CipherJournal Contributor Bios
Joseph R. Allen, Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, began his studies of classical Chinese poetry with the poet and scholar Yang Mu (C. H. Wang) at the University of Washtington, Seattle. He has written on and translated both classical and modern Chinese poetry, as well as editing Arthur Waley’s translation of the Chinese classic of poetry, The Book of Songs (NY: Grove P, 1996).
Translating Gu Cheng
Darran Anderson is an Irish writer, poet and jacobite. He is poet-in-residence with Dogmatika and editor of Laika Poetry Review. His own work has appeared in Blatt, Poetry Salzburg Review, Deaddrunkdublin, Snorkel, The Bathyspheric Review, Like Water Burning and the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore amongst others. He is currently working on a novel entitled All The World Is Blue, having recently completed his first collection of poetry Tesla’s Ghost.
Stalin Epigram
Bob Arnold is presently at work on Yokel, a new collection of poems out of the Green Mountains of Vermont where he has long made his living with his family as a stonemason, builder and bookseller. His list of books includes On Stone: a builder’s notebook, Where Rivers Meet, American Train Letters, Beautiful Swimmers, Once In Vermont, and the trilogy This Romance, published by Cid Corman’s Origin Press. Since 1971 he has edited journals, books, and anthologies from Longhouse—the most recent being Just So Happens—a collection of 52 separate booklets by poets worldwide. He is Cid Corman’s literary executor.
Woodburners for Cid Corman’s 80th Birthday
John Balcom is an associate professor and head of the Chinese program in the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He is the translator of twelve books, including Li Qiao’s Wintry Night and Chang Hsi-kuo’s The City Trilogy. His Indigenous Writers of Taiwan: An Anthology of Stories, Essays, and Poems is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. He is currently translating Lo Fu’s book-length poem Driftwood.
Three Love Poems by Du Ye
Anny Ballardini is an interpreter and translator (English-Italian, and a rusted French) with a double citizenship (American-Italian). She has lived in Bozen, South Tyrol, Italy, for the last ten years. Curator of the Poets’ Corner, her work can be easily found on the net. Her blog is Narcissus Works. Among her translations: In_Ri by Henry Gould; On the Trail of Words by Larry Jaffe; Smokestacks Allegro by Rita Cominolli; Metaphysical Reference by Kenneth Hirst; from English into Italian and from Italian into English: The Renaissance of the Self; and the Notebook of Positano by Arturo Onofri.
ten - 10 - ten / dieci - 10 - dieci
Tony Barnstone is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and English at Whittier College, and has published his poetry, fiction, essays and translations in dozens of major American journals. His books include Impure: Poems by Tony Barnstone; Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry; Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei; The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters; and the textbooks Literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Literatures of Asia, and Literatures of the Middle East. His forthcoming books are The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor Books) and seven textbooks for Prentice Hall Publishers, including The Pleasures of Poetry: An Introduction, World Literature (two volumes), and Modern Poetry: An Anthology with Contexts. He is currently working on a new book of poems and a critical book titled The Poetics of the Machine Age: William Carlos Williams and Technological Modernism. In 2005 Sheep Meadow Press will publish his new book of sonnets, Sad Jazz. Visit his webpage at www.Barnstone.com.
Translations and Transformations
Translationese: Prose-Poems on Translation
Han Shan Isn’t Dead, He’s Just Turned into the Mountain: Some Notes on Translation
Born in Lewiston, Maine, Willis Barnstone was educated at Bowdoin, Columbia, the Sorbonne and Yale. He taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949 – 51), in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War, and during the Cultural Revolution he went to China where he was later a Fulbright Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University (1984 – 1985). Former O’Connor Professor of Greek at Colgate University, he is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish at Indiana University. His publications include Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (Yale, 1993), Algebra of Night: Selected Poems—1949 – 1998 (Sheep Meadow, 1999), The Apocalypse (New Directions, 2000), Life Watch (BOA, 2003), Border of a Dream: Poems of Antonio Machado (Copper Canyon, 2003) and The Gnostic Bible (Shambhala, 2003), which has just been selected by Book of the Month.
Four French Poems, with English Translations
ABC of Translating Poetry
Claire Barre is a linguist who teaches English in Provence where she lives. She has always been interested in literature, especially French, American and English modern literature. After dedicating herself to the theater, she is now mostly concerned with contemporary poetry.
Amphibious / Amphibie
Herbert Batt:
Born in Buffalo, NY, in 1945; Ph. D. in Elizabethan drama from the University of Toronto, 1975. Led wilderness canoe trips for Toronto childrens’ aid kids,and taught English for eight years each in the People’s Rep. of China and in Poland. The anthology of his translations of Chinese-language fiction about Tibet, Tales of Tibet, appeared with Rowman and Littlefield Publishers in 2001.
from At the Czestochowa Institute of Foreign Languages and Business
Steve Bradbury has published poems, translations, and essays on poetry and translation in boundary 2, Jacket, and elsewhere; and two volumes of translation: Poems from the Chinese of Hsia Yü (Zephyr Press, 2001) and Poems from the Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh (Tinfish 2003).
Three Prose Poems
To the Translator, Somewhere in New England, on the Road to Far Cathay
On Li Bai’s “The Jeweled Stairs Grievance”
John Bradley is the author of A-E-I-O-U, All for Blanca, Love-In-Idleness, The New Wine Dreaming in the Vat, To Dance with Uranium, Add Musk Here, and the forthcoming Terrestrial Music. He is the editor of Atomic Ghost and Learning to Glow. He teaches writing at Northern Illinois University.
Blind Translations: Two Untitled Poems
Selected Poems of Cheng Hui
Louis E. Bourgeois is an instructor of writing and literature at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi. His most recent collection of poems, Olga, is forthcoming by WordTech in the fall of 2005.
Stéphane Mallarmé’s Fragments
In addition to Hence this cradle (Seismicity Editions, 2007), Ann Cefola’s translation of Hélène Sanguinetti’s work has appeared in journals such as Absinthe, Circumference, and Mantis. She has won a 2007 Witter Bynner Poetry Translation Residency and the 2001 Robert Penn Warren Award judged by John Ashbery. Her own chapbook, Sugaring (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in April 2007. Ann (anncefola.com) also holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and works as a creative strategist (jumpstartnow.net) in the New York suburbs where she lives.
Amphibious / Amphibie
from De la main gauche, exploratrice / from Left-hand exploring
Rosa Maria Costa and Laura Costantini are high school language teachers, who occasionally help Guido Monte in his experimental works.
Fragments—Frammenti di poesia latina—fragments of Latin poetry—fragments de poèmes latins
Maxine Chernoff is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Among the Names (Apogee, 2005) and Evolution of the Bridge: New and Selected Prose Poems (Salt Editions, 2003). Her most recent collection of fiction is Some of her Friends That Year: New and Selected Stories (Coffee House). With Paul Hoover, she edits New American Writing. She chairs the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. Her co-translation of Hölderlin will be published by Omnidawn in 2008.
