "Rita" by Roman Baembaev.  This new format now allows readers to leave comments, which I hope will generate discussion around these texts.  Also check out Lisa Katz's translation of "All" by Agi Mishol.

Artist Robert Ladislas Derr also participated in the "Theory and Practice" show that I saw recently at Gallery Aferro.  His piece "Intellectual Economy" is a video installation consisting of two computer monitors standing, back to back, on a table.  On one monitor, you see a man from the back, banging his head against the wall.  On the other monitor, you see his head coming through the wall.  In Derr's own words: "The front side view of the rupturing wall echoes the process of birth and challenges the notions of illusionistic space. Breaking through the wall from one side to the other illustrates that art is not easy."

Rilke's "Liebeslied," published in Neue Gedichte (New Poems, 1907).  Cliff Crego's English translation is lovely, as is Stephen Mitchell's.

I was reading about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and came across a bibliographic reference to Critical Kit-Kats, a 1896 collection of literary portraits by Edmund Gosse.  I've never heard the term "kit kat" used to refer to anything other than a chocolate wafer confection so I was intrigued.  The Kit-Cat Club was an 18th century club based in London that attracted those of political and literary persuasions (Jonathan Swift was a member).  The name also refers to a kind of pie, named after Christopher Catling, a pie maker.  In the preface to Critical Kit-Kats, Gosse offers another meaning:

In an age when studies multiply and our shelves groan with books it is not every interesting and original figure to whom the space of a full length or even a half length portrait can be spared For the low comfortable rooms where people dined in the last century there was invented the shorter and still less obtrusive picture called a Kit Kat and some of our most skilful painters have delighted in this modest form of portraiture which emphasises the head yet does not quite exclude the hand of the sitter I have ventured to borrow from the graphic art this title for my little volume since these are condensed portraits each less than half length and each accommodated to suit limited leisure and a crowded space.

You can download a scanned copy of the entire book through Google Reader.

Finally, I don't know how but I came across a fantastic and fun post on jellyfish by Molly Lambert, managing editor of This Recording.  I find jellyfish endlessly fascinating and recently learned about an "immortal" variety, Turritopsis nutricula (which Lambert mentions).  Appropriately titled "In Which They'll Outlive Us All," the post features a bunch of great illustrations and some mp3s.  I also recommend  this post on John Ashbery.

Anna T. Szabó

During the PEN World Voices panel "Rewriting Family," Hungarian author György Dragomán mentioned that his wife was a poet and frequently collaborated with translators. Dragomán blew me away with his generous and gracious comments on translation and translators, so I was interested to learn more about his wife and her translation background.  Her name, I learned, is Anna T. Szabó. and she has published several books of poetry.  Her website is in Hungarian but her author page on HunLit provides some biographical and biographical information in English and German translation (the English page is more comprehensive than the German).

In October 2004, Szabó and other Hungarian poets visited the UK and participated in Converging Lines, a program sponsored by the British Council Arts Group, which teams up writers and translators from the UK with poets from other countries.  It works both ways--first the UK writers toured Hungary and later the Hungarian poets came to the UK for reading tours and to participate in translation workshops.  Szabó was paired with Clare Pollard, a poet, educator and translator.  In creating her translations, Pollard, who doesn't know Hungarian, maintained an ongoing conversation with Szabó.  She had a literal translation to work with but the final translation also reflected how she interpreted and incorporated Szabó's comments on variant meanings, word play, sound and structure.  The program invited those who attended the public readings to participate in this translation enterprise.

Antony Dunn, who participated in this program, recounts:

We've created a leaflet for every audience member, which contains four literal translations of poems by the Hungarians€“ the very same literal translations that some of the Brits worked from at Lake Balaton. These literal (or plain text) translations contain a range of alternatives, notes and suggestions, to reflect the shades of meaning carried by the Hungarian words or phrases. Some are annotated with details of the rhyme scheme, or the rhythm, or with explanations of the Hungarian colloquialisms employed in the poems. The audience is invited to take these leaflets home and have a go at translation for themselves.

In some ways, it'€™s been rather easier for us, with access to the poets themselves. To be able to ask, What did you mean, exactly? and get an answer.

You can download from Dunn's website a pdf file that contains some of the translations put together by the group, including one of Pollard's translations of Szabó's poem "Around the Tree" (from a longer poem "Winter Diary").  It's a fantastic poem--here's the first stanza:

In the ice-storm these cats now mate,
light frozen on their soft, black skins.
They stage their hot, furred winter show,
wild things.

