Metaglossia: The Translation World

English has a rich vocabulary for rhyme, but names are unstable: in what follows, therefore, alternative names are sometimes provided in parenthesis. F

Translation Contest to Honor Abraham Sutzkever

Summer Literary Seminars has announced itsAbraham Sutzkever Translation Prize, marking the centennial of the birth of one of the most acclaimed Yiddish poets of the 20th century.

“To me, he is the leading Yiddish poet, the epitome of Yiddish literature in the 20th century,” Mikhail Iossel said of Sutzkever. Iossel, a Soviet émigré and associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal, is the founder and director of the literary, creative writing and historical workshops that have taken place in St. Petersburg, Montreal, Nairobi and Vilnius. The Sutzkever Prize is associated with the SLS Lithuania program for summer 2013.

The new prize is being added to a lineup of already existing ones that are given through theSLS Unified Literary Contest, awarding winners with tuition, stipends and publication assurances. The winner of the Sutzkever Prize will receive tuition to SLS Lithuania plus $500 toward travel expenses. In addition, the winning entry will be translated into Lithuanian, and read at a celebration in Vilnius on the centennial, on July 15, 2013. The deadline for submissions is February 28, 2013.

LITTÉRATURE - On se souvient de la fameuse boutade de Beckett: "J'ai choisi d'écrire en français parce que le français est une langue plus pauvre que l'anglais". Cette boutade est confirmée par plusieurs textes de l'auteur.

Newcomer Sean Borodale joins major names including Sharon Olds and Kathleen Jamie and Simon Armitage...

Vaidehi “Vi” Herbert will tell you she is not a poet or a language scholar. She is simply passionate and disciplined.

Herbert has dedicated the last three years to studying Tamil, one of the classical languages of India, and translating hundreds of ancient Sangam poems from her second language into English. She is originally from Tamil Nadu, located in southern India, where the language has official status.

“No other scholar in Tamil Nadu or from other countries have translated this volume of literature,” Dr. Rukmani Ramachandran, Herbert’s teacher and an assistant professor of Tamil at Queen Mary’s College in Chennai, wrote in an email. “Her passionate love for Sangam poetry knows no bounds.”

The Sangam genre of poetry dates from approximately 300 B.C. to 300 A.D. There are 18 Sangam Tamil books containing 2,381 poems written by 473 poets, 102 of whom remain unknown.

So far, Herbert has translated approximately 1,800 of those poems into English, with plans to complete the remainder over the next year. She has co-authored three books with Rukmani, with five more in the works and has set up more than 20 websites dedicated to teaching Sangam.

“This is something I am doing with passion,” she said. “I spend, on average, 13 to 15 hours per day.”

Herbert’s goal is simple — to share the beautiful poetry with the world.

In her “Introduction to Sangam Literature,” Herbert writes that the poems are “delightful in language and thought, scant in lines but rich in content and filled with human emotions intertwined with the natural elements found in the Tamil country.”

To put it simply, Sangam is “ancient, secular landscape and love poetry,” Herbert says.

“About 75 percent of the literature is love and nature poetry,” she said. “In every poem plants, trees, flowers, animals, mountains, streams, ocean, etc. are used as metaphors and similes. Human emotions are brought out through the nature of nature.”

The years I worked as a translator were some of the most frustrating of my career. I would often spend hours upon hours looking up a single word. From one dictionary to the next, I would try to guess which synonym best communicated the author’s intentions. Having resolved the lexical issues in the text, I would then turn to the syntactical dilemma of making each sentence sound like it was originally written in the target language, not awkwardly put together.

When laboring studiously on an incomprehensible text or trying to gracefully break up a paragraph-long sentence, I often thought of myself as “The Unknown Soldier” whose efforts were going unnoticed. I hoped that these efforts would be revealed in due time; I pictured myself receiving a newly-founded Nobel Prize in Translation, for choosing the perfect synonym and breaking up the sentence flawlessly. Since I was translating newspaper articles at the time, the award hasn’t arrived — at least not yet.

But last week it was raining recognition for translators, not in the form of a Nobel Prize for myself, but rather when Sinan Antoon received the 2012 National Translation Award for his translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s “In the Presence of Absence.” Then later in the same week, the American University in Cairo’s Center for Translation Studies jumpstarted its celebration of the Translator’s Day (15 October, coinciding with the birthday of the founder of Egypt’s first house of translation Rifaa Tahtawi) with a lecture by Randa Abou-Bakr, Professor of English Literature at Cairo University. The lecture was entitled “Translating Poetry in the Age of Prose.”

