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Poems by Kate Northrop.....Poems by David Trinidad.....33 Poems by W.G. Sebald.....Cloud Moving Hands by Cathy Song.....Notes for my Body Double by Paul Guest. Reviews of these new poetry collections can be found here...http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/bo...r=1&8bu&emc=bu These are all new to me except for Sebald. quasimodo1
I just picked up a new collection myself: The Golden Age-Poems of the Spanish Renaissance, translated by Edith Grossman. Ms Grossman, who is referred to Harold Bloom as "the Glenn Gould of translation" has made marvelous translations from the Spanish of works ranging from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Augusto Monterossp, Mario Vargas Llosa, to Cervantes. All of these poets are known to me: Fray Luis de Leon, San Juan de la Cruz, Luis de Gongora, Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, and Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. San Juan de la Cruz (or Saint John of the Cross) exists in two good translations, one my John Frederick Nims and the other (quite marvelous) by Roy Campbell. Most of the rest of these poets, contemporaries of the great British Renaissance and Baroque poets (Shakespeare, Donne, Spencer, Sidney, etc...) could only be taken on faith in the English-speaking world. One or two poems by any one of them show up from time to time in a more-than-passing translation... but little else. Sor Juana garnered a few translation in the wake of the renewed interest in women writers... but I can't speak of how good these were as poetic translations. I have just recently come across a new translation by John Dent-Young of Luis de Gongora, the giant who remade Spanish poetry. I'm only now reading through the introduction but have high hopes for this book. I have similar hopes for Grossman's collection. Dante Gabriel Rossetti declared that the entire purpose of translation was to bring the creation of a beautiful thing from one language into another. A good deal of the more recent poetry of the Spanish-speaking world has been available to us for some time (Neruda, Octavio Paz, J.L. Borges, Federico Garcia Lorca, Vinciente Aleixandre, Alberti, Machado, Hernandez. I ferverently hope that the works of these older Spanish masters can now be accessible to us.
Quasi... How much do you follow non-English language poetry? I've just come across a new translation of Cesare Pavese, who is accounted as one of the great Italian poets of the 20th century. I currently own the translation by William Arrowsmith but I have been wondering if you (or anyone else... if anyone else ever peruses the poetry boards:confused:) has heard anything about this translation.
To Stlukesguild: Wish I could say I knew more poetry from Italy or any non-anglo poets. Cesare Pavese is new to me (slightly embarressed) but you can believe I'm interested now. Except for E.M. Cioran and Proust, the ancient Latin and Greek masters...foreign poetry is new horizon. Rilke obviously has me rating translators since I'm interested in his work to the extreme. I guess multilinguistic skills are need for this era. quasi
To Stlukesguild: "Pavese's real ambition in this work did not reside simply in the creation of a successful novel: everything in the book converges in one single direction, images, and analogies bear down on one obsessive concern: human sacrifices."
— Italo Calvino .....Would you say this statement is accurate? Could you recommend one or two key poems? Whenever. quasi
With the usual idea of the "grass is always" greener I became fascinated by non-English language poetry during high-school and college... when most of my formal studies centered around the great British and American poets. Oddly enough... with the exception of Blake, Shakespeare, and a few others, it wasn't until after my formal education and I began to read for myself that I first began the appreciate the works of Milton, Donne, Spencer, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson, etc... I was drawn to the great German writers out of an interest in the literature of my ancestral heritage. Goethe is great (which goes without saying), but I became absolutely enamored of Hölderlin, Rilke, Novalis... and later Heine. Loving literature of great sensuality and suggestiveness I was especially drawn to the French "Symbolists": Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme, Valery... and later the Surrealists: Breton, Caudel, Eluard, etc... From there I branched out toward the Spanish and Latin-Americans: Lorca, Aleixandre, Machado, Alberti, Pessoa, Paz, etc... From that point on I became obsessed with exploring poetry from all around the world: China and Japan... the Middle-East... Russia (especially Pasternak)... Eastern Europe... medieval and ancient poetry... and obviously Italy. I'd obviously been exposed to Dante as part of my formal world literature surveys... along with Petrarch. Through them I came to Guido Cavalcanti, Leopardi... and eventually the 20th century poets: Cesare Pavese, Umberto Saba, Dino Campana, Antonio Porta, Salvatore Quasimodo (who might be of interest to you:D) and the giant of the era: Eugenio Montale. I am certainly most well-read in the works of Montale. His Cuttlefish Bones is a volume that holds a position in Italian poetry not unlike that of T.S. Eliot's Wastelend. Where Eliot confronts Whitman... and the great poets of the English language... Montale... even more directly... confronts Dante... a figure that might amount to an equivalent of what Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and Chaucer add up to in the literature of the Englisg-speaking world. Pavese was found guilty of "anti-Fascist activities" in Mussolini's Italy and was sentenced to banishment to the tiny seaside fishing village of Brancaleone in Calabria. The result was Pavese's book, Hard Labor which I own in a translation by William Arrowsmith acclaimed by James Wright, Harold Bloom, Jonathan Galassi (himself a brilliant translator from Italian), Kenneth Rexroth, etc... I remember the poems as avoiding any overt comment upon politics... but they are laden with an expression of constant silence... the sense of needing to live under silence... a sense similar to that one finds in many Russian poets after the Revolution. I'll browse this work again before making further comments upon Pavese or recommendations.
