Editor Alissa Valles Speaks

Team NEP: The below just in from translator, editor, and poet Alissa Valles. And here's an interview with her about her work as a translator. JB



Hello: I’m Alissa Valles – I edited the Polish, Spanish, Dutch and Flemish sections of the NEP anthology. Joel asked me a few things related to translation and cultural context that I’d like to respond to here. My own relationship to each of the above countries and cultures is very different, so first a word on that, because it may be relevant to some of the issues of cultural resonance Joel raised. I have ancestry and family history in Spain (my parents lived there before I was born, my brother was born there) but have never lived there. I was born in Amsterdam and raised there and in the US, multilingually; I’ve always felt more comfortable in English than in Dutch, and although I’ve translated into Dutch, all of my own writing is in English. I studied Polish in England (alongside Russian) and later lived, studied and worked in Poland for years, and now spend part of each year in Warsaw.

Here are Joel’s questions:

- Obviously, when we read a poem in translation, we apprehend a different object than the original in terms of language. But what about in terms of culture? Reading the poems in the anthology, my students have consistently expressed anxiety over the idea that even when they're enjoying a given poem, they may be enjoying it for the "wrong reasons," because they don't have an understanding of the cultural context in which the poem was born. How necessary would you say it is for American readers of these poems to acquaint themselves with the contemporary political/cultural/economic/ religious contexts of the countries represented? How much of the poetry is "lost" to us if we don't understand those contexts?

Obviously a great deal of the context for a poem is embedded in its linguistic choices and texture, but there is also context that can be learned – though the meaning it adds is still not even near what is available to a native speaker. One helpful analogy for reading poetry in translation may be reading poetry in English from a time or place remote from our own. To read Shakespeare, it obviously helps to learn something about his world. But in fact, readers of the NEP anthology may know (or intuit) more about the contemporary European world to which the anthology is related, than about Elizabethan England or colonial America. I’m not convinced a set of footnotes or a program of research is necessary to an enjoyment and immediate basic grasp of the poems in NEP (anymore than they are for Shakespeare). It’s a bit like meeting a bunch of new people at a party – you may not get all of their references, but you can have fun getting to know them. There is always room for a deepening of the response, if you decide you want to spend more time with these people, and history, politics, art, gender relations, religious tradition, anything you can learn about the culture will add interest and perhaps understanding. The untranslatable meanings embodied in language and social context of which a reader is acutely or vaguely aware should not preclude exploration and engagement with what is open. I feel poets in particular have a licence, and perhaps even a cultural duty, to guess and glean. Even misreadings, if we believe Harold Bloom, can be fertile. If the translator has done his or her job properly, the reader will be given a rich and suggestive poem that remains as faithful to the original in form and meaning as an English poem can. It is an impure, hybrid process – both for translator and reader - that should enrich poetry in English with new forms and meanings.

As for ‘wrong reasons’ for enjoying a poem in translation, what would be an example? There may be obstacles and misreadings, but perhaps there are no ‘wrong reasons’; just reasons, or readings, that are more or less profound. There may be a hierarchy of readings from shallow to deep, but I’m reluctant to be the arbiter of that hierarchy, or to dismiss a surface impression which may in fact lead to something important in the poem that isn’t so obvious. Being too much on top of a culture (as you often are if you’re immersed in a particular translation project) can also blind you (me) to potential meanings. So a widening of the readership only helps.

Generally speaking, I suspect that some knowledge of the culture is more important in reading the Polish section of the anthology than in reading the Dutch, Flemish or Spanish sections, and this is in itself interesting. For obvious political and historical reasons, Poland has undergone a radical transformation in the last thirty years, which is roughly the span of the anthology. In that period, Dutch and Spanish society have been relatively stable – despite their own at times explosive problems with immigration or separatism. (The Dutch section should really have some of the poetry written by the young poets writing in Dutch but intimately tied to the culture of Turkey or Morocco or Bosnia – all I can plead is lack of space, and a tentative sense that a great talent has yet to make its appearance among that group.) I think it’s fair to say – though I don’t know if the other regional editors would agree – there is not the same kind of generational revolution in poetry in Western Europe that you see in Poland. The younger Polish poets are often reacting against the politically engaged and often moralizing poetry of their predecessors who found themselves, in a variety of ways, opposing themselves to an authoritarian regime. In a more general way, the younger poets are trying to topple (or enrich, depending on your point of view) the canon of Polish poetry presented by Czeslaw Milosz. Sometimes polemically, sometimes by simply turning to relatively unexplored territory, particularly life in a new and very raw consumer society.

As I look at ‘my’ sections now, it seems to me that the Dutch and Spanish poets write with virtually no explicit references to their national culture, no geographical or linguistic markers. The Poles do it (perhaps only a bit) more. One should ask why this is. Have poets become more cosmopolitan, less connected to a particular culture and place? Certainly the NEP poets may be to an extent self-selecting, in that poems that translate well tend to be poems that forgo emphasis on local detail, slang, etc. In reading the whole anthology, I was struck by how many of the poets were themselves already tuned in to American (or English-language) poetry, spoke fluent Ashbery, had spent time in America or England, and so on. I made a conscious effort in working on my sections not to yield to that bias, and not to settle for any bland internationalism, but I did want to include poems that ‘worked’ in English. It’s very frustrating, and you see the phenomenon in the earlier generations of Polish poets as well: terrific poets whose language is rooted in slang, etymology, bent syntax, local references, are harder to transport – I’m thinking of Miron Bialoszewski, Krystyna Milobedzka, there are others. This is the real loss – or lack – which is a challenge to translators, but it remains in a sense invisible to a reader without knowledge of the particular foreign language and poetry. Some of the best wines don’t travel.

A side note: Another thing invisible to readers of translations is the involvement or non-involvement of the poet in the translation, and the arguments that may have gone on between translator and poet or translator and editor or editor and poet. Although the translation may be given as the work of a translator with the author, there are smaller but not insignificant interactions – a kind of back-stage life – which are another kind of context for the poem. Some poets don’t care if very place- or culture-specific references are preserved and would just as soon see some sort of English or American equivalent, others are terrified of losing them. Some translators avoid contact with the poet they are translating, some want to vet every detail.

One example of a poem for which some context may be essential is ‘Good Later’ by Marcin Sendecki. For a Polish reader, the poem takes place in the context of a certain polemic about and ‘incomprehensible poetry’. Sendecki inserts a particular Polish critic-poet’s text (published in a periodical) into the poem – everything in italics is an extended quote. In the background of the polemic is Czeslaw Milosz’s essay “On Incomprehensible Poetry” (cf. Milosz’s essays To Begin Where I Am, FSG 2001). Sendecki’s tactic for responding to the accusation (often leveled at him) is framing it in mundane, tacky, vital details of everyday life, as if tuning into it and out of it as if it were a radio broadcast, or a voice heard in passing. The title itself is a colloquial contraction of ‘good morning’ and ‘see you later’. I included the poem because it seems to me a kind of ars poetica poem (and because the Sendecki poem I wanted to include was too long for the section).

This is what I have time to write today, but I’d be happy to comment more on specific poets or sections, if questions come up in your reading.

