{"id":395446,"date":"2018-04-17T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-17T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2018\/04\/17\/before-lyricism-by-eleni-vakalo-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-05-07T14:20:06","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T14:20:06","slug":"before-lyricism-by-eleni-vakalo-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2018\/04\/17\/before-lyricism-by-eleni-vakalo-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“Before Lyricism” by Eleni Vakalo [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning\u2019s entry in the \u201cWhy This Book Should Win<\/a>\u201d series is from BTBA<\/span> judge and Riffraff co-owner, Emma Ramadan.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Before Lyricism<\/em><\/a> by Eleni Vakalo, translated from Greek by Karen Emmerich (Greece, Ugly Duckling Presse)<\/b><\/p>\n

I would happily and readily make the argument that of all the books on the BTBA<\/span> poetry longlist this year, Eleni Vakalo\u2019s Before Lyricism<\/em> was without a doubt the most difficult to translate. Made up of six book-length poems, the poems in Before Lyricism<\/em> get at a version of reality that can only be accessed by making someone hear and see an image through the written word.<\/p>\n

The shape of the forest has
\nThe shape of a jellyfish
\nThat you catch in your hands and it slips through
\nAs a wave
\nPushes it out
\nPerhaps this happens
\nBecause
\nIt moves
\nWithout
\nOpening seashores
\nThat are white
\nAnd
\nThe fresh ones glisten
\nWhile the others
\nAre white all through
\nYou\u2019ll find too the bones of the drowned<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now I\u2019ll push out my heart
\nBut no
\nSince jellyfish
\nHave no blood<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If I pretended for so long to be writing poems, it was only so I could speak of the forest.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These poems don\u2019t have a setting or a thread of movement. The most accurate thing would be to say that these poems are set in Vakalo\u2019s 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<\/em>, \u201cThat\u2019s 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\u2019m standing in is so many more things than I thought\u2014and the calm of the sea and of me becomes host to an undercurrent, if not of fear, then of astonishment at the unfamiliar.\u201d<\/p>\n

At night people betray one another
\nAnd when the forest
\nBegins
\nTo smother you
\nYou cry out
\nAs if
\nYou were not in
\nThe forest<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Vakalo pushes the Greek language to its limits, stretching its syntax and playing up its room for ambiguity. As Emmerich elaborates in her translator\u2019s note at the end of the book, \u201cBefore Lyricism<\/em> 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

If this poem is filled with the beating of wings
\nIt\u2019s because you hear birds<\/i>
\nYou don\u2019t just see them<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Emmerich spent over a decade translating these poems. The difficulty, she says in her Tupelo Quarterly<\/em> interview, is that \u201cwhat Vakalo is doing in this regard simply isn\u2019t something that English can do. The languages aren\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019s a point, a thing to understand but not untangle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Striking the spider
\nThe spasm as it falls
\nAnd its legs contract and tangle
\nIn three closed corners
\nThe whole spider shrinking
\nDeath when it suddenly comes
\nWith a swift pain from the strike
\nAnd that power you have in your hands
\nThe image of these moments gathers
\nAs passing you saw it on the wall
\nCreeping with its eight legs
\nIn an odd rhythmic arrangement
\nThe rapid change
\nIn the scene, starting with the strike,
\nTransforms the innocent into intent.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Emmerich\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning\u2019s entry in the \u201cWhy This Book Should Win\u201d series is from BTBA judge and Riffraff co-owner, Emma Ramadan. Before Lyricism 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":397992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[67786,66446,49386,23846,60166,18056,28616,37876],"class_list":["post-395446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-before-lyricism","tag-btba-2018","tag-btba-poetry","tag-eleni-vakalo","tag-emma-ramadan","tag-karen-emmerich","tag-ugly-duckling-presse","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395446","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=395446"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":398002,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395446\/revisions\/398002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}