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The music for this season of Two Month Review is by The Anchoress.

by Lidija Dimkovska, translated from the Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid, and published by Copper Canyon Press.

Idra Novey is the author of Exit, Civilian, a 2011 National Poetry Series Winner, and The Next Country. She is also the translator of The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector, On Elegance While Sleeping by Viscount Lascano Tegui, and The Clean Shirt of It, for which she was awarded a 2007 PEN Translation Fund Grant.

Born in Macedonia but long a resident of Slovenia, Lidija Dimkovska is a post-national writer. Her exuberant poems, vividly translated by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid, are international in scope and intimately so. In pH Neutral History, her second collection to appear in English, one poem opens with a “Peter Pan bus from New York to Amherst” and another in cold Schloßberg with stoves full “of our nails and hair.” Dimkovska’s radical mix of old world/ new world references make for a poetry that feels necessary to the future of poetry, and compellingly so. In the excellent long poem “Recognition,” she writes:

You have a sense of direction even in worlds
you’ve never visited, A.
You can tell what personal misery will give birth to a work of art
that will travel the world like the mind of an imbecile.
And which imbecile will return from no-man’s land, and which won’t.
That’s why in Christian bookshops
you pause with the Bible open in your hands
to listen to the singer simulating orgasm on the radio.

The leap from misery to art to imbeciles and Christian bookshops is funny and smart and darkly so. Like A., Dimkovska also has a sense of direction in worlds she hasn’t visited, or has witnessed only briefly. Her poems are equally lived and imagined, rooted and drifting. In her hands, an assassination attempt on the president is the work of Scheherazade. In her Collected Prose, Rae Armentrout says that “doubleness is the essence of consciousness.” In Dimkovska’s post-national poetry, the consciousness is more of a tripleness or quadrupleness. With these superb translations from Arsovska and Reid, pH Neutral History is a serious contender for this year’s Best Translated Book Award in poetry.

(ONE COMPLAINT: There is really no reason whatsoever to include a quote from J-Franz on the front of Near to the Wild Heart. I saw that and threw up a little bit in my mouth, especially considering that—at least based on all of his fiction and that totally mental Harper’s essay from a while back—my taste in literature and Franzen’s tend to overlap not at all.)

Click here for all past and future posts in this series.

Today’s post is by poetry committee member Idra Novey. Idra is the director of the Literary Translation at Columbia University program, a poet, and a translator. It’s worth noting here that her translation of Manoel de Barros’s “Birds for a Demolition” was eligible for this year’s BTBA, but was excluded from consideration based on the fact that Idra was a judge. That said, over on the fiction side, her translation of “On Elegance While Sleeping” is a finalist.

Flash Cards by YU Jian, translated by Wang Ping and Ron Padgett

Language: Chinese
Country: China
Publisher: Zephyr Press & the Chinese University Press
Pages: 151

Why This Book Should Win: Because Yu Jian knows we should avoid comparing ourselves to fish: they’re doomed, the lake drying up. Because Yu Jian has many lines that are this tragic and funny and involve washing machines and the Chinese army.

So many American poets are currently struggling with how to write about our environment. It’s an important questions, and I’ve been reading new pastorals: poems of lament, elegies for the flora and fauna that we’re rapidly losing and won’t get back. But here comes Yu Jian, writing about nature—and more—in a new way that addresses loss with humor and with a lack of familiar binaries.

In Flash Cards, his first collection to appear in English translation, he writes of frogs that died in 1998 along with their pond, but also of the mosquitoes that remain there, “sometimes conversing in English.” It’s hard to translate humor well, especially in the streamlined language of a poem, but American poet Ron Padgett and Chinese poet Wang Ping do an extraordinary job of getting the tone right every time. “Conversing” is just the verb for a wry, quirky line like this in English.

In another poem, when Yu Jian drives to the edge of “the virgin forest,” the translators go with a car that “zooms.” That zoom seems spot on when an imaginary doe leaps into Yu Jian’s heart and he says, “I no longer have a stream or meadow/ to keep it there.”

Not all of the poems in Flash Cards are concerned with the natural world, however, or at least not explicitly. One stunning poem begins with “the washing machine on Saturday” and ends with the declaration:

Happiness belongs only to a cashmere sweater
that demands a different spin cycle
its only wish to match
the mistress’ red skirt.

I would argue that happiness also belongs to the reader of Flash Cards and to its translators, as the humor and music in these English versions suggests that Wang Ping and Ron Padgett took great pleasure, and care, in translating these poems. If you haven’t yet had the experience of having a woman in heavy makeup and a wolf face turn to you at dusk in the zoo and say in perfect Mandarin, “Good evening, comrade,” you’re in for a delightful surprise with the poetry of Yu Jian.