How foreign is the foreign?

C. K. Williams, in the March issue of Poetry, muses about the globalization of poetry as evidenced by, among other things, New European Poets.

Don Share, on Harriet, muses about Williams' musings.

Johannes Göransson weighs in on his blog.

Your thoughts?

Ana Božičević Weighs In On Croatia

I asked Ana Božičević, a Croatian poet who's been living in America since she was nineteen, to weigh in on our blog. Ana's first book, Stars of the Night Commute, will be published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in Fall 2009. For poems and everything else, visit her at nightcommute.org.

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Hola. Let me start with a brief caveat: I moved to the U.S. from Croatia at age 19, and had for a long while, probably through the offices of overwork and an exclusive focus on my new environment/language (and some sort of don't-turn-back-Orpheus complex) lost much of my grasp of contemporary Croatian poetry. Only in the past couple of years, thanks to the wonders of internet bookstores and web mags, and an editorial project I worked on for an international spinoff of S. Young/J. Spahr's "Numbers Trouble," have I reconnected with Croatian poetry and poets. Some knowledge was inevitably lost in the gap.

So here's my two cents, which on the other side of the coin might be two kunas, or euros -- you pick.

Your brief historical/linguistic overview of Croatia on the blog is quite sufficient for these purposes. The two things to 'get' in respect to Croatia is how much social/national turmoil it has been subjected to, well, always, and how inevitably this has reflected on its poets' national and linguistic identities -- which were often shaped by reactionary instincts. Still, there's a great deal of variety in Croatian poetry -- from vernacular poems of daily life and witness, to the (neo)avantgarde, postmodern, language, and surrealist poetries... all loose labels you're free to peel off as soon as they bore. Check Poetry International Web here and here for more on the history of modern Croatian poetry from wiser folk. http://croatia.poetryinternationalweb.org and the Croatian section of Transcript magazine offer a great supplementary array of poets and poems for anyone interested in exploring beyond the NEP anthology (a word of warning though -- the translations are uneven). The Croatian language, like the other languages of the region, is notoriously "difficult" (remember "Clinton deploys vowels to Bosnia"? {Ed: Yes!}), but I don't think this is anything a good translator would be phased by.

Igor Štiks's selections are very representative of contemporary Cro Po -- on the mark. Any omissions can realistically be blamed on a lack of space. I was surprised, though, not to see Dorta Jagić in this anthology. That's a little bit like excluding, say, Matthea Harvey from an anthology of new American poets. She's an extraordinary poet and my frustration with her unavailability in English has finally driven me to begin translating her. Look for her at a friendly magazine near you, sometime soon. The not-sufficiently-spoken secret of Croatian poetry today is the immensely vital mini-renaissance of women poets who are taking Croatian poetry in very necessary directions. To quote Darija Žilić, a wonderful poet and critic (doubtlessly better qualified to answer these questions -- Darija? -- her latest book of critical essays is "Writing in Milk"), who says, in response to Rade Jarak's question "Has the poetry written by women brought a new sensitivity, in the form of literary experience, to our everyday lives?":

"You put that very well – the need for a new “sensitivity.” Recently, Kemo Mujičić Artnam made an interesting comment in the magazine Tema. As he read an anthology of poetry from the former Yugoslavia in the Sarajevo Notebooks, he noticed that 70% of the poems spoke about blood, knife, nationhood. That tells us all we need to know about the current zeitgeist. I think women authors much more significantly undermine the national(ist) discourse, they are more sensitive to “difference,” and the themes they investigate are closer to the everyday – generally, they don’t crow about the spirit of the nation, writing instead about the body, motherhood, etc." (from Knjigomat)

She also points out that contemporary Croatian women poets "avoid politics, preferring to write about their “I” and about a somewhat autistic dream-world." This "dreamworld," the direct opposite of the dialectic of war, "blood, knife, and nationhood" -- the poetics of a different kind of witness -- speaks very much to "gurlesque" as discussed by Arielle Greenberg, Lara Glenum, and others. And contemporary Croatian women poets (more names, in addition to the above and the anthology: Aida Bagić, Vesna Biga, Olja Savičević Ivančević, Jasenka Kodrnja, Ljuba Lozančić, Sonja Manojlović, Irena Matijašević, Sibila Petlevski and many more!) as well as the male poets willing to transcend the above dialectic (see the NEP anthology) are, in my view, the key to making Croatian poetry new, newly Croatian, Croatian and universal in new ways. The selection in NEP is reflective, for me, of this hope. That I focus more on the women poets here is incidental to my interests and research and -- well, someone has to focus on them. They're so worth it. I'd love to see an anthology of New European Women Poets Who Kick Ass; I volunteer to translate all of the above for its pages.
Since I'm not viewing these poets, or Croatian and American poetry, from inside Croatia (except my inner Croatia), I fear that my answers to your last few questions would be inaccurate. Let's leave them below, though, and I'll invite some wise Croats to contribute to the comments section, if that's acceptable. A glimpse at the latest issues of the Croatian journal Poezija (Poetry) tells me that Croatian readers have been reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kim Addonzio, June Jordan, Charles Bukowski (ah, Bukowski), Billy Collins and Anne Carson. A medley. And a lot of European poets to boot. The variety of nationalities and schools found in this one journal make it rather more interesting than many American poetry mags. Just saying.

Also, write to me and feel free to contradict me on any and all points above. I want/need to learn more about Croatian poetry too. Help.

Thanks for the opportunity to share with you! Happy reading,

Ana

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Additional Qs "Leftover" by Ana:

How are the poets in this anthology (Branko Males, Anka Zagar, Branko Cegec, Delimir Resicki, Kresimir Bagic, Damir Sodan, Tatjana Gromaca) viewed in Croatia? Are these the most popular poets in Croatia? The most accessible to non-Croatian audiences?

Do you feel that Croatian poets are pressured (internally or externally) to write poems that are Croatian? Are poets concerned with being Croatian enough? Or, are poets concerned with seeming too Croatian? Is there pressure to write poems that are accessible to non-Croatian audiences?

What role does poetry play in the life of your average Croat? Are Croatian poets writing for "the masses?" Do Croatian poets feel compelled to write poems that are beneficial to "the people?"

Are there any American poets who are particularly popular among Croatian poets?

Book Recommendations

Before I forget, folks. Recommendations for those interested in learning more about the regions we've been discussing this week and last.

Balkan Ghosts, by Robert D. Kaplan

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, by Rebecca West

Titos Patrikios (b. 1928)

Η ΠΥΛΗ ΤΩΝ ΛΕΟΝΤΩΝ

Τα λιοντάρια είχαν χαθεί από χρόνια
ούτε ένα δεν βρισκόταν σ’όλη την Ελλάδα
ή μάλλον ένα μοναχικό, κυνηγημένο
κάπου είχε κρυφτεί στην Πελοπόννησο
χωρίς ν’απειλεί πια κανέναν
ώσπου το σκότωσε κι αυτό ο Ηρακλής.
Ωστόσο η θύμηση των λιονταριών
ποτέ δεν έπαψε να τρομάζει
τρόμαζε η εικόνα τους σε θυρεούς και ασπίδες
τρόμαζε το ομοίωμά τους στα μνημεία των μαχών
τρόμαζε η ανάγλυφη μορφή τους
στο πέτρινο υπέρθυρο της πύλης.
Τρομάζει πάντα το βαρύ μας παρελθόν
τρομάζει η αφήγηση όσων έχουν συμβεί
καθώς τη χαράζει η γραφή στο υπέρθυρο
της πύλης που καθημερινά διαβαίνουμε.