Abou-Bakr is a brilliant scholar and translator, not only because she was one of my favorite professors as an undergraduate student, but her work speaks volumes about her experience with and passion for poetry, translation and literature in general. She has authored “The Conflict of Voices in the Poetry of Dennis Brutus and Mahmoud Darwish” and translated Ahmed Bekheit’s “Leila the Honey of Solitude.”

The two main questions Abou-Bakr tackled during her talk were, “Is translating poetry at all possible” and, “Why does translating poetry matter?” Although American poet Robert Frost once said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation,” Abou-Bakr tells us that theoreticians have suggested several strategies to deal with the multi-layered nature of poetry in ways that are both meaningful and beautiful. One way is to prioritize and centralize one of its elements over the others; for example, the sounds, the meaning, or the meter. Others believe in approximating: adopting an approach of dealing with a large variety of elements all at once. Abou-Bakr however, subscribes to another school of translation, namely focusing on the emotional resonance of the poem.

“I like to keep my translations as close as possible to the originals in the sense that I do not try to be a poet on my own, but rather claim to myself that I am the prophet who has received a certain revelation — not a message — and I am now being trusted with the sacred task of transmitting it to others.” The smooth flow and rhythm of Brutus' original South African poem was indeed retained in Abou-Bakr’s translation into Arabic, which she shared with the audience.

As for the second question of why translating poetry matters, in order to answer it, Abou-Bakr had to explain why literary translation matters in the first place. Translation of literature, she argued, was “one of the most fertile areas of cultural exchanges: it is a tool for understanding how cultures are interconnected as well as fragmented.” The act of translation itself can manifest the dynamics between two cultures, such as when a translator chooses to either domesticate or exoticize the text as she renders it into the target language.

Marilyn Hacker is a translator nothing short of prodigious. In the past five years alone, she’s brought the work of Hedi Kaddour, Guy Goffette, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Marie Etienne, and many more writers into English, expanding the audiences of these international figures. Her latest project, Tales of a Severed Head by Moroccan poet Rachida Madani, will be released this month by Yale University Press. (Read an excerpt from The Second Tale here.) This book-length sequence recasts the story of Scheherazade and her thousand and one nights, incorporating recent Moroccan history into the tales. In her preface, Hacker calls it “a story of contemporary resistance—but once again language provides the weapon.”

—Erica Wright for Guernica

Good journalism is preferable to bad poetry.

Guernica: How much background information about Morocco, if any, do readers need in order to access the text [Rachida Madani’s Tales of a Severed Head]?

Marilyn Hacker: Although I provided some historical background in my preface to the book, I think the text is accessible without very much additional information. The poems make it clear that the trope of Scheherazade is being used to reflect on a contemporary situation of political repression, which is by no means limited to Morocco. But knowing about the Moroccan resistance and its repression—that brought intellectuals and workers, women and men, together—gives a clarifying specificity to the sequences.

Guernica: You often choose writing and translating projects with a political undercurrent. What can poetry do that journalism can’t?

Marilyn Hacker: Good journalism is preferable to bad poetry. Ezra Pound said that poetry was “news that stays news,” and one would hope that poetry, but all good writing really, transcends the specificity of its occasion even while, indeed by means of, rendering it genuinely specific. As poets like Adrienne Rich, Louis MacNeice, and Robert Hayden, among many others, have exemplified in their work, individual experience and political observation are not separate; they exist on a continuum, and it is a particular gift or responsibility of the poet, of the imaginative writer, to observe and render that continuum.

'Poetry,' wrote Robert Frost, 'is what gets lost in translation.' Cooking may not be poetry, but in the right hands — whether those of a culinary-school grad or a mother re-creating authentic family recipes &mdash...

En su brillante -y discutible, como luego veremos- prólogo a la nueva versión de la poesía de Hölderlin en español, escribe Félix de Azúa: «Las traducciones son como un concierto, una interpretación musical a cargo de un artista.

a poésie de l´optimisme!..."Écho des Tropiques", recueil de poèmes de 104 pages publié en 2012 chez Édilivre, est la collection de différents poètes dont la plume peint l´Afrique, le monde, la vie de tous les angles. Le poète africain, soucieux d´affronter la réalité et de libérer le continent au moyen de l´expression poétique, se fie à l´adage si cher à l´Afrique selon lequel «une seule main n´attache pas un paquet».

