February 19, 2015
February 19, 2015
Chelsea Rooftops in the Snow
1980-1989
Andreas Feininger
d. February 18, 1999
via The Page _______________________Three Prose Poems
Sharmistha Mohanty
granta
(....)When a great loneliness has been attained, when there is no assurance, when the self is threadbare, ragged at the edges, when a life is so shaken out and empty that there is room in it for every object and being it watches, it is then that the ragged self sees through the muscular light, through the complex, melodic call of the unknown bird which never shows itself, and does not stop seeing, it finds a transparency in things that leads to their sources, whether that be a season or a man, the black clay horse with a benign sadness in its eyes leading to the hands of its maker, so nothing seems to have a definite end, and it moves towards each thing as easily as night towards day, so that the distinction between what is human and what is not falls away, and this is a knowing that cannot be lost as strength can or the ability to love, from this an enormous power unleashes itself that looks from the outside like complete powerlessness, and the evening wind from over the sea makes that threadbare self billow like a tattered sail, all that resisted it now become the air on which it rises, so that what has come to stay can regard the clear spring night, regard the new stars, regard the different trees, as variations on a life span, each not to itself but to the other standing witness.
...(more)
Izis
Israëlis Bidermanas
1911 - 1980
_______________________It is the way it is
Tua Forsström
Translated by David McDuff
books from Finland
(....)*
There is a certain kind of loss
and September’s objectivity
releases something imperceptible,
and is displaced: it makes
no difference. It is a coolness
that has settled on the surfaces,
it kept me quiet. One sits
on a bench that looks like other benches,
trains leave on time, dogs bark,
one is. Close to you
I read books and confused my name
with names of other places: a summer kitchen
with radio news in front of blowing curtains,
my cousin sailing in the bay
I stood on the threshold of my mother’s bedroom,
she was not there
Bedrooms smell differently in summer:
a weather of gentle snowfalls
One sees a snake and treads carefully
on the grass for a few days. Constantly weakened
by revenge: I inform against myself. There was
a magic room that was called Childhood
and always the same unfamiliar personal description
I have kept quiet for a long time. And now
the wind takes hold of the sail
and drives my cousin straight across the bay
the small red sail red against the green
*
...(more)
Big Snow, 42nd Street
Andreas Feininger
1956
Elizabeth Oakes
(....)Better Than Sliced BreadNow, after five years of intensive study and a stack of Finnish novels half navigated, I begin to suspect that tens years is an optimistic estimate. But I won’t give up. How could I, faced with the plethora of freaky, awesome novels published in Finnish every year? When I read a Finnish novel, how can I not engage in the submarine process that is reconciling the expressive quirks of my mother tongue with an aesthetic code shaped by a wildly different grammar? How can I resist something so mind expandingly fun?
Every literary translator I’ve spoken with emphasizes joy, if not expressly then by simply overflowing with it whenever the topic of translation comes up. So what’s with the tendency to write about literary translation within the rhetoric of the hopeless battle?
...(more)
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