Seven Poems by by Friedrich Hölderlin
Don Mee Choi was born in South Korea but now lives in Seattle. She has translated When the Plug Gets Unplugged: Poems by Kim Hyesoon (Tinfish, 2005) and Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women (Zephyr, 2006). More translations of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry are forthcoming from Action Books, 2007.
Four Poems by Kim Hye-sun
Translationese: Diary of a Translator
Dog’s Horns
Robert Creeley was one of the initial contributors to Cid Corman’s origin and was featured in its second issue (1951). He was also editor of The Black Mountain Review (1954 – 57) and taught at the college in 1954 – 55. A frequent collaborator with artists and musicians, he is best known as a poet and presently teaches in Brown University’s Graduate Program in Literary Arts.
For Cid
Lennet Daigle is a translator living and working in Taipei.
Blind Translations: One Poem
James DenBoer is the author of Learning The Way and Trying to Come Apart (University of Pittsburgh Press), Nine Poems; Olson/DenBoer: A Letter; and Lost in Blue Canyon (Christopher's Books), Dreaming of the Chinese Army (Blue Thunder Press), A Bibliography of the Published Work of Douglas Blazek 1961 – 2001 (Glass Eye Books), Back Until Then (PalOMine Press), and Black Dog: An Unfinished Segue Between Two Seasons, (Rattlesnake Press). He has had grants and awards from the International Poetry Forum, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Council on the Arts, and PEN Center-New York, among others. He is presently translating the Romance kharjas of Hebrew and Arabic muwashshahat.
from Book XI of the Opera Poetica of Venantius Fortunatus
Maria den Boer is an accomplished scholarly editor and indexer, with special competence in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. She has a large collection of work from such university presses as Princeton and Johns Hopkins, and from commercial presses such as John Wiley, Perseus and ABC-CLIO. She is married to the poet David den Boer.
from Book XI of the Opera Poetica of Venantius Fortunatus
Mayra L. Dole was born in Marianao, Cuba, raised in a Hialeah Florida Cuban barrio, and lived in New York, New Jersey, and Boston. Dole is the author / translator of two critically acclaimed bilingual children’s multicultural books, Drum, Chavi, Drum! / Toca, Chavi, Toca! and Birthday in the Barrio / Cumpleaños en el Barrio. Her young adult novel “Down to the Bone” is set in Cuban Miami and will be published by Harper Collins in winter, 2008.
Two Bilingual Afro-Cuban Poems
Ivailo Dragnev ended English school in English philology at the University of Sofia “St. Kliment Ohridski.” He specialized in British culture and civilization in Glasgow in 1996. He teaches English language at the University of Plovdiv “Paisii Hilendarski.” He is a writer and translator of poetry and fiction.
The Howl of the Years
Mark DuCharme’s second collection of poetry, Infinity Subsections, is due in 2004 from Meeting Eyes Bindery. His other books include Cosmopolitan Tremble (Pavement Saw Press, 2002), and several chapbooks including Near To (Poetry New York, 1999) and Anon, cowritten with Anselm Hollo, Patrick Pritchett and Laura Wright (Potato Clock Editions, 2001). In addition to his poetry, his essays have appeared widely, most recently in 26: a journal of poetry and poetics, New Review of Literature, Word for/Word, and Facture. He lives and works in Boulder, Colorado.
“Addressed to No One”: Reading Jack Spicer’s After Lorca
Sarah Dudek was born in Dortmund, Germany, in 1980. She studies philosophy and literature at the Humboldt University. In Berlin she has organised and directed readings about literary expressionism. Recently she attended the University of Amsterdam for one year as an exchange student; during this time she worked for Poetry International Web, Rotterdam, which published several of her articles and essays.
Walter Benjamin & The Religion of Translation
Beth Dugger Kanell is the author of a poetry chapbook, Mud Season at the Castle; another one seeking a publisher, Triangulation; three books of adventure travel, two of regional history, a young adult mystery, and multiple journalistic escapades. She lives in Vermont, with her back braced against the green hills and her toes in the Connecticut River.
Cid Corman: Par Avion
Andrew Duncan has published about ten books of poetry. Is associated as a translator with the work of Thomas Kling, Jurgen Becker, and Erich Arendt. Main languages French and German, also has passing relationships with Russian, Swedish, Welsh, Latin, etc. Website at www.pinko.org.
Fault-Tolerant Poetry
Denis Emorine is the author of short stories, essays, poetry, and theatre. He was born in 1956 near Paris and studied literature at the Sorbonne (University of Paris). His works have been published in France, Belgium, India, Luxembourg, Romania, and the US. His theatrical output has been staged in France and Russia. Writing, for Emorine, is a way of harnessing time in its incessant flight. Themes that reoccur throughout his writing include the doppelgänger, lost or shattered identity, and mythical Venice (a place that truly fascinates him). He also has a great interest in Eastern Europe. In 2004, he won first prize at the Féile Filiochta International competiton.
Le Sacre de la vestale / The Virgin and the Shadow
Clayton Eshleman, born in Indiana in 1935, is one of the most prolific and prominent of American poets, translators, and essayists. Now Professor Emeritus of English at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilante, he is former editor of the journals Caterpillar and Sulfur, and has translated the complete works of César Vallejo and Aimé Césaire. In 2004 Black Sparrow Press will bring out a new collection of poetry, My Devotion. His most recent publication is Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld (Wesleyan University Press). For more, see his personal website.
Bashō’s Back Roads to Far Towns
Cid
Three Poems
John Estes is a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Missouri-Columbia and an editor at the nascent online poetry journal The Saboteur. You can read other poems online at DIAGRAM and Not Just Air. Other work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Dogwood, and The Notre Dame Review.
Three Versions
Michael Farman was born in England, but he has lived in Texas for the past fourteen years, where he works as an electronics engineer on scientific balloons under contract to NASA. In earlier life he had studied Mandarin at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, and spent a year in Hong Kong, which stimulated a lifelong interest in Chinese culture. He began translating the classical poetry five years ago. His translations have since appeared frequently in literary magazines and some are featured in the anthology A Silver Treasury of Chinese Lyrics recently published by Renditions. His first collection: Clouds and Rain, Lyrics of Love and Desire from China’s Golden Ages was published by Pipers’ Ash in November 2003.
from The Book of Odes
Translating The Book of Odes
Liz Fortini is a poet and translator, published on French and Italian on-line poetry sites. Her poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, www.longstoryshort.us and local anthologies. She is co-author of A Cutting Edge: translations of Rainer Rilke, 2005, and publisher of www.languageandculture.net, an online poetry journal. She resides in Pleasanton, Ca. with her husband and daughter and is currently working on her second chapbook.
