Anastasia Nikolis recently received her PhD in twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and poetics from the URochester. She is the Poetry Editor for Open Letter Books and co-host of the Black Box Poetry podcast.

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by Reina María Rodríguez, translated from the Spanish by Kristin Dykstra with Nancy Gates Madsen (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida is one of the foundational texts for how critics think about photography. In it, he explores how some photographs serve merely a documentary function but others will provoke a feeling, a kind of madness or a wound. His example of this second kind is the Winter Garden Photograph, which he discovers among his mother’s belongings after she passes away. It shows his mother as a child and though Barthes didn’t know his mother at that age, something about seeing it makes him remember her, transports him, conjures up a kind of memory and makes him feel thrown through time. This isn’t a review about Barthes, but he lurks behind Reina María Rodríguez’s The Winter Garden Photograph and Kristin Dykstra’s excellent translation explicitly alludes to his work. As she explains in her translator’s note, the original title, La foto del invernadero, could have been literally translated to The Photo of the Greenhouse, but that translation doesn’t capture how challenging the text is, nor the demands it makes upon its reader.

In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes, “I was interested in Photography for only ‘sentimental’ reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound; I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think” (21). These verbs—see, feel, notice, observe, think—describe the act of moving through Rodríguez’s poetry. Many of the poems use seeing or observing as a orientation point, such as “—at least, that’s how he looked, backlit—”, which opens with the otherworldly visceral description of paper being punctured by a tack:

I stuck a tack into the photo.

—into the famous, legendary photo—

the ectoplasm of what has been,

what you see on the paper is as secure

as what you touch. Photography

has something to do with resurrection.

The poems favor long sentences with prodigious em-dashes, colons, and semi-colons. They get lost in their own meditations and often rely on the return of an image or motif, or on the repetition of a line, or on pairs of chiastic lines, to reorient the reader. When the photography motif returns at the end of the poem, it doesn’t provide clarity or closure. Instead of focusing on the photograph itself, now she brings the process of taking the photograph—the clicking of the shutter—to the fore.

(a poem gives us the right to be illegitimate in something more than its transcendence and its corruptibility).

a simple click of the shutter

and history returns like a declaration of love

(Michelet)

but empty and dry.

Orientation and reorientation aren’t necessarily satisfying for Rodríguez, but they are necessary for cultivating the experience of getting lost in the process of observing, noticing, and thinking. Some of the poems—especially some of the longer prose pieces—get a little too lost in their processes. But at their very best, the poems bring into sharp focus the abstract processes they are so fascinated by—the haunting and ineffable experiences of the Barthesian photograph alluded to by the title poem,

we had our suspicions. now, in my mind, I make space for

the mind of the winter garden. its warm flame

at the center of the images convincing us that something inside was quivering

or might have been unattainable.

the uncertain quivering where the wood creaks,

reality contorts and splits into two languages.

it was the one we always wanted, and it wasn’t there.

This is one of the more refreshingly challenging poetry texts I have encountered. It resists a typical coherent lyric speaker—a singular voice or perspective through which a poem is voiced. It also resists being solely as a formal experiment—where prose and poetry and images are neatly read alongside one another for the insights they provide on medium and genre, though of course the text courts those experiments, too. Instead, much like how photography for Barthes isn’t about capturing an image but about how it can produce the “madness” of feeling dislocated in time and memory, these poems for Rodríguez are about observing the poetic mind at work and questioning what, precisely, those poems capture.

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge and Greenlight Bookstore bookseller Jarrod Annis.��

Dark, ethereal, and sensuous, Marosa di Giorgio’s prose poems echo the haunted, half-forgotten landscapes of youth. Part meditation, part hallucinatory vision, the poems included in I Remember Nightfall��are imbued with a distant strangeness that pulls the reader closer to them, beckoning through their own mystery. This is a book of dim fantasias, where the forgotten and remembered converge, where nature is alive with spirits that play with time to induce a phantasmagoric botany of memory for both the poet and reader.

As much as I love Spanish language literature—and always have, probably since reading Cortázar in college—this seems kind of incredible. Outsized. Statistically significant. I’m tentatively planning on writing about the regions that tend to be overlooked by the BTBA (Africa, Asia, India), and some of the reasons why (lack of eligible books being the biggest), but given the fact that I was already going to write about two Spanish books this week, we might as well take the time to dig into this situation and see if the prevalence of Spanish books on the BTBA lists is in line with current publishing trends, or if something else is going on.

Before moving on to other forms of analysis, let’s see if the dominance of Spanish books in the 2018 Best Translated Book Awards is unusual or just run of the mill. It’s probably going to turn out to be recency bias, but I have the sense that Spanish always represents on the BTBA. And wins. Like with Yuri Herrera and Diorama and other books. Like, hmm. Maybe I’m wrong.

