Katherine Mansfield / Malade

Two windows
by Triunfo Arciniegas

Malade

By Katherine Mansfield

BIOGRAPHY

Katherine Mansfield / Malade

The man in the room next to mine

has the same complaint as I.

When I wake in the night I hear him turning.

And then he coughs.

And I cough.

And after a silence I cough. And he coughs again.

This goes on for a long time.

Until I feel we are like two roosters

calling to each other at false dawn.

From far-away hidden farms.

Katherine Mansfield / When I was a Bird

When I was a Bird

By Katherine Mansfield
BIOGRAPHY

I climbed up the karaka tree
Into a nest all made of leaves
But soft as feathers.
I made up a song that went on singing all by itself
And hadn't any words, but got sad at the end.
There were daisies in the grass under the tree.
I said just to try them:
"I'll bite off your heads and give them to my little
children to eat."
But they didn't believe I was a bird;
They stayed quite open.
The sky was like a blue nest with white feathers
And the sun was the mother bird keeping it warm.
That's what my song said: though it hadn't any words.
Little Brother came up the patch, wheeling his barrow.
I made my dress into wings and kept very quiet.
Then when he was quite near I said: "Sweet, sweet!"
For a moment he looked quite startled;
Then he said: "Pooh, you're not a bird; I can see
your legs."
But the daisies didn't really matter,
And Little Brother didn't really matter;
I felt just like a bird.

Poet Sarah Howe named young writer of the year

Sarah Howe
Photo by Hayley Madden

Poet Sarah Howe named young writer of the year

Half-Chinese author’s debut collection Loop of Jade, exploring her dual heritage, praised by judges as ‘a work of astonishing originality’


Alison Flood
Friday 11 December 2015 12.38 GMT

Sarah Howe has been named young writer of the year for a “luminous” first collection of poetry exploring her dual English and Chinese heritage, Loop of Jade.

Howe, 32, was named winner of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop young writer of the year award on Thursday night. The £5,000 prize, won in the past by Zadie Smith, Robert Macfarlane and Simon Armitage, is for the best piece of fiction, non-fiction or poetry by a British or Irish writer aged 35 or under.

This year, Howe was the only poet to be shortlisted, with her collection competing with Sunjeev Sahota’s Booker-shortlisted novel The Year of the Runaways, Ben Fergusson’s Betty Trask award-winning historical novel The Spring of Kasper Meier, and Sara Taylor’s Baileys-nominated The Shore.

Andrew Holgate, judge and Sunday Times literary editor, said the choice of Howe was “unanimous”. “From the strongest of shortlists, they selected Loop of Jade by Sarah Howe as a work of astonishing originality, depth and scope,” he said, praising her “luminous” work.

“She is a writer always conscious of language. These are poems that are sensuous, subtle, and full of immediacy and resonance,” added Holgate.

Howe, who was born in Hong Kong to an English father and a Chinese mother, told the Guardian that she was astonished to win. “The three other books were so extraordinary that I was just enjoying being shortlisted,” she said.

Loop of Jade is her first collection, and was previously shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, and for the Forward prize for best first collection. She spent 10 years writing it, and it has “quite a strong narrative strand running through it”.

“A lot of the poems are telling the story of my mother, who was an abandoned baby in China, almost certainly given up because she was a girl. That story is entwined with the story of my own childhood in Hong Kong,” she said. “It’s told quite elliptically and in fragments – poetry is good at that, and that’s the way the story was told to me. I heard about my mother’s story in fragments.”

Her mother, she added, is pleased about the success of Loop of Jade. “I think she’s really proud; we have glancing conversations about it, where I ask a question and she answers a different question. But she tells everyone about it.”

With her win, following poet Andrew McMillan’s triumph in the Guardian first book award for his collection Physical, Howe said that “poetry seems to be having a bit of a moment in the national consciousness”.

For National Poetry Day this year, Howe’s poem Relativity was recorded by Stephen Hawking. “They say / a flash seen from on and off a hurtling train / will explain why time dilates like a perfect / afternoon,” he read, asking: “If we can think / this far, might not our eyes adjust to the dark?”

Novelist Sarah Waters, a former winner of the prize who joined Holgate along with Sunday Times chief fiction reviewer Peter Kemp on the judging panel, said that Howe was “a significant literary talent, a very special writer indeed”.

THE GUARDIAN

José Martí / Two Poems

José Martí
Poster by T.A.

Two Poems

by José Martí

Waking Dream

I dream with my eyes
open and always, by day
and night, I dream.
And over the foam
of the wide and restless sea,
and through the spiraling
sands of the desert,
upon a mighty lion,
the monarch of my breast,
blithely astride
its docile neck,
always I see, floating,
a boy, who calls to me!

