circumferencemag.com · -tween 1979 and 1981. During this time, she befriended the Brazilian artist...

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CIRCUMFER ENCE M AGAZINE

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4–12russian

Четыре Стихотворения из Воронежских Тетрадей osip mandelstam

3–13 Four Poems from The Voronezh Notebooks john high and matvei yankelevich

14latvian

(No Sapņu grāmatas)baiba bičole

15 (from a dream diary)bitite vinklers

17–1921

persian

مادوِن قرمز

ابهام قفل هاgarous abdolmalekian

6–1820

Infrared CameraSealed Doorsahmad nadalizadeh and idra novey

22amharic

የሀገሬ ባሎችmihret kebede

23 Husbands of My Dear Countryeric ellingsen, jorga mesfin and uljana wolf

24amharic

አቃጅmihret kebede

25 The planneruljana wolf

26–32ukrainian

Два вірші зі збіркиНовий правопис serhiy zhadan

27–33 Two Poems from A New Orthography john hennessy and ostap kin

3436

38spanish

Mi abuelo Klaus KinskiTres lombrices en la pileta hacen en el fondo un cuadro abstractoNotas para un fadosilvina lópez medin

3537

39

My Grandfather Klaus KinskiThree Worms in the Bottom of the Pool Make an Abstract PaintingNotes for a Fadojasmine v. bailey

4244

icelandic

MENT ASKÓ LAKR AKKRRÓMA NTÍS KUST ALDAkári tulinius

4345

KIDS INHI GHSC HOOLTHEB ELLE STEP OQUElarissa kyzer

CIRCUMFERENCE MAGAZINE

poetry

Contents

1 Letter from the Editor elina alter

50–54chinese

家務chung kwok keung

51–55 Houseworkmay huang

58–60old english

The Ruinanonymous

59–61 The Ruingnaomi siemens

6466

french

[Enterre-moi vite][Tout gouvernail sera mon sabre d’aurore]khal torabully

6567

[Bury me quick][Each rudder will be my saber of dawn]nancy naomi carlson

6870–84

86french

POÉSIE ÉLÉMENTAIREDROIT DE REGARD SUR LES IDÉESGUILLOTINÉES EN TÊTE À TÊTEghérasim luca

6971–85

87

ELEMENTARY POETRYIDEA INSPECTION

GUILLOTINED HEAD TO HEADaustin carder

90–96greek

Ποίηση μες στην ποίησηantonis fostieris

91–97 Poetry Within Poetrygeorge fragopoulos

98slovenian

36 Sekundaleš šteger

99 36 Secondsbrian henry

102–106108110

portuguese

epílogoRio, 24 de dezembro de 1981Carta sem data com a poema “Vacilo da vocação”ana cristina cesar

103–107109111

epilogueRio, December 24, 1981Undated letter with poem

“Vacillation of Vocation”elisa wouk almino

112spanish

71magdalena chocano

113 71jacqui cornetta

poetry (continued)

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Contents (continued)

114–121

122–124

Herder and the Possibility of Translationwilliam eckDessicated Mermaids (from Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country)cristina rivera garza, translated by sarah booker

2, 125 41, 4640, 4748, 5657, 8962, 88

Spilled MilkHemlineTiptoeingDisappearedLike A GloveThe Thinkerhenni alftan

prose

art

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circumferenceissue 8, summer 2020

m a s t h e a d

editorElina Alter

founding editorsStefania HeimJennifer Kronovet

art directorJustin Moore

advisory boardSusan BernofskyJennifer GrotzMark KrotovBrett Fletcher LauerIdra NoveyEliot WeinbergerJeffrey Yang

advisory editorsMichael BarronElizabeth Clark WesselDaniel LeffertsSam Ross

readersElina AlterAlex BraslavskyMaria EliadesTjaša FermeAubrey JonesIverson LongSarah Milner-BarryJustin MooreLida NosratiKaija StraumanisKristin SvavaJay Zhang

Circumference is a journal of poetry in translation and international culture that is published two times a year. Information on how to purchase issues or submit materials can be found on our website circumferencemag.com. For all other inquiries such as publicity and advertising, email [email protected]

Support for Circumference has been generously provided by public funds from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo.

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10 11OСИП MАНДЕЛЬШТАМ (osip mandelstam)

Влез бесенок в мокрой шерстке —Ну, куда ему, куды? —В подкопытные наперстки,В торопливые следы;По копейкам воздух версткийОбирает с слободы.

Брызжет в зеркальцах дорога —Утомленные следыПостоят еще немногоБез покрова, без слюды...Колесо брюзжит отлого —Улеглось — и полбеды!

Скучно мне: мое прямоеДело тараторит вкось —По нему прошлось другое,Надсмеялось, сбило ось.

[8–12 января 1937]

tr: john high & matvei yankelevich

Up the devil clambers, his wool coat soaked—Where’s he going, where to now?Into hoof-imprinted thimbles,Into hasty, rushing tracks:On his way to fleece the farmlands,Cent by cent, of typeset air.

The road spatters out tiny mirrors.Fatigued, the rutted tracksWill hold out a little longerWithout cover, without mica…Wheels grousing in the slope—Stuck. Only half the trouble!

I’m bored: My straight-and-narrowWork is chattering off course—Another trampled over it,Snickered, kicked the axle out.

[January 12–18, 1937]

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የሀገሬ ባሎች

እስኪ ሀገሬ …..ልግጠምልሽ

የኔ መግጠም….. ከጠቀመሽ፤

እንደ ባለቅኔ …. ባልገጥምልሽ እንኳን

እንደ’ክት ባሎችሽ …. ባልሆንልሽ እንኳን

ያልራሰውን መሬት…… በላቤ እንዳለማ

ባ’ጥር እየሾለኩ….. ልሁንሽ ውሽማ፤

እንጂ በርሽማ

የላይ የላዩማ

ላይገጥምሽ ተዘግቶ

ላይሆንሽ ተጣብቶ……ማንን አስገብቶ?

ቢሆንም ቢሆንም ….. ላግባሽ ባልልሽም

እስኪ ሀገሬ ልግጠምልሽ

የኔ መግጠም ከጠቀመሽ ፤

መች ይቀራል…. መግጠሜማ

ሰባስቤ ….የቃል ማማ

የህዝብ ግጥም…. የህዝብ ዜማ፤

ግና እኔ ደርሼ …..ቶሎ እስክገጥምልሽ

ሀረግ ጠማጥሜ ….ቤት እስክመታልሽ

ቀለበት አጥልቄ …. የሁሉ እስካደርግሽ

ሰምሽ እዜህ ማዶ….ወርቅሽ እዚያ ማዶ

ህብረ-ቃልሽ ሁሉ…. ከባዕድ ተሰዶ

የድስትሽ ክዳኑ…. ሳይገጥም ተንከርፍፎ

በኔ እገጥም ……በኔ እገጥም…. ገላሽ ብርድ አትርፎ

ወጥሽ እኮ አለቀ ….. ተጨልፎ ተጨልፎ ::

mihret kebede tr: eric ellingsen, jorga mesfin & uljana wolf

የሀገ

ሬ ባ

ሎች

Husbands of My Dear Country

Let me have a polite conversation with my countryLet me write a poem to benefit my country

even if I’m not able to write a poem for my country like the wise poets writeeven if I’m not the legal husband of my country or a leaderlet me still water the dry land with planted sweatlet me slip in by the fence as a lover

By the front by the top by the upper upper door they closed the gate open by the gate never fitsit never fitted you, probably it never properlyfit the bowl

either way either way…

I don’t want to ask you to marry… Instead let me write you a poemLet me fit a poem… to benefit my country My writing of poetry will never stop… my writing of poetry will never ceasecollecting the hill of words

The poetry of the people… is the melody of the peopleuntil I grow vines I will… fit you with my poetryuntil I twist lines here I will… build a rhyming house here for you

Because the lid doesn’t fit and the leaders don’t fitand they always leave the door openand they always leave the lid of the pot open so people can scoop things out and scoop things out and scoop things out…

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24 25mihret kebede

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አቃጅ

ቢሆን ባይሆን ብሎ …..ማቀድ ለምንድነው?

