March 16, 2015
March 16, 2015
photo - mw _______________________
.....................................................If grief smoked
Eeva-Liisa Manner
Poems from six collections of poetry.
Translated by Herbert Lomas
Books from Finland
(....)A strange grieving in the forest –
while the village is sleeping.
A strange feeble grieving
like a child weeping.
You open the door. You listen. Nothing.
You close the door. It’s there again.
Who’s lost in the dark?
Who’s been abandoned?
Who are they drowning somewhere?
A strange long grieving
as if a memory were weeping, or a shadow, or an echo –
right across the lake.
...(more)
Why translate?
Herbert Lomas
James Livingston
(....)_______________________Like John Jeremiah Sullivan and Walter Johnson, and all other writers committed to the notion that there is no difference between past and present—it’s an exhausting imperative—Faulkner sometimes expresses impatience with his own rhetorical strategies: he “breaks,” as actors say, from the characters he has established as the narrators of this story. He pronounces from offstage, so to speak, in an authorial voice. In Absalom, Faulkner gives these exasperated, explanatory, metanarrative lines to Aunt Rosa Coldfield as well as old Compson:
“’Once there was—Do you mark (how) the wisteria, sun-impacted on this wall here, distills and penetrates this room as though (light-unimpeded) by secret and appetitive progress from mote to mote on obscurity’s myriad components? That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel—not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less: and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.’”
Sudden oracular exclamations like this are scattered throughout the dense thrumming of words that is Absalom, where the weight of the past registers as a genetic trait, a natural fact, a physical burden—“not mind, not thought”—as well as a psychic wound, probably because Faulkner himself knew that from time to time he had to find a verbal clearing, for himself and his readers, where they could rest, sip some water, then get on with his merciless, clear-cutting journey into the darkness at the heart of the American Dream....(more)
Eleanor and Barbara
c. 1953
Harry Callahan
d. March 15, 1999
George Szirtes
the white review
1._______________________
The translator meets himself emerging from his lover’s bedroom. So much for fidelity, he thinks.
2.
Je est un autre, said the translator. Try next door.
3. The translator was looking down his own throat. Come out, come out, wherever you are! he pleaded.
The translator’s wardrobe was full of other people’s shirts. At least they fitted him.
The translator stood in front of the window pretending to be transparent.
But if everything is potentially everything else, complained the translator, what am I doing here?
The translator was counting his chickens, none of them hatched but already squabbling.
4.
The translator wanders into Babel and books himself into a cupboard.
Two languages on the same floor of Babel. – I was here first. – I’m not talking to you. – Keep the music down. – You call that music?
But the gardens of Babel? Who talks about them? Who planted them? Who tended them? cried the translator in his cups, slurring his words.
...(more)
Harry Callahan
_______________________ Bright, Dusky, Bright: Translating Eeva-Liisa MannerEmily Jeremiah
the Finnish-English Literary Translation Cooperative
TheoremThe poems of Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921–95) are lucid yet mysterious. They are haunted by echoes, steps, shadows, reflections; but they evoke ghostliness with utter clarity. I wanted to translate ‘Theorem’ because as well as being characteristic of Manner’s oeuvre in terms of its style and imagery, it offers an aesthetic manifesto, a ‘theorem’ pertaining to poetry. I am also motivated by the fact that Manner’s work is shamefully little known outside of Finland.
Let prose be hard, let it provoke unease.
But the poem is an echo that is heard when life is mute:
shadows gliding on mountains; the image of wind and cloud,
the passage of smoke or life: bright, dusky, bright,
a river flowing silent, deep cloudy forests,
houses mouldering slowly, lanes radiating heat,
a worn-down threshold, the stillness of shadow,
a child’s timorous step into the darkness of the room,
a letter that comes from afar and is pushed under the door,
so big and white that it fills the house,
or a day so stiff and bright that you can hear
how the sun nails shut the abandoned blue door.
...(more)
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