The Lions’ Gate

The lions had already departed.
Not even one in all of Greece,
except for a rather solitary, evasive
lion hiding out somewhere on the Peleponnesus,
a threat to no one at all,
until it too was slaughtered by Hercules.
Still, our memories of lions
never stopped terrifying us:
their terrible images on coats of arms and shields,
their terrible figures on battle monuments,
that terrible relief carved
into a stone lintel over the gate.
Our past is forever full, terrible,
just as the story of what happened is terrible,
carved as it is now, written on the lintel
of the gate we pass through every day.

--Titos Patrikios

[from The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios. Truman State UP, 2007]

Patrikios, as I mentioned in one of the comments to a post below, is a member of that generation which comes after that of Seferis/Ritsos/Elytis and before the younger generation featured in the NEP anthology. I add this to the discussion since it seems to get at the complicated, ambivalent relationship a modern Greek poet (or any citizen of a place like Athens) has to history: namely, having to encounter (endure) daily contact with the Classical past while simultaneously recognizing the violence and chaos of the more recent past, not to mention the present.

May it thicken the soup just a little...in case you are all still actively processing the Balkan poets.

Christopher

A Couple Approaches

[& SORRY THIS POST IS SO HUGE!]



Hello Joel and others. And thanks for inviting me to participate in your blog. (And it’s very cool to see so much lively thinking about this project! The book was such an enormous task for Wayne and me and the many regional editors--so it’s especially gratifying to see it making its way in the world.)

Joel: I’m probably not the best person to answer your second question, which seems specific to translating. I’ve published only a few translations myself and, while I find the kinds of cultural questions you raise interesting, I’ll leave the answers to those who have spent more time wrestling with them.

But you also asked about how important it was that the selected poets be “representative of the current poetry scene” in each country vs. the value of including only poets we thought “most important.” That’s an interesting question—and it’s one I’ve wrestled with not only in this book, but in two other anthologies I’ve edited, as well. And recently, I had to write up some notes and ideas on this very subject for one of those AWP talks, so maybe I’ll flesh those out a bit here. [And looking back over it, I can't help thinking I've added maybe more flesh than you want!]

It seems to me that it might be useful to think about a couple approaches to editing any anthology that attempts to represent a large population of writers in a limited space.

The first approach might overtly acknowledge that any such project necessarily involves an imposition of strong editorial authority. The editor’s role here is to ask what the best of such-and-such poetry—younger poets, Latvian poets, etc.—might look like, to overlay one aesthetic, the editor’s, onto a multitude of poetries. This kind of activist approach, therefore, might imagine an idealized sort of canon within the limits of the anthology and advocate for it, the editor more-or-less explicitly saying, “here I am, the editorial ego. Hello!” This anthology sets forth a kind of editorial argument for one kind of poetry, or one so-called “important” poetry, against the mass of other poetry.

The second approach might also acknowledge this imposition, but then attempt, as much as possible, to subvert it. The second kind of anthologist sees editing as an active subversion of editorial ego in the service of a kind of generalized representation. I imagine this sort of anthologist suggests to the reader, “Here I am, but pay no attention to me,” as it tries to represent (albeit imperfectly) the writing of a population of writers. What are the many modes of writing that seem to be of interest to Lithuanian poets today? It asks not what, for instance, Irish poetry might ideally look like, but rather seeks to represent the many strands of what Irish poetry appears to be.

Of course, both approaches are troubling, and steering a middle course more often than not merely clouds the issue.

I’ve been both kinds of editor and made choices I regret. I’ve also seen anthologies that do the same kinds of work better than I have done.

About ten years ago, I edited a book called THE NEW YOUNG AMERICAN POETS—an anthology of poets in their twenties and thirties, actively writing in the United States in the late 1990s. I had a general sense of the kind of poetry I was going to select and, pretty self-consciously, decided to take the first approach—that is, to see in this anthology an early attempt to define for readers not just what poets of a certain age were writing—of course, there were thousands and thousands of them, and I could only include about 40—but also to suggest in my selection what I hoped American poetry might look like in years to come, what it might, in my fantasyland, become. At the time, I thought I’d favor a kind of poetry that was both formally innovative and, at the same time, suggestive of narrative. I was not that interested in Language poetry, poetry that owed too overt a debt to certain theoretical ideas I’d studied in school. I was not, I told myself, interested in winking irony. Nor was I terribly interested in poetry that seemed merely confessional. I imagined formal innovation with overt subject matter, poetry that, were it clearly about the self of the poet, challenged those notions at the same time. In short, I didn’t really know what I wanted, and this was the problem. I was young and I had not read enough in my life to be making the kinds of arguments I was trying to make. Also, I thought that, since I was OF that generation, I was in a kind of unique position to edit such a book. That’s a dangerous assumption.

The result, THE NEW YOUNG AMERICAN POETS, has some terrific poems in it, poems I return to with admiration. Other writers and readers have told me it was important to them, and I still think it’s an OK book. But it is a flawed book. The reason is that, while I imagined a ground breaking book, a sort of touchstone that would actively help define and influence American poetry, I had never really sat down and asked myself, what, exactly, am I trying to define here? What kinds of arguments is this book making? (And I recall that even as I edited the book, I imagined my editorial vision would be broad; nevertheless, the book, I’d hoped, would make a sort of implicit argument—though, in the final peer-review run, that argument got almost completely wiped out of the introduction. So I had a kind of problematic combination of both approaches, I suppose – editorial authority and editorial invisibility, never really doing a great job at either. )

(FYI: my late friend Reginald Shepherd put together a similar anthology in a more mature way. Not that I like his individual selections more; rather I think his overall project is more mature.)

Later, Wayne and I took what I think of as the other approach in NEW EUROPEAN POETS. We realized, first of all, that there was no editor alive capable of attempting to represent all of European poetry with any authority. To do so would require speaking every European language, being familiar with every European poetry, the history and nuances of language in every region of Europe….that is, the editor for such a book would have to be God. And even then, I wasn’t sure it could be done.

Wayne and I, therefore, decided that such a book, at least on our parts, would have to involve something closer to an exercise of editorial modesty. We’d see the project as more of an escape from the editorial self than an embracing of it. And, as you know, Wayne and I really selected almost none of the contents of the book (well, Wayne, a translator of Albanian, selected Albanian language poetry; my work with the tiny Icelandic section is more complicated. Glad to explain it, but not in print).

Instead, we brought into the fold those regional editors who have been commenting on your blog now and then. Our idea was that these would be people who would, first of all, have a deep interest in the poetry of their particular regions. And their project would be impossible; their allotment of the book’s total pages would be necessarily ridiculously small. Therefore, Alissa Valles would have 14 pages to represent all of Spanish poetry. Portugal would get 7 pages. And we’d instructed the editors to approach this impossible task with as little of their own baggage as possible. Represent not your own interests, we suggested; be as invisible as possible. Try to paint as quick a sketch of the poetry of your region, accepting all the while that the total project would suggest to readers the clamor of European poetry, the multitude of voices and, behind them, visions, histories, ethnicities, worldviews.