—From Ismaëlillo, 1882

Fragrant Arms

I know arms that are strong,
soft and fragrant;
I know when they encircle
my fragile neck,
my body, like a kissed
rose, opens,
and breathes in its own
languid perfume.
Rich in new blood
the temples throb;
and the red plumage of
internal birds begins to stir;
across skin weathered
by human winds
restless butterflies
beat their wings;
elixir of rose ignites
dead flesh!—
And I give up those rounded
fragrant arms,
for two small arms
that know how to tug at me,
and cling tightly
to my pale neck
and of mystic lilies
weave me a chain!
Away from me forever,
fragrant arms!

—From Ismaëlillo 1882.

Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen.

Esther Allen is currently editing and translating an anthology on José Martí, forthcoming from Penguin Classics.

—One thing Cubans everywhere agree on is that José Martí (1853-1895) is their national religion. The central intellectual and political leader in Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain, Martí was also an influential poet. His first book, Ismaëlillo (Little Ishmael), was published in 1882 in New York City, where Martí spent most of his adult life, and consists entirely of passionate poems addressed to his absent three-year-old son, who was in Cuba, separated from his father by politics and exile, and by his mother’s will. The reader who comes to these 19th-century poems in the year 2000 may experience a vertiginous feeling that they were inspired by recent headlines. Earlier this year, as crowds were gathering daily in José Martí Park in Miami’s Little Havana to shout that Elián González had to stay in the United States, Fidel Castro hastily erected in a Havana waterfront square (now known as Plaza Elián) a massive socialist realist sculpture of José Martí, carrying a small boy in one arm.

BOMB MAGAZINE

Blanca Varela / Two Poems

Blanca Varela
Poster by T.A.

Two Poems

by Blanca Varela

The Things I Say are True

A star explodes in a small plaza and a bird loses its eyes
and falls. Around it men weep and watch the progress
of the new season. The river flows and bears in its cold
and muddled arms inscrutable matter that has
accumulated for years and years behind windows.

A horse dies and its soul flies up to the sky, smiling, its
large wooden teeth stained with dew. Later, among the
angels, it will grow black, silky wings to shoo the flies
away.

Everything is perfect. To be locked in a small hotel
room, to be wounded, cast off, impotent, while outside
rain falls, sweet, unexpected.

What is it that’s happening, that throws itself down
from above and covers the leaves with blood and the
streets with golden rubble?

I know I am sick with a ponderous malady, brimming with a
bitter liquid, an inclement fever that whistles and
scares anyone who hears it. My friends left me, my
parrot has died, and I cannot keep people and animals
from fleeing at the sight of the black and terrible
splendor that my passage through the streets leaves
behind. I always have to eat lunch alone. It’s terrible.

—From This Port Exists, 1949-1959.

Family Secret

I dreamed of a dog
an eviscerated dog
singing its body was its red body whistling
I asked the other person
the one putting out the light on the carnivore
what’s happened
why are we in the dark

it’s a dream you’re alone woman
there is no other person
the light does not exist
you are the dog you are the flower that barks
gently sharpen your tongue
sweet black tongue with four paws

the skin of man burns in dreams
human skin combusts vanishes
only the dog’s red pulp is clean
true light inhabits the crust on its eyes
you are the dog
you are the eviscerated dog of every night
dream of yourself that’s enough

—From Light of Day, 1960-1963.

Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen.

Esther Allen is currently editing and translating an anthology on José Martí, forthcoming from Penguin Classics.

—Blanca Várela, born in Lima, Peru in 1929, belongs to the generation of Peruvian poets that also includes Sebastián Salazar Bondy and Jorge Eduardo Eielson. Varela’s poems exhibit economy of language, Surrealist imagery and a meditative voice. Among her poetry collections are Ese puerto existe (This Port Exists, 1959), Luz de día (Light of Day, 1963), Valses y otras falsas confesiones (Waltzes and Other False Confessions, 1971), Ejercicios materiales(Material Exercises, 1993), El libro de barro (The Book of Mud, 1994), and Canto villano: Poesia reunida, 1949-1994 (Villain Song: Collected Poets).

BOMB MAGAZINE

Virgilio Piñera / Poem to be Said in the Midst of a Great Silence

Virgilio Piñera
Poster by T.A.

Poem to be Said 

in the Midst of a Great Silence

by Virgilio Piñera
BIOGRAPHY

Translated by Pablo Medina

Can it be they are going to kill?

Will they pierce the heart with a huge knife?

And with the sharpest scalpel empty the eyes?

And with the steeliest chisel break the skull?

And with the most hammer of hammers crush the bones?

Can it be that on the erotic table

--table of sex, table of love--

my love, you and I,

being startled one night

your heart spoke

when you were under my blood?

Can it be the same as it was

when it was an oath, and even more so,

your work, your word bled,

soaked by the soft perfume of kisses,

so as not to deny, to be one indivisible?