To Stlukesguild: Before reading your last entry (above) I was wondering where I might find such a list of poets and writers of other countries, languages. I guess you inadvertantly just gave me such a list. You are nothing if not thorough in response, thankfully. Since you enjoy Rilke (and the other poets), I wanted to ask if you were ever exposed to E.M. Cioran, a "friend" and correspondent to Samuel Beckett (he was Romanian); not one person in these forums ever heard of him (maybe). If so, a critique? quasi
A list of Key poets, non-English writing? Surely you can find these in Harold Bloom's Western Canon.. Among the one's I have (and admittedly I have yet to read them all... or to have read each thoroughly):
German- Novalis (especially Hymns of the Night), Schiller, Goethe, Hölderlin, Eduard Mörike, Rilke, George Trakl, Hermann Hesse, Bertholt Brecht (both wrote a great deal of poetry beyond what they achieved in prose), Ingeborg Bachmann, Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Paul Celan (actually Romanian, I believe, but wrote in German)
French- Rabelais, Francois Villon, La Fontaine, Pierre Ronsard, Jacques du Bellay, Victor Hugo, Gerard de Nerval, Baudelaire, Gautier, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme, Paul Valery, Apollinaire, Valery Larbaud, O.V. de Milosz, Saint John Perse, Pierre Reverdy, Paul Claudel, Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Antonin Artuad, Henri Michaux, Jacques Prevert, Jean Follain, Edmond Jabes, Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet (a great source is the Random House Book of Twentieth century French Poetry)
Spanish- The Poem of the Cid (translated by W.S. Merwin), Jorge Manrique (Verses Written on the Death of His Father), Garcilaso de la Vega, Fray Luis de Leon, San Juan de la Cruz, Luis Gongora, Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, Gustavo Adolfo Bequer, Ruben dario, Antonio Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Vincente Aleixandre, Gabriela Mistral, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillen, and Miguel Hernandez.
Italian- Dante, Petrarch, Guido Cavalcanti, Torquato Tasso (Jerusalem Delivered), Ariosto (Orlando Furioso), Leopardi, Michelangelo Buonarroti (yes, THAT Michelangelo... also a great poet!), Ugo Foscolo-(On Sepulchres and Odes and the Graces), Giosue Carducci, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Umberto Saba, Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese, Primo Levi, Antonio Porta, Dino Campana.
Russian- Pushkin, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Ahkmatova, Marina Tvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Ahkmadulina, Yevgeny Yevtuschenko
Since you've mentioned having a background including the Greek and Latin classics I will skip over these with the exception of the Modern Greeks-
C.P. Cavafy, Anghelos Sikelianos, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos and Nikos Kazantzakis (his Odyssey is an epic poem based upon the Homeric original in both theme and form). Also check into Kimon Friar's Modern Greek Poetry
Other Europeans- Czeslaw Milosz (Polish), Wislawa Szymborska (Polish), Adam Zagajewski (Polish), Tadeusz Borowski (Polish), Jaroslav Seifert (Czech), Attila József (Hungarian), Luís de Camões (Lusiads-Portuguese), Eugénio de Andrade (Portuguese), Fernando Pessoa (Portuguese), J.V. Foix (Portuguese), Tomas Tranströmer (Swedish)
Hebrew- The Bible, Shmu'el Hanagid, Shelomo (Solomon) Ibn Gabriol, Moshe (Moses) Ibn Ezra, Yehuda Halevi, Avraham Ibn Ezra, Yehuda Alharizi, (Petr Cole's Dream of the Poem offers an excellent overview of medieval Hebrew poetry in Spain), Yehuda Amichai
Latin-American- Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Ruben Dario, J.L. Borges (as much a poet as a writer of short fictions and essay), Pablo Neruda, Robert Juarrez, Octavio Paz, Homero Aridjis
Non-Western- The problem with Non-Western poetry is that the translations are often mediocre at best. Good translation of poetry demands the ability to transform the poetry from one language into poetry in another. Capturing any aspect of the "poetic music" of another language usually demands that the translator have a certain degree of mastery of both languages. The number writers who not only have a working knowledge of Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, etc... but also the ability to transform the music of their poetry into something more than a mere academic gleaning in English is unfortunately limited (although the situation is improving). Chinese, as a monosyllabic language where the visual structure is often as essential as the verbal, is especially difficult... if not impossible to translate. Nevertheless... you should still seek out the best of these writers:
Li-Po or Li-Bo , Ou-Yang Hsiu, Tu-Fu, Wang Wei, Li Ho, Li Shang-Lin, Mei Yao Chen, Lu Yu, Li Ch'ing Chao, (Chinese), Yosana Akiko (Japanese)- of particular use are Kenneth Rexroth's translations including One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese, Li Ch'ing Chao-Complete Poems, Women Poets of China, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese and One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese. Also check out David Young's translations as well as those of Arthur Waley. From the Middle-East you might also check into the Qu'ran, Omar Khayyam, Attar, Rumi, Saadi, and Hafiz. Also of great worth is the Poems of Arab Andalusia a slim volume of poems from medieval Islamic Spain translated by Colla Franzen. These poems played a profound role upon the development of Modern Spanish lyric poetry... especially that of Garcia Lorca.
Of course this is in no way a complete list of the greatest poets of the non-English speaking world. I am continually discovering new poets of great talent myself.
By the way... I have highlighted with "bold" wjat I feel are probably the most important poets.
Speaking of Cavafy, I just ordered the 92 Keeley edition, though I wish I had Daniel Mendelsohn to crib off of. I tried a little demotic Greek when I was very close to leaving academia, and it was a rough row. After I spend some time with the edition, I'd enjoy posting some about Cavafy.