Literature in Translation |
“blazing cities,” “page blank” & “moment of silence”
“while night and day / cities flicker on under the stars / while things go swimmingly in Amsterdam / I doubt Ghouta / could present you a single dewy lawn / or Gaza …”
Literature in Translation |
“Canto XXVIII” from Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso
“And when I turned around and my own eyes / Were met with what appears in that vast space / Whenever one looks intently at its circling, // I saw a point that radiated such an intense light / That eyes seared by it are forced to close / Because of its extreme brightness.”
Literature in Translation |
“On Visiting an Absent Taoist Master,” “Endless Longing,” “Drinking Alone by Moonlight” & “Lute Song”
“I try as soul to leap the earth and air between us, but / my dream self can’t get through the gate that marks the Great Divide.”
Literature in Translation |
“Angelic Beings,” “Family Geography” & “Rocks”
“Angelic beings dwell in reflections, / her wrinkled face in the kitchen window, / the young man’s profile in the windshield.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Brave Ones” & “The Scientists Are Wrong”
“It’s my opinion that the world is created everyday / from all kinds of matter, each unrelated to the other / and their only correlation some quantitative relationship.”
Literature in Translation |
“Beyond Time”
“Life descends, we can walk / The footstep illuminates / The immense fear of being oneself in time // Our two almond hands are steel gates // And, look, how all the love of forests was needed / To adopt the eyes of the invisible.”
Literature in Translation |
on Translating Robert Seethaler’s The Café With No Name, with an excerpt from the novel
“I’d like to see a more diverse field where people join the translation profession from many different backgrounds, rather than only via academia or publishing contacts.”
Literature in Translation |
“new neo,” “[cutting away all difficult memories],” “[merged like rhyme, fire]” & “[who are you …]”
“you strike the month of february like a short match / punch the blue pill of tranquility from the foil packet / what was your name?”
Literature in Translation |
“Pagans Love Poetry”
“Pagans love poetry / they use it to enchant their gods and their kings, / to curse other gods and kings.”
Literature in Translation |
“This Loss”, “Words at the Entrance to Jerusalem,” “Luckily,” “Labyrinths” &
“So difficult, this loss: / to imagine your pages / are those of a dead man, / and that death’s colleagues / are the ones / consoling you now.”
Literature in Translation |
“B’s Grave,” “September 18, 1953” & “February 21, 1954”
“The past comes and walks by your side once more. / Don’t change your heart, don’t be charmed. / Don’t linger, take leave of the time …”
Literature in Translation |
“An Obituary for Roman”
“I called upon all residents of Omsk who follow me on social media to contact the fitness club where Roman was working and demand his firing for threatening women. My request went far and wide — tens of thousands of reposts, scores of news items in major media.”
Literature in Translation |
“I Didn’t Want to Be Born Here (or There),” “Decompression” & “untitled”
“I’m made up wholly of inertia / from which I suck the strength // of the stump / of a phantom / tree”
Literature in Translation |
“The Train”
“The train has stopped in a sleepy, quiet time, / this is the time of memory, / of waiting. / Mother says we will come back soon / to this land where my navel was buried, / where the / morning cicada sings and where flowers / never die.”
Literature in Translation |
“I laughed in my kingdom and as king I laughed,” “no doubt a rain sleeps in the hand,” “a child shows his hands,” “life looks like you,” “but we / do nothing but follow” & “the world transforms at a rapid pace”
“but we / do nothing but follow / traces / we ourselves are / nothing but traces / of life / that is why we need so profoundly / to hold on to ourselves …”