ሰው መሆን በራሱ …..ያቃጁ እቅድ ነው

የታቀደ ደግሞ…. ከማቀድ ውጭ ነው

አቀጁ ካለበት…. እቅዱን እስኪያጸድቅ

አልያም ተጸጽቶ ….. ዶሴውን እስኪቀድ

እንደ ጅረት ውሀ ዝ….ም ብሎ መፍሰስ ነው

አፈሳሰስ ደግሞ….. ፍቺው ለየቅል ነው

አንድም ቋጥኝ መዝለል….. መ ፈ ነ ጣ ጠ ር ነው

አልያም ጎዳና ላይ ….. ድንጋይ ስር መቅረት ነው ::

tr: uljana wolf

አቃ

ጅ

The planner

Why do we even make plans?Being human is like being the planof another planner/planet,so that in some way you are alwaysa plant in some-one else’s plan

and so until the planner decides tochange the planor unless the planner decides todismiss the plan

you are beautifully sitting there,plain plan man.

Like the flow of the river, determinedby the shape of the land in any situation. Buthow to flowis a very different question.

You can either carefully step on the rocksor you can simply decide to flow underthe rocks and be forgotten forever.

Two rocks, still out there –to shape your flow and course.

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34 35silvina lópez medin

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Mi abuelo Klaus Kinski

foto: sonrisas penden de un hilose corta en Klaus, gigante de cabeza inclinadasin anteojos elige ver malborrado, una mancha oscura en el brazo izquierdocomo un insecto muerto o no séno se ve bien

no flota una mariposa entre los dedos de Klausmarchan patas en punta, aguijones

ya de niñoocultaba manzanas en armarios, escribía:comer poco para no crecer

y crecía igual, como todos

es verano en la fotouna mano intenta tapar el brazo heridola otra a punto de secar, suspensagota que brilla en la frentecomo una lágrima corrida de lugar

tr: jasmine v. bailey

mi a

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My Grandfather Klaus Kinski

picture: smiles hang from a threadthat ends with Klaus, his huge head half-tiltedwithout glasses he has chosen to see poorlyerased, a dark stain on his left armlike a dead bug or I’m not sure whatit’s hard to see

no butterfly floats between Klaus’s fingersmarching on tiptoe, stingers ready

even as a childhe hid apples in closets, wrote:eating little so as not to grow

and grew anyway, as we all do

it’s summer in the pictureone hand tries to cover the hurt armthe other about to blot a glitteringdrop suspended from his foreheadlike a tear that’s gone off script.SAMPLE



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Tres lombrices en la pileta hacen en el fondo un cuadro abstracto

Esa vez que intenté romperel domingo en dosy en la mitaddel peor temporal bajo la flecha que parte la noche, agita sus criaturas,quise pisar la tormenta,los pies desnudos en el pastoel cuerpo a la espera de agua ajena

hasta recordarlo que sale a flote:

lombricesque tras el diluvio los pájarosbajan a devorar,levanté un pievolví a los saltitoshacia la zona de confortbajo las tejas

llovía, llovía en seriola lluvia no era fílmicoanuncio de otra cosa.


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Three Worms in the Bottom of the Pool Make an Abstract Painting

That time I tried to breakSunday in twoand in the middle of the worst galebeneath the arrow that parts the night, its creaturestrembling,I tried to walk over the storm,feet naked in grassbody given to the wait for distant water

until I rememberedwhat invariably floats:

earthworms that, once the storm has passed, birdswill descend to devour,lifting a foot I hopped backto safetybeneath the tiles

it rained, rained like it meant itnot like the rain that falls in filmsto signify something else.

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Notas para un fado

intervalo: un hombre viejo, viejo aferrado a un papel repasa su letra la punta del zapato se acerca y se aleja del piso marca el ritmo, ya no marca insinúa, en parte ha perdido el control del cuerpo, lo que queda entre el piso y su pie ¿es ese el espacio entre las cosas que Cage pedía no olvidar? el hombre viejo avanzalento en su estar un poco desprendido del entornose aferra al micrófono, sonríe hasta que encuentra el compás del cantoa veces se le va una frase o la voz,nosotros con pies firmes sobre el suelo firme de la tabernaen cada silencio le soplamos la letra,todavía creemos en la necesidad de completar.


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Notes for a Fado

interval: an old, old mangripping a paperrereads the lyricsthe tip of his shoe inching toward and away from the floorhe’s keeping time, or no longer marksbut suggests, he has partly lostcontrol of his body, what’s leftbetween the floor and his foot—is that the space between thingsthat Cage wanted us to remember?the old man comes forwardslow in his beinga little detached from the world around himhe takes the microphone, smilesuntil he finds the music’s compassfrom time to time he misplaces a line or his voice,we whose feet are firm on the tavern’s firm floorwhisper the words to him at each silence,convinced that everything must be whole.SAMPLE


48 49henni alftan

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Contextual Note:

“Housework” tracks its speaker from childhood to fatherhood, as he watches his relationship with chickens change—and along with it, his understanding of love and loss. The poem was composed in 2004, a time when the h5n1 influenza was resurfacing in Hong Kong. The first outbreak of the virus in humans occurred in Hong Kong in 1997; in December of that year, the government ordered the slaughter of 1.3 million chickens to control the spread of the virus.

may huang (黃鴻霙)

家務 / Housework

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50 51鍾國強 (chung kwok keung)

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家務喔喔的我從沒有聽懂你的語言我提起一個掏空了腹腔的身體

那是愛嗎？我在黝暗的禾桿窩裏拾起一枚蛋仍然溫暖，回頭便見你在柴木堆裏探出頭來喔喔的，像要對我説一些怎也説不清楚的話

那是一個下著細雨的下午嗎？我做著好像永遠做不完的家課抬頭便見你在園裏翻耙泥土，蓬起的翅膀下是三五小雞雛怯怯地探頭，忽然急步躥出，爭相啄食你嘴裏的甚麼我看著你頻頻點頭，在微雨裏，凝望小小翅膀抖掉閃亮的水珠

那是愛嗎？我看著雞雛慢慢變掉了顏色下雨和晴天之間，我學懂更多時態和語氣的變換看見勞累的母親突然動氣，向我掄起砧板上的菜刀看見桌上擺了一碗熱氣騰騰的餐蛋公仔麵待我吃了好去應付午後悶長的升中試