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On Elegance While Sleeping by Viscount Lascano Tegui, translated by Idra Novey

Language: Spanish
Country: Argentina
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Pages: 172

Why This Book Should Win: Because it hasn’t won any other awards, and it deserves at least one. On Elegance While Sleeping is our first opportunity to read a complete work by Tegui in English. Also, where else can we find heterosexuality, homosexuality, pedophilia, prostitution, and bestiality all wrapped into the experiences of one character.

Today’s entry is from Gwen Dawson, who runs the always excellent blog. And who will be joining the BTBA judging panel for 2012.

Emilio Lascano Tegui (1887-1966) was, at various times during his eventful life, an Argentinean, a Parisian, a self-labeled viscount, a translator, a journalist, a curator, a painter, a decorator, a diplomat, a mechanic, an orator, a dentist, and, fortunately for us, a writer. Tegui’s 1925 novel On Elegance While Sleeping, a cult classic in Argentina, Tegui’s home country, is now available for the first time to an English-speaking audience (thanks to Dalkey Archive Press and translator Idra Novey). This genre-defying novel is framed as a four-year series of chronologically-ordered diary entries composed by an unnamed French infantryman in the late 1800s. Like its author, this novel’s narrator concerns himself with a bit of everything, including the proverbial kitchen sink (or, should I say, the cultivation of carrots). The entries touch on the themes of life, illness (specifically, syphilis), death, sex, gender, memory, crime, and literature, to name just a few. Seamlessly shifting among present reflections, past recollections, and stories within stories, the entries examine the mundane (one begins “Cotton mittens bother me when they’re dyed black.”) as well as the sublime (“Nothing spreads sadness like popularity.”) and range in length from just two sentences to almost seven pages. The result is a work of art that’s impossible to categorize. Is it autobiography? Allegory? A crime novel? An experiment in form? In a word, yes.

Just before we lose our bearings wandering among this heady collection of seemingly aimless thoughts—that is, at the perfect moment—On Elegance While Sleeping changes registers. The novel adopts a foreboding tone as the diary entries slowly coalesce into the thoughts of a man intent on committing murder. Driven by a Raskolnikov-like need “[t]o unburden humanity of an imperfect being: a weakness,” the diarist lays out his motivations in chilling and poetic prose:

I’ve sketched out my plans and am ready. I have a new strength in me, taken from the secret core of my life, driving me on, controlling me. It’s health, youth, and optimism combined. Until yesterday, my tentative novel (“The Syphilis of Don Juan”) served as a haven for my imagination. Today, it doesn’t satisfy my thirst—or, better said, can no longer stem the anguish that gnaws at me on the eve of an act that is now quite inevitable. I’m halfway between a comedy and a strange sort of drama, and feel an overbearing need to lower the curtain. No simple curtain: the front curtain of the stage, the grand drape, the great iron and asbestos curtain that drops like a zinc plate from the sixth floor and creaks as it falls. Something like that, flamboyant, coarse, unexpected—something that will impose its tyranny over my life without question. I’m going to kill someone.

Tegui’s prose is a seductive mix of hard edges and soft contours, flowing musings and sharp declarations. Translator Idra Novey maintains this delicate balance, juxtaposing “a haven for my imagination” with “the anguish that gnaws” and following a complex and elegant three-sentence metaphor with the startling declaration, “I’m going to kill someone.” Tegui’s compelling style relies as much on rhythm and sound as it does on content, and Novey masterfully recreates this effect in English.

At its core, On Elegance While Sleeping gives us access to the soul of a man who is desperately seeking. Whether it’s love, sex, happiness, connection with his fellow man, an imaginative outlet, or simply a good story, the problem is the same: to find what he lacks. He asks, “Could it be that the thing I’m missing is courage?” Does our diarist have the fortitude to follow through with his murderous plan? To discover the answer, you’ll have to read the book.

These sparse poems are poems of “re” and poems of “un.” Poems that reinvent the natural world, that undo the poetic self, that redraw the relationship between language and nature and undermine it. “Before anything else a poem is an un-utensil.” (“from Thrush in Darkness III”). Or take sections II and III of “An Education on Invention”:

II

To uninvent objects.
The comb, for example.
To give the comb the abilities of not combing.
Until it is left with the inclination to be a begonia.
Or a gravanha.

To use some words until they belong to no language.

III

To repeat and repeat—until altered.
To repeat is a gift for flare.

