A book. An answer. A person. A moon. Some of mine
Something of mine, mine a rhythm
Rhythm and ritual

On January 24, 2021, Word Up Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria in Washington Heights hosted an open conversation about the nuts and bolts of translation contract negotiation and the critical importance of finding a community with translators Julia Sanches, and Umair Kazi ’16 (Fiction). Writer, translator, Word Up volunteer and Columbia alumna Daniella Gitlin ’12 (Nonfiction) moderated the event. Kianny Antigua and Dominican Writers Association founder Angela Abreu also participated in the conversation.

Bizarre, long-term disorders
can be harvested in people
I had three, four, or five

We are learning metaphors in middle school,
metaphors as a literary device rather than a lesson about life.

but my husband looks more like our savior:
more like Jesus than the man
they have stained into glass–

That’s what happens if you dive in murky water;

everything disappears from sight, you start looking

at that lot of nothingness closing in around you.

Everything looks as you wish it did not.

When you lift your head, your eyes shut quickly.

Editor’s Note: “Civics Unit: Naturalization Test” by Mariya Zilberman, was chosen by Ruth Madievsky as the poetry winner of Columbia Journal‘s 2019 Winter Contest. It was published in Columbia Journal #58 and appears here with permission from the author.

Speak to lightning, a memento of my beloved

—plunging into still dark—

if he remembers how he thundered me:

To be butchered between the banks
of North & South Bend & Black Lives
Matter asked her to suspend

I am a part
of whatever I create,
my contradictions and my compunctions

On October 17, 2020, Globus Books, an indie store that specializes in bringing Russian literature to the Bay Area and the wider country, hosted a live event to present Galina Ryumbu’s new book of poetry, Life in Space in English translation, translated by Joan Brooks and others, and forwarded by Eugene Ostashevsky, forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in November 2020. It is Rymbu’s first full-length poetry collection to be translated into English and includes poems from her three previous collections as well as new work. The book includes additional material translated by Helena Kernan, Charles Bernstein, Kevin M.F. Platt, Anastasiya Osipova, and others.

The following poems are taken from Abraham Sutzkever’s collection, Poems from My Diary. Like many of the poems in the Diary, the selected works concern nature, as well as friendship and neighborliness.

The white wild horse
Conceitedly stood at the stall
Contemplating the wretched chest of plains

The first day
is a memory unlived. A series,
confused slides in an archive.

“In Sawako Nakayasu’s first poetry collection in seven years, an unsettling diaspora of “girls” is deployed as poetic form, as reclamation of diminutive pseudo-slur, and a characters that take up residence between the think border zones of language, culture, and shifting identity. Written in response to Nakayasu’s 2017 return to the US, this maximalist collection invites us to reexamine our own complicity in reinforcing conventions, literary and otherwise. The book radicalizes notions of “translation” as both process and product, running a kind of linguistic interference that is intimate, feminist, mordant and jagged” Wave Books stated in their press release.

We are grateful to the contributions of over 500 writers and artists producing around the word of our choosing: Uprising.

li 力
in Chinese,

turned up-
side down

When they enter
my brain the grass
greens past its prime.

died in 1891 at Tenerife,
on his way from exile.

all the tattered things all the broken things hidden behind a sock stuck in drywall to keep out the cold a hole burrowed to store plunder hold ill-gotten gains stash secrets things crumbling down as hours slog away decomposing things heaped one on top of another on top of another dragged there by vermin into final rest into the thing-graveyard under the thing-night where light never unfolds its rays all the moldering things treasured by rats shiny this bits of stuff shiny shavings bits of that await some final release or re-assemblage amidst damaged things with parts seized up half a child’s toy wound down one last time a nest of silky grey hair pilfered buttons paper clips bottle caps all flung onto the growing thing-mound waiting like skeletons unburied unredeemed unfound should light break through exhume this boneyard-of-things when a cat hungry for prey strikes slashes the rodent’s doorway claws sharpened like shards of stained glass things might be freed blessed open unfettered rescued from their rot