Critical reviews of poetry in translation
Translator and poet Danielle Legros Georges translated the work of three remarkable women poets: Évelyne Trouillot, Marie-Célie Agnant, and Maggy de Coster. Each poet’s distinctive, urgent voice brings clarity to places and realities whose challenges our Western media often oversimplifies, misunderstands, and all too often simply forgets once the news cycle moves on.
Ovid Void presents a limit case for what we mean by translation. The World Poetry chapbook contains twenty of Eugene Ostashevsky's versions based on new Russian versions of Ovid's poems of exile by Ostashevsky's Russian contemporary Maria Stepanova, who based hers on the Soviet Academy of Sciences translations of the Latin originals.
Reading Liesl Ujvary’s marvellous 1977 poetry collection Good and Safe brought to mind William Carlos Williams’ words from his essay introducing The Wedge: “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” These poems, translated from the German by Ann Cotten and Anna-Isabelle Dinwoodie with a foreword by Fatima Naqvi, operate like machines just as Williams suggested. They loop, repeat, permutate, interlock, and when an “I” eventually shows up, it is a disassociated one.…
Earthly Conditions opens with a most earthly experience, very early morning, the birth of a day, first light anticipated but not yet arrived: it’ll wave like a lilac curtain behind the mountains then with the speed of light—yes, the speed of light—it’ll enter the dull room through the belly of glass calmly, quietly as if it were there to stay forever unchanging a door will stretch itself open to another the sound of tea in the kitchen will begin brewing As with any birth, there’s expectation and certainty about how it will happen. There’s humor as well—yes light does move with the speed of light! The expected light will open a door, then another—to the sound of brewing tea, ordinary and mystical, both.…
The recent appearance of Miss Sybil Thorndike as Medea at the Holborn Empire is an event which has a bearing upon three subjects of considerable interest: the drama, the present standing of Greek literature, and the importance of good contemporary translation. On the occasion on which I was present the performance was certainly a success; the audience was large, it was attentive, and its applause was long.…