Month: November 2013

from 1001 Winters

~ oxfordbrookesuni

In a dream
I saw a ticket booth
at a bus stop where
birds’ feathers were sold instead of tickets
and the seller was…
an old man
with the early spring sun in his eyes
 
and for you young lady…
he said slowly
and took from somewhere next to the door
where there might have been
a bin and a broom
one more feather
a white plume
light and as tall
as himself
 
I paid and went
in dream’s muddy buses
no notion of waking
no fear of inspection

by Kristiina Ehin, translated by Ilmar Lehtpere

This is the third in our series of four poems taken from the shortlist for The Corneliu M Popescu Prize. The Prize, run by the Poetry Society, was formerly called the European Poetry Translation Prize. The first winner of the Prize, in 1983, was Tony Harrison for The Oresteia. The prize was relaunched in 2003, and renamed in honour of the Romanian translator Corneliu M Popescu, who died in an earthquake in 1977 at the age of 19 The Popescu Prize 2013 has a shortlist of seven books, and the winner will be announced this Friday 29 November.

In addition, this Sunday 1 December sees the launch of a new poetry pamphlet. Inspired by exhibits in the Ancient Near East Gallery of the Ashmolean Museum, the pamphlet will be launched there from 3.30-4.30 with readings from the contributors, Adnan al-Sayegh, and Jenny Lewis. This free event will be introduced by Dr. Paul Collins, Curator of the Ancient Near East Gallery. More readings, led by Adnan al-Sayegh and Jenny Lewis, will take place at the Albion Beatnik Bookstore, 34 Walton Street, from 5.30-7.30: there will be a £2 cover charge and tea and wine will available.

This week’s poem comes from 1001 Winters and is copyright © Kristiina Ehin, 2013. The translation is © Ilmar Lehtpere, 2013. It is reprinted by permission of The Bitter Oleander Press from 1001 Winters by Kristiina Ehin, translated by Ilmar Lehtpere.

The judges of the Popescu Prize, Karen Leeder and David Wheatley, write: ‘Kristiina Ehin’s poem’How to explain my language to you’ ends with a moment of epiphany “in a language neither yours nor mine”, and these fine translations explore the meeting points in which the strange and the familiar find common ground.’

Kristiina Ehin is one of Estonia’s leading poets and is known throughout Europe for her poetry and short stories. She has an MA in Comparative and Estonian Folklore from the University of Tartu, and folklore plays a significant role in her work. In her native Estonian she has to date published six volumes of poetry, three books of short stories and a retelling of South-Estonian fairy tales. She has also written two theatrical productions as well as poetic, imaginative radio broadcasts, one of which has also been released as a CD. She has won Estonia’s most prestigious poetry prize for Kaitseala(Huma, 2005), a book of poems and journal entries written during a year spent as a nature reserve warden on an otherwise uninhabited island off Estonia’s north coast.

Kristiina has published seven books of poetry and three of prose in English translation. The Drums of Silence (Oleander Press, 2007) was awarded the Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation, and The Scent of Your Shadow (Arc, 2010) is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Her plays and broadcasts have also been translated into English and her work, poetryand prose, appears regularly in leading English language literary magazines and anthologies in the US, UK and Ireland. She is the featured writer in The Bitter Oleander, 18.1, with thirty-two pages devoted to her poetry, short stories and an in-depth interview. In addition to English, her work as been translated into nineteen languages. Kristiina lives in Estonia with her husband, the musician Silver Sepp, and her son. Learn more about her from Ilmar Lehtpere’s website devoted to her work, and hear her read from her work in a film from Poetry Parnassus.

Ilmar Lehtpere is Kristiina Ehin’s English language translator. He has translated nearly all of her work – poetry, prose and drama – most of which has appeared in Kristiina’s nine books in his translation, as well as in numerous literary magazines. Kristiina and he have won two prestigious prizes together for poetry in translation. Their collaboration is ongoing. Ilmar lives in Estonia with his wife, the poet Sadie Murphy.

The Bitter Oleander Press, begun in 1974, has devoted itself entirely to contemporary poetry of the imaginative and the concrete particular from both within the United States as well as the rest of the world. We not only publish books in translation, but feature international poets in every issue of our biannual journal, The Bitter Oleander, whose work in translation would not otherwise be available to our astute readership. We publish four to five books of bilingual poetry by individualpoets per year along with two issues (Spring & Autumn) of our journal. Of more recent note are Jacques Dupin’s Of Flies and Monkeys / de singes et de mouches (France) in 2012, Kristiina Ehin’s1001 Winters / 1001 talve (Estonia) in 2013, Ana Minga’s Tobacco Dogs / Perros de tabaco(Ecuador) in 2013, and José-Flore Tappy’s Sheds / Hangars (Switzerland) in 2014 along with Philippe Rahmy’s Movement for the End, A Portrait of Pain / Mouvement par la fin, un portrait de la douleur (Switzerland) also in 2014 and Karl Krolow’s Puppets in the Wind / Eine Puppe im Wind(Germany) also scheduled for publication in early 2015. You can find out more about the press fromits website.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