As you may have noticed—and if not, take this post as a sort of public announcment—you can now search the for all previous BTBA titles. You can get the longlist or shortlist for any given year, find out which books from which presses have made it, or, as befits this post, see how often various languages have been represented.

Of the 249 longlisted fiction titles in the database,¹ 56 are translated from the Spanish. That would be an incredible 22.5%. Or 5.6 a year. Not that far removed from this year in fact. To put those numbers into perspective, here’s a chart detailing the ten languages with the most titles to have made the longlists.

Unsurprisingly (?), French doesn’t lag that far behind Spanish in BTBA representation. But that’s for the longlists. Let’s see what happens when we narrow this down to the finalists.

The gap widens! I guess. But really, there’s not that much of a difference between Spanish and French on here, and when you think about the overall number of speakers—220 million French vs. 500 million Spanish—French seems like a bit of an underdog, despite their long history at the top of the European publishing scene.

I think we need to dig a bit deeper before making any sort of conclusion. Up to now we’ve only been looking at raw numbers devoid of context. Is it really that surprising that no Hindi titles have made the longlists? What if I told you that there have only been five eligible Hindi titles over the eleven years of the award? Compare that with the fact that only three Japanese books have made it—out of 221. I’m no where near smart enough figure out those probabilities, but I can totally crank out some charts looking at how likely it is for one of the three most-translated languages—Spanish, German, French—to make it to the BTBA fiction longlist.

Let’s start with the three-year averages for the number of titles published from these languages:

Two observations:

1) I don’t think I can explain the dominance of French fiction. I don’t feel like I can name very many French authors, and yet, it’s almost always the most translated language. I don’t think that I’ve included a French book as the impetus for one of these weekly rambles for all of 2018.²

2) What the fuck, German literature? If this chart was a year-by-year thing, I would write off that decline as a small sample, but theoretically, by looking at three-year averages, we should be filtering out most of the noise. Given the cultural investments, the raw number of German books written every year, the promotional publications, the Frankfurt Book Fair, the je ne sais quoi of German lit (sorry), this is surprising. Disconcerting. A trend to watch.

Now, given that baseline, here are the three-year rolling averages for the percentage of books from those same languages to make the BTBA longlist:

LOOK AT THOSE SPANISH BOOKS! I CALLED IT!

There’s probably a hot take to be written about 2013—the moment when Spanish surpassed French as the “most literary language.” It probably involves statements about “Bolaño’s lasting influence” and the Granta special issue and some U.S. demographics. I’ll bet you could unpack that shit into a PhD thesis with the right advisor.

OR, you could write a thesis about the ways in which the increase in the number of languages with at least one translation has impacted the Big Three and their stranglehold on the marketplace.

OR, you could check publication against proliferation (sales) and try and figure out if the Spanish trend was predictive—there were more books, then more sales—or responsive—way more sales for Spanish titles around 2007-2009, so let’s double-down on the trend—or random—there is no correlation and this situation just developed.

OR, is there something about the makeup of the BTBA jury—especially among the booksellers and translators—that tilts things in favor of Spanish titles.

There are so many options . . . This narrative doesn’t feel very fulfilling at all. Numbers are frustrating that way.

One more thing: At the top of this, I made an off-handed remark about Spanish books always winning the BTBA. Not true! Only three Spanish titles have won the Best Translated Book Award—Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera was the only work of fiction, with both Diorama by Rocio Ceron and Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik winning for poetry. Perceptions, man. Perceptions and biases. It doesn’t matter what’s factual, it matters what you remember and believe.

I just had a text exchange with the “Beer Reporter” for our local newspaper. Which has zero relevance, except in the way that proliferation and quality aren’t always in sync.

Thanks to middle-age and trends, we have like 42 new breweries here in Rochester—all fine, none spectacular. They support each other and make sure that an excessive proportion of paychecks are spent on beer instead of other forms of cultural entertainment.

That’s totally fine, I think. But when it comes to our biggest brewery—Genesee—I’m a bit of a hard ass. Everyone knows that I’m a contrarian for life, but I honestly don’t care for or against Genny or Genny Light. It’s beer in the way most books are books. It’s functional. (Sorta.) If you drink a few pitchers, you’ll definitely feel it, like how if you read all five hundred John Grisham books, you’ll know words.

Here were the Rochester-centric jokes I came up with in our texting to describe Genny:

“It’s like a Xerox of Bud Light!”

“I Kodak, and never will, see what you see in that beer.”

“Something, something, Wegmans!”