The readership, we figured, would be American, the reader an American who would smartly understand the impossibility of the project and, at the same time, appreciate the peek into the writing of other lands and languages, who might, afterwards, be inspired to read further, in other translated or untranslated works.

Of course, editorial invisibility was every bit as problematic as stated editorial/aesthetic authority, though it was, finally, a far more appealing approach to me. (And, of course, it was easier to accomplish when working on a book on a community of poets I wasn’t part of; what right had I, after all, to impose a vision for how I thought European poetry OUGHT to look.) And, since the project was flawed from the start, the acknowledgement of that flaw made the project exciting and strange, trusting both the knowledge of regional editors and the luck of what they’d haul in in their nets.

I’m not sure one approach is actually better than the other and, as I suggested, steering a middle course is difficult. One can’t both try to paint a picture of what you THINK poetry OUGHT TO BE and, at the same time, represent EVERYBODY, the total diversity of a population’s poetry.

The result of my approaches has been two anthologies that are flawed in every way that any anthology is flawed. What I learned, however, from doing this, is the importance of spelling out these problems ahead of time, of thinking about them and, better still, planning for them. If editorial invisibility is, somehow, the ideal, of knowing and stating clearly in the introduction that this is both the goal and, at the same time, impossible. There can be no perfect representation of any group but that the noise and orchestrated clamor of the anthology is as close as one can get.

(Or—and had I more foresight—in the case of the first anthology, spelling out exactly what my editorial intentions were, coming to a clear definition of them for myself before I imposed them on readers. Had I spelled those out, the discussion of the anthology might have had less to do with who was included and who, damn him, was cut, and more to do with the problems and viability of what the anthology was, overall, arguing for. Of course, this kind of anthology must exclude plenty of good writers, writers that don’t fit the argument. Mere “goodness,” whatever that is, is not, alone, enough.)

I guess in an abstract way, I’m suggesting that your question comes right to the heart of the problems I’ve always worried about when I’m editing a book. Obviously, there’s more at stake in this kind of project than an editor’s selecting 50 or 200 poems he likes, typing them up, and putting them between two covers. To do that is to either, 1) assume that people really care who Kevin’s 50 favorite writers are (as if editing were like making the ultimate mix-tape) or 2) to think that Kevin’s 50 favorite writers are in any way representative of the larger community outside Kevin’s imagination.

Strangely, last year the NEA asked me to put together a book called CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY to be published in Pakistan, in Urdu. Here, a whole new set of problems was raised: Upon completing a first draft—and I’d taken the approach of maximum editorial invisibility, an attempt to give Pakistani readers a sense of the many modes, styles, and aesthetics of contemporary American poetry—the book had to be vetted by a panel of government readers, many of whom were obviously must more sensitive to the expectations of the publishers and readers in Pakistan. When the manuscript was returned to me for a second draft, I learned that many of the poems I’d considered rather benign were much more complicated than I’d thought. The advance readers were nervous about what I’d considered mild profanity or sexual explicitness, arguing that these would be not translate well for their desired readers and would misrepresent, if not the literal words of American poetry, the experience of American poetry, or, more specifically, an American poetry not necessarily MEANT to shock or even disturb that, nevertheless, was overshadowed by those traits in translation. But that’s another story—one that, strangely, gets at the heart of the question I started this blog thinking I’d avoid.

On Editing Greece and Cyprus

Greetings, readers of the anthology!

I’m Christopher Bakken, regional editor for Greece and Cyprus, and co-editor of the section dedicated to Turkey. Joel just alerted me to the site earlier today, so I haven’t had a chance to scroll through everything—so if I’m redundant about certain things, forgive that. Joel also reports that you’re about to discuss those three countries in class tomorrow, so I thought I’d toss down a few notes to get the conversation rolling, in the hopes that you might fire specific questions my way, or fire ideas into the blog’s friendly ether, and I can cover whatever I haven’t more easily in subsequent responses.

Joel asked me:

As you were selecting poets for the sections of the anthology you edited, to what extent were your choices based on a desire for the selections to be representative of the current poetry scene in the country? On a desire to include the poets you thought most important, regardless of how representative? Or on other desires entirely?

I answer:

In case you don’t know, Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer, the anthology’s editors, divided our page limits according to each country’s population (so Cyprus gets two pages, and Greece six, and Turkey many more) and the instructions were simple: it was up to us to fill those pages as we saw fit, according to our own tastes and rules of literary logic. They just trusted us.

Since most of the regional editors were themselves poets, they did this knowing that we’d be idiosyncratic and personal in our choices, perhaps, rather than academically “responsible” or mathematically representative. Their aim, as I understood it as a regional editor, was to produce an anthology that re-awakened American poets to what was happening in European poetry: which is to say, the audience for the anthology was American poets, not Comparative Literature scholars (I’m guessing the Comp. Lit. folks would have produced a very different kind of anthology).

I dealt with each section differently, according to my understanding of each place and the situation of poetry within each place. I’ll try to confess what I was thinking with regards to each country, offering what amounts to a highly personal rationale for my editorial choices. I can only get to Greece and Cyprus tonight. Push me a little and I’ll promise to talk about Turkey (which I co-edited) in the near future.

Greece

This is the country I know the best, since I’ve lived there and visited there off and on for almost two decades. I speak the language and translate Greek poetry.

So it was easy for me to go there to do “research,” hanging out in Athens for several weeks, tapping into the very hierarchical and nepotistic literary scene there, and interviewing poets and editors regarding the “young poets” of Greece.

What I found out was rather astounding: the concept of the “young poet” doesn’t really exist in Greece. When I asked one famous editor who the crucial young poets were he said, “ask me again in twenty years…then we’ll know.” It’s rare for poets to publish much before their thirties and it’s rare for any poet to have a real reputation before their late forties. In short, there wasn’t much consensus about much before that.

So I went back to some simple criteria: I’d choose poets whose work I admired, whose translations seemed to “work” in English. And I decided early on to offer at least a few poems by each poet rather than just one poem by six or eight poets. That meant making choices that have no doubt perplexed and angered some of my Greek friends. Some have, no doubt, wondered what I was thinking.

Well, I knew that I wanted to dedicate at least half of my selection to women poets. Here’s a crucial subject for your blog: in many countries in Europe (Eastern Europe in particular), there’s barely a tradition for women poets. Greek women poets may reach way back to Sappho, but there’s not much between B.C. and the 20th century to hang on to with regards to a tradition. And feminism has come late to Greece as well, since it is an Orthodox Christian and openly patriarchal culture. But in the last two or three decades, women are beginning to find their voices in every sphere, and in poetry as well. One of the greatest living Greek poets is Kiki Dimoula. Another is Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke. They are passing the baton to a new generation of Greek women. I wanted my selections to represent this exciting development accordingly.