Loin de souffler des mots inconnus et de fredonner une musique étrange, voici une nouvelle poésie qui use des NTIC et des réseaux sociaux pour atteindre les cœurs et mettre ensemble les plumes africaines coulant des quatre coins de la planète, conjuguant ainsi les synergies dans le but d´esquisser et d´exprimer une vision du monde avec pour toile de fond ce qui donne le désir de vivre à l´Homme: l´Espoir, l´Amour, l´Optimisme.

New Online Poetry Translation Workshop
Posted on September 11, 2012 by A. Scott Britton
Playing Another Tune: Poetry and Translation

Instructor: Yvette Neisser Moreno

It is no coincidence that most famous poets also have translated poetry. Translating allows you to deeply understand how a poem is composed and to stretch your poetry muscles—by playing with words—while following someone else’s script. We will begin by reading short essays by poets about how translating has influenced their own writing. Then, the workshop will follow this format: Students (1) translate a poem they love (from any language into English); (2) share what they discovered about the poet’s techniques or style; and (3) write their own poem using those techniques or style. Both translations and original poems will receive feedback from instructor and classmates.

Dates: 10/1/2012-11/9/2012

Duration: Six weeks
Location: Online
Cost: $169.95 for Writer’s Center members; $190 for non-members

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Literature laid bare
Review by Ian Thomson
A new translation is true to Stéphane Mallarmé’s melancholy and mystique
Stéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse, translated by Peter Manson, Miami University Press, RRP£15.95/$24.95, 288 pages

Stéphane Mallarmé, the 19th-century French poet, was a lexical innovator, whose stripped-down verse foreshadowed the hermetic sparsities of Samuel Beckett and Wallace Stevens. For much of his brief life, Mallarmé was prone to bouts of dyspepsia and desperately poor. As a trainee English teacher in 1860s London, nevertheless, he contrived a poetry of mesmeric beauty and strangeness. His most famous verse, “Un coup de dés” (A dice-throw), was compared by one critic to an absinthe flame that “burns in the void” without visible matter. To his painter friend Degas, Mallarmé insisted that poems are made not out of ideas, but out of words alone.
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IN BOOKS
Small Talk David Bezmozgis
Small Talk Anita Desai
Small Talk James Kelman
Small Talk Joe Simpson
This new version of the poems by the Glasgow poet and mallarmiste Peter Manson is a marvel of luminous precision. Sensitive at all times to Mallarmé’s ideal of a literature stripped to the bone, the translation glows with a melancholy sense of absence (“The flesh is sad, and I’ve read all the books”). As Manson reminds us, Mallarmé was a tireless promoter of Edgar Allan Poe, in whom he saw a European sensibility at work; much of his verse, like Poe’s, aspires to the condition of music.

We translate contemporary poetry into English from Africa, Asia and Latin America through poet-translator pairings and translation workshops.

Translating Poetry with MPT. An afternoon of talks and workshops at the Notes and Letters Festival

2-6.30pm, Sunday 7th October 2012, King's Place, London

As part of the Notes and Letters Festival, MPT will present a poetry translation afternoon. This will include a plenary talk by MPT Editor David Constantine, Going abroad - some ideas about the translation of poetry, followed by a choice of workshops, and closing discussion for all participants.

Workshops will be suitable for those new to poetry translation, and without knowledge of the specific language concerned, as well as those with more experience. Workshops will focus on translating poems from German, French, Russian and Italian, and will be lead by experienced translators Jennie Feldman, Sasha Dugdale, Caroline Maldonado and David Constantine.

Concentrating on particular texts, discussing their possibilities, workshop leaders will present some of the general principles and strategies in the art of translating poetry.

All welcome! The one requirement is enthusiasm. Beginners and experts equally may learn and help in learning. There will be plenty of opportunity in the talk and in the workshops for questions and discussion.

The total cost is 29.50 for the full afternoon or 9.50 if you only want to attend David's talk on poetry translation. Spaces are limited and early booking is advised. We hope to see you there.

By Kristin Wilson Recently, a number of us have begun assembling works, notably poetry, written in African languages on a blog titled “The African Poetry Anthology”. In one sense this endeavour is ...

