Category Archives: Poetry

November 22, 2016 · 11:57 am

Review: Berlin-Hamlet — Poetry by Szilárd Borbély

I received a review copy of this title from NYRB.  This collection was published in the original Hungarian in 2003 and this English version has been translated by Ottilie Mulzet.

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My Review:
berlin-hamletI was debating whether or not to even attempt any type of review of this collection of poetry.  The layers of imagery, references and allusions to great figures like Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Attila József and Erno Szép could never be unpacked or fully explained in one short review.  But I found the language and images of Borbély’s  poetry so moving that I decided I had to at least attempt to put some thoughts together in order to bring more attention to this Hungarian poet and his tragic end.

The collection of free verse poems is divided into five interwoven themes and each poem in a cycle is given a sequential number.  The cycle of poems entitled “Letter” are based upon quotations extracted from diaries and letters of Kafka.  Borbély puts his own unique touch on each of Kafka’s quotations by rewriting and reworking them.  Kafka is the perfect figure through which to mix images of Berlin, with city he had a connection through Felice, and Hamlet, whose indecision is reminiscent of Kafka’s own hesitancy about his relationship.  The first in the series of “Letter” poems is the perfect blend of elements that include Kafka, Berlin, and reticence:

[Letter I]

At last I have a picture of you as I
once saw you. Of course not as when
I glimpsed you
for the first time, without your
jacket, bareheaded,
your face unframed by a hat. but
when
you disappeared before my eyes into
the entrance of the hotel,

as I walked beside you, and nothing
as of yet
connected me to you. Although I
longed only
for the strongest tie to bind me to
you. Tell me,
don’t your relatives pursue you
altogether too much? You shouldn’t
have had time for me, even if I had
come
to Berlin. But what am I saying? Is
this how I want
to bring my self-reproaches to an
end? And finally,
wasn’t I right not to have come to
Berlin? But
when shall I see you? In the
summer? But why
precisely in the summer, if I shan’t
see you at Christmas?

The second cycle of poems specifically deals with the city of Berlin and Berbely’s visit there in the mid-1990’s.  Each poem in this series is given the name of a specific place or a district in Berlin. Poem titles include, “Naturhistorisches Museum,” Herrmann Strasse,” and Heidelberger Platz.”   The translator, in his afterword, points out that it is in this series of poems where Benjamin’s Arcades Project is heavily alluded to.  The poems are a blend of Borbély’s personal experience of Berlin with that city’s complicated history.  In “Krumme Lanke” he opens with a memory of the “last days of the Reich” and proceeds to tell a story of two soldiers who ignore their superior’s orders and have a clandestine meeting.  The poem then shifts without a transition to the poet’s own memory of walking next to Krumme Lanke:  “Our conversation/ was more of a remember, a/revocation of all that had happened earlier. Like a/ film being played in reverse.”  There is a deep sense of wandering that pervades these poems as he visits train stations, various seedy parts of the city and the natural history museum and uses these places as starting point with which to reflect on Berlin’s past and the poet’s present.

The series of poems entitle “Epilogue” do not appear to have any specific references to famous authors and are the most deeply personal and reflective.  These poems only appear at the beginning and end of the collection and show us a writer who is battling many emotional demons:

[Epilogue II]

For the dead are expected to know the
path
above the precipice of the everyday.
When
they leave the lands of despair, and
depart
towards a kingdom far away and
unknown,
which is like music. Swelling, a solitary
expectation everywhere present. this
music
does not break through the walls. It
taps gently.
It steals across the crevices. Silently it
creeps,
and cracks open the nut hidden deep
within the coffer.

Next, are a series of poems entitled “Fragment” which are all addressed to an unnamed receiver.  There is a deep sense of not only hesitation but also loneliness in these poems.  He begins the first “Fragment” poem:

Yes, I could express it simply by
saying
that our conversation left in me a vacant space. Since then, every
day contains this space.