So two women poets have their say here: Liana Sakelliou (who spent a lot of time in the U.S., married an American, and who is deeply influenced by H.D., Plath, and the Midwestern American poets) and Marigo Alexopoulou, a very new arrival on the scene, who seems a little more firmly planted in her home country (even though she took her Ph.D. in England).

Of the male poets, Haris Vlavianos is perhaps the ultimate “establishment poet,” the editor of the most important poetry magazine in Greece, as well as the editor or the most important poetry publishing house in Greece. He’s the translator of Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Stevens, Poe, and many other American poets into Greek. I thought he’d give American readers some sense of the cosmopolitan nature of the Greek intellectual: Greece is a small country, but its intellectuals cast their glance very wide. His poems reflect that pretty openly, I think.

Giorgos Chouliaras, a kind of diplomat in the U.S., barely lives in Greece, which means many Greek poets have pretty much forgotten about him or written him off as an ex-pat (though he is very much Greek and his poems reflect that). You’ll feel the timbre of political poetry and a sense of exile in his work, reminiscent as it is of someone like Milosz, ready to do the work of witness. He is representative of the engaged poet in the generation following the junta and all the nastiness it represents. And, well, David Mason’s translations were just so damn good that it seemed right to throw caution to the wind and include him.

So, do you see how capricious and irresponsible I am?


Cyprus

I went to Cyprus about five years ago and spent several nights intentionally dining in excellent restaurants in Nicosia right next to the “Green Line,” the wall that separates the Greek and Turkish parts of the city. The Berlin Wall may have fallen but the wall in Cyprus has not. One feels the Cold War there, those tensions and violence we’d almost forgotten. So I’d sit in a fancy Greek place, eating octopus on white tablecloths listening to Vivaldi while, from just over the wall, I’d listen to some Turkish kids blasting Madonna from their car stereo, arguing about who knows what, all of this within the gaze of the heavily armed guards stationed at the check-point towers.

Somehow I wanted my selections in the anthology to reflect this uncanny edge and Babel.

The very week I visited Cyrpus, fat men from the U.N. were at a fancy hotel in the Alps trying to broker a deal to “re-unite” the island. Their plan failed. The Greeks of Cyprus wouldn’t agree (and it would take a long entry to explain why), it was clear.

Only two intellectuals on the whole island had spoken up IN FAVOR of the U.N. plan in the papers, and both were poets: Stephanos Stephanides (Greek) and Gur Genc (Turkish). These two poets had met in spite of the green line and had become friends, translating their poetry to one another, for one another. When I went with Stephanos to the Turkish side of the border and met Gur Genc, when I watched the two of them kiss, then argue about the things poets care about (what else: language, the truth, et al.), I knew that they truly represented the situation of Cypriot poetry. Given two pages, it was kind of a no-brainer.

I included the other poem by Lyssandros Pitharas because it was gorgeous. And because I knew a little of his story: Pitharas (a very promising young Cypriot-Greek, writing in English) had a Turkish lover and he died of AIDS. I’ll spare you my over-determined reading of the metaphor that represents and let his stunning posthumous poem speak for itself.

Kalinichta (that's Greek for "good night"),

Christopher Bakken

Interview With Kristin Dimitrova

Do you feel that the poets representing Bulgaria in New European Poetry (Edvin Sugarev, Lyubomir Nikolov, Boiko Lambovski, Mirela Ivanova, Georgi Gospodinov, and yourself) are an accurate representation of What’s Going On in Bulgarian Poetry Today?


Everyone included cuts a fairly distinctive figure here, one way or another. But of course, there are other names as well. Rumen Leonidov, Georgi Borisov, Ekaterina Yosifova, Ivan Metodiev… The poets in New European Poetry make a representative sample, but it is still a sample. Imagine the following question: “Now that I’ve seen Chicago, do you think I’ve got an accurate picture of what’s going on in America?” There is no easy answer to this.




If you were editing the Bulgarian section, which poets would you have selected?


I wasn’t in charge of the Bulgarian section, so I’d rather respect the choice of the editors. When one compiles an anthology, one usually keeps to a chosen angle, so the whole book would have a message of its own, like “the new European poetry is pessimistic, or political, or preoccupied with cultural diversity, of metaphysical, or you name it.” An anthology is as much representative of its editors’ tastes as it is of the poetic trends of the period. (By the way, I haven’t seen the book so far. I just didn’t receive it.)




Do you identify as a Bulgarian Poet (as opposed to a poet who happens to be Bulgarian)?


Maybe the second way of thinking feels closer to what I am. I happen to be a woman, I happen to be born in Bulgaria, I happen to have brown eyes, to go to bed late and to love cats. It’s an illusion to think that everything is a matter of choice. A lot of things just happen to us, but they define us nevertheless. I don’t feel like a spokesman for my country, if that’s what you mean. I feel like a person talking to other persons. As a child I decided to prepare a speech in case I get abducted by Martians. Soon I found out I could say very little on behalf of the Earth inhabitants in general. This seems like an early problem of representation.




Do you ever feel pressured to write more “globally?” What I mean is, do you ever feel pressured to make your work accessible to non-Bulgarians?


Living in Bulgaria and writing in Bulgarian, I’ve always seen Bulgarians as my immediate audience. However, the pressure you are asking about is already in the air and is becoming a very important factor in whatever is written and published at home. Perhaps this is only logical for a culture, shared by eight million people, a million of them abroad. This pressure comes both from the outside and from the inside:

• There are very few non-Bulgarian specialists, translating from Bulgarian, so whatever happens in Bulgaria tends to stay in Bulgaria (just what they say about Vegas). I imagine that these rare people are a target of all kinds of lobbying pressure coming from home, where it is very easy to cheerlead enthusiasm for a book nobody cares to read.

• There are some set expectations abroad concerning life on the Balkans, which are as enduring as the news of violence, mafia and corruption (not that we don’t have them) in the newspapers. I’ll try to give and example. The Vikings did a lot of trouble to Europe between 800-1100, but they are unflaggingly depicted as cool and romantic in books and movies. Even I am a victim of this ravishing image of huge swordsmen with blond plaits, you can’t help liking them. On the other hand khan Krum, who ruled between 802-814, stretched Bulgarian borders to the Frankish empire. In those days Bulgaria was a neighbor of what was to become later France and Germany. Attacked by the Byzantines, Krum summoned an army which included women as well, defeated the invaders and killed their emperor. Have you seen any Antonio Banderas films about this? No matter what happened in the past, we are forever held hostages by our recent histories. What is commonly expected from Bulgarian art nowadays – this, of course, is as inaccurate as all generalizations – is this sort of passionate, love-hate, song and tears, grotesque, absurd and exotic picture of a periphery, preferably trimmed with folk songs and national costumes. Nobody expects national costumes from the Italians.