喔喔的你在尋找你的蛋嗎？我在找我的嗎？空空的方格待要填上甚麼呢？我望向窗外斜風細雨又見你翻耙濕潤的泥土，深深的

一個彷彿永無止境的窟窿，藏下你的希望我的希望麼？我看見漫天降下熱騰騰的蛋我的喉管哽著，筆下一個字也寫不出來

那是愛嗎？一個下著冷雨的冬天我看見你挺高了喉管，頷下的羽毛還未飄落便見你把鮮紅的血瘋狂注入奶白的瓷碗來不及發出喔喔的聲音，你已躺在沸水盆邊掏空了腹腔，瞪看自己一一鋪陳在地的內臟然後在茫茫蒸氣中，你從一個白瓷盅裏升起模糊了揭起蓋子的手，模糊了不斷增添的皺紋

tr: may huang (黃鴻霙)

Housework

Oh oh-ing, I have never understood your languageI picked up a body with an emptied belly

Was that love? From the dark depths of the nest I took an eggStill warm. Turning around, I saw you stick your head out from firewood, Oh oh-ing, as if you wanted to tell me something you could never explain

Was that an afternoon of fine rain? I was doing almost never-ending choresWhen I saw you rake the soil, while a flock of chicks under your wingsLooked around nervously, leapt, fought over something in your mouthI watched you nod in the rain, gaze at glistening beads shaken off by small wings

Was that love? I watched chicks slowly change their color Between rainy and sunny days, I understood more about shifts in tense and tone Saw a weary mother suddenly grow irritated, brandish the kitchen knife at me Saw piping hot spam and egg noodles on the table for me to eatSo I could face the afternoon’s tedious high school entrance exams

Oh oh-ing, were you looking for your eggs? Was I looking for mine? How to fill the empty grids? I looked out the window At light wind and fine rain and saw you raking the wet mud, a deepAnd almost never-ending cavity, hiding your hopesAnd my hopes? I saw piping hot eggs descend from the sky I felt a lump in my throat, and could not write a single word

Was that love? On a rainy winter’s dayI watched you raise your throat, the feathers under your chin not yet fallenAnd saw you pour bright red blood into a milk-white porcelain bowlWith no time to cry oh-oh, you already lay by the hot water basinYour stomach emptied, staring at your own scattered organs Then in the vast steam, you rose from a porcelain potBlurring the hand that lifted the lid, blurring the ever-increasing wrinkles

家務

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52 53

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而雨下了多時還在下我還在做我做不完的家務下雨和晴天之間，我學懂更多簡單的方法解決複雜的問題你有無端抑鬱的時刻，我學懂在旁靜靜地看靜靜地洗瓶開奶，更換尿布，小小的搖鈴靜靜地搖你有無端暴烈的時刻，我學懂吞吐言辭收拾破碎，學懂在關鍵時刻，緊緊的從後緊緊抱著你彷彿一對沉默厚重的翅膀，在漫天毛羽紛飛中無有流血，無有掙扎，無有誰失聲委地

那是愛嗎？我買了一個九吋寬燉盅內外洗淨，然後到市場買一隻母雞隔著竹籠，我一眼便看到那異樣的眼神沒有淚滴，只有那熟悉的，微微的喔喔的聲音。然後寂滅。我看見血水從溝渠流出。我看見肚腹全掏空了。深深的，像一個口甚麼話也說不出來。我揮一揮手斷然拒絕店主手上閃亮的內臟

雨還在下水氣還在蒸騰我提起掏空腹腔的身體喔喔的我好像聽到窗外傳來喔喔的聲音我學懂水的份量蔥的性情火候的大小端上飯桌的蒸氣準確盤旋在晴雨之間當黃油油的表層倒影臉上凝結的空氣孩子又打噴嚏了是誰忘了添衣？母親話來簡潔我聽到話筒那邊老房子的寂寞春節回來麼元宵回來麼那麼中秋呢？井水清洌風爐迸裂柴木還是去年的麼？日子瘦得乾癟許是到了屠宰歡慶的時光

鍾國強 (chung kwok keung)

家務

It rains and keeps raining I am still finishing never-ending housework Between rain and sun, I learn simpler ways to solve complicated problemsWhen you are gloomy for no reason, I learn to watch quietly from the sideQuietly clean the nursing bottle, change diapers, shake a small jingleWhen you are violent for no reason, I learn to swallow my wordsClean up broken shards, squeeze you tightly from behind at crucial momentsLike a pair of silent heavy wings in a sky swirling with feathers Without blood, without struggle, without anyone losing their voice

Is that love? I bought a nine-inch wide steaming potWashed it inside out, then went to the store to buy a hen Outside the bamboo cage, I saw with my eye that peculiar gazeNo tears, only that familiar, faint Oh-oh. Then silence. I saw bloodFlow from a ditch. I saw a bellyEmptied out. Gaping, like a mouthThat cannot say anything. I waved my handAnd refused the shiny organs the shopkeeper held out

The rain keeps falling the steam keeps rising I pick up the body with the emptied belly Oh-oh, I almost hear an oh-oh from outside the windowI learn the water’s volume the onion’s temperament the cooking flame’s size The steam we bring onto the dining table spirals exactly between rain and shineWhen the oily yellow surface reflects the condensation on my face A kid sneezes again who forgot to layer up? Mother’s words are concise I hear in the microphone that old house’s lonelinessWill you be back for the New Year for the Lantern Festival and what about Mid-Autumn? The well water is clear the tea stove cracked and is the firewood still last year’s? The days are shriveled thin perhaps it is time to celebrate slaughter


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那是愛嗎？我看到你喙裏流著稀液如淚滴那是流感麼我看見滿城的人拉長了面容

下雨和晴天之間，我學懂穿戴面罩和塑料保護衣深深的翻耙泥土做那永遠做不完的工作喔喔的我又聽到那聲音那聲音若斷若續在一個一個飽滿的黑色塑料袋內密封了口那是愛嗎為了孩子我們把你驅除出菜譜那是愛嗎，為了我們我們把你的軀體一一堆疊像擁擠的房子在清晨在黑夜在關緊了的城市我聽到那聲音那聲音就在不遠就在腳下還未聽懂那語言便像日子般沉埋下去

[2004年2月10日]

鍾國強 (chung kwok keung)

家務

Is that love? I see a thin fluid flow from your beak like tearsIs that the flu I see a whole city of people with long facesBetween rainy and sunny days, I learn to wear masks and hazmat suitsDeeply raking the mud, doing that never-ending workOh-oh, I hear again that voice that voice stopping and goingMouths sealed in every stuffed black plastic bag Is that love, for the children we removed you from the cookbook Is that love, for our own sake we piled up your bodiesLike houses crowded together in the morning at night in a shut-up cityI hear that voice that voice is nearby is at my feetWithout understanding it that language is buried like the days

[2/10/2004]


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DROIT DE REGARD SUR LES IDÉES

Dans une des régions les plus raréfiées de l’espritoù je campais au pied de la lettreà une altitude de nul piedplane un petit nombred’idées très particulièresqu’il eût été dommage de ne pas saisirau vol de mes distractions

Je faillis ne pas les apercevoirtant elles étaient creuses au milieud’oublis et de vertiges sans nom

L’une entre ellesattira notamment mon attentionnon pas pour la beauté de sa démarched’une indistinction certainemais à cause de ses yeuxlongs et mincesque j’ai pris pour des antennesde sauterelle

Je me penchais, alors, et reconnusune de ces idées à capuchon vertqui prennent les hommes au dépourvuElles ne sont paségarantes, au contrairemais le traitement qu’elles font subiraux penseurs est si étrangequ’il faut décrire en détaille dispositif destiné à les captiver