Reading this translation out loud, I'm struck by the cadence and the rhyme between "skins" and "things," as well as the internal rhyme between "soft" and "hot."  Also, most of the words are monosyllabic which can't be incidental.  A great deal of attention has been given to the sound of this translation, which makes me wonder how its sounds in Hungarian.  Hungarian sounds nothing like English so the translation isn't necessarily striving for aural equivalence, but perhaps there is something interesting about the original poem's prosody that the English poem is trying to evoke. 

In an on line interview, Szabó, who translates from English to Hungarian, acknowledged that she prefers not to self-translate.  "I have tried, but what comes out is not what I had intended."  This is an incredible admission and, in a way, contradicts Dunn's comment that having the original authors on hand gave the UK translators an advantage.  There is a prevailing assumption (that even translators tend to perpetuate) that original authors always know what their work means.  And, frankly, speaking as a translator, I'd rather have a range of meanings and possibilities to work with. 

For Szabó, translation is not only a creative exchange (that is more productive when the translator is someone else) but also a way to assess the merits of a work, to go beyond first impressions:

I used to think that mutuality in translation was some sort of a gesture of respect. In fact it is nothing of the kind. It is extremely useful. While you work on the translation you are also in contact with the author. During these conversations you find your place into their world and their vision, and it becomes much easier to get an understanding of their poetry. When you place yourself in the other's poetic world you really get in tune with them. This can be mutual, which is really a very exciting process. It was during translation that I grew to like Pollard's poems a lot. There were poets I started to translate convinced that they were great, and found out during the translation process that they were not. You come to stumble upon subtle shifts more easily, and find that things which look graceful from the outside may not be all that well put together, after all.

This has happened to me on several occasions. I'll start translating a poem I really like in Hebrew or Spanish and, in the process, certain flaws or missteps are revealed.  In this way, translation serves as a mode of critical reading.  I'm looking forward to reading more work by Szabó and Dragomán.  It's been very exciting to encounter their ideas on writing and translation and to find in them something "mutual."

Links:

Two Poems by Anna Szabó, Translated by David Hill

"Poetry in the NIght" (prose) and "This Day" (poem), Translated by George Szirtes

Poems from "The Labour Ward," Translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri

Short Stories @ PEN World Voices

May 2, 2008

Short Stories
Scandinavia House
Participants: Young-ha Kim, Dafna Zur, Etgar Keret, Abdourahman Waberi and Ingo Schulze (Moderated by Radhika Jones)

"Short Stories" was an outstanding panel.  Jones asked very direct questions that not only got the writers talking about their work but also generated discussion between writers.  I'm sure that these writers have talked on numerous occasions about their interest in the short story, its status among other literary genres, and the different ways they approach writing.  Even so, there were numerous moments of "thinking out loud," of discovery and unveiling.

PEN Worlds Voices 2008

I just got around to organizing my notes on the PEN Worlds Voices Literary festival, which took place last week in NYC.  It's an amazing gathering of writers, publishers, translators and readers.  The only drawback: there was just too much to do and so many good things overlapped!  Here are my notes from the panels and readings that I attended--my notes on the panel "Short Stories" will appear in a separate post:

Wednesday, April 30

Rewriting Family
Housing Works Bookstore Café
Participants: P.F. Thomése, György Dragomán, Yael Hedaya (Moderator: Stacey D'Erasmo)

Dragomán is a Hungarian novelist and translator who was born in Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureş, Romania in 1973.  As a literary translator, he's aware of the limits of translation but doesn't let them become an excuse for not translating.  So let's say you can only get 90%, he said, that's something!  He also conceded that the kinds of limits or problems that one translator faces may be entirely different for another.  If you can't find the solution, someone else will.  This is a very generous and optimistic approach to translation and I thank Dragomán for it.  An audience member asked about the different between translating poetry and prose and remarked that poetry, in particular, tends to be untranslatable.  Dragomán smiled and told us that his wife is a poet and frequently works with translators.  "First, the rhyme goes,  second, some of the meter....but it's ok!  Something stays and that's what's important."  I really wish more readers and critics would focus on how much remains in translation rather than fixating on "losses," which I put in quotes becomes often those who assert that something has been lost in translation 1) haven't read the original or 2) haven't/won't read the translation.

He has a fantastic author website (authors, take note!), where he's posted excerpts from and links to a number of interviews.  I recommend highly his interview with James Smith in which he discusses at length his relationship with his translators and how he approaches the task of translation.