Rendez-moi mon Boulevard !
Je n’ai jamais habité le quartier de Gibraltar mais j’en ai toujours rêvé. Et pour une seule raison. Du plus loin que je me souvienne, le plus beau jour de l’année se passe dans ce quartier, sur le Boulevard du centenaire précisément. Le 4 avril, le jour où le Sénégal célèbre son accession à l’indépendance. C’est le jour où je peux voir toute la Nation sénégalaise rassemblée et unie. Un jour où les militaires rivalisent de prestance dans leurs uniformes chamarrés, où les invités en grandes tenues arpentent fièrement les Allées Centenaires pour rejoindre les tribunes festonnées et où le public se presse dès les premières heures sur les abords de l’avenue pour assister au défilé. Entre les notes rythmées du Grand tambour major Doudou Ndiaye Rose, les déhanchements des majorettes et l’attendrissant spectacle de ces jeunes élèves du Prytanée sévèrement sanglés dans des uniformes trop grands pour leurs petits corps d’enfants, je me sens fière de mon pays, fière d’ê­tre Sénégalaise.
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NOS RUBRIQUES VACANCES
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Au Rythme de...
Lettres d’Hivernage
Profil Bas
Souvenirs
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Bégué
Focus
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Pli Ouvert
Pleins feux
CONTACT INFORMATION
Email: vacances2012@lequotidien.sn
tel: +221 33869 84 84
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Yoff Cité Djibly Mbaye - Route des cimetieres
BP : 22589 - Dakar - Sénégal

La langue française dans la poésie de Senghor
Léopold Sédar Senghor, agrégé de grammaire et membre de l’Académie française, a toujours été considéré, certainement à cause de ses titres, comme l’Africain le plus attaché au purisme linguistique. De ce point de vue, la critique l’oppose constamment à Ahmadou Kou­rouma, connu pour ses hardiesses dans la déstructuration de la langue française. Or, un examen minutieux de l’écriture poétique du chantre de la Négritude révèle un pionnier dans le combat culturel pour l’africanisation et la négrification du français.
Nous nous proposons donc d’étudier, à travers Chants d’ombre, comment, dès 1945, Senghor, en insérant dans sa poésie des mots tirés des langues nationales, en usant de néologismes et de détournements de sens, en violant délibérément la syntaxe, a réussi à légitimer la langue des écrivains africains.

I- UNE POESIE FRANCO-AFRICAINE
Dans un article intitulé René Maran, précurseur de la négritude et paru dans Liberté 1
(Édition du Seuil 1964, p.410), Léopold Sédar Senghor écrivait :
«On ne pourra plus faire vivre, travailler, aimer, pleurer, rire, parler les Nègres comme des Blancs.
Il ne s’agira même plus de leur faire parler «petit nègre» mais wolof, malinké, éwondo en français.»
Cette volonté d’africaniser le français se perçoit chez Senghor à travers l’insertion dans ses poèmes de termes tirés des langues nationales, la présence de chansons orales africaines dans sa poésie et l’usage d’africanismes dans sa poétique.
1- Les langues africaines dans les poèmes
Voici comment Senghor justifie l’existence du «Lexique» qu’il a placé à la fin du volume contenant l’ensemble de ses sept recueils et intitulé Œuvre poétique (Éditions du Seuil 1990 p.435) :
«Certains lecteurs se sont plaints de trouver dans mes poèmes des mots d’origine africaine qu’ils ne comprennent pas.
Ils me le pardonneront : il s’agit de comprendre moins le réel que le surréel - le sous-réel.
J’ajouterai que j’écris, d’abord, pour mon peuple. Et celui-ci sait qu’une kora n’est pas une harpe, non plus qu’un balafon un piano. Au reste, c‘est en touchant les Africains de langue française que nous toucherons les Français et, par delà mers et frontières, les autres hommes…
C’est pourquoi, ai-je pensé, il n’était peut-être pas inutile de donner une brève explication des mots d’origine africaine employés dans ce recueil.»
Il serait fastidieux de relever tous ces termes. Qu’il nous suffise de présenter ceux des Chants d’ombre que le Poète explique lui-même dans le «Lexique» :
Balafong : (bala en manding) : sorte de xylophone.
Dyoung-dyoung : tam-tam royal de la cour du Sine d’origine mandingue.
Gymm : chant, poème. Mot qui vient du gim, «chant», poème. C’est la traduction exacte du grec ôdê.
Mbalakh : long tam-tam évasé au son clair.
Dyâli : mot d’origine mandingue. C’est un troubadour d’Afrique de l’Ouest, dans la zone soudano -sahélienne.
Guelwâr (ou guelowar) : mot sérère qui désigne le noble, descendant des conquérants mandingues.
Ndeudeu : tam-tam.
Sabar : long tam-tam au son clair.

