These translations of avant-garde Iranian modernist Bijan Elahi (1945-2010) have been co-translated from Farsi by Rebecca Ruth Gould and the Iranian poet Kayvan Tahmasebian and have been drawn from their forthcoming project, available here.

I’m a little confused.
We were crowbar sweethearts—
remember the lengths we’d go for pomegranates?

The collection New Selected Poems: Thom Gunn draws from the poet’s canon to commemorate one of the most profound members of a generation of English poets who came of age during and after World War II. An AIDS-era eulogist. A renegade Cambridge-cowboy. A devilish Brit writing from both the epicenter and the lava-outskirts of a shifting American landscape. In his lifetime, Gunn was often positioned as an incongruent peer to Ted Hughes and The Confessionals. Yet Gunn, by his own rhetoric, was not a confessional poet. As an expatriate, his work evokes an oozing liminality that is addressed in an interest in the body and masculinity—ranging from cowboys to Elvis. Poems set in iambic pentameter and formal rhyme schemes speak about motorcycle-clad emblems of a brazen American masculinity and layered with double-entendres on gay male sexuality. The most interesting moments in Gunn’s poetry occur with a metaphorical preoccupation with the intimacies between the interior and exterior self.

A new edition of selected poems by Makoto Ooka, translated by Janine Beichman and entitled Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets, is a treasure chest for lovers of Japanese poetry and poetry in general. Ooka was one of the most revered poets and critics in Japan, and Beichman, is a masterful translator of Ooka’s work. This is the third anthology of Ooka’s poetry she has translated. Beichman captures the stark simplicity of Ooka’s language as well as the Western influences on his work. Ooka himself approved her translations, and he knew English poetry well. He even reciprocated by translating one of her Noh plays.

It’s the wrong exit, and I’m lost on my way
to Malibu Beach. I might not hear the freeway
if the car windows were up, but it’s hot,

The poems below have been excerpted from a longer work called Wulf & Eadwacer, an experimental translation by M.L. Martin of the Anglo-Saxon poem “Wulf ond Eadwacer.” As Martin explains, “code-switching between the original Old English and Modern English, Wulf & Eadwacer embraces the proto-feminist, disjunctive voice of the original poem so that its enigmatic nature and plurality can fully be explored for the first time.”

These poems by Chilean poet Stella Díaz Varín have been taken from her 1959 collection, ‘Time, Imaginary Measure,’ and have been translated from Spanish by Rebecca Levi.

At dawn, after they drove me
by emergency to the hospital, or
the mansion on the outskirts of the city.

In conversation with Columbia Journal’s Online Poetry Editor Brian Wiora, the poet Cynthia Cruz, discusses Nomadism, the nature of dreams, and of course, her poetry. After reading this interview, we hope you will read a selection of her poems, published here.

These poems by Lidija Dimkovska have been translated from the original Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Patricia Marsh.

Sun a thin-red lip,
dim through slit in chthonic
cavity, each berry

I said she didn’t have slender ankles, and she really took offense.
Three washings and still under my fingernails the smell of September.
It was fun. It continued to be fun. Then it was not fun at all.

Peruvian born poet and linguistics professor Mario Montalbetti’s latest collection of poetry Language Is a Revolver for Two showcases his incredible ability to use poetry to rhythmically unfold a prophecy to his reader. Throughout these fourteen poems, Montalbetti consistently uses the motif of movement, particularly its risings and fallings, as a way of tracking his exploration of language’s, and by extension, the world’s economy of supply and demand. Essentially delineating the reason that law cannot be fully applied to love: “one thing and only one thing affects love: / the demand for love. / … supply doesn’t affect love.”

SNOWDROP

First flower, or nearly.

No one forces it to do anything.

Reading No Budu Please is like committing to the excavation of the continual traumas that occur within a post-colonial consciousness that is paradoxically both foreign and too familiar.

Red light, where you were when the strike struck-to

and split, singeing thusly the center, burning

Something burning or maybe already burnt

A cataract climbs a triage

How many bushels in an apple?

Welcome to Blurbed, a round-up of literary recommendations from the editors and contributors at the Columbia Journal! Each month, Blurbed features a curated list of things to read, events to attend and news from the Journal.

These poems by the Iraqi visual artist and poet Ali Rashid have been translated from Arabic by Dr. Saleh Razzouk and Scott Minar.

Whatever is cool. Whatever is fine. Simple

is fine. Simple is more than fine. Home is fine too.

I’ll survive. As long as it’s something.