For Salgado and me, the music of poetry is the heart of the matter. Rhythm, alliteration, assonance. Of course, the translator cannot always reproduce the same sounds in the same places. But he can attempt to create an equivalency of emotional effect through language. Here is a modest example of the translator’s challenge and struggle. The first stanza of poem III is held together by repeated s sounds: Sangrar com a sorte escrita
a foice; sangrar
com a asa expandida aos astros.
In translation, I could only come up with three s sounds, but they appear in important places:
To bleed, one’s fortune
written by the scythe; to bleed
with wings stretching
to the stars.
The happiest moment for me came with the stretch of “stretching/to the stars.” Hope the reader feels the same.
Alexis Levitin on "The Rain That Sweetens the Name of Things" |
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René Kladzyk Interviews Palestinian Poet Mosab Abu Toha
"I think poetry is maybe one of the only tools that emerges from under the rubble of a bombed city. Israel is not only killing houses or neighborhoods, they are killing the city itself. Because if you look at Gaza, it doesn’t look like a city. It looks like a graveyard, really. I think poetry is the most direct way of communicating the horrors of the war and the siege."
via THE CREATIVE INDEPENDENT |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Johannes Göransson on Ann Jäderlund's [Not here]
"The influence between texts seems to flow in mulitple, volatile, anachronistic directions. It’s perhaps even wrong for me to say that the poems are based on Celan’s and Bachmann’s correspondence. The correspondence is one source, but from these letters, Jäderlund’s poetry is brought into contact with Hölderlin, Heidegger, Shakespeare, Rilke and others. Like Manny Farber’s infamous concept of 'termite art,' Jäderlund’s writing 'goes always forward eating its own boundaries.'" |
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