“Genny is great. My parents and uncles love it, which is heartwarming, since old people also deserve beer.”

“Letters So That Happiness”: by Arnaldo Calveyra, translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Zuba (Argentina, Ugly Duckling Presse)

This is a very different collection from Stormwarning, the poetry book I tried to write about last week. (I do a thing with my kids where I pretend that I can’t remember the name of anything and invent word combinations like a living Queneau poem. Every object and location has about fourteen different names in the Post Vernacular, which is both semi-amusing and fairly confusing. If I were writing this for them—which I wouldn’t, unless the poems were on YouTube—I would’ve called last week’s collection “Stormblaster” or “Storm Soldier” or “Snow Warning” or some other dumb ass shit like “Winter Wonder Times.” I have done this bit for so long that I have literally torn apart my own memory and feel like most of my days are just highlights from the inevitable onslaught of early-onset dementia. Never buy into your jokes too much, kids, they’ll bite you in the “Blizzard Blaster” in the end.)

I still don’t feel like I have the terminology to talk about poetry. I set about this self-challenge with the simplest of ideas—if you read enough, and try hard enough, you’ll figure out a way to say more than uhhhh, that poem is funny! I’m only to weeks in, but I feel like poetry is all barrier. And I’m not even looking at poems that are confined by form, that are playing with some Alexandrine rhyme scheme or particular pentameter. (Not the right terms, I’m sure. Alliteration. Assonance. Enjambment.)

Without someone—or some piece—to unlock the key, I feel like I’m all surface when it comes to evaluating these collections. Like week I wrote about joy, this week I want to talk about unsettled language—the aspect of Calveyra’s poetry that’s so salient that’s it’s cited in the afterword as the singular reason for why these poems appealed to Borges:

What captivated Borges and Mastronardi in 1959 was Calveyra’s singular use of syntax and language. It is often said that Calveyra invented a new grammar that could release time and place from the stasis and confinement that words inescapably mark.

Yep. That. Which I completely agree with, and which can be found throughout. Here are a couple samples:

The boy came back by the mettle of the night. The military had taught him to steal and whistle for anything. Now whistling he forgot stealing. Feathered casuarina trees quieted to his step. But because they’d never met the winds that travel from a sadness to a happiness, there was no breeze to wake the nests sleeping in their fist: for them, he was returning, one of so many from the village.

And, from a different poem:

As if it were ever almost here this forever company in the cave of a shiverer’s winter, together with the dog we found your day, I jump up on the hill that hurries to take me back to bring you happy daisies.

This is all off-kilter and not pretentious—two qualities I gravitate toward. But where to go from there?

Setting aside any deeper analysis of the style of the poems, or the technical tricks Calveyra employs as being beyond my paygrade, I instead am drawn to the ways in which these feel like poems of childhood, of a sort of pre-linguistic way of encountering the world that allows for a possibility of happiness. The twists of his language seem a bit different than the Russian formalist conception of enstrangement to me, and are more like smudges of one’s worldview—a way of seeing and saying before everything is codified and has a “correct” way of being described.

Which sort of connects with the title, Letters So That Happiness. “Letters” is ambiguous—these aren’t proper letters, but some of this “smudging” of the world involves a few slipped letters—and “so that happiness” can what? Exist? Be recaptured?

The afterword talks about how Calveyra was trying to capture the language of Entre Ríos, his hometown, but I feel like it’s capturing that language through the lens of youth, of play. Here’s an example that’s probably a bit too on the nose, but demonstrates what I mean:³

Hopscotch singing rounds with one foot on the ground and the other without anywhere.

Coming! Coming! and already in the marrow sky, grace wobbling, life long. And let’s pick a square with all our names to stand one little afternoon minute resting flamingo gentle foot.

That afternoon when we all win, we’ll be watching each other from our resting squares and not stepping on the lines.

When the soles of your feet aren’t named anymore, named pebble anymore, named all back at the beginning anymore, the only foot of the little late afternoon will go on begging entry and already all back at the beginning-ginning again.

So pleasant, so much twist in the expected words. This collection has the feel of nursery rhymes reimagined through a rural landscape. I like the voice. The simplicity of the happiness. There is warmth here and I dig it. Also, there are exclamation points!

I want to give a quick nod to The Desert and Its Seed by Jorge Barón Biza, translated from the Spanish (duh and or obviously) by Camilio Ramirez for New Directions. Cool book! It’s like Tomb Song but with more acid and alcoholism. I think? I read a third and had to stop, but for you plotsters out there, it’s an autobiographical novel (I should end with “full stop” since that’s all anyone reads these days when they’re not reading YA) about a young man who takes care of his mom after his dad throws acid over her face. It’s legit fucked up, and although it’s now a cult classic, it was originally self-published, and that’s saying something. What it’s saying about art and commerce and originality and telling one’s life, I’m not sure, but something. Something for sure.

