Although Stanislav Belsky's pre-war poems do not directly name an invasion, the atmosphere of his poetry is prescient and is aware of the state of things. This poem can be categorized as pre-war and is tinged with an oblique darkness squared off in reality's light. Translating Belsky's poetry, I'm keen to transfer a poem's affect as much as its content, hoping to bring the English reader into a comparable room.
olga mikolaivna on [do not compose a poem] |
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"Death, Desire, and the Poetics of the Automobile"
"Writing from the heart of the smoggy car city of Los Angeles, I followed this Brechtian prompt to ask what aesthetic forms could say something about the consequences of petromodernity 100 years later, as we live and drive toward climate collapse and the car’s obsolescence. I sought out to find a poetics of cars and death/drives, asking what form could convey the tragedy and cost of our lived experience of the bound reality of freedom and unfreedom, of the tenor and the vehicle."
via LITERARY HUB |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Eleanor Goodman on Translation
"For Zheng, and for me, the function of poetry, its innate raison d’être, is to mourn. And in mourning, to point a finger. Look! the poet cries, Look! Look at everything that’s been lost, that we are in the process of losing, that we are throwing away out of ignorance and fear and laziness and greed, the habits we’ve formed over a lifetime and cannot loosen our grasp on even if it kills us.” |
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