• So far I’ve been arguing that there aren’t many differences between us and the rest of the world. Now I’ll say something in the opposite direction. There are social facts nobody cares to know about us, but still they are part of our lives. Like, for instance, doctors are generally poor and underpaid in Bulgaria; writers used to be very important people during socialism; getting rich overnight is usually connected to politics and not to business or industry; party affiliations play very important roles for all kinds of careers, etc. One usually finds all these peculiarities after deciding to translate a short story into another language. Consciously or not, this has resulted in a long list of novels and films depicting a foreigner, coming to Bulgaria, and what happens to him or her. The eyes of the foreigner are a sort of an excuse for the additional explanations a native reader might find boring; they are a kind of interpreting tool. Novels appear, which are written by Bulgarian authors, but are not about Bulgaria at all. It is like: “So if you want something recognizable, something you already know a lot about, there you are!” The intertext between Bulgarian sources is lost in translation and is practically useless abroad. Hidden quotations, stylistic clashes, historical references: they all go.

• Each language has its phraseological shortcuts. They are a great source of puns; they open the door to a kind of literary playfulness I enjoy so much. They are a big problem in translation, however. The title of my collection of short stories – Life and Death under the Crooked Pear Trees – proved to be such a problem. “Under the crooked pear tree” is a set phrase in Bulgarian, meaning “right in the middle of nowhere”, most often used to denote a lack of progress. Like for example: “How is your PhD going?” Answer: “Ah, it’s right under the crooked pear tree”. So this is all lost and the title of my book looks a bit crazy. Otherwise, the short story with this title is perfectly translatable. But the problem with rhymes in poetry is much, much, much more insurmountable. Let’s say challenging.

Strangely enough, I’ve never felt this kind of pressure when I write poetry. But I have already faced the problem in prose. It’s like you are under siege. You never know what will be interpreted in what way, extolled or ignored for the same reason. My antidote is to keep to what I know and say what I want to say. Then maybe somebody else, miles away, would recognize the experience. The closer I come to what I see as the truth, the better I feel. The rest is a side effect.




The Bulgarian poetry in New European Poetry seems very politically charged. Do you consider yourself a “political” poet? Do you feel a duty/desire to write political or historical-minded poetry?


No, I don’t think I do. Out of seven books published in Bulgaria, I think I have only one true-blue political poem. It is translated by British poets Andy Croft and Mark Robinson and very easy to quote in full:

Cold War Memoirs

We were told
there were two worlds at war
when there was really only one.

We were
the other.

Otherwise, like all devoted readers of newspapers, I am interested in politics too. Nobody wants to be lied to. But poetry for me is a room, reserved for my deepest, most important and sometimes most bizarre impressions of life, and politics very rarely finds its way to it.
Of course, if we are talking on this “personal is political” level, then we are all into politics.




Is poetry “popular” in Bulgaria? Does the general Bulgarian public read poetry?


Poetry is becoming less and less popular among the general readership in Bulgaria, but it has devoted fans among those who write or intend to start writing it. Other people have taken the lead. Television, not the book, is everyone’s media. Politicians get the best part of the public attention, because they are the ones who crack the important news. Then come talk-show hosts, singers, journalists, actors, sociologists, sport-stars, models and tycoons. I don’t really see the place of a poet here. Poetry used to mean a lot during socialism, when everybody’s ears were attuned to catch the faintest sound of criticism or unrest. Now it means a lot to readers only, and I think that’s fair enough.




Could you describe your poetry education? Did you study poetry in school?


I had classes in literature at school, mostly covering poetry from the first part of the XX c. Then came my university education in English and American studies, although poetry wasn’t exactly a priority. Then all the books I read. Then the poems we keep reading to each other at home with my husband, literary critic Vladimir Trendafilov. He translated selections of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and William Butler Yeats into Bulgarian, I translated John Donne. This is something we did as part of the “sharing” thing. There is no money in that. A lot of people are doing the same, from many languages. I think this last kind of school is my best one.




Are there any American/English poets you are fond of? Are there any American poets that are particularly popular among Bulgarian poets-in-general?


All the above mentioned and Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Edwin Morgan, Stevie Smith, e.e. cummings, R. S. Thomas, G. M. Hopkins. I am the editor of the two selections of Mark Strand’s poetry into Bulgarian, translated by Katia Mitova, and this says well enough how I feel about him. Wendy Barker, W. N. Herbert, Andy Croft, Linda France and Mark Robinson are all friends of mine and I admire them both as poets and people. Whatever I say, the list will be incomplete. E. A. Poe, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Elizabeth Bishop, Raymond Carver. Very often the issue is who gets translated and is lucky enough to get a good translation.




Lastly, what projects are you currently working on?


I work, that’s for sure. But I’d rather not talk about the future.

My One Turkish Friend Adds a Few Words on Turkish Poetry

With a few contextualizing comments by me, Alex, in italics.

There are lots of things you can say about Turkish poetry. There is traditional folk poetry, goes back to more than thousand years and mostly anonymous. Also after Islam, there is divan literature affected (Arabic and Persian ... Read MoreCulture) poetry and again there is folk poetry. Each divides into several groups and these poetry have rules (like first two lines rhyme [I imagine this refers to the gazel/ghazal, which Wikipedia said was the primary form of much Turkish divan poetry through the ages.] , etc - Also there are types of rhymes in Turkish poetry which I don't remember right now.)

There is western poetry (which became free poetry after).
There is also modern poetry.
There are some famous poets.
Yunus Emre
Nedim
Can Yücel
Nazım Hikmet Ran
Baki (Baqi)
Attilâ İlhan

This website has links to side-by-side translations of poems by the above poets.


This website gives information about poetry at Ottoman Empire.
Scroll down to the second poem for the first appearance (here, at least) of the symbolically-essential nightingale. Scroll down farther for myriad gazels - translated with the last word of each couplet rhyming with the first, but not actually the same word. A slightly different form than the way we learn them in contemporary American poetry.


Here's a nice comment from Murat Nemet-Nejat, who translated most of the Turkish poems in our anthology, on "accented writing". It gives some insight into my question about fragmentation, etc., in my first post.

"What is, then, writing which has an accent? It is a writing which does not completely identify with the power, authority of the language it uses; but confronts, without glossing over, the gap between the user and the language. Such writing reveals an ambiguity towards power: the writer chooses to embrace a language (because of its pervasive centrality) which he/she knows is not quite his/her own, is sufficient for his/her inner purposes. Accent in writing has little to do with explicit theme or semantic context: it rather has to do with texture, structure, the scratches, distortions, painful gaps (in rhythms, syntax, diction, etc.) caused by the alien relationship between the writer and his/her adopted language. Accent is cracks (many unconcious, the way a speaker is unaware of his or her accent when speaking, does not have to create it) on the transparent surface."

I got to that comment through this website, which has lots more Turkish poetry in translation.

Here is a webpage on Nemet-Nejat himself.

I should not forget Orhan Veli Kanık

Not poetry but epics.

There is a table on the right side of the page says Turkish literature. You can find some information on this page also.

Adam J. Sorkin on Romanian Poetry PART TWO

Joel:

Thanks so much for your comments.I'll venture two more questions, which you should feel free to skip if you haven't the time or inclination to reply.

- We noted in the poems in the anthology a number of poems dealing
with women's issues, a number dealing with the church, and a few, most
intriguingly, which seem to deal with both at the same time, e.g.
Stanescu's "The Infanta Augustina," which seems to have something to
say about violence against women as well as something to say about the
(mis)uses of religious iconography. Could you comment on the currency
of these topics in Romanian poetry?