Jacana Media is proud to announce the forthcoming publication of a South African classic, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum / Imisindo Yesighubu Sesikhumba Senkomo by Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali.
Originally published in 1971 by Lionel Abrahams’ Renoster Books, it quickly became a classic but has been unavailable for many years. The new edition carries a simultaneous isiZulu translation of the poems, and a new foreword by Nadine Gordimer.
“Not surprising that Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali, with his deep understanding of the human psyche, master of the ultimate in communication – undreamt of by Twitter – the poet’s power to reach from the conscious to the depths of the subconscious, has added to Sounds of a Cowhide Drum in this new edition the beat of poems written in his mother tongue, isiZulu.”
– Nadine Gordimer, Foreword to Sounds of a Cowhide Drum/Imisindo Yesighubu Sesikhumba Senkomo by Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali
“Poetry is the language of emotions and a medium for articulating feelings, opinions, ideas, thoughts and beliefs. Much more than an artistic pastime, it is the spiritual repository of human dreams which originate from the depths of the subconscious.”
– Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali, The Light of the Poetic Spirit, SGI Quarterly
About the author
Dr Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Southern Africa English Academy Poetry Award in 1971, the London Poetry International Award in 1973 and the South African Lifetime Achievement Literary Award (SALA) from the Department of Arts and Culture in 2007. He taught at the New York City College of Technology and is founder and deputy headmaster of Pace Community College in Jabulani, Soweto. Having worked in the United States for many years, Mtshali returned to South Africa and now lives in Soweto.
Book details...

http://jacana.bookslive.co.za/blog/2012/09/05/jacana-releases-new-edition-of-oswald-mtshalis-sounds-of-a-cowhide-drum/

Published on Monday 3 September 2012 09:00

A one-day poetry workshop will take place in The Glens Centre, Manorhamilton on Saturday, September 15, from 10am to 6pm.

The workshop, which is suitable for both beginner and more experienced writers, will be led by poet and AWA trained writing group leader Monica Corish.

The day will start with inspiration – a diverse collection of writing prompts, chosen to get the poetry juices flowing. From these first drafts participants will each choose one piece of writing, and spend the afternoon re-writing, editing, refining, distilling, turning the rose-water of first drafts into concentrated perfume; or, to change the metaphor, transforming rough beer into smooth whiskey.

At the end of the day each participant will have brought at least one poem one step closer to completion. “But be warned”, says Monica, “this is still only a beginning. With some poems you may spend many more days, weeks or months, even years, re-writing until your poem has arrived at a place where you know that the smallest further alteration would damage it, and you are satisfied.”

Lettres et Sciences humaines de l’Ucad. Cette thèse est le fruit de plus de cinq années de recherche sur la poésie orale des Fulbé du Jolof et du Ferlo, dans les régions administratives de Louga et de Matam. Le fond documentaire auquel l’impétrant a eu recours comprend la poésie profane, les œuvres de bergers et de troubadours en plus d’une poésie religieuse de Thierno Koyli Bâ et de celle des disciples de Cheikh Aldiouma Bâ.

Moussa Diallo a dû abattre un important travail de collecte, de transcription, de traduction et d’analyse, un labeur que l’on perçoit au caractère substantiel des deux tomes qui constitue sa thèse de doctorat.

La conviction du Dr Diallo est que « l’homme peul du Ferlo et du Jolof a amorcé sans dommage le passage de l’ère profane à l’ère islamique en s’appuyant sur un sacré utilitaire et un religieux non pas perçu, de manière fort heureuse et conséquente, comme le fait (une action ) d’envahisseurs ».