The Homecoming

~ oxfordbrookesuni

For Lois Pereiro

In Ithaca everyone was dead.
They say it was me, Argos the dog, who woke first:
           –  Dead, dead, dead!
A smell stronger than dung,
the smell of a living man,
made me vomit celestial remains,
cloud-bones,
rainbow-hides.
That man who reeked of legend,
a twitching skeleton,
a bad-tempered ghost,
ripped open the scar with his nails
and smeared the mired shadows with words.
There were our names. All of them.
And the infallible memory of the trees
in Laertes’ orchard.
Half a hundred rows of vines,
thirteen pear trees,
ten apple trees,
forty fig trees.
The blind old man saw, in the end, his son, thanks to the earth’s algebra.
After, Odysseus
came and woke us one by one
and our tears, since then,
are the rope that binds the light
with a violent joy.

by Manuel Rivas, translated by Lorna Shaughnessy

This is the second in our series of four poems taken from the shortlist for The Corneliu M Popescu Prize. The Prize, run by the Poetry Society, was formerly called the European Poetry Translation Prize. The first winner of the Prize, in 1983, was Tony Harrison for The Oresteia. The prize was relaunched in 2003, and renamed in honour of the Romanian translator Corneliu M Popescu, who died in an earthquake in 1977 at the age of 19. The Popescu Prize 2013 has a shortlist of seven books, and the winner will be announced on 29 November.

The original poem ‘The Homecoming’ is copyright © Manuel Rivas, 2009, and the translation is © Lorna Shaughnessy, 2012. It is reprinted by permission of  Shearsman Books from  The Disappearance of Snow  by Manuel Rivas, translated by Lorna Shaughnessy.

The judges of the Popescu Prize, Karen Leeder and David Wheatley, comment: ‘What is your message?’ asks Manuel Rivas in ‘Missed Call’, but these translations show that, as well as being what gets lost, poetry in translation can be about what gets through, the connections we make, and the voices we hear loud and clear.

Poet, novelist, short-story writer and journalist, Manuel Rivas was born in A Coruña, Galicia (north-western Spain) in 1957, and writes in Galician, which is one of Spain’s co-official languages. His work has a deep connection with the landscape, folklore and history of Galicia, but has a universal impact that has led to him being recognised as one of Europe’s leading contemporary writers. A desaparición da neve is his most recent collection of poems and had the unusual distinction of being issued with a single volume in Spain together with translations of the poems into Catalan, Basque and Castilian. Further selections from The Disappearance of Snow can be found in  this pdf file from the Shearsman website.

Lorna Shaughnessy was born in Belfast and lives in County Galway. She lectures in the Department of Spanish, NUI Galway. She has published two collections of her own poems, Torching the Brown River and Witness Trees (Salmon Poetry) as well as two translations of contemporary Mexican poets: Mother Tongue: Selected Poems by Pura López Colomé and If We Have Lost Our Oldest Tales by María Baranda, both with Arden House.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with a very active translation list. Founded in 1981 as a magazine, with some occasional chapbooks, the press – now based in Bristol – has grown rapidly in recent years, and is now one of the most active poetry publishers in the U.K. You can find out more about Shearsman’s work from the  publisher’s website.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

The Tomb of Edgar Poe

~ oxfordbrookesuni

uch as into Himself at last eternity changes him,
the Poet with a naked sword provokes
his century appalled to not have known
death triumphed in that strange voice!

They, like an upstart hydra hearing the angel once
purify the meaning of tribal words
proclaimed out loud the prophecy drunk
without honour in the tide of some black mixture.

From soil and hostile cloud, what strife!
if our idea fails to sculpt a bas-relief
to ornament the dazzling tomb of Poe,

calm block fallen down here from an unseen disaster,
let this granite at least set for all time a limit
to the black flights of Blasphemy scattered in the future.

by Stéphane Mallarmé, translated by Peter Manson

This week we begin a series of four poems taken from the shortlist for The Corneliu M Popescu Prize. The Prize, run by the Poetry Society, was formerly called the European PoetryTranslation Prize. The first winner of the Prize, in 1983, was Tony Harrison for The Oresteia. The prize was relaunched in 2003, and renamed in honour of the Romanian translator Corneliu M Popescu, who died in an earthquake in 1977 at the age of 19. The Popescu Prize 2013 has a shortlist of seven books, and the winner will be announced on 29 November.

This translation of ‘The Tomb of Edgar Poe’ is copyright © Peter Manson, 2012. It is reprinted fromStéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse, translated by Peter Manson and published by Miami University Press in 2012. You can read more about the book on the press’s website.

From the judges of the Popescu Prize, Karen Leeder and David Wheatley: ‘Mallarmé is the strong enchanter of French symbolism, and in these versions Peter Manson has carried an entire body of work across into English with authority, conviction and compulsive readability.’