Six poems by Rainer Maria Rilke
A galla / Afloat by Eugenio Montale
Mark E. Francis lived several years in Taiwan before returning to the U.S. and earning graduate degrees in Chinese from Stanford University. His most recent translations of classical Chinese poetry have appeared in Contemporary Rhyme, The Raintown Review, and Passport: The Arkansas Review of Literary Translation.
Dream Within a Dream? Imagining Li Shangyin’s Medieval Chinese Verse
Ryan Gallagher was born in 1976 in Lowell, MA. He lives there now with his wife Jess and daughter Olivia. Ryan has recently finished a translation of The Complete Works of Gaius Valerius Catullus, a project he started at the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where he received the William Burroughs scholarship. His first book of poems Plum Smash and Other Poems will be published by Bootstrap Press in March of 2005. He is also a painter and owns a Jack Kerouac bobblehead.
LXIV / 64
Forrest Gander’s recent books of translation include Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems
of Coral Bracho, forthcoming from New Directions, The Night, a booklength poem by the great Bolivian visionary poet of the 20th century, Jaime Saenz (translated with Kent Johnson), and No Shelter: Selected Poems of Pura Lopez Colome from Graywolf.
desde Fotografias en los labios de alguien / from Photographs on Someone’s Lips
Lorand Gaspar was born in 1925 in Transylvania (now Romania) to a Hungarian family. In 1943 he enrolled at the School of Engineering in Budapest only to be drafted several months later. In 1944 he was deported to a Nazi labor camp, from which he escaped a year later and emigrated to France. He studied medicine in Paris, then took a job as a surgeon in Jerusalem, where he lived for sixteen years; after 1970 he moved to Tunis, where he continued his medical practice, and now lives in Paris, where he is involved in medical research dealing with human psychology. Gaspar is a very respected poet, essayist, photographer and translator, author of numerous volumes of poetry, among which Le quatrième état de la matière (1966), Sol absolu (1972) and Patmos (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). He masters several languages: to the languages learned as a child—Hungarian, Romanian and German—he later added French, English, Latin, Greek and Arabic. He has translated Spinoza, Rilke, Seferis and several Hungarian authors.
from The House by the Sea II
Michelle Gil-Montero is a graduate of Brown University and The University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She has published poems, translations, and essays on translation in Jacket, Colorado Review, Haydens Ferry Review, Conjunctions, Mar Con Soroche, and elsewhere.
Amor Islam
Jesse Glass lives outside of Tokyo with his wife and family. Recent work has appeared on-line at Masthead and Big Bridge. His Selected Poems will be published by West House Books later this year. Glass is currently making slow but real progress in his study of Japanese. On the Old English front, his translations of “Wulf and Eadwacer,” an Anglo-Saxon “Charm Against Tooth-Ache” and the first section of Beowulf can be found elsewhere on the web. He is also publisher of Ahadada Books.
Deor
2 Poems for Cid Corman
Anne Gorrick’s work has been published in many journals including: American Letters and Commentary, the Cortland Review, Dislocate, Fence, Fish Drum, For Immediate Release, Good Foot, Gutcult, Heaven Bone, Hunger Magazine, No Tell Motel, Petroglyph (Utah State University), the Seneca Review, Situation, the South Carolina Review (University of South Carolina), Sulfur, word for/word, and Yellow Silk. She also has work coming out or out in a few anthologies including: The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, (No Tell Press) and Homage to Vallejo (Greenhouse Review Press).
from Japonisme
Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. Her poems have appeared in America, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and she’s included in the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her newest book, The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006), is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.
Two Poems
Willem Groenewegen (born 1971) is a bilingual Dutch-English poet and literary translator. During the ’90s his English poetry was published in various pamphlets in Britain. The past few years his Dutch work has started to appear in magazines and anthologies, though at the moment he is still better known for his translations of Dutch poets into English, which appear regularly in English magazines (Poetry Wales, Leviathan). His first book, published with Arc Press, including translations of Arjen Duinker’s poems, came out last year.
Teruglezen, voor James Brockway / Read Again, for James Brockway
Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, and teacher who sometimes writes poetry and movie reviews. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one-man shows, including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His paintings, drawings and collages have been published in many on line magazines including Rock Heals, Otoliths, Winamop, Melancholia’s Tremulous Dreadlocks, Barfing Frog, The Raving Dove, Foliate Oak, Siren, Triplopia, Thieves Jargon, Opium, Dirt, The Centrifugal Eye, the DMQ Review, Broadsided, Hotmetalpress, Double Dare Press, Events Quarterly, Unlikely Stories, Coupremine, Cerebration, Chick Flicks, Softblow, & Eclectica Magazine. Over the years he has received three National Endowments For The Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants, and most recently in 2004 received The Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant. Currently he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn.
Four Images
Stanton Hager (1946 – ) studied Chinese at Georgetown U., Latin at McGill U., and English Literature at Florida Atlantic U. He holds a master’s degree. Although he has published academic literary criticism, book reviews, and short fiction and has written in most other literary genres, he now devotes himself to writing and translating poetry. In 1971 – 72, he translated about a third of Carmina Catulli; those published in CipherJournal come from that batch, recently revised during a brief break from his larger ongoing project, a book-length translation of T’ang poetry. He has been a ’60s dharma bum, construction worker, comic book retailer, and English professor. He has lived in NYC, Cambridge, Montreal, Fort Lauderdale, and Thailand’s Chengmai. He currently resides north of Boston, where he writes full-time. For word-relief, he plies his other creative passion: papier collé. He can be contacted at stantonhager (a) verizon.net.
from Catulli Carmina
Kathleen Hannan, Kiwi born and bred, studied English and French lit. and was in May ’68 in Paris... merely as a bystander. She has lived 35 years in France and Italy and, between 3 undemanding children and a demanding cat, manages to eke out a living as a full time translator. She has collaborated in several poetry anthology translations. She would love to retire but words are her drug.
Erasing the Blue Numbers / Cancellando i numeri blu /
Éffaçant les numéros bleus / Die Blauen Nummern Ausradiern
Jeff Harrison has appeared in Nerve Lantern, Sentence, XStream, Moria, Poethia, VeRT, MAG, BlazeVox, Word for Word, Xerography, Blackbox, Masthead, Side Reality, canwehaveourballback, XPress(ed), Generator, Tin Lustre Mobile, Znine, A Chide’s Alphabet, 5_Trope, The Dream People, Aught, Blackboard Project, Newtopia, Pettycoat Relaxer, Great Works, Gypsy, Kichen Sink, and Cranky.
O - 7
Alamgir Hashmi has been writing poetry for forty years and is author of several books of literary criticism and theory as well. His translations of Pakistani literature have been published widely in Pakistan and abroad. Of his eleven volumes of English poetry, the latest two are A Choice of Hashmi’s Verse (OUP, 1997) and The Ramazan Libation (Arc, 2003). He has been Professor of English and Comparative Literature in Asian, European, and American universities.