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IDEA INSPECTION

In the upperreaches of the mindwhere I camped at the foot of the letterat an altitude of zero feeta small number of very strange ideas are floatingit would’ve been a shameif I had missed themin my distracted flight

I almost didn’t even notice themthey were so hollowed outby oblivion and unknown vertigo

One in particulardrew my attentionnot with the beauty of its walkwhich is pretty ordinarybut with its longthin eyesthat I mistook for grasshopperantennae

I leaned closer and recognizedone of those ideas with green hoodsthat catch men off guardThey aren’tlost, quite the contrarybut what they do tothinkers is so strangethat I have to describe in detail the device necessaryto lure them in

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La paupière du milieu, carelle en a plusieursest incliné en arrière, à la baseen sorte qu’elle se trouve tout contrela paupière supérieureet lui est partiellement accoléeDeux paupières latéralessont réunies sur la moitiéde leur longueurde manière à former commeune fourchette dressée en l’airC’étaient les extrémités effiléesde celle-cique je pris pour les antennesd’une sauterelle

La prunelle encapuchonnées’appuie sur elles

Ainsi tout l’œil d’idée se présentedans la position inverse du regardIl semble également en veilleusecar il ne s’ouvre que rarementL’acte de regarder s’accomplità l’intérieurde manière fugitive et constanteet lorsqu’il s’accomplitne fait que s’avancerentre les fourchettes

On ne s’attendait certes pasmais c’est pourtant à cet endroitque s’est posé naturellementmon regard

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The middle eyelid, sinceit has a fewis sliding backward, toward the spineand eventually finds itself right up againstthe upper eyelid and is partially connected to itTwo lateral eyelidsjoin for halfof their lengthshaped like a forkstanding uprightI mistook theseslender extremitiesfor the antennaeof a grasshopper

The hooded pupilweighs them down

So the idea’s entire eye amountsto a negative image of looking And it seems shut for goodsince it only opens rarelyThe act of looking happenson the insidesneakily and constantlyand once it’s doneit has to passthrough the forks

You certainly wouldn’t expect itbut nonetheless at this spotmy gaze quite naturallycame to rest

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car il n’y a pas d’autres voiespour y pénétrerL’irritabilité en fut extrême

Même le souffle d’une penséeou un minuscule battement de cœurle font se retirer à l’intérieurcomme mû par un ressortentraînant le regard du penseuret obturant encore plusla lourde trappe mentale

A peine aspiré au fond de l’œilmon regard entreprit de se frayer

un chemin vers le haut

Il fait plus clair au sommetlà où les extrémités des paupières

sont repliées sur elles-mêmes

C’est sans doute la raisonpour laquellej’ai pu voir mon regard ramperdans toutes les directionsà la fois

le seul moyen d’y parvenir étant de n’y plus penser

(Il n’y avait pas beaucoup d’espaceà l’intérieur de l’idée)

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since there’s no otherway in The irritability was extreme

Even the breath of a thought or the slightest beat of a heartwould cause it to snap backas if stuck to a springdragging the thinker’s gazeand sealing all the morethe heavy mental trapdoor

Just when I was sucked into the depths of the eyemy gaze began to open up

a path toward the top

It’s brighter at the summitthere where the edge of the eyelids

are folded in upon themselves

That’s no doubt the reasonI could see my gaze crawlingin every directionat once

since the only way to get thereis to stop thinking about it

(There’s not much roomon the inside of an idea)

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Arrivé en hautil se frotte nécessairementcontre soi-mêmeet reste le plus attachéà sa manière de voirqui n’est plus tout à fait la même

Toute cette étrange manœuvrequi recommence aussitôtdans l’autre œilne donne lieu apparemmentà aucun échange de vues

Il se peut cependantque nos regards trouventau double fond de l’œilquelque peud’une sécrétion visionnaire

Espérons que cette compensation au moins leur soit accordée

Eux qui normalementse laissent fascinertout de suiteétaient comme aveugléspar des larmes secrètes

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Having reached the summitit has to rub itself against itself and stays bound upwith its way of seeingwhich is no longer quite the same

All of this strange maneuver which begins right awayin the other eyeapparently does not resultin a change of the mind

It’s nonetheless possiblethat our gazes findat the double depths of the eyea little bitof visionary secretion

Let’s hope they’d at least be granted this compensation

They who normallylet themselves be taken inright awaywere as if blinded by secret tears

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et des gémissements saccadés sortaient de leurs orbites

On comprendra que ce soit là un exempleextrême, à perte de vue

Quand au long regardil n’arrive presque jamaisà pénétrer dans l’œilde l’idée, il n’y a d’ailleurs rienpour l’y attirer

Seuls les voyeurs à courte vueen dépit des chocs plutôt rudesà l’entréesubissent un traitement plus doux et on les laisse se retirer au bout d’une demi-heurece qui vaut mieuxque d’être retenu à vie

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and stuttered groans sounding from their sockets

You’ll understand that this is an extremecase of losing sight

During a long gazeyou can hardly everenter the eyeof an idea, there’s nothingyou can do to force it

Only shortsighted seersdespite rather rough shocksat firstare greeted with gentler treatment and allowed to leave after half an hourwhich is betterthan being retained for life

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On trouve pour certains un exemple de long emprisonnement

C’est l’acte de cesser de regarderqui déclenchele mécanisme de libérationmais les voyousne procèdent pas toujoursprogressivementet, s’il se produitle moindre contretempsl’œil de l’idée ne s’ouvrira plus

L’idée que j’ai vue était ainsi

Son œil était privé de lumièremais il dégageait une lueur masquéequi attirait

A moins que les glandes idéativesne sécrètent quelque suc invisiblequ’elles peuvent opposer de temps en tempsles regards entrentsans rencontrer d’obstacle

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In some casesthere are extended periods of captivity

It’s the act of stopping lookingthat unleashesthe freedom mechanismbut the hoodlumsdon’t always proceedprogressivelyand, if there’s the slightest setbackthe eye of the idea will never open again

The idea I saw was like this

Its eye was deprived of lightbut it gave off a masked glimmerthat drew me in

Unless ideational glandssecrete some invisible sapthat allows them to blockfrom time to timeincoming gazeswithout encountering an obstacle

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Ils ont pour ce faireà descendre le long du clignotementpar les deux cercles de cils raidesqui poussent inclinés vers le bas

Les regards peuvent passeren pressant contreles extrémités plus flexiblesmail il leur est impossiblede revenir en arrièrecar ces extrémitésne sont inclinées que d’un côté

Ils se trouvent alorsdans une petite chambre

au milieu de la vision mêmeet tandis que pris de paniqueils font des efforts pour sortir

ils se couvrent d’images

C’est alors que se révèlele côté fascinant de la trappecar aussitôtqu’une quantité d’imagessuffisantes pour émerveiller l’œilsurgit, les zones de cilsse détendent, se contractentet finalement se recroquevillent :plus rien dans ces conditionsn’empêche les penseursde prendre leur liberté

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To do this they have to climb down a blinkby the two rungs of stiff eyelashesjutting out and pointing down

Gazes could pass throughpressing againstthe softest edgesbut it’s impossible for them to go backbecause these edgesonly point in one direction

Then they find themselves in a little room

in the middle of vision itselfand gripped by panicthey attempt to leave

cloaked in images

This is the way the captivating sideof the trapdoor reveals itselfsince as soonas a number of imagessufficient to dazzle the eyearises, the eyelash arearelaxes, contractsand finally curls up:then under these conditionsnothing stopsthinkers from wriggling free