In November (I think), I’ll try and write a gigantic post—one that involves me drinking a plethora of whiskeys—about the position of auto-fiction, fictionalized autobiographies, non-fiction tinged fiction in today’s literary scene. There’s so much of it now (see Ben Lerner, see Knausgaard, who will obviously [and or duh] be the occasion for this post) that some readers see it as some new, hipster trend. There is a long history there, there are differences, there are—and this is what interests me—ways in which the approach ends up highlighting form more than content. There’s a lot to say. And Tomb Song and The Desert and Its Seed can be captured into that conversation.

Two other quick things, left unexplored:

1) Books about damaged faces. Kobo Abe’s The Face of Another. Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face. Others. The writing of skin. On skin. Skin-like. Replacement and reconstruction. The self as the image portrayed.

2) Self-published literary successes. There is the one? Sergio de la Pava? Who is literally not of this time and makes words fun by unconventionalizing the under-workings of words. Biza is different, yet the self is throwing its work into the ether. The cojones of standing by your works in relation to the gratitude, the admiration achieved in later years.

¹ For the curious, there was a book that made the longlist one year, but wasn’t technically eligible. (It was a reprint.) We’re not going to repeal the BTBA designation—I mean shit, we’re not the NCAA or anything—but the title isn’t actually listed in the database. I’m sure you can sleuth it out if you’re really interested.

² Actually, I have: The Perfect Nanny!

³ There’s not an assertion I can make about poetry that I can’t equivocate a sentence later. I know this breakdown is childish, simplistic, easy to dismiss. I don’t have this sort of public anxiety when it comes to fiction—I’m more versed, the hours with the form have been logged—although it may all come down to a famous poet telling me that my favorite poems from a particular collection were the “easy” ones. I’m gun shy. But trying!

by Eleni Vakalo, translated from Greek by Karen Emmerich (Greece, Ugly Duckling Presse)

I would happily and readily make the argument that of all the books on the BTBA poetry longlist this year, Eleni Vakalo’s Before Lyricism was without a doubt the most difficult to translate. Made up of six book-length poems, the poems in Before Lyricism get at a version of reality that can only be accessed by making someone hear and see an image through the written word.

The shape of the forest has
The shape of a jellyfish
That you catch in your hands and it slips through
As a wave
Pushes it out
Perhaps this happens
Because
It moves
Without
Opening seashores
That are white
And
The fresh ones glisten
While the others
Are white all through
You’ll find too the bones of the drowned

Now I’ll push out my heart
But no
Since jellyfish
Have no blood

If I pretended for so long to be writing poems, it was only so I could speak of the forest.

These poems don’t have a setting or a thread of movement. The most accurate thing would be to say that these poems are set in Vakalo’s mind and in our minds and nowhere else. Poems that seem to start out as straightforward descriptions peel apart in our hands as we read, every line taking another layer with it so that what we are left with is a series of jarring images that reverberate with an energy of abstraction. Her translator Karen Emmerich describes in an excellent interview for Tupelo Quarterly, “That’s what all of reading Vakalo feels like to me: being in the sea in a moment of utter calm, and then finding that the water I’m standing in is so many more things than I thought—and the calm of the sea and of me becomes host to an undercurrent, if not of fear, then of astonishment at the unfamiliar.”

At night people betray one another
And when the forest
Begins
To smother you
You cry out
As if
You were not in
The forest

Vakalo pushes the Greek language to its limits, stretching its syntax and playing up its room for ambiguity. As Emmerich elaborates in her translator’s note at the end of the book, “Before Lyricism is intensely inward-looking in its disruption of conventional grammar and syntax, which render it resistant to familiar modes of translation . . . Greek is an inflected language in which word endings indicate grammatical function . . . Writers can manipulate these elements in such a way as to push their texts to the limits of intelligibility . . . Vakalo does just that: she intensifies the particular forms of grammatical ambiguity available in Greek by recasting its syntax in unexpected ways.”

If this poem is filled with the beating of wings
It’s because you hear birds
You don’t just see them

Emmerich spent over a decade translating these poems. The difficulty, she says in her Tupelo Quarterly interview, is that “what Vakalo is doing in this regard simply isn’t something that English can do. The languages aren’t the same. In many places, given the tyranny of the word order in English, there are clear subjects or objects for my verbs, in places where there aren’t for hers. What I tried to do instead was just let other forms of ambiguity exist, syntactical, grammatical, interpretive . . . I wanted there not to be a clear image, always, but rather a sense of something . . . I just had to let myself go, mess with all the pieces and make something I thought was equally disturbing, mixing issues of innocence and guilt in a similar way of effacing the boundary between actor, action, and effect . . . Yet the cumulative impression is somehow still comprehensible. There’s a point, a thing to understand but not untangle.”