There is an echo of Auden’s aphoristic “poetry makes nothing happen” in all this repeating to undo. And it is the kind of nothing that is replete with intent. It is the poetic nothing that requires sharp precision in language to inscribe. It is seeing anew the everyday; the ability to alchemize language into thing and thing into nothing.

14.

What I don’t know how to construct I unbuild in phrases.

To make nothing appear.

(What it demonstrates is that man is a dark well.
From here, above, one can’t see that nothing.
But when you arrive at the bottom of the well, there it is.)

To lose that nothing is an impoverishment.

(“Desiring to Be”)

The empty space that is at the heart of this book reflects in part the emptiness of the Brazilian countryside, deserted as millions move to cities chasing a dream of a better life. There is melancholy rooted in this unbuilding, in the movement of nature over the constructions of man, but there is beauty and silence also in the nothing.

Grounds besieged by abandon, given over to poverty.
bq. Where men will have the strength of poverty.
bq. And the ruins will bear fruit.

(“Six or Thirteen Things I Learned Ģ����ý Myself”)

The fruit of the ruins for de Barros seems to be the poetry, though that too is fraught with denial, undoing, and nothingness. Being a poet, de Barros is justly concerned with what poetry is, how language works (or doesn’t), and what that means for the poet. The aphorisms Novey creates in his voice are eminently quotable:

A poet is a creature who licks words and gets delirious.

(“Six or Thirteen Things I Learned Ģ����ý Myself”)

Poetry is to flap without wings.

(“An Education on Invention”)

*

There are many serious ways to say nothing, but only poetry is true.

(“The Book about Nothing”)

But the slightly self-deprecating tone, the derisive pithiness that underlies this navel-gazing concern gets a bit tiresome. “The artist is nature’s error.” de Barros says later in “The Book about Nothing.” The sense that poetry always falls short of the thing it wishes to be, that the language can never fully alchemize, the emphasis on lack which seems intended to soften the potential for ostentation with humor, only serves as an irritant.

Where the book is most powerful is where the power of language and the power of nature combine. In “from Song of Seeing” the subject of the poem, perhaps a stand-in for the poet, spends years living in nature like a bird until he gains the ability to observe “things the way birds observed them. / All the unnamed things.” The power to name, to create and transform the natural world, is celebrated. But that power transforms the poet, the namer as well.

And, if he wanted to end up a bee, it was only a matter
of opening the word bee
and stepping inside it.
As if it were the infancy of language.

These poems are tightly packed, sharp little lyrics cutting through the world. And it is a testament to Novey’s poetic sensibilities as a translator that they are so dense, and yet so light. That the voice is varied, yet consistent. That the poems invent in English without sounding stilted. She does this exquisitely in “Small World.”

Here, if the horizon reddens a little,
        the beetles think it’s a fire.
Where the river starts a fish,
                     river me a thing
River me a frog
River me a tree.

Novey brilliantly performs de Barros’ simultaneous un- and re-construction of himself and the natural world through language. Packed with luminous, inventive and often witty verse, A Demolition of Birds preserves the nothing at the core of poetry, nature and being.

Erica Mena is a poet, a translator, and visible. She joined the BTBA poetry committee this year, and has reviewed for us in the past. She’s also the host of the “Reading the World Podcast series”: /College/translation/threepercent/?s=tag&t=reading-the-world-podcast which is available by clicking there, or at the side, or on the iTunes.

I don’t know much about Manoel de Barros, but Idra Novey is phenomenal, and if she translated something, I’m sure it’s good. Idra is the director of the (Quick observation: so they’re using the “at” in the acronym? Is that because LTAC is that much easier to pronounce than LTC? Must be another department with that same LTC designation . . . The Long Term Care program?) She’s also a poet, a translator, and an overall awesome spokeswoman for literature in translation.

And as mentioned above, she’s also a member of the BTBA poetry panel. And just to make sure no one thinks the fix is in, to avoid potential conflicts, Birds for a Demolition won’t be considered for this year’s award.

But that doesn’t stop us from reviewing it . . .

Birds for a Demolition is a deceptively slight book of deceptively simple poems. Poems that at first glance seem embedded in the natural world, in the landscape of Brazil, in the language of the wetlands. But this is in fact an expansive collection, spanning more than forty years of Manoel de Barros’s illustrious career and a breadth of styles and subjects. Idra Novey’s first triumph in this book is the selection of these poems, which make clear the development of the poets trajectory, while elucidating de Barros’s unwavering interest in language and the poetic self. Her second is her successful performance, as she put it in an interview with , of de Barros’s voice in English.