Que la religion ait été vulgarisée par des ressources locales a pour beaucoup contribué à tolérer des pratiques, certes rejetées par un Islam monothéiste, tout en introduisant une nouvelle manière de voir les choses, adaptable au quotidien du pasteur. Les pasteurs, ajoute l’auteur de la thèse, s’approprient cette poésie, l’ajoutent à leur répertoire qu’ils déclament dans les pâturages. Le thème n’est plus seulement celui des sites abandonnés, des terres qu’on a hâte de retrouver, la saison achevée, il s’y ajoute le thème du Cheikh et de sa famille à magnifier, avec, en plus du bien matériel que constitue le cheptel, une nouvelle raison de vivre, exister pour Dieu et sa religion, et sous la responsabilité d’un guide. Dans le fond, ces poèmes, transcrits en Pulaar puis traduits en Français, ont dû révéler une grande richesse dans la livraison du message par le pasteur ; cette richesse tient, à en croire l’auteur, à ce qu’à partir du moment où l’acte de communication est enclenché, tout, dans l’environnement diachronique et synchronique, concourt à l’élaboration du message, à sa diffusion, son décryptage et à son exploitation. Dès lors, la langue n’est plus un simple instrument de communication dans lequel on empaquette un message pour le livrer à un destinataire quelconque. Il s’agit de bien plus derrière les guillemets de l’oralité.

D’éminents Professeurs ont composé le jury de six membres, venant de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de l’Ucad, notamment : Bassirou Dieng, Professeur titulaire et président, Amadou Ly, Professeur titulaire, directeur de la thèse, Aboubacry Moussa Lam, Moussa Daff, Professeurs titulaires et rapporteurs, Yero SYLLA, Professeur titulaire et Mamadou Ndiaye, Maître de conférences.

Writing Workshop: Found In Translation with Bohdan Piasecki Saturday 13th October, 10am – 12.30pm South Birmingham College, Digbeth, Birmingham B5...

Poetry is what gets lost in translation, said Robert Frost (and every journalist who wrote about the subject). Bohdan Piasecki disagrees. His workshop will help you build on approaches and strategies used by literary translators to develop your own poetic voice and step out of your comfort zone. Combining translation work with creative writing, the session will leave you eager to explore the foreign and the unexpected in your own words. Important note: participants are not required to know more than one language.

The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine have awarded eight poets for their contributions to the magazine over the past year.

Dean Young has won the Levinson prize, a $500 award, for his poems “Handy Guide,” “Crash Test Dummies of an Imperfect God,” “Dear Bob,” “Spring Reign,” and “Peach Farm.” Linda Kunhardt took the Bess Hokin prize, a $1,000 award for her works “Indian Winter,” “Road Work,” “Clifton Webb,” “The Jingle,” and “More Juice Please.” Ange Mlinko won the $500 Frederick Bock prize for her poem “Cantata for Lynette Roberts.”

Eduardo Corral won the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood prize, a $5,000 award, for his poems “To the Angelbeast,” “To Robert Hayden,” and “In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes.” Peter Cole won the John Frederick Nims memorial prize for translation, a $500 prize, for his translation portfolio “The Poetry of Kabbalah.” Devin Johnston won the Friends of Literature prize in the amount of $500, for his poems “New Song,” and “A Close Shave.”

BEMIDJI – Erin Lynn Marsh knew that she wanted to be a writer for as far back as she can remember, but it took a “writer in residence” at the College of St. Benedict to support that dream.

Poet Blanca Baquero has translated a book of poetry and prose by Quebec author Anne-Marie Labelle. The Montreal writer created Ma lumiere est une ombre/My Sunshine is a Shadow after adopting a daughter Lovita.

We were happy to discover this interview with Mónica de la Torre over at Zoland Poetry.

We were happy to discover this interview with Mónica de la Torre over at Zoland Poetry. Mónica talks with ZP “about her approaches to translation, her work as an editor, and her own poetry.” Excitingly, they also discuss the beautiful Four:
ZP: In your newest collection, Four, asides of location, whether physical, temporal or emotional, wind like tree rings through the larger landscape of the book; while on a more immediate level, fragments of other texts, quotes, and cultural references (sometimes marked, sometimes not) are folded into the body of each poem independently. Could you talk a little bit about the structuring of Four, and the poetic dialogue that is created when a work is internally quartered, fragmented, then shattered into such a multitude of layers?
dlT: I like that you call it a collection of poems and not a book. Calling it a book might be a stretch given that it’s four chapbooks (two long poems and two serial poems) saddle-stitched individually and bundled together in a slipcase. With the collection’s format, my aim was to have readers assemble its contents—the booklets can be read in the order of the reader’s choice. Had the poems been bound in a single book, I would have had to order the four different series sequentially, and in doing so, I would have imposed a narrative logic to, and perhaps even a hierarchy on, the collection.