{"id":297756,"date":"2014-04-23T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-23T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/04\/23\/the-guest-in-the-wood-by-elisa-biagini-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-05-04T15:11:43","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T15:11:43","slug":"the-guest-in-the-wood-by-elisa-biagini-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/04\/23\/the-guest-in-the-wood-by-elisa-biagini-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Guest in the Wood” by Elisa Biagini [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

The second entry in the \u201cWhy This Book Should Win<\/a>\u201d series for this year\u2019s BTBA<\/span> Poetry Finalists<\/a> is by judge Anna Rosenwong.<\/a> <\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Guest in the Wood<\/em><\/a> by Elisa Biagini, translated from the Italian by Diana Thow, Sarah Stickney, and Eugene Ostashevsky (Italy; Chelsea Editions)<\/b><\/p>\n

I love The Guest in the Wood.<\/em> I didn\u2019t expect to; it snuck up on me. I anticipated respecting the poems, appreciating the marvelous translations by Diana Thow, Sarah Stickney, and Eugene Ostashevsky, and the elegant volume from Chelsea Editions, but masterful translation and thoughtful publishing have been the rule in this competition. Dozens and dozens of brilliant translations have invited themselves into my home over the past months, but this book asked me in and wouldn\u2019t let me leave.<\/p>\n

I say it snuck up on me because, unlike many other remarkable submissions, The Guest in the Wood<\/em> did not announce itself as exotic, exhaustive, avant-garde, genre-defying, or canonical. The Guest in the Wood<\/em> is humbly subtitled, \u201cA Selection of Poems 2004-2007,\u201d and it was with no more warning than this that I ventured into the wood and became Biagini\u2019s guest.<\/p>\n

From the first, these surreal, understated poems create an uncanny physical space that is equally domestic, disturbing, and luminous, their airy structure leaving room for the reader-guest to receive their hospitality and offer something in return (the Italian ospite meaning both \u201cguest\u201d and \u201chost\u201d). The poet\u2019s and translators\u2019 forceful language presses us to \u201cattend and rediscover\u201d the quotidian and overdetermined realities of, as Angelina Oberdan explains in her introduction, \u201cthe self, the other, the body, and the private rituals of our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in 1970, Elisa Biagini is herself a translator of contemporary North American poetry, and part of my attraction to her work surely comes from a sense of the poems in translatorly conversation with influences such as Anne Carson, Emily Dickinson, and Adrienne Rich. Tellingly, The Guest in the Wood<\/em> merges two of Biagini\u2019s six collections, The Guest<\/em> and Into the Wood<\/em>, with the wood representing a very different kind of contained space than the home, one synonymous with fairy tale archetype and danger. With its evocation, Biagini\u2019s homey interiors are revealed to be haunted, their spare restraint repeatedly performing domestic cleanliness and order in a perpetual struggle to manage threatening guests.<\/p>\n

The plates are never left out
\nbecause otherwise the dead will come
\nand sop bread in the broth
\ncarefully
\nso that a misplaced spoon won\u2019t be noticed
\nthe next morning.
\nYou don\u2019t want them counting the crumbs
\nreading your fortune in the leftovers
\ntasting your body
\nat night.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve been thrilled to find that my fellow BTBA<\/span> judges were likewise caught out and drawn in by this book\u2019s unapologetically feminine sense of embodiment and urgency\u2014Biagini\u2019s sharp distortions of ironing boards and dirty dishes as compelling, political, and philosophical as any of the more obviously ambitious or grandiose works we read. The fact that this collection is Biagini\u2019s first in English is a credit to Chelsea Editions for bucking the publishing preference for safety and known quantities, as well as testament to both the message of Three Percent and the importance of projects like the Best Translated Book Award. You should read this book. And it should win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The second entry in the \u201cWhy This Book Should Win\u201d series for this year\u2019s BTBA Poetry Finalists is by judge Anna Rosenwong.   The Guest in the Wood by Elisa Biagini, translated from the Italian by Diana Thow, Sarah Stickney, and Eugene Ostashevsky (Italy; Chelsea Editions) I love The Guest in the Wood. I didn\u2019t […]<\/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":[55936,35996,55996,39876,55966,40126,14086,55976,55986,55956,37876],"class_list":["post-297756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-anna-rosenwong","tag-btba","tag-chelsea-editions","tag-diana-thow","tag-elisa-biagini","tag-eugene-ostashevsky","tag-italian-literature","tag-sarah","tag-stickney","tag-the-guest-in-the-wood","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297756","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=297756"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397242,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297756\/revisions\/397242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}