Of the five different categories of poetry, the “Fragments” are my favorite because Borbély’s  own voice, pain, and struggle come through most clearly.  I found a line from “Fragment III” especially chilling and laden with foreshadowing: “My need is for those who will know/how/all of this will end.”  Borbély tragically takes his own life in 2014at the age of fifty and there are hints throughout his poems that allude to his melancholy.

The final category of poems are called “Allegory” and are a mixture of philosophical observations which still maintain obvious references to Kafka.  The first poem in the collection especially evokes images of Kafka and his complicated relationship with his father:

[Allegory I]

The pierced heart, in which lovers
believe, recalls me to
my task.  Always have I desired

to be led.  My father’s spirit instruc-
ted me
in ruthlessness.  what he missed in
life, he now
in death wished to supplant.  I did
not

find my upbringing to be a comfort.
the spirit of our age is for me
excessively
libertine.  My scorn is reserved for
the weak.

Finally, a word must be said about the afterward which was beautifully written by the translator. It serves as a thorough introduction to Borbély’s life, literary influences, and style of writing but is also a fitting eulogy for this gifted poem whom the world lost too soon.

 

About the Author:
borbelySzilárd Borbély is widely acknowledged as one of the most important poets to emerge in post-1989 Hungary. He worked in a wide variety of genres, including essay, drama, and short fiction, usually dealing with issues of trauma, memory, and loss. His poems appeared in English translation in The American Reader, Asymptote, and Poetry. Borbély received many awards for his work, including the Attila József Prize. He died in 2014.

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October 3, 2016 · 12:00 am

Review: Two Lines 25 World Writing in Translation

I received a review copy of this title from the publisher, Two Lines Press.

My Review:
two-linesA few times a year I find a book that I rant and rave about and recommend to everyone I know.  I become rather obnoxious with my comments that gush with praise.  I am giving you fair warning that Two Lines 25 is one of those books.  Literature translated from Bulgarian, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian and Spanish are all contained within the pages of this 192-page volume.  I am in awe of the fact that the editors crammed so many fantastic pieces into one slim paperback (there I go gushing again.)  This is the type of book that everyone needs to experience for him or herself; but I will attempt to give an overview of some of my favorite pieces.

The volume begins with a humorous and absurdist short story written by Enrique Vila-Matas and translated by Margaret Jull Costa.  I have to mention that not only is the English translation provided in these brilliantly collected pages, but an excerpt from each text in the original language also appears on the facing page in a colorful light blue that matches the artwork on the cover.  Vila Matas’s begins his story, Sea Swell, on a jarring and depressing note:  “I had a friend once.  Indeed, at the time, I only had one friend.”  This nearly friendless narrator, who is also completely broke, visits his one friend, Andre, who is living in Paris.  The unnamed narrator is an aspiring writer and Andre graciously agrees to introduce the narrator to Marguerite Duras.  The story becomes increasingly absurd when Duras offers the narrator an attic flat to rent for practically nothing.  But the narrator almost ruins the entire encounter because of his edgy demeanor which due to the two or three (he isn’t sure exactly how many) amphetamines he has ingested.    The expectation throughout the first few paragraphs is that the narrator is an absolute emotional mess and his friend Andres will have to come to his rescue.  But after Andre drinks two bottles of wine at a dinner party hosted by Duras, it is the narrator who has to pull Andre out of the Seine.  Vila-Matas, in the span of a few pages, writes a ridiculously funny tale but one that finishes with unexpected and surprising turn of events.

Russian author Dmitry Ivanov’s writing can also be found within the pages of this brilliant book.  His short story, Where Sleep the Gods, which is translated by Arch Tait, revolves around the Winter Olympics in Sochi and Putin’s strategy to sell the Olympics to the people of Sochi.  The main character in the narrative, a self-proclaimed “creative,” is named Anton and lives a comfortable life in Moscow while working for an ad agency.  Anton is used to dealing with wealthy customers who only demand the best that their money can buy.  Anton’s strategy in dealing with his wealthy clients is to adopt an air of aloofness: “He was accustomed to treating these types in a perfunctory, even insolent manner.  This was not risky, but, on the contrary, the surest approach to respect.”  When Anton is escorted in a private jet to meet a particularly important client he prepares to don his mask of insolence;  but when Vladimir Putin enters the room any and all attempts at smugness instantly dissolve.  Anton is quickly given the task of marketing the Olympics to the Sochians and is whisked off to that city to set up his Olympic headquarters.  What Anton discovers about the Sochians is astute and funny.  After spending about an hour in that city he decides that his slogan will be: “Thieves, because poets.”  You must read Ivanov’s humorous and brilliant story to fully get the joke!

