Poetry anthology recommendations please

woops

is not like other people
Cheers Luke but I could at least attempt my own Rimbaud translation (and I have on here) I don't think that's snobbery
 

luka

Well-known member
be proud to be english. dont worry about french. fuck em. they dont even like us
 

woops

is not like other people
yeah but it was rubbish
it might not have been your favourite that's true.

i have that feeling of walking into another unwinnable @luka argument trap but i find it strange that you are only able to prefer poetry in translation because of people who thought they could speak more than one language and translate poetry
 

luka

Well-known member
its a nice language but its not ours and never will be. we have our own one which has its own advantages and tbh its way better than theres
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
English could be improved poetically by sticking the suffix -wibble on every word so everything rhymes (pace H R Leavis)
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
i think you massively overate your knowledge of french and the insight it gives you into language generally. you have basic conversational french, nothing more
I've got no idea obviously how good woops' French is, obviously, but with my experience of reading Lorca - my Spanish is pretty decent and the poems are miles better in the originals, but I'm still grateful to have a bilingual edition and would need to refer to a dictionary without having translations there. I think it's pretty much impossible to attain the level of a native speaker even if you've lived in the country for years. Plus, even native speakers will have trouble reading poetry in their own language at times.
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
My ma translated poetry by a Nobel Prize nominee into English, whereupon her translations were 'interpreted' = stuffed up by a few v famous Anglophone poets... a faithful rendering of the originals can still only be found by reading them in their original language.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Read through Celan's Breathcrystal a few times now (and read around the internet a bit on his life and a good interview with the translator Pierre Joris) and I reckon this could be one of the best poems I've ever read, the sort of thing I'll be puzzling over and picking at for years. It really slows you down and makes you think about every single word and what it could mean. Only thing I could compare it to that I know is white stones-era Prynne.
 

woops

is not like other people
Read through Celan's Breathcrystal a few times now (and read around the internet a bit on his life and a good interview with the translator Pierre Joris) and I reckon this could be one of the best poems I've ever read, the sort of thing I'll be puzzling over and picking at for years. It really slows you down and makes you think about every single word and what it could mean. Only thing I could compare it to that I know is white stones-era Prynne.
Link the interview plx thx
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Think I'll have to invest in this bilingual edition of his later stuff - it includes loads of detailed notes by Joris.

 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
THREADSUNS
above the the greyblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
The Tammuzi Poets chapter of this anthology is absolutely wild, I love it.

"I will awaken Marx and Engels from their tombs
and make them scream, baring their teeth
to victims of concentration camps,
to corpses of mine shafts, avalanches..."

"Poet
Tree of the ogres matrix of the deserts devouring queen
I ejaculate my nothingness
Grasshoppers of the elements..."

"Notre dame
weep, oh angels of hell,
you'll no longer find visitors whose roasting you'll relish..."

"Baudelaire...
Where the electronic mind wraps itself
In Krishna's cloak and the black minotaur.."

And so on.... Really exciting stuff I had no idea about.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
but also translated poetry has a texture and feel distinctive to itself that is quite exotic and glamourous imo
Pierre Joris/Jeremy Rothenberg are total heroes aren't they? As are all skilled dedicated translators imo, but these two have done so much and have cast the net so wide. Ended up ordering that late Celan collection even though it was quite expensive cause I trust Joris to have done a good job, and he's a good commentator/critic too, so I know the intro essay and the notes will be well worth reading.

Read some interviews with Joris where he says his approach is to go for the most literal translations possible and to hell with smoother the more target audience-orientated approach, and I think this works very well with modern Avant Garde poetry that's as mad as fuck in the original language anyway. He's got no qualms about making difficult stuff even more difficult, and I admire that. Poetry in translation is mind-expanding like nothing else if done well. Like with that Tamuzzi Poets gear I read the other day, love that stuff and I'm hardly gonna learn Arabic am I?

Sorry to bash on about it @woops but that conversation has got me thinking is all.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Whoa, these Osip Mandelstam poems in PFM vol1, I am in absolute bits - the one about Stalin that first got him into trouble, then the two later ones he wrote just before being arrested for a second time and
sent to a forced labour camp, where he dies within a year. Amazing.

If they dare to keep me like an animal
And fling my food on the floor -
I won't fall silent or deaden the agony,
But will write what I am free to write,
And yoking ten oxen to my voice
Will move my hand in the darkness like a plough
And fall with the full heaviness of the harvest...
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
they can be done really badly. hopefully i do them ok. theyre good when theyre good arent they.
Too much?

LATEWOODDAY under
netnerved skyleaf. Through
bigcelled idlehours clambers, in rain,
the blackblue, the
thoughtbeetle.

Animal-bloodsoming words
crowd before its feelers.
 
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