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Il peut se passerdeux ou trois joursavant qu’ils soient relâchéscar déclencher les imagespar petits à-coupsne suffit paspour ouvrir l’œil (la trappe)et la distribution de non-imagesdoit se faire perpétuellement

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Two or three dayscan go bybefore they’re releasedbecause triggering imageswith turbulenceisn’t enoughto open the eye (the trapdoor)and the distribution of non-imagesmust be carried out perpetually

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elisa wouk almino

The beloved Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar (1952–1983) lived in England be-tween 1979 and 1981. During this time, she befriended the Brazilian artist Bia Wouk (my mother), who lived in Paris. The two women exchanged many letters during this time, and Ana C. (as she is known) sent Bia early drafts of a book of prose poetry that she was working on, called Kid Gloves. Like much of her oth-er writing, Kid Gloves reads like an intimate conversation or diary. In one let-ter to Bia, Ana C. confides that the book “is filled with clin d’œil, private jokes and a particular desire” and gives “the impression of a highly edited notebook (which is actually true, but I don’t say for the sake of fiction).” Along with this letter, she sent an early (slightly different) draft of the book’s “Epilogue,” which describes the narrator opening a suitcase packed with postcards from around the world. The scene recalls Ana C.’s own life of travel and passionate correspon-dence with friends.

Selected Letters from Ana Cristina Cesar

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Num minuto vou passar para vocês vários cartões-postais belos e brilhantes. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture postcards. This is the leather suitcase that contains the famous collection. Notice my hands, empty. My pockets are also empty. My hat is also empty. Look. My sleeves.I turn my back, I spin completely around. As all can see, there is no trick, no hidden trapdoor, nor any deceiving light games.The suitcase rests on this chair here. I open the suitcase with this master key in ceremonies like this, if you allow me such a game.The first thing we find in the suitcase, on top of everything, is—guess—a pair of gloves. Here they are. Kid gloves. A fine thing. I put on the gloves—left hand… right hand… perfect… cut. That reminds me…A young artist lost in the elegant Berlin of the Belle Époque, alone, looking in vain for pleasure. A clamorous group of skaters pass by, and a woman in white drops her glove, a glove with six padded buttons, white, long, perfumed. The young man runs, picks up the glove, but reluctant as to whether he should accept the challenge or not. In the end he decides to ignore it, keeps the glove in his pocket and goes back walking to his hotel through poorly illuminated streets. But I’m digressing from my purpose tonight. Later, if there is time, I will conclude this fantastic story, in which even a Neptune carriage, a giant bat that smiles and always runs away, and an ocean of foliage make a cameo. Who knows if this is not exactly that glove? However, we don’t have just one here, but the pair; it’s very delicate and contrasts with this black suit. Will the leather valise contain various toiletries? No, my friends. As all can see, by gently rotating the chair on which it rests, the valise only

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contains paper… cards… dozens, maybe hundreds of postcards. Strange valise! And now, attention.

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sé que no llegará el poemaque prometes en tus cartas

no muy lejos se oye el ruidode las almas que se separan de los cuerpos

caen ministros al pantano

vendrán mensajes a centenaresy aun un retrato vendrá muy añorado

tú vacilas ante cada palabra dices ¡cámara! ¡acción! nada acontece

tu navecilla de papel con cuatro letrasse estrella en la costa de Cornwallel faro está apagado para siempre

sueño asomada al balcón con aquel viejo verso:¡presos políticos, libertad! ¡amnistía general!

a esta hora de la tarde el reparto de la realidad ya ha comenzadoy te toca ese estribillo impronunciable

apenas un poema deleto

pero ya no quiero nada

ya no prometas, no jures,escucha no más cómo lo que no está escrito llena el tiempo, teme

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71

I know the poem won’t comethe one promised in your letters

not far off you can hear the soundof souls separating themselves from bodies

Ministers fall into the bog

messages will arrive by the hundredseven a long-desired portrait will come

you hesitate at every word you say camera! action! nothing happens

your little paper boat with its four letterscrashes into the coast of Cornwallthe lighthouse goes out forever

leaning out the balcony I dream of that old verse:freedom to political prisoners! amnesty for all!

at this hour in the afternoon reality’s distribution has already begunand it’s your go at that unpronounceable refrain

a poem nearly expunged

but I don’t want anything now

don’t promise anything else, don’t swear,just listen to the way what is not written fills time, fear it

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william eck

Herder and the Possibility of Translation

Who would take on an arduous lifelong project while expressing skepticism, even at the outset, about the possibility of its success? The often overlooked 18th-cen-tury German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder is noteworthy—and par-adoxical—for the deep significance he attributed to the act of translation, and for his skepticism concerning the possibility of successful translation. His Volkslieder collected poetry and folksongs from Germany and other nations, placing his own translations of Spanish ballads and Shakespeare’s poems alongside tradi-tional German pieces. Unlike most his contemporaries, other philosopher of the German Enlightenment, Herder saw the literature of a culture as encapsulating a worldview, and thus held it to be worthy of serious philosophical consideration. Yet he often expressed doubt that these worldviews could, in fact, be translated. He wrote of Homer and the ancient Greeks, “But could these poets have written their works in our language? In our time? With our ethics? Never!… I am hence in great despair about the translation of the oldest Greek poets.”1 Yet Herder’s unique views on language were ahead of their time, making his questions con-cerning translation worth considering.

Herder stood at the center of the German Enlightenment and German Romanticism, despite the contradictory natures of these intellectual movements. In 1762, he studied under the central philosopher of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, and remained deeply influenced by his work throughout his career. Yet in 1773 he also collaborated with Goethe in writing Von Deutscher Art und Kunst, which served as a manifesto for the Sturm und Drang Counter-Enlightenment movement, and provided a foundation for German Romanticism. This tension between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment elements in Herder’s thought is the consequence of a unique philosophical account of the role of language in shaping thought.

To see what made Herder unique in his time, it’s helpful to contrast his concep-tions of reason and language with those of Kant. Kant’s writing develops the ar-chetypical Enlightenment picture of man: man is defined by the power to reason as well as a sensible nature. Unlike the beasts, man has the power to make judgments, and the conceptual apparatus that allows us to make judgments is shared amongst all human beings. We each reason according to the same laws of logic—or, at least, our thought is to be evaluated according to these laws of logic, though we may sometimes err in following them. Language, on this typical Enlightenment pic-ture, is a code by which we express our thoughts—which exist independently of language—to one another.

1 “Fragments on Recent German Literature” 42

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What made Herder unique and pulled him away from Enlightenment doctrine was that he saw thought to be dependent on language. He thought that a child only learns how to think by learning how to speak—meaning that the particu-lar language a child learns to speak shapes both the world that child inhabits, and their ways of conceptualizing and inhabiting that world. So, unlike Kant and oth-er philosophers who took the form of thought to be a universal form of human nature, Herder came to believe that there were many radically different ways of seeing and thinking about this world, each appropriate for a given culture at a particular point in history, and that these ways of seeing the world are embodied by a language. According to Herder, by means of language, our culture shapes the way we reason. It is our histories and cultures make us reason and think the way we do, not any eternal, innate faculty. Thus the study of man must involve the study of culture.

