Literature in Translation |
from A Gap in Time
“today i held / a seminar on surgery / online / we discussed thyroid cancer / where are those sufferers now? / recently / we’ve had hellishly good luck / since the bridge was blown up / our village / is no longer of importance to the military”
Literature in Translation |
“The Stranger,” “Nobody” & “He Can”
“… the mere presence / of his breathing / in this world is poison. / He can have a sky and a road / sewn out of doves and roses.”
Literature in Translation |
from Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death, or Language Haunted by Sex
“Retired Lieutenant Dostoevsky, age twenty-seven, for having taken part in criminal designs, having circulated a personal letter filled with impertinent expressions against the Orthodox Church and the sovereign power and for having attempted, together with others, to circulate works against the government through means of a private printing press, is condemned to death.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Missionary”
“It was pointless to warn him about the perils of crossing the sea and the dangers of the continent noir, the newly branded missionary would hear none of it. He left as if off to his honeymoon …”
Literature in Translation |
from The World and Varvara
“I once read that it was so cold at Lenin’s funeral that the musicians had to wipe their instruments with vodka so their lips wouldn’t stick. That’s about how chilly it was on the January day some eighty years ago when Varvara entered the world.”
Literature in Translation |
“To Whom It May Concern: On a Poet’s Development”
“Dozens of poetry books could be published without the authors’ names on the cover, because the composers of these books, in essence, are not really authors, but weak-willed mediums of a mode, school or tendency.”
Literature in Translation |
from Lojman
“Selma grabbed the razor from Görkem’s hand. She pressed it against the green cord coming out of the baby’s belly and connecting to something mysterious inside her. In one deft motion, she slashed the cord. She took a piece of twine from her pocket and tied the end.”
Literature in Translation |
from All Before the Night
“Blind to your destiny / your hand holding your hand, you go off / into the abyss of knowledge.”
Literature in Translation |
“Atlas” & “Y2K”
“No aircraft appears in this photograph. Instead, a mountain of trash bins overflowing in the background. Empty tuna cans, coffee filters, dirty diapers, used needles, cattle bones.”
Literature in Translation |
from Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems
“Yet another dagger pulsing under the rain / Diamonds and deliriums of tomorrow’s memories / Taffeta sweat homeless beaches / Madness of my flesh gone astray”
Literature in Translation |
“Portrait of the hunt (the house)”
“Your idea of love was never excessive: / You first trust the thorn and then the rose, / in the fallow deer’s flight.”
Literature in Translation |
On Translating The Postcard by Anne Berest & an Excerpt from the Novel
“I knew, going in, that this was partly a story of lives lost in the Holocaust. That raised the stakes immediately. Without Anne’s book, and everything that went into the writing of it, the members of her family who died at Auschwitz would have remained anonymous and silent.”
Literature in Translation |
On Revisiting Amelia Rosselli’s The Dragonfly: Panegyric to Liberty (1958) — & an Excerpt
“Retranslating The Dragonfly offered an opportunity to revisit one of my favorite poems, to establish a through-line more clearly, and to eliminate errors that were minor but, for me, persistently nettlesome.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Wasp of Time,” “A Glass Dress” & “Peephole”
“It won’t let me part, it won’t let me inside — / so we’ll stand here like this and we’ll look / at each other this way today, tomorrow, forever. / O my enemy, mirror-eye!”
Literature in Translation |
from Professor Schiff’s Guilt, a novel by Agur Schiff
“The past I am being asked to submit to you, distinguished members of the Special Tribunal, is my family heritage, for good and for bad, and when it rears its head, I cannot pretend to be surprised.”