These sparse poems are poems of “re” and poems of “un.” Poems that reinvent the natural world, that undo the poetic self, that redraw the relationship between language and nature and undermine it. “Before anything else a poem is an un-utensil.” (“from Thrush in Darkness III”).

Click here to read the full piece.

Listening to it now, and it’s really interesting . . .

(UPDATE: Thanks Idra for name-checking us re: Merce Rodoreda and Death in Spring. Much, much appreciated. And to add some information, Graywolf did Time of the Doves, My Cristina, and Camellia Street. University of Nebraska Press did Rodoreda’s A Broken Mirror.)

To try and make up for this, Open Letter is launching a poetry series (one book a year, starting in February or thereabouts) and below you’ll find a poem that I came across in the new issue of (BTW, the new issue isn’t actually featured on the website . . . yet. Whoops. There is a mention of the pub date—March 23rd—but that’s it. I can confirm that yes, this really does exist, and that it’s filled with good stuff.)

“Invented Memoir” by Manoel de Barros, translated from the Portuguese by Idra Novey

I leaned into the morning the way a bird leans and a vision appeared: the afternoon running behind a dog. I was fourteen. The vision must have come from my origins. I don’t remember ever seeing a dog outrun the afternoon. I made a note of it anyway. Such leaps of the imagination are what make our speech more beautiful. I made a note in a phrasebook. By this point, I was already saving visions like this one. I had another that month, but first I should tell you the circumstances. I transported parts of my childhood between the kitchen wall and the yard. I pretended to put a yoke on the frogs behind our kitchen. We understood each other well. I fixed things so the frog’s skin matched the color of the ground. It seemed right, since they were of the ground and grimy. One day I said to my mother: A frog is a piece of the ground that jumps. She said I was mixed up, that a frog isn’t a piece of the ground. Now that I’m older, I think of the prophet Jeremiah. He was so distraught at seeing his Zion destroyed and dragged through the fire that a vision came to him in his home: even the stones in the street were crying. Later, calmer, writing to a friend, he remembered the vision: even the stones in the street had cried. It was such a beautiful sentence because there was no reason in it. He said this.

Selections by Nicole Brossard. Translated from the French by Guy Bennett, David Dea, Barbara Godard, Pierre Joris, Robert Majzels and Erin Moure, Jennifer Moxley, Lucille Nelson, Larry Shouldice, Fred Wah, Lisa Weil, and Anne-Marie Wheeler. (Canada, University of California)

This guest post is by Idra Novey—poet, translator, executive director of the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University. Idra also served as chair of the poetry committee, and did an amazing job keeping things organized and on time. I know how hard this can be . . . But wow, the poetry committee seemed to run even smoother than the fiction one . . .

In a 1998 essay, the Canadian writer Nicole Brossard declared that she liked to keep herself in the untranslatable, at the limit between “I exist” and the poem on the page. For Brossard’s translators in this superb selected collection of her work, she presented the challenge of how to recreate that untranslatable voice in English and to assume that by “untranslatable” Brossard meant the impossibility of translating the full complexity of sensation into any language, as opposed to between languages.

The various translators who contributed to this book make a strong case for this interpretation. Throughout the selections, the translations recreate all the lively complexity and lyricism of Brossard’s investigation of language and its limits as she presents them in French. In an excerpt from Shadow: Soft Et Soif, translated by Guy Bennett, Brossard writes:

a few night syllables
through leafy words
let’s watch
our dream muscles move
our eyes outstripped by nostalgia
let’s watch
tears, palms and fists like thirst
the ever vague idea that living is
necessarily a plus dans le langage

Through the driving rhythm of the repetitions here and the lyrical specificity of “dream muscles” and “fists like thirst,” Bennett’s translation gives the reader a rich sense of the pleasure and mystery of Brossard’s work. Well-known as an essayist and novelist as well, the selections in this book include several essays and interviews along with a long series of prose poems translated by Lucille Nelson in which Brossard speaks in a section called Ultrasounds of “navigating at night by means of milky arms and igniters of syntax.”

As in the poem excerpted above, Brossard has a wonderful talent for mixing evocative bodily descriptions of milky arms with abstracts like “syntax.” Her poetry is avant-garde but not to the point that her experimentation makes any discernible meaning hard to grasp. Brossard is a poet, as she says in an essay at the end of collection, interested in “vision” rather than “subversion,” in speaking with clarity about where patriarchy, language, and sexuality converge and explode. That explosion, and the untranslatable place in which Brossard likes to keep herself, are wholly present in these excellent translations.