Five Poems by Parveen Shakir
Waltraud Henderson (Schmidt), born 1946. Lived in a D. P. camp in Bavaria, Germany, for four years. Waltraud moved to Canada at the age of twenty-one. She owned and ran Nunavut Gallery first in Regina, Saskatchewan, then in Victoria, British Columbia, where she represented both first nations and other Canadian art. She has translated Lynn Strongin’s poems for Italy’s Storie, and Canada’s Ygradsil. She is in seventh heaven with one dictionary at the right, one at the left. Her other passion is art. She now lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
Erasing the Blue Numbers / Cancellando i numeri blu /
Éffaçant les numéros bleus / Die Blauen Nummern Ausradiern
Brian Holton has taught Chinese language and literature at Edinburgh, Durham, and Newcastle, and was director of the Chinese Translating & Interpreting programme at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published a variety of translations from modern and pre-modern Chinese literature, as well as articles and essays on translation. He is currently teaching translation at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Driving to the Harbour of Heaven: Translating Yang Lian’s Concentric Circles
Paul Hoover has published eleven collections of poetry including Edge and Fold, Poems in Spanish, Winter (Mirror), Rehearsal in Black, and Totem and Shadow: New & Selected Poems. His collection of critical essays, Fables of Representation, was published in 2004 in the Poets on Poetry series of University of Michigan Press. He is also editor of the Norton anthology Postmodern American Poetry and, with Maxine Chernoff, of the literary magazine New American Writing. Winner of the Jerome J. Shestack Award for the best poetry to appear in American Poetry Review in 2002, he teaches Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.
Seven Poems by by Friedrich Hölderlin
Four Vietnamese Poets
Dr. Claire Huot is a sinologist and author. A professor of Chinese language and culture, and Comparative Literature, she served as the Cultural Counselor at the Canadian Embassy to the People’s Republic of China in Beijing and is presently teaching Chinese Film at the University of Calgary in Alberta. She is the author of China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes, Duke University Press, 2000.
After Li He, Li Ping plays the Kong Hou
Daniela Hurezanu has translated French and Romanian authors into English and W. S. Merwin’s The Miner’s Pale Children into French. Her translations have been published in numerous magazines, including Manoa, Field, Exquisite Corpse, New Orleans Review, Cairn, Words without Borders, Sulphur River Review, Europe, Diner and Subtropics. Her reviews and essays are forthcoming in Translation Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Bloomsbury Review and The Redwood Coast Review.
from The House by the Sea II
John Irons:
Born 1942. Studied modern languages at Cambridge (French, German and Dutch). Doctoral thesis on the development of imagery in the Dutch poet P.C. Boutens. Since 1968, resident in Scandinavia. Professional translator since the mid 1980s. Has specialised in the translation of poetry over the last ten years—mainly Dutch and Flemish, but also Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and German.
Teruglezen, voor James Brockway / Read Again, for James Brockway
Sarah Ruth Jacobs is the author of Valence, a poetry chapbook from Flarestack Press in the UK. Her writing has won awards from The Cornell Council for the Arts, The New York Times , and Poets & Writers. She currently resides in New York City where she works as the Assistant Graduate Poetry Coordinator at the New School.
Grodek
Matthew Jewell is a Chicago-based artist and writer. He earned his M.F.A.W. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003 and currently teaches Anything Available at St. Augustine College and the University of St. Francis. His work has recently appeared on Nidus and BlazeVox and is forthcoming in Bird Dog. If he were independently wealthy and his French were better, he’d move to Paris and skulk around OuLiPo meetings. As it is, he’s content to occasionally fall off his roof. Don’t worry; he’s a trained professional.
Orbit 13
Kent Johnson is co-translator, with Forrest Gander, of Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz (University of California Press, 2002), which was a 2003 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation finalist. He and Gander have recently finished translating Saenz’s The Night, a book-length poem.
“Addressed to No One”: Reading Jack Spicer’s After Lorca
Poet, translator & essayist Pierre Joris left Luxembourg at age 19 & has since lived in the U.S., Great Britain, North Africa, and France. Rain Taxi praised his most recent collection, Poasis: Selected Poems 1986 – 1999, for “its physical, philosophical delight in words and their reverberations.” Just out from Wesleyan U.P. is his collection of essays A Nomad Poetics. His recent translations include 4x1: Work by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey & Habib Tengour and Abdelwahab Meddeb’s The Malady of Islam. With Jerome Rothenberg he edited the award-winning anthology Poems for the Millennium. In Spring 2004 Green Integer will reissue three volumes of his translations of Paul Celan: Breathturn, Threadsuns, and Lightduress. He often performs his work in collaboration with vocalist & visual artist Nicole Peyrafitte, most recently touring their multimedia show Sumerica Bachbones throughout Europe & the US. He currently teaches poetry and poetics at SUNY-Albany. During the fall of 2003 he was Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Visit Pierre Joris’s website at www.albany.edu/~joris/.
from Cycle III of Lightduress
Eight Poems from The Fire Eater
From Picasso: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, & Other Poems
George Kalamaras is the author of six books of poetry, four of which are full-length, Gold Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors (The Bitter Oleander Press, forthcoming 2008), Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair (Quale Press, 2004), Borders My Bent Toward (Pavement Saw Press, 2003), and The Theory and Function of Mangoes (Four Way Books, 2000), which won the Four Way Books Intro Series. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry 1997, American Letters & Commentary, The Bitter Oleander, Denver Quarterly, Hambone, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, New Letters, Sulfur, and others. He is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990.
Translate This Page: Nicanor Parra, Revered Father of the Anti-poem
Tim Keane’s poems, from his recently completed collection Alphabets of Elsewhere, have appeared in numerous magazines, including Modern Painters, Denver Quarterly,Shenandoah, Aesthetica Magazine, International Poetry Review and XCP-Cross Cultural Poetics. He lives in New York City and teaches writing and comparative literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at New York University.
The Observers and The Dreamers / Les Observateurs et Les Rêveurs
W. B. Keckler’s Sanskrit of the Body won in the National Poetry Series a few years back and is available through Penguin Books. He has hundreds of pages of poetry online if you care to do a Google Easter Egg Hunt. The author has recently removed to Steelton, Pennsylvania, and taken possession of a house with rather transigent ghosts who seem to favor the cat over all other denizens
Section III from André Malraux’s Paper Moons
David Keeling lives and works in Chicago, IL. His poems have appeared in the Ohio Review and The New England Review, among others.