- And on another note, not so much regarding poetry translation per
se, but rather its promulgation in anthologies. On the one hand, our
class is consistently finding itself wishing that each section of the
anthology had a prefatory essay, even a brief one, giving some
cultural/political/historical context for the poems. How, for example,
are we to understand the nationalist (or anti-nationalist?) sentiments
in Vakulovski's poems if we have no clue about the history of
Bessarabia? On the other hand, we understand full well that this is a
poetry anthology, not a history book, and there's no way short
headnotes could ever really give us the degree of context we wish we
had. You've contributed to many, many anthologies; I'm guessing you'll
have some thoughts on this question.

Dr. Sorkin:

Romania remains an Orthodox country and religion is a powerful force. That
Communism discredited and opposed (rather, in a sense, co-opted religion)
makes the free choice of being religious more compelling, even to the
younger generations.Feminism actually has been a kind of force since the late 70s with a group of strong women voices, Ana Blandiana, for instance, Denisa Comanescu,
Daniela Crasnaru, Ioana Ieronim, Ileana Malancioiu, Angela Marinescu, Grete
Tartler, Liliana Ursu. Mariana Marin, too, who cites Anne Sexton and Elsa
Lasker-Schuler in her poems, but there's the Plath example, too. Many of
these poets were far more resistant to communism than male poets, at least
in their terms of being a bit challenging to the censors. The younger women
are more outspoken, but while domestic and other violence might well be of
note, in a male-macho kind of society, I wouldn't say violence is a major
theme these days.

If you look at the history of Moldavia, become Bessarabia (the SSR of...,
indeed given over to Russia with the secret protocols of the
Molotov ­Ribbentrop Pact [non-aggression pact, between Hitler & USSR --
didn't last long, did it?], then become the Republic of Moldova after 1989,
with a retrieval of Romanian-ness, you can understand that
politics/nationalism is important. I do think the poet implies his own
situation, including reasons to leave (a poor, poor country) and a kind of
patriotism side by side with it.

I admire Graywolf for this book, as well as the editors, Kevin and Wayne,
for their thankless task of keeping things to a publishable size and dealing
with such courtesy and restraint with what could have been a herd of
rampaging translators. Remember, the press has to control the pages, even
distribute book space carefully, for pages add up to expenses, as well as
the amount of space for intros, etc. So it is not meant to be critical, but
I would agree with you. On the other hand, make the book bigger, add to its
cost, what do you do to the market? Clearly the decision was made to be as
inclusive of poets and poetry. Hard to fault that. All the production values
were topnotch, as one would express of a press of this stature.

Context helps, and poems help define contexts... it goes both ways, doesn't
it?

Adam J. Sorkin on Romanian Poetry PART ONE

JOEL:

Dear Dr. Sorkin,

My students are delighting in your translations from the Romanian in
the New European Poets anthology, and are bringing up some interesting
questions about them, particularly regarding the challenges you must
have faced when dealing with idioms. The conversation is ongoing on
our blog at

http://neweuropeanpoets.blogspot.com/2009/02/romanian-literature-not-as-intimidating.html

If you have any time or inclination to comment on the comments posted
there, we'd be tremendously grateful to hear from you.


DR. SORKIN:

Choices in diction are always choices. Some of the ones brought up were done
in conjunction with Romanian poets who did know English. I didn't go back to
the originals to check, but Radu Andiescu was playing with language and
establishing tone of voice, and I don't really think there is particular
reason that an idiom has to be up-to-date according to any time period's
narrow definition of with-it-ness, anyway (which would mean that five
minutes, months, or years from now, it will sound as old-fashioned as some
think this is). (I probably had running in my head a smile at Ronald
Reagan's use of "keister," which really would have sounded really out of
date; it surely added a private glee to the verbal energy the phrase should
have.) I recall that Radu used the usual Romanian idiom for a fist in the
muzzle/poke in the nose/punch in the face, but idioms get slithery, language
to language, and we wanted something vivid. So, a foot instead of a fist. I
sometimes feel it's freer when I can agree on things with the author.
Anyway, why not use what's at your disposal, that works in context and has a
corresponding effect? I notice that no one so far has so far remarked on the
use of "bloody" with "bad shit," which ("bloody") is clearly the British
locution. Saviana Stanescu's poem had typographical voice-echoes, but it
hardly matters given that she has the right to change her poem, anyway, to
what she feels (what we agree on) that she wanted in the English; if you
read her plays, done in English, or her poems written in English now, oh
yes, she does those things.

As to my own intent, at least, I always try to get something vernacular for
something vernacular, a corresponding register of diction. Recent Romanian
poetry is full of the demotic, the idiomatic, the slangy and the off-color,
and in the last decade, since poetry had been prohibited such diction and
references (communism was very prurient about language and about sexual
terms, a long story), the downright vulgar. Particularly from the 80s on,
with the influence of the American Beats (Ginsberg, some O'Hara) on the
so-called blue-jeans generation, the self-consciously postmodern generation
(e.g., Mircea Cartarescu, but very differently, Magda Carneci, a feminist
and more than a bit mystic, religious poet, developing the same freedoms
differently, or a third to note, not really influenced by these American
styles, the Serbian-born Ioan Flora, whose poems are, like most of these
writers, dyed-in-the-wool ironic and chock-full of detail and surrealism) --
you see the same kind of postmodernism-cum-religion in a number of the
writers in the Romanian/Moldovan sections, e.f., Galaicu-Paun, whose
references and energy can be quite wild, or similarly, Galatanu ---you can't
get a full sense of this from the various shorter poems, and an anthology
requires hard choices.

Anyway, postmodernism had rather a different, less esoteric/esthetic set of
connotations there under communism, since it meant working the way Western
writers worked, and had implications, then, about content. Irony was a way
of life, a state of the spirit, and continued to be after the Dec. 1989 fall
of communism. A native source for some of this kind of writing (I'm just
finishing a book of a selection of his poems for British publication) is
Mircea Ivanescu, who used no capital letters in his poems (yes, e.e.
cummings influence, but he isn't otherwise similar), whose broken syntax,
full of parentheses, asides, disconnects, makes for a kind of discursive
(well, a kind of "inward conversation," a phrase from one of the poems) and
less immediately poetic surface, anti-lyrical. Very unlike Mariana Marin,
poor woman, who gets mentioned in the comments, whose poems I sometimes
found editors in the U.S. rejecting for being -- as one commented -- too
neurotic. I took it as a compliment for the translation and kept on sending
her poems out and finally did place a book (the Ugly Duckling Presse book,
Paper Children).

This is all background to the poets in New European Poets, what they
develop, what they react to, what they sidestep as too immediately
influential. Post-communist poets are rarely political, tend to movements
such as "biographism" (until 1989, there was only one biography worth
writing, in official terms -- the dictator's -- but biography, remember,
opens up individualism and what were the forbidden "psy" disciplines,
contraband ways of thinking -- not that the younger poets really ever
accepted the official line) -- anyway, and what is often called
"miserabilism" (Sociu, more in slightly later poems, fits this well, though
he has now developed beyond that mode, as I think he'd agree -- which is not
to put down down-and-out sensibilities).