Stéphane Mallarmé was born in Paris on 18 March 1842, the son of Numa Mallarmé and Élisabeth Desmolins. He had one sister, Maria. After a short spell in the Registry Office at Sens, he trained as a teacher of English, working at schools in Tournon, Besançon and Avignon before settling in Paris in 1871. He married Maria Gerhard in 1863, and they had two children, Geneviève and Anatole. He retired from teaching in 1893, and died, at Valvins (now Vulaines-sur-Seine), on 9 September 1898. His books include Poésies (limited ‘photolithographic’ edition 1887, trade edition 1899), the prose book Divagations (1897), school textbooks on the English language (Les Mots anglais, 1878) and on mythology (Les Dieux antiques, 1879), and a French translation of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe (1888). He wrote widely on contemporary literature, visual art and theatre, and briefly became the editor (and main contributor to) a fashion magazine, La Dernière mode (1874). His groundbreaking visual poem, ‘Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard’ (‘A throw of the Dice never will abolish Chance’), was published in the journal Cosmopolis in 1897, and in book form in 1914. Works published posthumously include the prose tale Igitur (1925) and the surviving notes towards three unfinished projects: ‘Le Livre’ (‘The Book’, 1957), ‘Les Noces d’Hérodiade’ (‘The Marrying of Hérodiade’, 1959) and ‘Pour un Tombeau d’Anatole’ (‘For Anatole’s Tomb’, 1961).

Peter Manson lives in Glasgow. His books include Between Cup and Lip (also from Miami University Press), For the Good of Liars and Adjunct: an Undigest (both from Barque Press). Another book,Poems of Frank Rupture, is due soon. More information about his work can be found on Peter Manson’s website.

Miami University Press publishes poetry, poetry in translation, novellas and short fiction, and books about Miami University history or conferences held at the university. For more details, visit the press’s website.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

The George

~ oxfordbrookesuni

While most have for their smell the deep
entanglement of beer in nylon underlay,
this joint is scrubbed and temperance-sweet,
at least as far as the far corner where Gran
bequeaths her eternal stash of lossin dants.

There’s grandpa strangling the swan who dared
to take a nip at baby Alf, and right behind him
Uncle Alf, lean and in his prime, crooning Haydn
to a brace of pinnied sisters and the highwayman
who someone traced to someone’s distaff side.

There’s our Huguenot great-grandsire, slopping
in off the Pembrokeshire coast. He pontificates
on the elect, sticks out a hand to feel for rain,
moans his way east to Rhymney, and don’t
even get him started on the Treaty of Nantes.

They’re all in there, jammed like junked receipts
in a filofax. Beyond them there’s the Davies Suite,
and further back the Eveleigh, the Jones: dimly lit,
proliferating function rooms, packed with thatchers
and lay-preaching stiffs, each of them marrying in,

each of them thwacking upon the table their own
lame dowry of myth. Sunday visits. Suicides.
The gypsy someone had a tumble with, and hence
that auntie’s Persian eyes. They’re all there gossiping
as far as the dark back garden, ignorant of my love.

by Dai George

‘The George’ is copyright © Dai George, 2013. It is reprinted from The Claims Office, published by Seren Books in 2013.

Notes from Seren:

Dai George is originally from Cardiff and now lives and teaches in London. He studied at the universities of Bristol and Columbia, NYC, where he completed his Master of Fine Arts in Writing in 2010. As well as poetry, his criticism has been published in a range of magazines including Poetry Wales, Poetry Review and New Welsh Review. He writes fiction and is working towards a historical novel on the Gunpowder Plot, with Ben Jonson as the central character. According to Roddy Lumsden, ‘Dai George seems to me to offer something new to Welsh, and to British poetry. In fact, perhaps the poet he most reminds me of is the leading Northern Irish poet of the newer generation, Alan Gillis, not in terms of direct stylistic commonalities, but in that both these poets can and do switch successfully between a higher, lyrical style and something closer to demotic narrative’. You can read more from The Claims Office on Seren’s site, watch Dai George read from his work on YouTube, and attend the launch of the book on Thursday 14 November at The Tea House Theatre, 139 Vauxhall Walk, London .

Seren Books (‘Seren’ means ‘star’ in Welsh) is based in Bridgend, South Wales. Originally conceived by Cary Archard and Dannie Abse as an offshoot of Poetry Wales magazine in the latter’s garage in Ogmore-by-Sea in the early 80s, under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press has gone from strength to strength and has published a wide range of titles including fiction (which under Editor Penny Thomas has seen the Booker-nominated novel by Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days, and an acclaimed novella series based on the medieval Welsh tales from the Mabinogion) and non-fiction (including literary criticism such as the new John Redmond title Poetry and Privacy, as well as sumptuous art books like the collaboration between photographer David Hurn and poet John Fuller, Writing the Picture). Seren’s poetry list, edited by Amy Wack since the early 90s, has produced T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated titles by Deryn Rees-Jones and Pascale Petit, Costa winner John Haynes, and a large list of Forward Prize winners and nominees, as well as continuing to publishing classic Welsh writers. Most recently, Seren has also added Irish and American writers to its list.

For more details about Seren, visit the publisher’s website, where there is a blog about Seren’s news and events. You can also find Seren on Facebook, on Twitter, and on YouTube, where there are videos of a number of poets reading from their work.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.