The Intoxication of Translation: Jerome Rothenberg’s Writing Through
Christopher Kelen is a well known Australian poet whose works have been widely published and broadcast since the mid seventies. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature describes Kelen’s work as ‘typically innovative and intellectually sharp’. Kelen holds degrees in literature and linguistics from the University of Sydney and a doctorate on the teaching of the writing process, from UWS Nepean. Kelen’s first volume of poetry The Naming of the Harbour and the Trees won an Anne Elder Award in 1992. In 1988 Kelen had won an ABA/ABC bicentennial award with his poem ‘Views from Pinchgut’. In 1996 Kelen was Writer-in-Residence for the Australia Council at the B. R. Whiting Library in Rome. In 1999 he won the Blundstone National Essay Contest, conducted by Island journal. He also won second prize in the Gwen Harwood Poetry Award that year. In 2000 Kelen’s poetry / art collaboration (with Carol Archer) Tai Mo Shan / Big Hat Mountain was exhibited at the Montblanc Gallery in Hong Kong’s Fringe Club. And in 2001 another collaboration (essay and watercolour) titled Shui Yi Meng / Sleep to Dream was shown at the Montblanc Gallery. Both exhibitions have been published as full colour catalogues. Kelen’s fourth book of poems, Republics, dealing with the ethics of identity in millennial Australia, was published by Five Islands Press in Australia in 2000. A fifth volume, New Territories—a pilgrimage through Hong Kong, structured after Dante’s Divine Comedy—was published with the aid of the Hong Kong Arts Development Board in 2003. In 2004 Kelen’s most recent chapbook Wyoming Suite—a North American sojourn—was released by VAC Publishing in Chicago. In 2005, Kelen’s long poem ‘Macao’ was shortlisted for the prestigious Newcastle Poetry Prize and a re-edited version of Tai Mo Shan appeared in Southerly. Apart from poetry Kelen publishes in a range of theoretical areas including writing pedagogy, ethics, rhetoric, cultural and literary studies and various intersections of these. Kelen currently teaches Creative Writing and Children’s Literature at the University of Macau in South China. Kelen is the principal investigator in the University of Macau’s ‘Poems and Stories of Macao Research Project’ and the editor of the on-line journal Writing Macao: creative text and teaching. In addition to the Meng Jiao Project, he is also working on Li Yu and Xin Qiji.
odd one out: a first sampling of method and output from the Meng Jiao Poetry project
Tsipi Keller’s short fiction and poetry translations have appeared in various journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and of a CAPS and NYFA awards in fiction. Her translation of Dan Pagis’s posthumous collection, Last Poems, was published by The Quarterly Review of Literature (1993), and her translation of Irit Katzir’s posthumous collection, And I Wrote Poems, was published by Carmel, Israel (2000). Her novels, The Prophet of Tenth Street (1995) and Leverage (1997) were translated into Hebrew and published by Sifriat Poalim, Israel. Her latest novel, Jackpot, was published by Spuyten Duyvil (2004)
Three Poems by Tamir Greenberg
Robert Kelly:
I live in the Hudson Valley and teach in the Writing Program at Bard College. Forthcoming books: Lapis (from Godine/Black Sparrow) and Scham/Shame (a collaboration with the German poet Birgit Kempker, Engeler Editions), The Language of Eden (Black Square). Interview in recent Poets & Writers (by Celia Bland) sets out my current concerns.
On Corman
David Koehn’s poetry appears in a variety of publications such as New England Review, NYQ, The Bitter Oleander, and ZYZZYVA. His prose appears in Jacket, New Hampshire Review, New York Quarterly and elsewhere. Currently he lives outside San Francisco, CA, where he participates with a group of San Francisco Poets in a workshop called Thirteen Ways. He works for the software start-up he founded, TailWind Solutions. He has also recently started, and contributes to, an online poetics blog The Great American Pin-up partnered with Webdelsol at: http://greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com/. More information is available in summary form at http://davidkoehn.com.
Eleven from Catullus
Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz appear in Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Webster’s Dictionary of American Authors, The HarperCollins Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, NNDB.com, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, among other distinguished directories. Living in New York, where he was born, he still needs two bucks to take a subway.
Spanglish Inserts
Karl Krause:
Born in the woods of West Bend, Wisconsin, Karl Krause performs poems and music with good friends. He is the author of one chapbook, TV: The Movie, one film, TV: The Movie: The Movie, the designer and co-editor of one online superpoetryartsandmusicjournal www.PuppyFlowers.com, lead saxophone and clarinet for Gospel Hospital, and is currently finishing his first documentary production “Sing Along with Donna Dee”. Keep your eyes on this rising star, he has it all! (You can see “Sing Along with Donna Dee”, here).
Appendice alla Religione : una luce / Appendix to The Religion: a light
Rika Lesser is the author of three books of poetry: Etruscan Things (Braziller, 1983), All We Need of Hell (North Texas, 1995), and Growing Back (South Carolina, 1997). She has published five books of poetry in translation—by Claes Andersson, Gunnar Ekelöf, Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Göran Sonnevi—as well as translations of various works of Swedish or German fiction and nonfiction. In 1982 she received the Landon Prize for her rendition of Ekelöf’s Guide to the Underworld, a new edition of which is due from Green Integer in 2005. In 1996 the Swedish Academy awarded her its Poetry Translation Prize. For her work on Göran Sonnevi she has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in both 1992 and 2002 the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize. She co-chaired the PEN Translation Committee from 1989 – 1995 and has taught poetry or literary translation at Columbia, the George Washington University, the New School University, Yale, and the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y.
Mozart’s Third Brain
Norman MacAfee’s most recent books are The Coming of Fascism to America (New York: Bowery Poetry Club, 2006); The Death of the Forest (Amsterdam: Blankert 2004), opera by Norman MacAfee to music of Charles Ives; and The Gospel According to RFK: Why It Matters Now (New York and Boulder: Basic Books / Westview 2004). Forest, a chamber variation on The Death of the Forest directed by Beppie Blankert, will premiere in Massachusetts in June 2007 then tour to Amsterdam and to New York and elsewhere in America in November 2007. Norman MacAfee co-translated the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Farrar Straus Giroux 1996, Random House 1982), the letters of Jean-Paul Sartre (Scribner, Penguin UK, 1993, 1994), and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (Signet 1987). He translated Claude Cahun’s legendary long-lost surrealist lesbian manuscript Heroines, for Inverted Odysseys (MIT Press 1997). MacAfee’s first book of poetry was A New Requiem (Cheap Review Press 1988). “The Song of the Earth” is part of a new poetry manuscript, One Class.
The Song of the Earth
Robert Majzels is a novelist, playwright, poet and translator, born in Montréal. His most recent books are the novels Apikoros Sleuth and, forthcoming in October 2007, The Humbugs Diet (The Mercury Press). He won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for translation in 2000, and has translated, with Erín Moure, three books of poetry by Nicole Brossard. He is presently on a limited term appointment as Associative Professor teaching creative writing in the English Department of the University of Calgary.