Striking the spider
The spasm as it falls
And its legs contract and tangle
In three closed corners
The whole spider shrinking
Death when it suddenly comes
With a swift pain from the strike
And that power you have in your hands
The image of these moments gathers
As passing you saw it on the wall
Creeping with its eight legs
In an odd rhythmic arrangement
The rapid change
In the scene, starting with the strike,
Transforms the innocent into intent.

Emmerich’s stunning translation is nothing short of miraculous in its ability to evoke the same feelings of both alarming confusion and immediate comprehension in her English readers as Vakalo was able to evoke in her Greek readers. This book shimmers with a new layer of reality, with new poetic possibilities, and it is a gift to English readers to be able to access both.

It’s been slow on the review and post end this summer, while we’ve been busy around the offices here and elsewhere, but we hope you’ve all been enjoying your summers, and of course enjoying the Copa and Euro Cup games!

But literature in translation is as important as ever—so here’s the beginning of Vince’s review:

It took reading 44 pages of Intervenir/Intervene before I began to get a sense of what Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez were up to. Recurring throughout these 44 pages—throughout the entire book—are shovels, shovel smacks to the face, lobelias—aha! Shovels and lobelias; gardening, violence, flowering plants. Buried secrets and blossoming. There seemed a sense to it all.

Intervenir/Intervene is being sold as a book of poetry. That is true. But then again, this is not poetry that obeys the rules poetry are supposed to follow. I state this in the year 2016, long after free verse and post modernism have done their best to ruin formal poetry. Even in the age of facile “performance art” and hollow “experimentalism,” there is work that reminds jaded readers like myself that there is value in some of what stands under the all too wide umbrella of avant-garde. Intervenir/Intervene is that sort of work.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Intervenir/Intervene is being sold as a book of poetry. That is true. But then again, this is not poetry that obeys the rules poetry are supposed to follow. I state this in the year 2016, long after free verse and post modernism have done their best to ruin formal poetry. Even in the age of facile “performance art” and hollow “experimentalism,” there is work that reminds jaded readers like myself that there is value in some of what stands under the all too wide umbrella of avant-garde. Intervenir/Intervene is that sort of work.

It’s easy to throw words together in an attempt to confound, to shock, or to demonstrate cleverness. Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez are not doing the reader many favors, but they’re not simply engaging in empty experimentation. They have an impossible task: to articulate what often goes unsaid, the brutal, sanctioned violence of their native Mexico. Translator Jen Hofer calls this Mexico’s dirty war. How shocking to see this term applied to what so many of us might dismiss as political corruption, a term that seems insubstantial in comparison to “dirty war,” which is more often applied retroactively. But this is a contemporary, ongoing dirty war whose victims are largely unacknowledged. Since they cannot speak, Dorantes and Flores Sánchez do their utmost to give them voice and to blend those voices with those of the state, the killer, and the reader. Intervenir/Intervene is a polyphony of these voices overlapping, interrupting—intervening. Readers will likely be disoriented by the fragmented presentation, but the elliptical, overwhelming approach culminates in a sense of understanding. This is not an easy book, but neither is the subject matter.

Intervenir/Intervene surprises. There is the before-mentioned merging of voices, the seemingly free form style, but also, actually, structure. From the apparent chaos, a page of rather direct poetry emerges:

To my urn
To my museum
To my barking
To my pain
To my depth

I come

From a country of ash
From an ocean of blood
From another unfinished city
From my deserted head
From the mouth without its teeth

Here we have anaphora and fairly rooted lines and stanzas, a true oddity among passages like:

The effect is to disrupt the expectations of the reader, even after their expectations have been thoroughly disrupted. Anything is possible in this book, as in a country like Mexico, a place of immense beauty and tremendous suffering.

Intervenir/Intervene is a book of poems and a short study of translation. Jen Hofer ends the text with notes on her process, which are often as elusive as the poetry. It is a dual language book that subverts and embraces both languages. It is a political book coming partially from Dolores Dorantes, a writer in exile from Ciudad Juarez who once resisted her poetry being translated into culturally dominant English. It is a statement of the absurdity of communicating violence and the tragedy of keeping silent in its wake. Few works of art are able to succeed on so many levels.

by Yevgeny Baratynsky, translated from the Russian by Rawley Grau (Russia, Ugly Duckling Presse)

This book is a beast—it is a hefty, beautiful bulk that constitutes one of Ugly Duckling Presse’s biggest translation endeavors to date. The stately volume is justified by the work it contains—the most substantial selection of Yevgeny Baratynsky’s poetry to be available in English. Readers are also treated to a selection of letters and detailed notes, all compounding into a detailed portrait of a unique poet who was lauded by Pushkin, his great contemporary, and had a key influence on Russian modernists such as Akhmatovah and Mandelstam.