Finally, I would like to discuss a piece in the collection that occupies the creative literary space somewhere between poetry and philosophy.   Nude Enumerated, written by Jean-Luc Nancy and translated by Charlotte Mandell, is a lyrical reflection on the different societal and emotional views and reactions that we have to nudity. The writing reminds me of Pascal Quignard whose philosophical poetry has also been written in shorter pieces which manage to be unexpectedly thought-provoking with only a minimal amount of words.  This was my favorite translation from the collection and the purchase of the book is worth it just for this one piece.  Nancy begins his reflection with a series of antonyms:

Nude: conquered, triumphant; undone, reassembled; lost, found;

undressed, costumed; obvious, indiscernible; shameless, virtuous;

sexed, neutralized.

Nancy proceeds to challenge us to look at different types of nudity that occur in different circumstances; his words make us uncomfortable but at the same time they make us think more deeply about the experiences we have with our unclothed human bodies.  Note also in this passage that Nancy’s asyndeton, lack of connectives like “and” or “or”, emphasizes the complexity of nudity:

Always elsewhere the male/female nude; not here, which welcomes

only clothed people, but over there somewhere undecided  at a

distance, within reach of desire of touching flattering hiding staining.

If you buy one book this month, if you only buy one more book for this entire year then I implore you to make Two Lines 25.  I haven’t even mentioned the poetry and essays that this volume also offers.  I am wondering how the editors at Two Lines go about choosing what literature to include in their collections.  I have in my mind an image of them exhaustively scouring the world in search of only the best of the best.  I don’t know how else they could produce such an astonishing collection.

To read the full index of works included in Two Lines 25 please visit: http://twolinespress.com/two-lines-journal/

About the Editor:
cj-evansCJ Evans is the author of A Penance (New Issues Press, 2012), which was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and The Category of Outcast, selected by Terrance Hayes for the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets chapbook series. He edited, with Brenda Shaughnessy, Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House, and his work has appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Pleiades, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

CJ is the editor of Two Lines Press, the publishing program of the Center for the Art of Translation, which has quickly grown into a premier publisher of international literature, and he has edited translations of the works of authors like Marie NDiaye, Jonathan Littell, and Naja Marie Aidt. He also edits Two Lines: World Writing in Translation, a bi-annual journal of the best international literature in translation and curates Two Voices, an event series in San Francisco. He is a contributing editor for Tin House, and occasionally teaches, most recently in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco.

Prior to working at Two Lines Press, CJ was an editor at Tin House for 8 years, and worked at the Academy of American Poets. He received his MFA from Columbia University, and his BA from Reed College, where he wrote a thesis on the poetics of American Hip-Hop. He was the recipient of the 2013 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, and currently lives in San Francisco with his wife, daughter, and son.

For more information visit his website:  cjevans.org

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September 30, 2016 · 10:01 pm

Review: Sebastian Dreaming by Georg Trakl

I received a review copy of this title from Seagull Books.  These poems have been translated from the original German into this English version by James Reidel.

My Review:
sebastian-dreamingGeorg Trakl died from a cocaine overdose while recovering from a nervous breakdown in a military hospital during World War I.  He was awaiting the proofs of Sebastian Dreaming which he had requested despite the fact that the publication of this collection was put off indefinitely because of The Great War.  Sebastian Dreaming was the second, and final collection that was prepared for publication by the author himself and James Reidel’s translation of this collection is the first that has appeared in English in its entirety.  Although some of the poems have appeared in other collections, the translator has argued that these poems ought to be read as part of this single collection, which is what Trakl himself intended.