After Li He, Li Ping plays the Kong Hou
Nicholas Manning graduated from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia with a B.A in Comparative Literature and French. He was then a recipient of a three year scholarship to the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, where he is currently completing his second year of study. Last year he took his Maîtrise (MA Degree) at the Sorbonne with a thesis on the contemporary French poet Philippe Jaccottet. His poetry has appeared, or is soon to appear, in the following literary journals: Free Verse, Manifold, eratio, MiPOesias, Stylus, Blue Fifth Review, Fire, Imago.
Free Translations from Apollinaire
Thomas Meyer is a poet and editor who lives in the Natahala mountains in the southern Appalachians, and in the western most of the Yorkshire Dales. His most recent books is Coromandel (2003) from Skanky Possum, Austin.
from The Dao De Jing
KK Mohapatra (1951 – ) has published two collections of stories, Palabhuta and Chor, and a novel, Photo, in Oriya and co-translated The HarperCollins Book of Oriya Short Stories (HarperCollins India, 1998) and Ants, Ghosts and Whispering Trees: An Anthology of Oriya Short Stories (HarperCollins India, 2003).
The Whore: A Love Story
Leelawati Mohapatra (1952 – ) has co-translated The HarperCollins Book of Oriya Short Stories (HarperCollins India, 1998) and Ants, Ghosts and Whispering Trees: An Anthology of Oriya Short Stories (HarperCollins India, 2003). She is currently at work on her first novel in English.
The Whore: A Love Story
Guido Monte was born in 1962, and teaches Italian and Latin literature in Palermo, Italy. He blends living and dead languages, and ancient and modern poets, in search of deeper relations between different people and cultures. About him, see www.happano.org/pages/fragments/63.html.
Fragments—Frammenti di poesia latina—fragments of Latin poetry—fragments de poèmes latinsViaje to the dream deux portes, n.2 & Pulvis 3
Barbara Moraff—“Passionate with inevitability of own persona”—bakes kickass organic whole-grain breads she sells at farmer’s market in St. Johnsbury, along with limited edition unique from ground up stoneware pottery. Moraff is now disabled and needs to sell her 2200-foot genuine Cape farmhouse (2 acres) in Danville, Vermont. Gladly will give buyer of her real estate bonus of all rights to her works published by Totem-Corinth Press, Potes and Poets Press, Pentogram Press, White Pine Press, Toothpaste Press, Coffee House Press, Snake-Tail Press (London), Shadow Play Press, New Victoria Press. Please help. Tashi deleg! May auspicious coincidence arise.
3 Poems for Cid Corman
Tosa Motokiyu is the pseudonym of a writer who did not wish to publicly attach his name to the Yasusada materials.
from The English Letters of Araki Yasusada
Christopher Mulrooney has written poems and translations in Zoland Poetry, The Hollins Critic, H_NGM_N, Knock and Eclipse, criticism in Elimae, The Film Journal and Parameter, and a volume of verse called notebook and sheaves.
Carmen
Murat Nemet-Nejat’s recent poems and publications include Aishe Series and Other Harbor Poems, Steps (Mirage, 2003), The Peripheral Space of Photography (Green Integer Press, 2003), Frédéric Brenner Diaspora: homelands in exile, photographs and voices (HarperCollins, 2003), Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (forthcoming, Talisman, 2004).
A 13th Century Dream
Translation: Contemplating Against the Grain
Rodney Nelson grew up hearing Norwegian and Swedish in his home and Dakota region but acquired Spanish and German at school. He was a navy musician and has worked as librarian, freelance copy editor, and licensed psychiatric technician. Poems and narratives began appearing in such print journals as Georgia Review and Carleton Miscellany in 1970; several small-press books followed, among them the novels Boots Brevik Saga and Villy Sadness. A lifelong nonacademic, Nelson turned to the ezines in 2002 and has had work in Big Bridge, Taint, Retort, and many others. He was in the 2000 Who's Who in America.
Wildern Green
Path Around
Poet and essayist Richard Jeffrey Newman is an Associate Professor in the English Department of Nassau Community College. His work, prose and poetry, has appeared in Changing Men Magazine, Salon.com, The American Voice, On The Issues, The Pedestal, Birmingham Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, ACM and other literary journals. These are his first published translations. His selections from the Gulistan as well as a projected five more books of translations from classical Persian literature will be jointly published in book form by Global Scholarly Publications and the International Society for Iranian Culture.
From The Gulistan
A poet, journalist, and translator, Nguyen Do was born in Vietnam’s Ha Tinh province in 1959 and moved to Hanoi as a youth. For a long time he lived in Ho Chi Minh City, where he worked as an editor and reporter for a literary review and many other newspapers and magazines before moving to the United States. His poetry collections are The Fish Wharf and The Autumn Evening (1988, in collaboration with Thanh Thao) and The Empty Space (1991). While living in Vietnam, he wrote many articles criticizing the government and legal system. As a result, for eight years nothing he wrote could be published under his name. To make a living, he did sports and arts reporting under a dozen different pseudonyms. He is not a member of the Vietnamese Writers Association.
Four Vietamese Poets
Alistair Noon lives in Berlin, where he coordinates the Poetry Hearings festival and is poetry editor of Bordercrossing Berlin. His poems have appeared in Oasis, Shearsman, Litter, Noon (Tokyo, no relation), Nth Position, Chimera, Poetry News, and Magma, among others. He translates from German, Russian, and Chinese.
The Last Drop: Versions of August Stramm
Richard Owens is currently pursuing a PhD in poetry and poetics at the University of Buffalo, NY. He also edits Damn the Caesars, an annual journal of poetry and prose. His writing has appeared in O Poss, Skanky Possum, Jacket, Rain Taxi, Bongos of the Lord, Maximum Rock-n-Roll and elsewhere.
Conscripts of Modernization: Transformational Variations Drawn from the Korean
Ron Padgett’s books include a collection of poems, You Never Know, and a memoir, Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers. He is the editor of The Handb
ook of Poetic Forms and the translator of Blaise Cendrars’ Complete Poems and Apollinaire’s Poet Assassinated. For 20 years he was publications director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative. His poetry has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation. Padgett’s new book, from Coffee House Press, is Joe:A Memoir of Joe Brainard. He lives in New York City and Vermont. For more information, go to www.RonPadgett.com.
A Note on Translating Yu Jian
Simon Patton was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1961. He currently works as a freelance literary translator, and teaches Chinese language and translation part-time at the Uinversity of Queensland. He also co-edits the China domain of Poetry International Web with the mainland Chinese poet Yu Jian at china.poetryinternational.org.
On Yu Jian’s “Afternoon A Colleague Walking in Shadow”
Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru of the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), has lived in California since 1995. He is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of 2 chapbooks: constellations gathered along the ecliptic (Shadowbox Press, forthcoming 2007) & all with ocean views (Overhere Press, forthcoming in 2007). His poetry, essays, fiction, reviews, and translations have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, Sentence, Traffic, Tinfish, Rain Taxi, and Jacket, among others. He blogs at blindelephant.blogspot.com.