If it is true that our thoughts are entirely shaped by the language that we speak, what do we hope to achieve by translating literature from one language to anoth-er, and what do we hope to learn by reading literature in translation? If different languages really do represent radically different worldviews, or different forms of life, how is translation possible? In taking languages to embody radically different forms of thought, we seem to rule out the possibility that one could genuinely take a thought from one language and convert it into another. But if something like translation is possible, what might be the best method for translation? If all translation must, to some extent, fail, what approach should we take in order to minimize those failures?

One of Herder’s earliest essays, “On the Diligence in the Study of Several Learned Languages,” acutely poses the challenges translators face. The essay argues for the importance of reading literature in its original language, on the basis of the idea that this language expresses a worldview that’s impossible to express in the new, destination language. Part of the goal of reading literature in its original language is to come to an understanding of a different worldview. Herder proposes several

“national characters” which are captured in the respective languages of these cul-tures: “I seek to join the thorough English temperament, the wit of the French, and the resplendence of Italy with German diligence. I encompass the spirit of each people in my soul!”2 The diligence Herder sees in the German people, for instance, may be reflected in the piecemeal construction of complex words from more basic words, or the precision of the case structure in the language. By learn-ing to read German and reading German texts in the original, the reader may ex-

2 “On Diligence” 32

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perience this “diligence” in a way that would be impossible to imitate by reading the text in translation. And if the traits of a people are infused into their language, since language is the framework in which they think, then learning to speak a foreign language involves taking on a new stance towards the world, seeing the world from a new lens.

However, the “national character” that Herder discusses as being expressed by a language actually goes deeper than the attitudes he finds embedded in language. Herder argues that languages have thoughts and even judgments built into them.

“Whoever masters the entire scope of one language surveys a field full of thoughts, and whoever learns to express himself precisely in it thereby gathers for himself a treasure of clear concepts.”3 There are a few ways of approaching this thought. First, by means of an example, we might consider how English differentiates be-tween such terms as “drizzle,” “rain,” “shower,” “rainstorm,” and “downpour.” The fact that we have different terms for each of these phenomena suggests that, at some point in history, English speakers thought that it was worthwhile to dis-tinguish between a “drizzle” and a “downpour.” And being able to distinguish between these two phenomena by the choice of one word over another remains useful—we know, for instance, whether to wear a raincoat or to bring an umbrel-la, or whether to wait out the storm. A central part of Herder’s idea here is that the idea to distinguish between “drizzle” and “downpour” by creating distinct words for each represents an idea or a series of judgments which have become embed-ded into our language.

Furthermore, even simple judgments like “It’s raining out” license a number of inferences, and a failure to make those inferences upon hearing an utterance of

“It’s raining out” can amount to more than just a disagreement about facts—it can become a disagreement about language itself. If someone were to say “It’s raining out,” and you were to ask, in response, “Is the ground very wet?” and they were to respond, “No, the ground is perfectly dry,” you would have to wonder what they meant by saying that it was raining. It simply cannot be the case that your inter-locutor means both that it is raining out and that the ground is perfectly dry—she must be confused about the meanings of these words. That “The ground is wet” follows directly from “It’s raining out” is a judgment built into the meanings of the words “rain” and “wet,” built into the English language, on the view that I am here attributing to Herder.

3 “On Diligence” 33

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Herder ends “On the Diligence” with a poem which compares the speakers of a given language to bees,

who in scattered swarms whisper through the air, and fall upon clover and blossoming plants,and then return to the hive burdened with sweet booty,and bring us the honey of wisdom!4

A language, to Herder, represents not just a series of definitions, but also a body of knowledge, built up by all prior speakers of the language. It contains a shared cultural knowledge and a shared way of looking at the world. It is only, it would seem, by coming to learn a language and read a work of literature in this lan-guage, that we can fully appreciate the worldview this literature inhabits, fully understand the thoughts expressed within it.

In his early work, Herder thus often appears to be a skeptic concerning the pos-sibility of successful translation. Just as Homer couldn’t have written in 18th-cen-tury German, 18th-century Germans are not really reading Homer unless they’re reading him in Greek. “I feel sorry for those who want to read Homer in a trans-lation, even if it were as correct as possible,” Herder writes in his early essay

“Fragments on Recent German Literature.” “You are no longer reading Homer, but something which approximately repeats what Homer said inimitably in his poetic language.”5

Yet it was Herder’s appreciation for the radical differences in ways of thought ex-pressed in difficult cultures by different languages that led him, in the Volkslieder and elsewhere, to take the task of translation so seriously. Insofar as a work of translation is successful, it can allow us to see the world in an entirely new way, allow us to think thoughts that were inconceivable to us before. And so, even in questioning the possibility of the success of translation, in the “Fragments” Herder suggests a possible aim for translation.

In his later philosophical writings, Herder begins to explore how translation might, indeed, be possible. The central component of Herder’s approach to trans-lation is his conception of interpretation, embodied by his notion of “Einfühlung,” or “feeling into,” developed in later works, including his famous essay, “This, Too, a Philosophy of History.” By means of “feeling into” a text, the interpreter takes up everything she knows about a culture—the climate under which it developed,

4 “On Diligence” 345 “Fragments” 41

william eck

its history, the practices of its inhabitants—and attempts to put herself into the cir-cumstances of the author. Herder writes:

The whole living painting of mode of life, habits, needs, peculiarities of land and climate, would have to be added or to have preceded; one would have first to sympathize with the nation, in order to feel a single one of its inclinations or actions all together, one would have to find a single word, to imagine everything in its fullness—or one reads—a word. 6

Interpretation thus relies on a combination of knowledge (of a culture, their cir-cumstances, and their practices) and empathy; we must use what we know about a culture to feel as they felt, if such a thing is possible. The interpreter must ask herself, for instance, “If I had been an Ancient Greek, had I lived as they lived, had I done as they did, had I felt what they felt, if I had spoken as they spoke, what would I have meant when I used this phrase in these circumstances?” In a text on the Bible, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, Herder further emphasizes the empathetic role of this “feeling into”:

In order to judge of a nation, we must live in their time, in their own country, must adopt their modes of thinking and feeling, must see, how they lived, how they were educated, what scenes they looked upon, what were the objects of their affection and passion, the character of their atmosphere, their skies, the structure of their organs, their dances and their music. All this too we must learn to think of not as strangers or enemies, but as their brothers and compatriots…7

Herder’s writings on aesthetics are critical of his peers for judging ancient forms of art according to contemporary standards of beauty and ethical values. For example, an understanding and appreciation of an Ancient Greek sculpture of Apollo can only come by means of an understanding of the practices surrounding Greek sculpture and its role in Greek culture, as well as an investigation into the representation of the divine in physical form in this particular culture at this par-ticular point of history. It is not that we must discard our meanings, values, and standards in interpreting the work of another culture, but that we must consider how these meanings, values, and standards would shift if we were to be a mem-ber of another culture, if we were to live their histories. Thus a successful trans-lation can only be the product of a successful act of interpretation. Ideally, it will be one which brings to reader to a successful act of “feeling her way into” the language and the culture from which the literature was adapted. The possibility of

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translation relies on our ability to engage seriously with a culture, on both an emotional and intellectual level, and to transform our own values and meanings into theirs.

