To experience another's thoughts and emotions, one first has to feel them. Eyes, lips, tongue, and teeth are involved before the brain/heart can engage. Translation of poetry is the same. My mother has sung Chinese poetry to me since forever, and English poetry came alive for me through verse speaking. I studied and taught as I wrote for many years. I cannot say I find my way into every poem I come across, but the poems I translate are ones I know and love. That is why I am passionate about translation. For me, it is not a secondary experience but a primary, primal performance art!
The book is dedicated to his three students from Princeton’s translation workshop, “Madeleine, Nadia, and Susan, and their faith in the art of translation.” And yes, that last is me. This dedication has not biased my love for these poems even though I recognize his tutelage in their lines: he taught us to be bold, true and simple, as in Ritsos’s famous poem, “The Meaning of Simplicity,” which begins, “I hide behind simple things, so you’ll find me...” which is placed smack in the middle of this volume.
Many of these poems are short but not simple, as in simplistic. Their references to ancient myths give us another chance to relive the meaning of those myths through the senses; as Ritsos said in one of his interviews, “Human beings develop through their senses, not through their brains.”
The celebrated modern Greek poet Yannis Ritsos follows such distinguished predecessors as C. P. Cavafy and George Seferis in a dramatic and symbolic expression of a tragic sense of life. The shorter poems gathered in this volume present what Ritsos calls "simple things" that turn out not to be simple at all. Here we find a world of subtle nuances, in which everyday events hide much that is threatening, oppressive, and spiritually vacuous--but the poems also provide lyrical and idyllic interludes, along with cunning re-creations of Greek mythology and history. This collection of Ritsos's work--perhaps most of all those poems…
It seems repetitive now to sing Wilson’s praises, but I have read many translations of Homer’s Odyssey, from Pope to Fagles, but it was not until I came to Emily Wilson’s rendition that I felt truly drawn, bodily, to Homer and I especially enjoyed her readings, one, in her Introduction to the poem in the book, and two, her performance of it on YouTube.
Also, Judith Thurman’s review/interview of her in the New Yorker is particularly revealing. Her article, “Mother Tongue,” about Wilson’s personal relationship with the poem and her “folk poetics,” spoke to me like a kindred spirit. Poetry, for me, has always been a physiological experience, which is why Wilson’s approach feels so familiar: “I write for the body,” she told Thurman in that interview.
The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage, family and identity; and about travellers, hospitality and the changing meanings of home in a strange world.
This vivid new translation-the first by a woman-matches the number of lines in the Greek original, striding at Homer's sprightly pace. Emily Wilson employs elemental, resonant language and an iambic pentameter to produce a translation with an enchanting "rhythm and rumble" that avoids proclaiming its own grandeur. An engrossing tale told in a compelling new…
I read this English translation before I even read the book in Chinese, even though Chinese readers in Hong Kong where I grew up all read it as teenagers or young adults. The popular title of the novel is Dream of the Red Chamber, in both English and its original Chinese, but I immediately agreed with Hawkes that The Story of the Stone, one among its many titles, is much more expressive and fitting.
The eighteenth-century aristocratic family is a hugely complex world we are introduced to, but Hawkes’ faithful, resourceful, and unpretentious translation makes getting to know the multitude of characters easy and unforgettable.
Even though it is set in eighteenth-century China, for a twentieth/twenty-first-century English reader like myself, the family dynamics, tragedy, and romance here are palpable thanks to Hawke’s understanding and translation.
The Story of the Stone (c.1760) is one of the greatest novels of Chinese literature. The first part of the story, The Golden Days, begins the tale of Bao-yu, a gentle young boy who prefers girls to Confucian studies, and his two cousins: Bao-chai, his parents' choice of a wife for him, and the ethereal beauty Dai-yu. Through the changing fortunes of the Jia family, this rich, magical work sets worldly events - love affairs, sibling rivalries, political intrigues, even murder - within the context of the Buddhist understanding that earthly existence is an illusion and karma determines the shape…
Stanley Kunitz, with Max Hayward’s translation of Poems of Akhmatova from Russian, is another book that I find myself going back to over and over again.
This is a poet’s translation of a poet, and not only that, but a poet who is willing to give himself entirely to the art of translation in order to bring another poet’s voice in another language back to life, as he puts it in his Translator’s Note, “...to record what we have heard, and to try to give it back in the language that we love.”
This is why I love these translations; I love that I can hear her through him, the translator as a medium, and the result is pure and uncontrived, hitting me right in the heart as I read and taste these poems out loud. This is a poet-translator who has “walked through many lives” (from Kunitz’s poem, “The Layers.”)
That I would love a poem written/translated by Seamus Heaney did not come as a surprise to me, but that it is Beowulf, a poem/story steeped in the Germanic warrior culture and soaked in blood that enthralled me, did surprise me.
I do not remember the occasion that prompted my reading, but even as I opened the book to its Introduction, and read “...And now this is ‘an inheritance’ --/Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked/ In the long ago, yet willable forward...Again and again and again,” I could not put it down.
In fact, you might say, it is not the story but the voice of the poet and how he brought this ancient language and people back to life that compelled me to read on. Of course, the voice is that of the poet of “Digging,” as he traces his roots back to these unlikely ancestors.
Composed towards the end of the first millennium, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is one of the great Northern epics and a classic of European literature. In his new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work which is both true, line by line, to the original poem, and an expression, in its language and music, of something fundamental to his own creative gift.
The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically and psychically exposed, in that exhausted aftermath. It is not hard to draw parallels between this story and the history of the…
My book is the first of three volumes in a series I call My China in Tang Poetry. It tells the stories of the two poetic giants, Li Bai (aka Li Po) and Du Fu (aka Tu Fu), in what is called the Golden Age of Poetry in China, but it is not just a poetry book. I interweave stories found in the poems, stories of the poets’ lives, and their historical background into a whole to make this poetry accessible to the general reader, serving as their medium and guide.
It is a personal account that grew out of my passion for these poems and the stories my mother told me as a child. It aims to build a bridge between the two languages and literary cultures that I love.
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