Y Salmo Sija / The Psalms
Gilbert Wesley Purdy’s work in poetry, prose, and translation has appeared in many journals, paper and electronic, including: Jacket Magazine; Poetry International (San Diego State University); The Georgia Review (University of Georgia); Grand Street; SLANT (University of Central Arkansas); Consciousness, Literature and the Arts (University of Wales, Aberystwyth); Orbis (UK); Eclectica; and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. His Hyperlinked Online Bibliography appears in the pages of The Catalyzer Journal.
Dos Gacelas / Two Gacelas
Burton Raffel has lived and worked in four countries. After 55 years of university teaching, he now resides and writes in Louisiana. His books include fiction and poetry, translations, literary and historical criticism, teaching texts and anthologies, and annotated editions of Shakespeare and Milton.
The Tiger / Le Tigre
Translation: Processes & Attitudes
Red Pine (Bill Porter) was born in Van Nuys on October 3, 1943, and grew up in Northern Idaho, where his parents moved in 1954. Since his father was often away on business, he attended boarding schools in LA and the Bay Area and graduated from high school in 1961. After a tour of duty in the US Army 1964 – 67, he attended UC Santa Barbara and majored in Anthropology. In 1970, he entered graduate school at Columbia University and studied anthropology with a faculty that included Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. While he was living in New York, he became interested in Buddhism, and in 1972 he left America and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After nearly four years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and supported himself for the next eighteen years by teaching English and later by working as a journalist at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong. During this time, he married a Chinese woman, with whom he has two children, and began working on translations of Chinese poetry and Buddhist texts. In 1993, he returned to America so that his children could learn English, and he has lived ever since in Port Townsend, Washington. His current projects include translations of the Platform Sutra and the Lankavatara Sutra and a book about Zen in China.
Dancing with the Dead: Language, Poetry, and the Art of Translation
Anne Ross, is a translator, interpreter and specialist on the history of Florence, where she lived and worked as a tour guide. She took her undergraduate degree at the University of California in Berkley and began her career as a high school French teacher. She decided, however, that she preferred running a switchboard to drilling students in the forms of “avoir” and “être” in order to support her cat and her translating habit. She currently lives In San Francisco with her cat, Gigliola.
Erasing the Blue Numbers / Cancellando i numeri blu /
Éffaçant les numéros bleus / Die Blauen Nummern Ausradiern
Diane Rothenberg is an anthropologist and social worker with longstanding connection to poetry and art movements around the world. She is the co-editor of Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics (University of California Press, 1983) and the author of Friends Like These: An Ethnohistorical Analysis (University Microfilms International, 1976) and The Mothers of the Nation & Other Essays (Ta’wil Books, 1992). She has long been an active player in the discourse around an emerging ethnopoetics.
From Picasso: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, & Other Poems
Jerome Rothenberg’s Writing Through, a selection of his translations and related writings, has just been published by Wesleyan. Still in the works for 2004 are 25 Caprichos, after Goya, with Spanish translations by Heriberto Yépez (Kadle Books, Tenerife), A Book of Concealments (Chax Press, Tucson), and The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems by Pablo Picasso, co-edited with Pierre Joris (Exact Change, Cambridge, Mass.). A Book of Witness, his twelfth book of poems from New Directions, appeared in 2003.
Translation as Composition / Composition as Translation
From Picasso: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, & Other Poems
French poet Hélène Sanguinetti is the author of De la main gauche, exploratrice (Flammarion, 1999), D’ici, de ce berceau (Flammarion, 2003), Alparegho, Pareil-à-rien (Comp’Act, 2005), and Hence, this cradle (Seismicity Editions, 2006) translated by Ann Cefola. Hélène also appears in 49 Poètes, a Collectif (Flammarion, 2004), Du Pain, a collaboration with artist Anna Baranek (Espace Liberté, 2006) and L'Année Poétique 2005 (Seghers, 2006). Hélène lives and works in Arles, where she takes much of her poetic imagery from the stark landscape, sky and nearby Mediterranean.
Amphibious / Amphibie
from De la main gauche, exploratrice / from Left-hand exploring
Larry Sawyer’s work has appeared lately in The Prague Literary Review, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and Exquisite Corpse, among others. In his spare time he edits milk magazine at www.milkmag.org
Wearing Away the Days: Remembering Cid Corman
Andrew Schelling is a poet, mountaineer, and the preeminent translator of India’s classical poetry. He lives in Colorado, along the Rocky Mountain Front Range, and teaches at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School. Prior to that he lived for two decades in Northern California and was active in Bay Area literary scenes, publishing samizdat journals, exploring wilderness areas, and studying Asian languages. Schelling has traveled in India and the Himalayas researching poetry and Hindu/Buddhist culture. He has published ten books of poetry, essay, and translation. Recent titles include Tea Shack Interior: New & Selected Poetry (Talisman House) and Wild Form, Savage Grammar: Poetry Ecology, Asia, a gathering of essays and essay-poems (La Alameda Press). His translation of the 101 poems of the eighth century Sanskrit anthology Amarushataka will be out from Shambhala in October with the title Erotic Love Poems from India.
Cid Corman Death Notes
from the Amarushataka
Born in 1958 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Gerald Schwartz lives in West Irondequoit, New York. He is the author of Only Others Are: Poems, released by Legible Books, (New York) in 2003.
Eavesdropping on Cid Corman’s Silence: Discovering Mysterious Worlds
Parveen Shakir (1952 – 1994), author of Khushboo, Sad-Barg, Khud-Kalami, and Mah-e-Tamam, is one of the most popular poets in Pakistan. All her verse is written in Urdu and, along with other women poets of her generation, she was responsible for developing a new expression for women’s poetry in Pakistan.
Five Poems
Mark Spitzer is a novelist, poet, literary translator, and murderer of fish. His novel Chum was based on Céline’s film sketch “Secrets dans l’îsle,” written in 1936. He is now working on Chub—the prequel to Chum—somewhere in Missouri, where he somehow got a job as a professor bent on corrupting the young minds of America. For more info, visit his website at www.sptzr.net.
Secrets on the Isle
Paul St. Pierre (1945 – ) is professor of translation at Montreal University and has co-translated, among others, Ants, Ghosts and Whispering Trees: An Anthology of Oriya Short Stories (HarperCollins India, 2003).