Reading A Science Not For the Earth, it’s hard not to feel a sense of disbelief at not having encountered the work before—how could it have slipped through the cracks? This surprise is perhaps due to Rawley Grau’s crisp translations, which render these nineteenth century gems in a language that feels contemporary and lively, despite beyond their nearly two-hundred years, while still honoring Baratynsky’s original forms. This is poetry that transcends ages, poetry which is not through speaking. As Baratynsky writes,

But why talk now of ancient times?
The poem is ready. Very likely,
as a register of who I am
you’ll soon find it will come in handy.

Don’t be put off by the size of this collection—we have Rawley Grau and Ugly Duckling Press to thank for a volume of poetry as fresh and elegant as the work it contains.

First off, the main (?) Lit Hub list contains two books on my Translations Everyone Was Talking about in 2015 list, and the rest are basically from major commercial presses. Such as Aleksandar Hemon’s latest! In what world is Hemon “overlooked.” Sure, this book didn’t get the same amount of love as his last one, but It was also reviewed in The Guardian, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Slate . . . (The list of overlooked women is better, although it includes a book on the general “overlooked” list and one by Jeannette Winterson. So unknown!)

It’s clear from these lists that the word “overlooked” can mean basically anything. Which, to be honest, is philosophically accurate. Who “overlooked” these books? Lit Hub? The general reading public? All of the literati at last week’s swanky lit party? Your mom? The mainstream media? Booksellers? God?

Anyway, to join in on this trend of flippant and marginally important list-making, today I’m going to post tne poetry collections I would’ve read and loved, if I read poetry. Based on my general knowledge of publishers, translators, and titles, I’m pretty much positivie that these are the best collections I should’ve read this year.

Just so you know, I do have three serious lists ready in my mind for the rest of this week, but since I’m extra-pressed for time today (in case you weren’t aware, Arsenal and Manchester City are playing at 3pm), these descriptions are going to be pretty thin. I’ll make up for it later, trust me.

by Yevgeny Baratynsky, translated from the Russian by Rawley Grau (Ugly Duckling)

To be honest, I’m just including this one because I really like the title. That and it’s from Ugly Duckling Presse and they’ve never steered me wrong before. Plus, there’s this blurb: “Baratynsky is an oddity.“—Joseph Brodsky

by Frédéric Forte, translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker, Ian Monk, Michelle Noteboom, and Jean-Jacques Poucel (Burning Deck Press)

I actually did read a few of the poems from this collection. They are insane and wonderful. Here’s an explanation from the Burning Deck website (another poetry publisher with incredible taste):

Frédéric Forte’s Minute-Operas are poems “staged” on the page. A simple vertical line of 3 inches separates what Forte calls the stage and the wings. The poet explores the potential of this form with multiple typographic games, calling on different registers of the language, different poetic techniques and, in the second part of the book, by “fixating as minute-operas” 55 existing poetic forms (come out of various poetic traditions or more recently invented by Oulipo, the famous French “Workshop for potential literature.”)

by Angelica Freitas, translated from the Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan (Phoneme Books)

I said above that I don’t read much poetry, and to be completely honest, that’s absolutely true. I read the collections we published (selected by Jennifer Grotz), anything by Kim Hyesoon, and whatever makes the Best Translated Book Award longlist, but that’s about it. It’s not that I don’t respect poetry as a form—it just rarely seized my attention at night when I finally get to sit down to read a bit for myself (instead of for work). What I like most about poetry are poets explaining what they’re up to (that heady mix of theoretical art school terminology and total bullshit is really amazing to read and listen to), and poems that are funny.

gertrude stein has a big butt slide over gertrude
stein and when she slides it makes a great noise
as though someone dragged a wet cloth across
the huge glass window of a public building [. . .]

but gertude stein is a charlatan thinks it’s fine to let one
loose under the water eh gertrude stein? it’s impossible
that anyone could so enjoy making bubbles

by Hiromi Ito, translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles (Action Books)

In case you haven’t figured this out yet, most of the books on this list are from a handful of presses—the ones that have earned a reputation for publishing the most daring, interesting works of poetry in translation. Seems to me that when it comes to poetry publishers, branding and reputation are even more crucial than they are for presses doing mostly fiction.