In my review of Trakl’s  first collection of poems that was also published by Seagull Books and translated by James Reidel, I argued that, although Trakl’s struggle against depression and despair is evident, an underlying sense of triumph against these demons lingers; Trakl does not let his feelings of dejection overwhelm or destroy him.  Not yet, anyway.    But Sebastian’s Dreaming, which contains more overwhelming images of decay and dying, foreshadows Trakl’s impending overdose which many speculate was a suicide;  by the time this collection was composed he had finally been overwhelmed and defeated by his emotional disturbances, excessive indulgences in drugs and alcohol and the incestuous relationship he shared with his sister.  In short, the tone of these poems is more deeply melancholic than those in the previous collection.  In  Dream and Benightment he writes:

O, cursed breed.  When every fate is consummated in filthy
rooms, death enters the household with mouldering footsteps.
O, that spring was outside and a lovely bird might sing in
the blossoming tree.  But the sparse green withers grey at
the window of those who come by night  and the bleeding
hearts still think about evil.

The collection is divided into five sections, the titles of which suggest something of a final scene, before the curtain of his life has fallen: “Sebastian Dreaming”, “The Autumn of One Alone”, “Song Septet of Death”, “Song of the Solitary,” and “Dream of Benightment.”   In the poem Passion there exists a struggle against nature and our natural surroundings which bring about our inevitable demise.  Orpheus, who was torn apart by wild beasts as he sings a lament for his lost wife, is an apt figure for the destruction that passion can wreak on a human soul:

When Orpheus strums the lyre silver,
Lamenting one dead in the evening garden,
Who are you, one reposed, under towering trees?
The autumn reeds rustle with the lament,
The blue pond,
Dying away under greening trees
And following the shadow of the sister;
Dark love
of a wild kind,
For whom the day rushes by on golden spokes.
Silent night.

Anyone familiar with Trakl’s complicated relationship with his sister Grete can’t help but notice the proximity of the word sister to those of Dark love/of a wild kind.

I found it interesting to learn from reading an introduction to Reidel’s  manuscript,  Some Uncommon Poems and Versions,  that the Austrian pediatrician who lends his name to the disorder believed that Trakl displayed the symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome.  Trakl’s poetry demonstrates two of the hallmark symptoms of this syndrome:  a gift with language and an emotional remoteness.  As an expressionist poet it is natural that his poetic landscape is full of this movement’s angst, interactions with nature and vivid colors.  But after reading Reindel’s comment about Asperger’s Syndrome I viewed his poems with a different eye, one towards someone who has difficulty with intimate connections and certain emotional cues.  Trakl never tells us he is melancholy or sad or overcome with despair.  But instead he describes Love as a pink angel appearing quietly to a boy or Joy as an evening sonata playing in cool rooms.

Finally, I would like to mention the pervasive use of colors in this collection.  The pages are consumed with the various shades that Trakl sees in nature.  Colors play an interesting role in expressing our emotions; we wear black at a funeral and a red dress to a festive party.  Different colors are associated with different holidays and seasons.  Trakl’s uses of color in his poetry brought to mind the vivid and bright pieces of the Expressionist painters.  Perhaps color was the best way that Trakl knew how to deal with and process his complicated emotional struggles.  He writes about a “blue soul” and a “black silence” in Autumn Soul.  The poem By Night contains a different color in each line that captures the mood of what could be the beginning of a passionate night:

The blue of my eyes is put out in this night.
The red gold of my heart.  O! How still burns the candle.
Your blue mantel enfolds the one falling;
Your red mouth seals the friend’s benightment.

Seagull Books will publish one final collection of poetry in the Trakl series.  I look forward to reading that collection and comparing it with the previous two volumes.

About the Author and Translator:
G TraklGeorg Trakl was born in Salzburg, Austria. As a teenager he gravitated towards poetry, incest and drug addiction and published his first work by 1908, the year he went to Vienna to attend pharmacy school and became part of that city’s fin-de-siècle cultural life. He enjoyed early success and published his first book in 1913. A year later, however, he died of a cocaine overdose due to battle fatigue and depression from the wartime delay of his second book.