It comes as no surprise that both a translator and as a theorist of interpretation, Herder values historical accuracy over readability. He takes great care to ensure that translations refrain from assimilating the meanings of words which have no correlate in the target language to any word in the target language. In the

“Fragments,” Herder is critical of historians of Ancient Greece who translate the Ancient Greek term καλοι κἀγαθοι / “kaloi k’agathoi” (roughly meaning “well-brought-up”) as either meaning a broadly ethical training or referring to a specific education in the arts and athletics. These translators fail, Herder argues, because they have assimilated a term from a different conceptual framework into our own. Whereas we see a firm division between morality and training in the arts, the Greek sense of virtue acknowledged no such distinction, and a translation must, to whatever degree possible, reproduce the conceptual structure of the original. To a certain extent, the point of reading literature and poetry in translation is to make us feel as though we are not quite “at home” in the text—or, perhaps more accurately, to make us feel “at home” in the home of another culture.

The intellectual historian Michael Forster notes that Herder’s method of transla-tion often involves “bending” the use of a word in translation—consistently using a single term to translate a term from the original language, even in cases where in the target language this term no longer seems appropriate. In the eyes of the reader, the meaning of the word in the target language then shifts to something which resembles the meaning of the word in the language of origin.8 The idea, on the reading of Herder I have presented in this essay, is that the very unnatu-ralness of the use of the word forces the reader to divorce it from inferences she would otherwise make in her native language—for instance, moving from the statement that a child was well-brought up to the thought that that child acted in conformity to the moral standards of the Bible. Instead, she’ll begin to make inferences that a contemporary Greek reader of the text might have made—like that the child is familiar with the work of Homer. If this is does indeed happen, the language of the translated text will stand somewhere between the language of the original and the target language, borrowing from the character of each cul-ture to bring them closer together.

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In the “Fragments,” Herder claims that the translator of Homer must be “a cre-ative genius if he wants to do justice to his original and to his language,” in part because it will be impossible to make German into the kind of poetic language that Homer spoke.9 The argument I have developed on Herder’s behalf attributes great significance to the act of translation, but it also imposes severe, potentially unsatisfiable demands on the translator. But perhaps this conception of translation as an impossible yet necessary act of bridging two disparate worldviews, however contradictory, will strike the reader of this magazine as not altogether implausible.

Works Cited

Forster, Michael After Herder. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Fragments on Recent German Literature.” Philosophical Writings, Edited by Michael Forster, Translated by Michael Forster, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 33–64.

—.“On Diligence in the Study of Several Learned Languages.” Selected Early Works: 1764–1767. Edited by Ernest Menze and Karl Menges, Translated by Ernerst Menze and Michael Palma, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, pp. 29–34.

—. “Fragments on Recent German Literature.” Philosophical Writings, Edited by Michael Forster, Translated by Michael Forster, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 272–359.

—. The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, Vol. 2. Translated by James Marsh, Burlington, 1883.

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Contributors

contributors

garous abdolmalekian was born in 1980, days after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, and lives in Tehran. He is the author of five poetry books and the recipient of the Karnameh Poetry Book of the Year Award and the Iranian Youth Poetry Book Prize. His poems have been translated into Arabic, French, German, Kurdish, and Spanish. Abdolmalekian is presently the editor of the poetry section at Chesmeh Publications in Tehran and the executive editor of publications at the Youth Poetry Office in Iran.

jasmine v. bailey’s first poetry collection, Alexandria, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2014 and won the Central New York Book Award. Her second collection, Disappeared, was published in 2017 by Carnegie Mellon, and her chapbook, Sleep and What Precedes It, won the 2009 Longleaf Press Chapbook Prize. She is the winner of Michigan Quarterly Review’s Laurence Goldstein Prize for poetry and Ruminate Magazine’s 2020 VanderMey Prize in nonfiction. She has been an Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University, a Fulbright Fellow in Argentina, and a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. She is a contributing editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.

Born in Latvia, baiba bičole left as a refugee during World War ii, and since 1950 has lived in the United States. A prominent Latvian poet since the 1970s, un-til Latvia regained its independence in 1991, she was known primarily in the West, as an exile poet, her work being banned in Latvia during the Soviet occupation.

sarah booker is a doctoral candidate at unc Chapel Hill and translator from Spanish. Recent or forthcoming translations include The Iliac Crest and Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza and Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda.

austin carder is a writer and translator based in Philadelphia. He received a b.a. in English from Yale in 2015 and is currently a ph.d. candidate in Comparative Literature at Brown. He is an editor and contributor at Caesura (caesuramag.org).

nancy naomi carlson has received two literature translation fellowships from the nea. She is a poet, translator, essayist, and senior translation edi-tor for Tupelo Quarterly, having authored ten titles (6 translated). An Infusion of Violets (Seagull, 2019) was named “New & Noteworthy” by the New York Times. www.nancynaomicarlson.com

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ana cristina cesar (1952–1983) was a poet, critic, and translator from Rio de Janeiro. She was also a prolific letter writer. Today her work has risen to cult sta-tus and she is considered one of Brazil’s most original literary voices. Her poetry, which switches between prose and verse, is known for its epistolary, diaristic style and feminist bent.

magdalena chocano (Lima 1957) has published Poesía a ciencia incierta (Lima, 1983), Estratagema en claroscuro (Lima, 1987), contra el ensimismamiento (Barcelona, 2005), otro desenlace (Barcelona, 2008) (where the poems in this issue appear) and poems in several journals and anthologies. Her writing has been translated into English, most notably in Poems Read in London (Cardboard House, 2015) trans-lated by William Rowe and Larisa Chaddick.

jacqui cornetta is a multi-disciplinary artist. Her translations, poetry, and sound collaborations have appeared in A Perfect Vacuum, No, Dear magazine, Lost & Found: cuny Poetics Documents Initiative, The Puerto Rico Review, Portátil, among other places. She received an m.f.a. from Queens College cuny where she now teaches.

One of the most prominent and influential poets of Greece’s “Generation of the ’70s,” antonis fostieris is the author of a number of poetry collections, most notably The Great Journey (1971), Dark Eros (1977), and The Devil Sang in Tune (1981), the last two of which were translated into English by Kimon Friar. His most recent collection, Landscapes of Nothingness, was published in 2013. Fostieris edited the influential journal New Poetry from 1974–1976 and has translated into Greek works by Max Jacob and Henry Miller. The poems translated here are from a six-teen-poem sequence titled “Poetry Within Poetry.” He currently lives in Athens.

george fragopoulos’s poems and translations have appeared in the Found Poetry Review, House Organ, Salamander, and Words Without Borders. He is the editor of new editions of Laura Riding’s long out of print texts Experts Are Puzzled and Convalescent Conversations, both of which were published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2018. He is Assistant Professor of English at Queensborough Community College, cuny.

john hennessy is the author of two poetry collections, Bridge and Tunnel and Coney Island Pilgrims. Hennessy is the poetry editor of The Common and teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

brian henry is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Static & Snow (Black Ocean, 2015). He has translated Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices (Harcourt, 2008), Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers (boa Editions, 2015), and Aleš Šteger’s Above the Sky Beneath the Earth (White Pine, 2019), Berlin (Counterpath, 2015), and The Book of Things (boa Editions, 2010), which won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award. His poetry and translations have received numerous hon-ors and awards, including an nea Fellowship, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and the George Bogin Memorial Award. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.