Anyway, from a review in

The 96-page tract demonstrates the author’s shift from verse to a more continuous, genre-bent experience, knitting a full narrative across its many still-fragmented parts. The work follows the travel of a family of many children, their mother, and a father who is both alive and dead, through fields of insane fauna, dystopian wasteland landscape, eerie haunted temporary homes, refrains of song fragments, skin plagues, and breakouts.

Reminiscent of the plunging-network narratives of Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette and Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the book goes into both the multivalent psyches of the human landscape and the ground we walk on, forging between them a trek that is by turns spiritual, spasmodic, romantic, furious, contemplative, and insane.

by Mang Ke, translated from the Chinese by Lucas Klein (Zephyr Press)

Lucas Klein is a really stand-up guy who does a lot to promote Chinese poetry. He’s also been a judge for the PEN Translation Prize, and been mistaken for me at several ALTA conferences. (I don’t know that we look all that alike, except that we both have dark hair, are white, about the same height, and smile, but this happens more than you would expect.)

He also likes to get all up in my shit about mis-alphabetizing Chinese authors in my various lists and posts. This is totally my fault, although it’s not always that easy to figure out . . . Zephyr Press doesn’t even have this book on their website (which is woefully out of date), but even if they did, it probably wouldn’t be listed as “MANG Ke” or “Mang KE,” which would immediately make clear which is the surname. doesn’t do this either. I did some Googling and since “Mang” is a common Chinese surname, I think this should be under “M.”

The beauty of this list that I’ve put together though is that, even if “Ke” is his surname, this book is STILL properly alphabetized. I CAN NOT BE BEATEN TODAY.

by Silvina Ocampo, translated from the Spanish by Jason Weiss (New York Review Books)

Silvina Ocampo was an amazing writer and literary figure in Argentina (married to Adolfo Bioy Casares, friends with Borges, sister to Victoria who ran Sur) who, thanks to NYRB, is finally getting some of the attention she deserves from English readers. I’ve not read her poems (yet!), but if these are half as good as her stories . . . damn. I’d recommend buying this one and Thus Were Their Faces.

edited by Kevin Platt, translated from the Russian by fifteen different translators (Ugly Duckling)

The Orbita group is a creative collective of four poets—Sergej Timofejev, Artur Punte, Semyon Khanin, and Vladimir Svetlov—who live in Riga, Latvia and write poetry in Russian.

In part, I’m including this book because of Kaija’s Latvian heritage, although I know that Latvian Latvians have some mixed feelings about Russian Latvians . . . Anything Russian tends to bring up bad memories of that whole occupation and Soviet thing.

Regardless, this group sounds really interesting, and a few paragraphs from introduction makes this all clear:

These poems were written in Russian, yet they are not simply Russian poems. For one thing, they are written in free verse, and Russians are a bit particular about rhyme and meter. [. . .] For another thing, the primary context in which this poetry shoudl be seen is that of Latvia. The poets of Orbita participate actively in a bilingual cultural scene drawing from the multiple literary traditions of an intimately multinational society. [. . .]

Which is not to say that this is not Russian literature, too. Orbita has made a name for itself in Russia over the past decade or so with its sui generis texts that [. . .] push the boundaries of “mainland” Russian poetic traditions and expectations, charting out new possibilities of Russian literautre in the context of twenty-first-century “transnational Russian Culture.” This is Russian poetry out of bounds. [. . .]

Since the collapse of the USSR, Russian cultural life in the Baltic has, on the whole, become somewhat attenuated and rather conservative—if not provincial. Being in Europe, as it turns out, is sometimes challenging for Latvia’s sizable Russian-speaking minority in the twenty-first century. On the whole, the majority of Russians in Latvia feel cut off from the cultural homeland of the Russian Federation [. . .] and marginalized in Latvia.

Worth reading for that cultural context alone!

by Tomasz Rozycki, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston (Zephyr Press)

I can’t remember where, but I’m almost positive that I heard Bill Johnston read part of this aloud . . . Maybe at Translation Loaf this past summer? Regardless of where I heard it, I remember wanting to grab a review copy of this when I got back to the office. Unfortunately, I can’t find it now to give you all a quote, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that this epic poem is really interesting.

Besides, it’s Bill Johnston. That man could translate scraps of MFA garbage and I’d probably read it.

by Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi, Sukirtharani, translated from the Tamil by Lakshmi Holmstrom (HarperCollins India)

It’s pretty rare that HarperCollins India sells their books into the U.S. market. Almost as rare as it is to have access to poetry by a female poet writing in Tamil . . .