One thing a translator has to know is that there's always another way to do
it, another style, another perspective, another variation on the original,
foreign-language theme, another improvisation. I consciously try to keep
rather close to the originals, that is, not to make Sorkinesque poems out of
So-and-So's; in contradiction to this, if I have to err, I'd rather err on
the side of making poetry than of literal accuracy. The old conundrum,
often expressed as faithful dullness vs. faithless beauty. A poem that
doesn't come across as a poem in what is usually called the target language
(English, in this case) might as well be accused of targeting the source
poem with the gun-barrel of verbal violence. I do recognize, anyway, that
I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth here.

I notice what I take to be some dismay that line lengths and breaks don't
quite follow American practice. That is quite true. One older-generation
poet I worked with, the late Mihai Ursachi, the rival of Nichita Stanescu
(at least that's what he himself said, and in ways, there is much more truth
to that than Sorescu, who is mentioned -- what Ursachi called, "ontological"
reasons, speaking with me) -- anyway, Ursachi said that Romanian critics
sometimes complained that he didn't have a good sense of line. I myself find
a sometimes anti-poetic use of line more and more in recent times, and
usually I keep it the way it was. If you concoct and all-American smoothie
out of everything, you blend away whatever makes this poetry different from
that poetry, and the differences from American poetry practice and
poetry-writing-class advice.

Formal poetry didn't get in the anthology, but it is still pursued, I'll
add. It was a matter of whom I judged most representative. And not just me
-- I asked many for advice. Anthologies have a canonic effect, but I think
they are more like snapshots. Limited. Ad-hoc. Continent.

By the way, those who liked Radu Andriescu's poetry might want to look (I'll
give it a plug, why not, though operators are not standing by at any
900-number) for a book just being published in Prague, from Twisted Spoon
Press: *Memory Glyphs* -- a book of three Romanian prose poets, Cristian
Popescu, Iustin Panta, and Radu Andriescu.

Enough, I'll close, but I'll sign off not in my own voice but with a poem
that always keeps me humble as a translator:

Translation by Marin Sorescu

I was taking a test
In a dead language.
I had to translate myself
From man into ape.

I started indirectly, at arm¹s length,
First tackling the translation of a text
From a forest.

The translation became
A lot trickier, however,
The closer I got to myself.
Still, with a little effort,
I found satisfactory equivalents
For toenails and leg-hair.

Around the knees
I began jabbering wild guesses.

Right before the heart, my hand jerked
And I put a blotch across the sun.

I tried to repair it
With the hair on my chest.
But I tripped up for good
At the soul.

translated by Adam J. Sorkin

Kristin Dimitrova

Kristin Dimitrova was born in 1963 in Sofia. She has a degree in English and American Studies from the University of Sofia. She has published a collection of her translations of John Donne.

In addition to publishing eight books of poetry, Dimitrova has published a novel (Sabazuis), a short story collection (Life and Death under the Crooked Pear Trees), and two screenplays (Billy-goat and Etienne).

Those of you who are particularly quick have already noticed that Dimitrova is the translator of Boiko Lambovski’s “The Clay Man.”

Dimitrova used to be an editor for Art Trud, a weekly “arts and culture” supplement for the Trud Daily. She has also worked as a columnist for Klasa Daily.

According to Marlene Smits, Dimitrova sits timidly and has a girlish habit of moving around in her chair.

Here is an English translation of Dimitrova’s poem “The Strong Skins of Memory.”

Here is a video of Kristin Dimitrova reading/performing (or maybe just speaking):

Edvin Sugarev

Edvin Sugarev was born in 1953 in Sofia. He graduated from Sofia University in 1979 and worked in the Institute of Literature of the Bulgarian Academy of Science. His dissertation was called “Bulgarian Literature after the First World War and German Expressionism."

In 1991, Sugarev was elected in to the Bulgarian Parliament. (I think it's safe to call him a Politically-Engaged Poet.)

Sugarev was a member of the Great National Assembly; this means that he helped write the current Constitution of Bulgaria. (Think about that for a second. A poet helped write the Bulgarian constitution.)

Sugarev used to serve as the Bulgarian ambassador to Mongolia and India. He resigned in 2002 to protest the election of Georgi Parvanov (a former member of the Bulgarian Communist Party) to the Bulgarian presidency.

He also has some strong feelings about Bulgaria’s lack of official position on the matter of Kosovo’s independence.

From Verve Magazine :

Sugarev’s poems carry the sarcastic spirit of the disappointed former political activist, but the very word “politics” is absent. His characters are animals, plants, and rarely people. The homeland is compared simultaneously with “fate,” an “ax,” and a “mother’s lap.” Sugarev’s sharp tongue makes the dark tone of his poems stronger, and he reads his work with an underlying passion.

When asked about his political career, Sugarev said, “I am one of the last active social figures from the beginning of the nineties who withdrew from politics. I did it late and it is at my account. I do not regret anything I have done. […] The mistake of all democratically thinking people [in Bulgaria] was that they made way too many compromises.”

Ivy Press Princeton is selling a bilingual edition of Edvin Sugarev's work. (Click on the link that says "Sample Poems" to see "Liminal Moments" in Bulgarian.)

Translation and its Discontents

I know we agreed to just deal with the poems as is (as are?), but I thought that this article (and its comments thread) might be of interest to some of you.


- Daniela

What do you want to ask the editors of this anthology?

Post your questions in the comment field, and I'll forward the queries along to Wayne and Kevin.

Interview and Reading/Recital with André VELTER

One of these is a reading André Velter did with flamenco guitarist Pedro Soler; the other is an interview in which Velter talks about collaboration with musicians, among other things.

Where Poems Get Written and Where They Get Read

Team Iberia asks:

If there are any, what are the relationships between geographic and political situations, and poetic language? Does poetry "naturally" change because of the location in which, and circumstances from which, it's written?

Lewis adds:

That's a cool question to ask right at the beginning of our reading an entire anthology of EuroPoetry(TM). Over time I guess it must, necessarily, if only because poets of a later generation often will be cognizant of the changes of prior generations. They inherit the categories. A protest poem we might compose is likely to be in some way informed by the protest poetry of the prior generation, maybe? The language might change over time because we inherit, or at least cannot escape, their language?

And it gets me thinking about just how many irresolvable troubles we're going to have if we try to make any generalizations about what we're reading as we move through this anthology. Think about all our impediments!

- The poems are in translation so we're not really hearing or understanding what the authors sound like or mean.

- Each country and/or language is represented by poets and poems selected by the editors from amongst many others, so we can't really know how "representative" the selected poets and poems are.

- Each poet, country, and language has its own peculiar literary, cultural, political, social history which yes, must of course have some effect on the poems, or at least must provide contexts at least helpful and perhaps even crucial to understanding the poems, and we simply aren't capable of assimilating all that contextual information.

- Inevitably, when we read these poets, we have a tendency to assign them to categories familiar to us, but those categories may not be remotely applicable to these poems and poets.

And so on! I'm getting panicky! It's a bit early in our journey to raise such a dangerous question, but what exactly is the point of reading these poems at all, when it seems pretty clear that there's no chance we'll understand them as their authors intended for them to be understood?