 James Reidel is poet, translator, editor and biographer. In addition to the works of Georg Trakl, he has translated novels by Franz Werfel and poetry by Thomas Bernhard, among others. He is the biographer of poet Weldon Kees and author of two volumes of poetry.

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April 25, 2016 · 9:05 am

Review: The Inventors and Other Poems by René Char

This is my second review for National Poetry Month and is, once again, another unique volume published by Seagull Books.  The translator of this volume is Mark Hutchinson.

My Review:
The InventorsAs I first read the introduction to this volume, the piece of information that stuck out to me immediately was that Char was influenced by Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher.  Char imitates Heraclitus’ style of short and puzzling works as well as his theme of strife.  The pre-Socratic course I took in graduate school was one of the most challenging yet rewarding courses in my career as a student.  The Ancient Greek, which is fragmentary, is difficult to put together and even more difficult to analyze when one has come up with an English version. Heraclitus acquired the nickname “The Obscure” for good reason.  I had the same feelings, both of obscurity and difficulty, as I was reading Char.

The poems are in various lengths and some of the are not poems at all, but actually prose that still read like poems.  “Pontoneers” is an excellent example of a shorter work in the Heracletian style:

Two riverbanks are needed for truth: one for our outward

journey, the other for truth’s return. Paths that soak up their

mist.  That preserve our merry laughter intact.  That, even when

broken, are a haven for our juniors, swimming in icy waters.

I could spend a lifetime trying to unpack these few short lines and each time I look at them I find something different.  They are reminiscent to me of Heraclitus’ famous line about never being able to step into the same river twice.  But here Char reminds us of the ever-changing nature of our existence by posing two rivers and suggesting that what we experience, our own personal truth, may be different depending on which path we take.

Char struggles with the idea of existence and whether or not something of us serves in an afterlife.  Sometimes he comes across as a Stoic, such as in these few lines from “Loins.”

In taking leave of the world, we return to what was out there

before the earth and stars were formed; to space, that is.  We

are that space, in all its prodigality.  We return to aerial day and

its black rejoicing.

The Stoic idea that something of us, of our spirit, survives seems to be lurking in these lines.  But there are also times when I thought that Char leaned toward the Epicurean.  A line in “How Did I Ever Get this Late?” stood out to me as particularly Epicurean.  He imagines a deity that sets the human experience in motion but then steps back and has nothing else to do with its own creations.  The “Master Mechanic” watches his own chaos for his amusement:

In the immense community of the heavely clock

face, the Master Mechanic, it would seem, has greased the

motors and slipped away, chuckling, to amuse himself elsewhere.

This volume of poetry is nearly impossible to write a coherent review for.  The selections that are chosen for this edition are a sampling of the poet’s wide range of styles and topics.  Char’s enigmatic messages and obscure writing style are as difficult to unpack as Heraclitus.  But this is absolutely a volume that any lover of poetry will want to have on his or her shelf.  I find that the most challenging volumes of poetry are the most rewarding.

Finally, I have to say something about beautiful book jackets that are all designed by Sunandini Banerjee of Seagull Books.  Each volume is wonderfully colorful and captures the spirit of the poems contained within.

About the Author:
CharHe spent his childhood in Névons, the substantial family home completed at his birth, then studied as a boarder at the school of Avignon and subsequently, in 1925, a student at L’École de Commerce de Marseille, where he read Plutarch, François Villon, Racine, the German Romantics, Alfred de Vigny, Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire.

Char was a friend and close associate of Albert Camus, Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot among writers, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Victor Brauner among painters.

 

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April 19, 2016 · 12:37 pm

Review: The Anchor’s Long Chain by Yves Bonnefoy

In order to celebrate National Poetry Month, I decided to review some of the poetry collections from Seagull Books.  Thanks so much to Naveen for sending me some beautiful offerings from their catalogue.  First up is an edition of Bonnefoy’s poetry translated by Beverley Bie Brahic.