The Whore: A Love Story
Jonathan Stalling, Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Oklahoma, specializes in twentieth-century American poetry and East-West poetics with additional research and teaching interests in multi-ethnic American poetry, cultural theory, and Asian American studies. Stalling’s publications include articles, translations, poems, and reviews in Boston Review, CLEAR (Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews), Chain, Verdure, and WLT, as well as several book chapters on American poetry and poetics. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book entitled The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, A Critical Edition with Haun Saussy and Lucas Klein, and is working on a book project entitled Poetics of Emptiness, which traces the contributions and transformations of East Asian philosophy, religion, and poetics in Twentieth Century American poetry and poetics. He is also working on a project that traces the reception and influence of Classical Chinese prosody on American poetry. A native of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, Stalling began his education at the University of Hawaii and Beijing University before finishing his BA at UC Berkeley summa cum laude in Chinese Studies. He received his Masters with highest distinction in English Literature and Cultural Theory at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) in 2000, and his PhD in Poetics at State University of New York at Buffalo (2005).
Dharma Poetics: Andrew Schelling’s Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry
Lynn Strongin is best known for her perceptive and evocative poems on illness and medicine, her meditations on the nature and cost of talent, and her visionary love poems. Her work has been described as intense, crafted, mysterious poetry that “woos the reader by dint of sheer lyricism and imagination.” For more information, visit her website at http://members.shaw.ca/stronginweb/index.html. Her anthology The Sorrow Psalms has just been published by the University of Iowa Press.
Three Poems
The Mudlark Poems: An Eider of Dawn
Erasing the Blue Numbers / Cancellando i numeri blu /
Éffaçant les numéros bleus / Die Blauen Nummern Ausradiern
Susan Swenson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She is the editor and publisher of Pierogi Press, a literary and arts journal. Her writing has appeared in AGNI, The Brooklyn Rail, Cabinet Magazine, and newmediapoets.org.
Blind Translations: Two Poems
Arthur Sze is the author of eight books of poetry, including Quipu (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in September 2005), The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970 – 1998, and Archipelago. His translations of Chinese poetry, The Silk Dragon, received the 2002 Western States Book Award for Translation and features work by eighteen different poets, including Tao Qian, Li Bo, Du Fu, Wang Wei, Li He, Li Shang-yin, Ma Zhi-yuan, Bada Shanren, and Wen Yiduo, among others. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
On Wen Yiduo
Jan Theuninck was born in Belgium, also known under the pen name of ORC (°1954), a few of his poems are well known e.g. “Stalag Zehn B”, “Papirac”, “Yperite”, “Tyne Cot” and “Shoa”, which is an early warning against ideological hate. Native speaker in Dutch, he writes in French, sometimes in English. His poetry has been translated in many languages and is given in courses at different universities. Most of his work and poetry is based on his social and political convictions; considered as a lone crusader, he’s building alliances for a new society. He is also an abstract artist: His style is distinguished by the use of pure color in delicate lines or abstract amoebic shapes. His paintings are the vector for his provoking subjects, waking up the people from a lethargic sleep: critical works are: “white niggers”: a denunciation of colonial and modern abuses and referring to the slave mentality described by Nietzsche—he says about himself: “I am a white nigger”; “fagospatose” is about the european political situation; “homo multiculturalis” is a philosophical work to express the surplus value brought by the eclecticism of many different cultures; “beyond the limit”—they went too far—refers to 9.11; “Wargasm”: the psychoanalysis of a warrior and “Holocaust” which forms an ekphrastic unit with his poem “shoa”.
Poessays
Phillip John Usher is the founding editor of Annetna Nepo, a print and on-line poetry review. He earned his PhD in French from Harvard University and currently teaches at Brooklyn College (City University of New York). He has also translated Dans les impasses du monde (No Through World) by Denis Emorine (Ravenna Press, USA, 2004) and various other texts (poems, short stories) by the same author.
Le Sacre de la vestale / The Virgin and the Shadow
Stoyan Valev was born and lives in Bulgaria, Eastern Europe. He is a specialist in Bulgarian language and literature, graduating from Paisii Hilendarski University in Plovdiv in 1982 and teaching there for five years as an assistant in XX century Russian literature. He used to work as a journalist for the radio, as well as weekly and daily papers. He has been chief editor of the weekly Freedom, as well as the dailies Maritza and Twenty-four-hour news maker. In 1999 Hermes Publishing House published his first book When God Was On Leave, about the drama of a Bulgarian village in the time of socialism and after 1989. In 2000 two Bulgarian theatres put on scenes from his play for teenagers A United Class. His second book is The Bulgarian Decameron, in two volumes published in 2002 and 2003 by Golden Apple Publishing House. The volumes include 30 stories about the love life of the Bulgarian past, giving us Bulgarians our own encyclopedia of the art of love. In 2003 Golden Apple Publishing House published a story collection of 40 stories named Time for Infidelities. Some of his stories have been published or are forthcoming in the USA, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, Italy, Poland, the Kingdom of Nepal, Ireland, Canada, and Switzerland. Book about Love, with stories of his paired with those of the Russian writer Igor Kuznetzov, was published in Moscow. At the moment he is editor of Book News—www.knigi-news.com—a literary magazine and internet portal with everyday news from the world of the literature.
The Howl of the Years
Geoffrey R. Waters is a Senior Vice President at a large California bank, where he is the industry credit officer for film finance, entertainment, media and communications. He earned a BA degree in History and Chinese from Vanderbilt University. After military service as a Field Artillery officer, he earned an MBA in Finance and a PhD in Classical Chinese from Indiana University. His translations of Chinese poetry have appeared in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies. He is the author of Three Elegies of Ch'u: an Introduction to the Traditional Interpretation of the Ch'u Tz'u, University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Two translation projects are also forthcoming: from Tibetan, White Crane: the Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama (White Pine) and from Chinese, Broken Willow: the Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji (SUNY Press). He lives in Glendale, California.
Du Fu as Literary Critic: “Six Quatrains Written in Jest”
Some Notes on Translating Classical Chinese Poetry
Jay Weaver is a bookseller and musician in Seattle. This is his first co-translation.
Dog’s Horns
Yi Kang-baek (b. 1947) is South Korea’s preeminent contemporary playwright. Rebelling against social realism, he has been writing plays since 1971. Dog’s Horns, a play without dialogue, was produced in October 1979, two weeks before President Park Chung Hee’s assassination. This play is considered the quintessential expression of life under the military dictatorship of the 1970s. Yi is married to Kim Hyesoon (Kim Hye-sun).
Dog’s Horns
David Young has nine poetry collections of his own, most recently At the White Window, and has translated, among others, Rilke, Neruda, Montale, Holub, Du Fu, and Petrarch. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio, and work as an editor at the Oberlin College Press.
5 Poems by Eugenio Montale
3 Poems after Tao Yuanming
Zhang Er, born in Beijing, China, is the author of three collections of poetry in Chinese, most recently Because of Mountain. She has six chapbooks in English translation, among them are Carved Water and Sight Progress. Her selected poems in a bilingual edition, Verses on Bird was published from Zephyr Press. She has edited several Chinese poetry journals and participated in translation projects. She teaches at The Evergreen State College in Washington.
Postface: On the Translation of The Talisman Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry
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