{"id":293896,"date":"2013-04-25T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-25T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/04\/25\/why-this-book-should-win-almost-1-book-almost-1-life-by-elfriede-czurda-btba-2013\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:28","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:28","slug":"why-this-book-should-win-almost-1-book-almost-1-life-by-elfriede-czurda-btba-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/04\/25\/why-this-book-should-win-almost-1-book-almost-1-life-by-elfriede-czurda-btba-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Why This Book Should Win: "Almost 1 Book \/ Almost 1 Life" by Elfriede Czurda [BTBA 2013]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the course of this week, we will be highlighting all 6 BTBA<\/span> Poetry Finalists one by one, building up to next Friday’s announcement of the winners. All of these are written by the BTBA<\/span> poetry judges under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win.” You can find the whole series by clicking here.<\/a> Stay tuned for more information about the May 3rd ceremony.<\/i><\/p>\n

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Almost 1 Book \/ Almost 1 Life<\/em><\/a> by Elfriede Czurda, translated from the German by Rosmarie Waldrop, and published by Burning Deck.<\/b><\/p>\n

Erica Mena is a poet, translator, and editor, not necessarily in that order. Her original poetry has appeared in Vanitas<\/em>, the Dos Passos Review<\/em>, Pressed Wafer<\/em>, and Arrowsmith Press.<\/em> Her translations have appeared in Two Lines<\/em>, Asymptote<\/em>, PEN<\/span> America<\/em>, and Words without Borders<\/em>, among others. She is the founding editor of Anomalous Press.<\/i><\/p>\n

Most of us have probably never heard of Elfriede Czurda. That\u2019s because this translation is her first publication in English. More interestingly, it\u2019s a translation of (almost all of) her first book to appear in her native German, as well as the entirety of her second book. It\u2019s unusual for poets\u2019 first books to be translated into English, in part because of most publishers\u2019 self-fulfilling expectations that unknown poets are hard to sell, and even harder in translation. But translator, and extraordinary poet herself, Rosmarie Waldrop has an advantage in this sense: she and her husband co-edit this book\u2019s publishing house, Burning Deck, and so can take risks on new work they feel deserving of an English readership. (Burning Deck, I want to point out, brought out the phenomenal BTBA<\/span> finalist engulf \u2014 enkindle<\/i> by Anja Utler, translated by Kurt Beals that I reviewed last year for Three Percent.)<\/p>\n

Which is not to say that Elfriede Czurda is unknown in German. She\u2019s won numerous awards for her work which includes poetry, plays, and criticism, and has published three books in the past five years. But introducing new, living, experimental authors to an English poetry readership already resistant to works of literary translation is a daring move, one that we\u2019re fortunate independent houses like Burning Deck continue to take. And that brings me to why, I think, Almost 1 Book \/ Almost 1 Life<\/i> should actually win the Best Translated Book Award this year. It\u2019s utterly daring.<\/p>\n

The book is divided into two sections, \u201cAlmost 1 Book\u201d and \u201cAlmost 1 Life.\u201d The first part of the work is definitively hybrid: it includes lineated verse; long, meandering lines that spill across the page; blocks of prose; images; diagrams; and text-images reminiscent of the world-wide mid-century concrete poetry experiments. Take one page spread of the book as an example, the one that is the most varied:<\/p>\n

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The verso is the second and page of a section of a long poem called \u201cMutilation with Intent,\u201d this section titled \u201cmanifesto of the stitchomantic cat.\u201d I can\u2019t imagine what the word \u201cstitchomantic\u201d was in the original German, my German being literary nonexistent. What I do know is that it\u2019s evocative, inventive, and fascinating in English. It resonates with schizophrenic. It makes me think of an automated sewing machine, and a particular kind of invented advertising language that might say \u201cstitch-o-matic.\u201d The \u201c-mantic\u201d also could be \u201cmanic,\u201d especially given that it\u2019s a cat and all cats are of course neurotic. The recto is a narrative-poem-rhebus of sorts. This sets my mind spinning, thinking about translation of image-reliant poetry; how the images sound in English versus how they sound in German, the meanings that can be read into and out of them shifting based on context (of the poem, and of the culture). Images are percieved to be universal, but of course are far from that.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not all flashy typographics. One of my favorite poems in the first section is a obsessively comprehensive microscopic description of a landscape that shifts into the poets body, and the body of an unknown you:<\/p>\n

\n

by the rain-puddled wheel-rutted road on the mossy ground rank
\ndandelion ribwort plantain clover milkwort grass
\non either side of the road pear- apple- and plum-trees galore
\na beetle with a black carapace and an orange dot in the lower third
\nof it climbs up a blade of grass and tries belly-up head-first to reach
\nthe next blade belly and legs pale pink like shrimp shells<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The excessive detail, the attempt at wholeness of description, the violence done to the landscape and the body in this attempt, is exquisite.<\/p>\n

The second section of the book, \u201cAlmost 1 Life,\u201d is a poem composed of seventeen sections with three \u201ceditorial digressions\u201d and is part satire, part \u201c(almost) true-life-novel,\u201d and begins with discussion of the work at hand in relation to its reader:<\/p>\n

\n

i put the reader off with promises: all our famous animosities<\/em> will
\nbecome characters in this (almost) true-life-novel
\nthe reader\u2019s reaction is not what i expected (he wants to wait and see)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And readers who do wait and see, who are willing to take the risk that Czurda and Waldrop have taken, each in their own language, are richly rewarded. The reward of a work like this is directly proportional to how challenging it is to read. The playfulness of the language belies a serious challenge to readerly poetic expectations, it gives with one hand and takes twice as much with the other. It entrances and disturbs, and stays, like good poetry should, lodged under your skin like a bullet. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the course of this week, we will be highlighting all 6 BTBA Poetry Finalists one by one, building up to next Friday’s announcement of the winners. All of these are written by the BTBA poetry judges under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win.” You can find the whole series by clicking here. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[51266,48756,50266,38156,51246,28396,5706,1646,51256],"class_list":["post-293896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-almost-1-book-almost-1-life","tag-btba-2013","tag-btba-2013-why-this-book-should-win","tag-burning-deck","tag-elfriede-czurda","tag-erica-mena","tag-german-literature","tag-review","tag-rosmarie-waldrop"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293896"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318346,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293896\/revisions\/318346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}