My Review:
Layout 1This collection of poems begins with a series of short pieces that have some common themes, the most striking of which is a reflection on memory.  The poems appear to the reader as snippets of the poet’s memory as he is trying to reflect on pieces of his life that have passed.   Sometimes the images are very clear and precise.  For example, the end of one poem reads:

 

Do you remember

Our first bedroom?  Do you remember the ad

Flowered wallpaper?  We wanted to strip it off

Only there was other paper underneath,

Layers of it,

And the last, on the grey plaster, newsprint,

With words from the other century

That we rolled under our wet fingers. At last

We craped the wall clean with pen knives.

You were laughing, so was I, night was falling.

But the images that flit across the poet’s memory are not always this transparent.  He oftentimes struggles to grasp at a fleeting memory and it is at these times where the poetry also becomes more blurred for the reader.  One of the most poignant images that he evokes to demonstrate his frustration at the ephemeral nature of memory is that of the Greek god Erebus:

Oh, memories: our Erebus,

A great shapeless sob is at the bottom of us.

Erebus is the perfect symbol for Bonnefoy’s struggle with memory as he is grasping around the dark recesses of his mind to find his past.  As I noted above, the passages in which his memory is not clear come across as muddled and harder for the reader to understand.  One such passage, which I read over and over, is:

She dreams

She is up on the ladder, she knocks at the

closed door.

The engines roar.

Fro the plane’s belly no one responds

And the world takes off.

She hangs there adrift between birth and death

In the calm sky,

The sky where just a few puffs of cloud

Melt into the blue, that is, God–no, the eternal.

One more aspect of these poems that I have to mention is the recurring images of the ocean, the sand and the waves.  They are prominently feature in these short pieces and these images seem to have made an especially lasting impression on the poet’s memory.  He remembers a relationship with a woman as they are walking on the beach; he remembers a summer’s eve when he is crumbling up newspapers to make a fire by the sea.

The next part of the collection actually features short pieces of prose.  Each of these short stories, which I would argue can be considered flash fiction, revolve around the innocence of childhood.  The most striking story is the one entitled “The Long Name.”  The story begins with a boy wandering in the woods and he hears what he thinks is singing.  He stumbles upon a little girl who is setting out things for her tea.  The boy learns that the little girl is a princess and the song isn’t a song at all but her servant calling out her extremely long name.  The girl, who is a princess, explains why the king gave her such a long name.  These stories all have a fairytale quality to them and the poet seems to  envy the innocence and simplicity of childhood.  A little girl who wants to play with her toys and have tea should not be burdened by the adults in her life with such a long and cumbersome name.

The final part of the collection features a series of nineteen sonnets.  I so much enjoyed reading these and I have read a few of them over and over again.  This is the type of poetry collection that will sit on my coffee table and I will pick up and will reread and find something different and interesting every time.  Many of the sonnets are tributes, a tombeau in the French as the note in the text tells us, to artists and writers of the past.  The collection starts with a tribute to Leon Battista Alberti and also includes sonnets about Maupassant, Descartes and Poussin.

My favorite sonnet, which should be no surprise to anyone who knows about my classics background, is the one entitled “Ulysses Sails Past Ithaca.”  In this poem we are given an image of Ulysses as he sail past a place he once knew as his home of Ithaca.  “Remember, with the bees and olive tree,/ The faithful wife and the old dog.”  But this is all gone now, just a fading memory.  The poem ends with the wish that Ulysses might be able to go back to the child he once was that played in the surf.   This sonnet ties together the entire collection perfectly; in its subtle nod to the poetry of Homer the poet uses the images of the fleeting nature of memory and the innocence of childhood.

This is a difficult collection of poetry to review because it is impossible to capture its brilliance in a few short paragraphs.  Thanks to Seagull Books for translating and bringing to English readers this beautiful and thought-provoking collection.

About the Author:
Y BonnefoyYves Bonnefoy (born June 24, 1923) is a French poet and essayist. Bonnefoy was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, the son of a railroad worker and a teacher.

His works have been of great importance in post-war French literature, at the same time poetic and theoretical, examining the meaning of the spoken and written word. He has also published a number of translations, most notably Shakespeare and published several works on art and art history, including Miró and Giacometti

 

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