{"id":420692,"date":"2019-05-14T16:30:18","date_gmt":"2019-05-14T20:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=420692"},"modified":"2019-05-14T16:54:32","modified_gmt":"2019-05-14T20:54:32","slug":"negative-space-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2019\/05\/14\/negative-space-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"Negative Space [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win<\/a> posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Tess Lewis<\/b>\u00a0is a writer and translator from French and German. She\u00a0is co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee and\u00a0<\/b>serves as an Advisory Editor for the\u00a0Hudson Review.\u00a0Her translations have won a number of awards including the 2015\u00a0ACFNY\u00a0Translation Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Negative Space<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by Luljeta Lleshanaku, translated from Albania by Ani Gjika (Albania, New Directions)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cNegative Space is always fertile,\u201d we read in the title poem of Luljeta Lleshanaku\u2019s latest collection in Ani Gjika\u2019s crystalline translation. Indeed, this collection is fertile ground for thoughts physical and metaphysical. The wry, matter-of-fact tone that dominates these poems highlights all the more dramatically their subtle glimmers of import and nuance as well as flashes of insight. Lleshanaku\u2019s poems are filled with striking and unexpected metaphors and similes that open new perspectives onto ordinary objects and reveal layers of meaning that have accrued to them. The poems in Negative Space<\/em> offer a metaphysics of the ordinary, an epistemology of observation.<\/p>\n

\"\"Trains approach small town stations \u201clike ghosts, \/ the way a husband returning after midnight \/ slips under the covers, \/ keeping his cold feet at a distance.\u201d Poetry books, \u201cthin, sly, bought at discount prices\u201d break apart \u201clike crumbled bread thrown at swans in the park.\u201d Fear retreats \u201clike periodontal disease revealing the roots beneath gums.\u201d Diphthongs on a blackboard rub \u201cagainst one another like kittens.\u201d And, most exquisitely, the h\u00e1cek on the end of the poet Charles Simic\u2019s name was washed away by the rain in transit when he left Serbia for the United States as a teenager.<\/p>\n

His last name is pronounced differently<\/p>\n

in his new language than in his mother tongue:<\/p>\n

the final consonants hardened along the way<\/p>\n

like cardboard boxes drenched on the deck of a ship<\/p>\n

only to dry again under another sun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lleshanaku was born in 1968 in Albania under the ruthless dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, so rigid a Marxist-Leninist that he severed ties with the Soviet Union in 1961 after Kruschev\u2019s \u201cSecret Speech\u201d and then cut off diplomatic relations with China, Albania\u2019s last ally, in 1972 after Nixon\u2019s visit. Politics\u2014suffocating, corrosive\u2014was all-pervasive in her childhood and early adulthood.<\/p>\n

I grew up in a big house<\/p>\n

where weakness and expressions of joy<\/p>\n

deserved punishment.<\/p>\n

And I was raised on the via politica<\/p>\n

with the grease of yesterday\u2019s glories,<\/p>\n

a thick grease collected under arctic skies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"Some who survived those harsh decades, left \u201cdamaged like lottery numbers scratched away with a blade,\u201d bore witness to their experiences and through their narratives created \u201ctheir own grease.\u201d Others emigrated and buried their \u201cwretched survival . . . in the darkest crevices of their being.\u201d But neither silence nor distance provides an escape from \u201cannoying history,\u201d the scent of which lingers indefinitely like perfume.<\/p>\n

Absence and silence are not necessarily empty, but can, indeed, be made fertile. \u00a0The negative space left by relatives sent to prison, by words no longer to be said because of censorship, emotional or material constraints, by want was something Lleshanaku learned to read, to mine for significance. Yet the meaning and lessons she finds there are descriptive, not prescriptive. She could draw conclusions, but for whom? In \u201cChildren of Morality,\u201d the poet announces that after receiving her first lessons in morality as a young child \u201cwithout chewing them like cough syrup\u201d she has learned so much more about it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In fact, I actually could be a moralist,<\/p>\n

pointing my index finger out as a rhetorical gesture.<\/p>\n

But without referring to anyone. Where did everyone go?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is urgent, resonant poetry, a bracing tonic in any age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards.\u00a0 Tess Lewis\u00a0is a writer and translator from French and German. She\u00a0is co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee and\u00a0serves as an Advisory Editor for the\u00a0Hudson Review.\u00a0Her translations have won a number of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":420702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[69052,39566,69042,22526,37876],"class_list":["post-420692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-ani-gjika","tag-luljeta-lleshanaku","tag-negative-space","tag-tess-lewis","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420692","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=420692"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":420742,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420692\/revisions\/420742"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}