And can it be so blindly believed,

so blindly, that all the suns go dark forever

while the soul travels in darkness?

Can it be there never was a soul despite the waves of music we made?

Soul that never was though soul you might be for an instant?

Remember that instant when you were a soul and adored me,

and then your own monster came suddenly

to take you to the place where being you were?

Can it be that after you are no longer,

when not being is merely a mound of dried out kisses,

you will be by not being, instead being love?

(1967)

Virgilio Piñera / I See It

Virgilio Piñera
Poster by T.A.

I See It

by Virgilio Piñera
BIOGRAPHY

Translated by Pablo Medina

Better death raise

the crown of your life

to weigh it,

and on the forehead where the moon hides its reflection

death will overcome its own severity with splendor.

You are naked,

as if the hourless days slid down your body,

as if a fleeting animal raced

between rest and memory.

Day now begins its ascent

and you end up in the sudden beak of inertia.

You call me as if the impregnable shrouds

of destruction dropped on my ear one by one.

And I too label you destroyed,

I reach your outskirts,

I set fire to you with the suns of my condolence,

I place you in a box of laments,

your fear reaches me and I wreck the air

with the vibrations of its impediment.

I see you in the air like a dead star

shattering into cold moons,

I see you with your shoes and your perfection.

(1945)

Virgilio Piñera / Elegy and Such

Virgilio Piñera
Poster by T.A.

Elegy and Such

by Virgilio Piñera

BIOGRAPHY

Translated by Pablo Medina

I invite the word
walking its barren bark among the dogs.
Everything is sad.
If it crowns forehead and breasts with shining leaves
a cold smile will blossom on the moon.
Everything is sad.
Later the sad dogs will eat the leaves
and bark out words with glistening sounds.
Everything is sad.
A dog invites the hyacinths by the river.
Everything is sad.
With loony words, with doggerel arrows,
with tiny toothy leaves
the hyacinths wound the mute damsels.
Everything is sad.
The black grass grows with a quiet hum,
but shiny edges caress the rhythm.
Everything is sad.
Behind the words the serpents laugh,
deaf earth allows no sound.
Everything is sad.


A heavenly bird barks in the sky
to scare death away.
The bird discovers it with with the flowers of night
and seduces it with words of a dog
and buries it with a cupful of earth.
Everything is sad.
I invite the earthbound word
that cuts through life and mirrors
and splits the echo of its image.
Everything is sad.
A play of words and barks.


Everything is sad.
A javelin whooshes through the speeding wind
in virile variations.
Half a cup of earth silenced the music.


Everything is sad.
Then the earth drank itself.
Everything is sad.
And when the time for death arrives
place me before a mirror where I may see myself.
Everything is sad.


(1941)

Collected French Translations: Poetry by John Ashbery – review

Visionary lunacy and peculiar choices tell us much about the Pulitzer prize-winning poet

BIOGRAPHY

Patrick McGuinness
Saturday 15 November 2014 11.00 GMT

I

n a 1956 letter to Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery wrote: “I hate all modern French poetry, except for Raymond Roussel”, specifying: “I do like my own wildly inaccurate translations of some of the 20th-century ones, but not the originals”. The editors of this book rather solemnly gloss this as Ashbery musing on “his own hard work”, and his “difficulties in building a canon for his own new poetic journeys”. They may be right, but the comment is also funny and provocative, taking a dandy-esque line on the tired debates (tired even then and comprehensively exhausted now) about accuracy and fidelity in translation.

This book (along with its sibling, Ashbery’s Collected French Translations: Prose) is mostly non-canonical in focus. Though several poets may be familiar – Reverdy, Breton, Supervielle, Eluard – others, such as Daumal, Ganzo, Lubin, Blanchard, Roche, will not. The highlights include a few poems by the Swiss boxer-poet Arthur Cravan and the sequence of prose poems, from The Dice Cornet, by the the Jewish-Breton Max Jacob, who died on his way to a concentration camp in 1944. The contemporary with whom Ashbery feels most kinship is his friend and former companion, Pierre Martory, whose volume The Landscapist he translated in 2008. Where Ashbery often reads like a French poet writing in English, Martory, barely known even in France, has the air of an American poet writing in French. His poem “The Landscape is Behind the Door” not only gives us one of the best lines in this book – “I draw you like a salary” – but reads like a New York School poem that just happens to use French words:

The landscape is behind the door. 

The person is there … New York is full 

Of similar places where a world, 

A large cloud, is being built. Only 

The heads stay put. You pay 

Before arriving, a long time before 

Opening your mouth. There are things 

Near us whose sides are all green.