To explain why I’m including this here, I’ll just quote the beginning of

In 2003, at a time when politicians and other establishment figures of Tamil Nadu were caught up in a surge of Tamil chauvinism, a group of men and women, setting themselves up as guardians of Tamil culture, objected publicly to the language of a new generation of women poets, particularly in the work of Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi and Sukirtharani. They charged the women with obscenity and immodesty.

These women poets came into prominence at the same time; their first collections of poetry were published between the years 2000 and 2002, when they were in their late twenties and early thirties. Though each of these poets is unique in what she has to say in her poetry, there are some themes which are common to all of them, notably the politics of sexuality and a woman’s relationship to her body. For the moral police, such language was not permissible for Tamil women. So the poets were condemned and vilified. The debate gained focus with the publication of Kutti Revathi’s Mulaigal (Breasts, 2002). The poets received abusive letters from individuals as well as literary organizations. The media had a field-day. A popular song writer for films gave a much publicized interview to a literary journal condemning women writers in general. This was followed by another film-song writer, Snehithan, who appeared on television declaring that these women should be lined up on Mount Road in Chennai, doused with kerosene oil and burnt alive.

This is horrifying and disturbing, and probably happens more than any of us want to know. Fuck those people; buy and read this book. The poetry looks fairly straightforward, lyrical, with a political undercurrent that rings true even if you’re not familiar with the particular situation in Tamil Nadu.

by Abdourahman Waberi, translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson (Seagull Books)

I love Abdourahman Waberi’s novels, which is why I wanted to include this here. It’s got a great, fun title, and it will be the only collection of poetry from Djibouti that you’ll read this year. (Most likely.)

Translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, Waberi’s voice is intelligent, at times ironic, and always appealing. His poems strongly condemn the civil wars that have plagued East Africa and advocate tolerance and peace. In this compact volume, such ideas live side by side as a rosary for the treasures of Timbuktu, destroyed by Islamic extremists, and a poem dedicated to Edmond Jabès, the Jewish writer and poet born in Cairo.

*

OK, now that I’ve put this all together, I’m thinking that in 2016, I should try and read more poetry. I think it would be more interesting to read these with a group of people—especially people who actually know shit about poetry. Maybe, and this is one of those momentary ideas I probably won’t follow through on, we could start a sort of “International Book Club” via Three Percent and feature a new work of fiction and poetry every month. Each week we could have a post on both of these—from me, or from someone who actually knows something—about the author, the themes, some interesting tidbits, whatever. Readers could join in on Twitter or the Facebook or, if you’re old school, in the comments section. This could be interesting . . .

The chapbook itself is short—clocking in at 32 pages—and is yet another beautiful work of print done by Ugly Duckling. Here’s the beginning of Vince’s review, which tries to get a grasp on what to expect, or not to expect, from poems labeled as “avant-garde”:

There’s little to say about a series of prose poems that willfully refuse to identify pronoun antecedents. Or perhaps there are a million things. The poems in _Morse, My Deaf Friend_— the chapbook by Miloš Djurdjević published by Ugly Duckling Presse as part of their Eastern European Poets Series— will be confounding to those accustomed to poetry that holds its reader’s hand. These poems do not. They are elliptical and strange and offer very few concrete signifiers.

For the rest of the review, go here.

if it opens it won’t take root and only then could you touch the facelessness, it drizzles in your ear, tapping, leaf drop at the first step, it spreads its fingers on the membrane, catches its breath to defend itself and walks on, down again, down again, because death is not here, wall-zone is air-zone is an obstacle, like a breach sunk flat, a second step

If this block of words seems like nonsense, well, you’re not wrong. But it could mean something specific. It’s the reader’s job to give it meaning. This may feel burdensome, but these poems are asking the reader to be their co-creator. It’s an obligation you accept when you continue to read them. In this duty, you are as important as the poet. There are clues, but you get to put them together. Lucky you.

Djurdjević’s poems are referred to as avant-garde, a label that seems both vague and lazy. His work does qualify as such, but to lump it in with everything else under the umbrella term doesn’t offer one much of an idea of what to expect. Then again, the term avant-garde might be enough to engage curious readers and weed out timid ones. Of course, Morse, My Deaf Friend will not likely win over new poetry fans. There are plenty of people who are comfortable ignoring poetry, and, to quote Frank O’Hara, bully for them.

Clearly Djurdjević is not concerned. Rather, he offers the adventuresome reader a chance to see what can be found in this puzzle. And who am I to say that my reading or yours or anyone’s is best? There’s a smidgen of loyalty we owe the text, otherwise it’s every man for himself. Read into these what you will. It’s part of the experience.