john high is a poet and translator. The author of eleven books, he is the chief ed-itor of Crossing Centuries: The New Russian Poetry (Talisman) and a former mem-ber of the Moscow Poetry Club; he has translated several contemporary Russian poets, including Nina Iskrenko, Ivan Zhdanov, and Alexei Parschikov. His most recent book of writings, vanishing acts (the last part of a tetralogy) was published by Talisman House, and a new book is forthcoming from Wet Cement Press in 2020. He has received four Fulbright and two nea fellowships as well as grants from irex and The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. He is a Zen monk in the Soto tradition and is currently living with Andrea Libin in Cambodia. Along with Matvei Yankelevich he received an neh Fellowship to complete a new trans-lation of Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks.

may huang (黃鴻霙) was born in Taiwan and raised in Hong Kong. She graduat-ed from the University of Chicago and is a member of the Third Coast Translators Collective. Her work has appeared in InTranslation, Asymptote, Cha, and elsewhere. She is a mentee in alta’s 2020 Emerging Translators Mentorship Program.

mihret kebede is an Ethiopian poet and artist, a co-founder of Tobiya Poetic Jazz. She is currently a ph.d. candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work is featured in the Wax and Gold: Poetry Jazz publication (2019), and in the first-ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry in English, Songs We Learn from Trees (Carcanet Press, May 2020).

ostap kin has edited an anthology New York Elegies, winner of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies 2020 Prize for Best Translation into English, and co-translated, with John Hennessy, Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography, and, with Vitaly Chernetsky, Yuri Andrukhovych’s Songs for a Dead Rooster.

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chung kwok keung (鍾國強) is a Hong Kong poet, essayist, and critic. A graduate of the University of Hong Kong, Chung has received numerous Youth Literary Awards and Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature, among other accolades. He is the author of eight poetry collections, including The Growing House, Umbrellas that Blossom on the Road, and A Bright House Standing in Light Rain.

larissa kyzer is a writer and Icelandic literary translator. She was Princeton University’s fall 2019 Translator in Residence and is a member of Ós, an Iceland-based international literary collective, as well as the American Literary Translators Association. Her translation of Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s A Fist or a Heart was awarded the American Scandinavian Foundation’s 2019 translation prize. She is co-chair of pen America’s Translation Committee and runs the bi-monthly, NYC-based Women+ in Translation reading series Jill!

silvina lópez medin was born in Buenos Aires and lives in New York. Her three books of poetry are La noche de los bueyes (Madrid, 1999), awarded the International Young Poetry Prize, Esa sal en la lengua para decir manglar (Buenos Aires, 2014), and 62 brazadas (Buenos Aires, 2015). Her play Exactamente bajo el sol won the Plays Third Prize by the Argentine Institute of Theatre. She co-trans-lated Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (Buenos Aires, 2015) and Home Movies (Buenos Aires, 2016), poems by Robert Hass. She co-edits the Señal series for contemporary Latin American poetry at Ugly Duckling Presse.

ghérasim luca was born in Bucharest in 1913, where he co-founded the Romanian Surrealist group. Luca relocated to Paris (via Israel) in 1952, after which he wrote exclusively in French. He was also a prolific visual artist who pioneered a collage technique known as “cubomania.” Luca committed suicide in 1994. The poems in this issue of Circumference come from Luca’s 1976 book, Paralipomènes. The translator would like to thank Bertrand Fillaudeau of Les Éditions Corti and Micheline Catti for permission to publish these poems.

contributors

osip mandelstam was born in 1891 in Warsaw to a well-to-do Jewish family. He studied at the Sorbonne and in Heidelberg before finishing his education in St. Petersburg. In 1913 he published his first book, Stone, after helping found Acmeism (a movement set up in opposition to both Symbolism and Futurism). After the Civil War and the emergence of the new Soviet state, unwilling to change his writing for the sake of the socialist cause, Mandelstam was marginalized as a cul-tural figure. For a time, he survived with the help of such political and literary figures as Nikolai Bukharin and Boris Pasternak. In 1934 Stalin sent Mandelstam into exile, eventually to the city of Voronezh in central Russia because of a poem in which the poet depicted the dictator’s body in the language of “worms” and

“cockroaches.” After interrogations, prisons, exile, and two attempted suicides, Mandelstam died in a transit camp near Vladivostok on December 27, 1938.

ahmad nadalizadeh is a translator from the Persian and ph.d. candidate in comparative literature at the University of Oregon.

idra novey is a novelist, poet, and translator. She is the award-winning author of the novels Those Who Knew and Ways to Disappear. Her work has been trans-lated into ten languages and she’s translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. For her poetry and translation she has received awards from the pen Translation Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

cristina rivera garza is an award-winning Mexican author, translator, and critic. Her books in English translation include No One Will See Me Cry, The Iliac Crest, The Taiga Syndrome, Grieving, The Restless Dead, and La Castañeda. She received her ph.d in Latin American history from the University of Houston, where she is currently Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies.

gnaomi siemens holds an m.f.a. from Columbia University School of The Arts in poetry and literary translation. Her work can be found at Asymptote, Words Without Borders, The Believer, Slice Magazine, EuropeNow Journal, The American Journal of Poetry, Penny Thoughts (uk), and American Chordata, among others in the US and abroad. She has read her translations at The British Library’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition in London, was selected by The Poetry Society of New York for a residency at the iconic Mid-Manhattan branch of The New York Public Library, and was a 2019 alta Travel Fellow. She lives in New York City.

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Slovenian writer aleš šteger has published seven books of poetry, three nov-els, and two books of essays. A Chevalier des Artes et Lettres in France and a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, he received the 1998 Veronika Prize for the best Slovenian poetry book, the 1999 Petrarch Prize for young European au-thors, the 2007 Rožanc Award for the best Slovenian book of essays, and the 2016 International Bienek Prize. His work has been translated into over 15 languages, including Chinese, German, Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, and Spanish. Five of his books have been translated into English: The Book of Things, which won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award; Berlin; Essential Baggage; Above the Sky Beneath the Earth; and the novel Absolution.

khal torabully is a prize-winning poet, essayist, film director, and semiolo-gist from Mauritius who has authored some 25 books. Torabully has given voice to the unimaginable suffering of millions of indentured laborers and coined the term “coolitude” in the way Aimé Césaire coined the term “negritude,” imbuing it with dignity.

kári tulinius is an Icelandic poet and novelist. He and his family move back and forth between Iceland and Finland like a flock of migratory birds confused about the whole “warmer climes” business.

bitite vinklers is a translator of Latvian folklore and contemporary literature. Her translations have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, among them The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and The Massachusetts Review. Recent translation collections include Imants Ziedonis, Each Day Catches Fire: Poems (Red Dragonfly Press, 2015) and Knuts Skujenieks, Seed in Snow: Poems (boa Editions, 2016).

elisa wouk almino is the translator of This House by Ana Martins Marques (Scrambler Books) and is a senior editor at Hyperallergic. She is a 2020 fiction judge of the Best Translated Book Award. Her translations and essays have ap-peared in the Paris Review, LitHub, Asymptote Journal, Words Without Borders, and other places.

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matvei yankelevich’s most recent book of poetry is Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square). His translations include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Ardis/Overlook), and he is the co-translator (with Eugene Ostashevsky) of Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (nyrb Poets), which received a National Translation Award. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a founding mem-ber of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective where he curates the Eastern European Poets Series. He teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

serhiy zhadan is a leading Ukrainian poet and writer. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He has received the 2015 Angelus Central European Literary Award (Poland), the 2014 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature (Switzerland), the 2009 Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski Literary Award (Ukraine), and the bbc Ukrainian Book of the Year award in 2006, 2010, and 2014. He lives in Kharkiv.

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