Rimbaud is Ashbery’s guiding figure, prince of the counter-canon as well as the canon, a poet who occupies the centre through sheer force of vision while managing to fill the margins for pretty much the same reason. Ashbery’s version of Illuminations appeared in 2011 with a splendidly ardent introduction: “If we are absolutely modern – and we are – it’s because Rimbaud commanded us to be.” As for the 19th century, there is only one Baudelaire poem here, no Verlaine, no Gautier and none of the Symbolists, save Mallarmé. It’s such a peculiar choice that even the French don’t have a name for the genre it falls into: a series of English nursery rhymes followed by Mallarmé’s own prose translations, re‑Englished by Ashbery with faithful, visionary lunacy, the kind of meaning-promising meaninglessness that makes nursery rhymes so compelling. “Fabulous and fabulously unreadable,” Ashbery concludes, with relish.

Ashbery is a poet of margin-quarrying, tributary-chasing curiosity, but as a translator he is far more accurate than his throwaway comments suggest. It’s as if his very exactness guaranteed his translations their unfamiliarity. This chimes with something in Ashbery’s own poems, which have what he calls, in Rimbaud, a “crystalline jumble”, and where personal pronouns (the I’s and You’s and We’s) on which we hang interpretation, are porous, interchangeable things. Ashbery’s poems track the minutiae of a consciousness that is rangy and unbounded; that, as he writes in A Wave (1984), “belongs where it is going / Not where it is”.

This book begins with versions dating from the 1970s of Jean-Baptiste Chassignet (c1571-1635). Ashbery had by then published, notably, The Tennis Court Oath, Rivers and Mountains and the Pulitzer prize-winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. This is the period of what he called “the French John Ashbery”, “a temporary phase of troubling the waters so as to be able to fish in them later”. It is a neat image, the poet-translator as fisherman casting his line for a Gallic catch:

Seat yourself on the edge of a wavy 

river; 

You’ll see it flow in a perpetual course, 

And wave upon wave rolling in 

thousands and thousands of turns 

Release among the meadows its 

damp career. 

But you’ll see nothing of the first wave 

Which flowed once, water changes 

every day, 

Every day it passes, and we still name it 

Same river, and same water, in the 

same way.

If Chassignet sounds like Ashbery, it’s not because Ashbery takes liberties, but because he sticks to the original’s unnerving mattness of diction and resists the temptation to freshen up the cliche of Time-as-flowing-river. The result is a sequence of haunting, spiritual and oddly austere poems that seem at once close and far away.

There are many waves in Ashbery, and, more generally, as in Rimbaud, a lot of water. Water is Ashbery’s element; as a poet, he deploys a kind of  liquid consciousness, sometimes slack, sometimes in spate, sometimes a flood and sometimes just a leak, that carries its flotsam of disparate feelings, observations, statements and states of  mind, with apparent indifference to their size, shape and value. “Your form was that of a wave, only more truthful, more circumspect”, writes Jules Supervielle in Ashbery’s version of “To Lautréamont”. “You take the form of a wave so people think it’s all the same to you.” Making pronouns fluid rather than fixed also enables Ashbery to de-hierachise the poem’s different elements, so that an intimation of mortality reaches the reader on the same level, on the same wave, as noticing a fire hydrant or a hot-dog stall. For some critics this just leads to a tricksy poetry of surfaces; for others, it is a way of elegantly rendering the wavy ways we perceive a wavy world.

With many poems in the New York School lineage, the obscure and disjunctive energies of French surrealism become diluted into a sort of decaffeinated whimsy. The effect is like watching André Breton’s Nadja filmed by the makers of Ally McBeal. While Ashbery is not responsible for this, his poems, like Dylan Thomas’s, look easy and temptingly imitable. One result of reading his translations is to realise just how deep-rooted the superficiality of his poetry is.

• Patrick McGuinness’s The Last Hundred Days is published by Seren. 

THE GUARDIAN

RETRATOS AJENOS

John Ashbery

DE OTROS MUNDOS

Poesía en la red / Ashbery y 'bits' de robustez poética

John Ashbery / "Uso frases hechas para hacer más democrática mi poesía"

John Ashbery / Un poeta en Nueva York

John Ashbery / No es excusa la ignorancia de la ley

John Ashbery / Apoteosis de la fragmentación

John Ashbery / El arte como espejo extraño

John Ashbery / Gente interesante de Terranova

Tres poemas de John Ashbery

John Ashbery / "Somos la civilización del deseo por lo nuevo, de lo desechable"

Muere John Ashbery / La voz de América

La poesía luminosa de John Ashbery

KISS

Quick Question by John Ashbery / Review

John Ashbery / Parallel lines

John Ashbery / Ignorance of the law is no excuse

John Ashbery / How to Continue

Poem of the week / Breezeway by John Ashbery

Collected French Translations / Poetry by John Ashbery / Review

John Ashbery / The Art of Poetry

John Ashbery / Just Walking Around

Poem of the week / Life is a Dream by John Ashbery

John Ashbery dies age 90

John Ashbery and Pierre Martory / With eyes wide shut