Translator’s Note: These poems are selected from Esther Ramón’s book Morada (Dwelling), published by Calambur (Barcelona) in 2015. In Dwelling, Ramón organizes the poems in three sections, and does not title the individual poems. I have used the first lines of the poems to function as titles for convenience. The section titles in the book are Excavation, Speed, and Water Stone. The poems included here are from the first section, Excavation.

When she came back from Tokyo for the first time, she was famous, she was twelve and she didn’t recognize her own apartment.

Columbia Journal is delighted to announce the shortlist for our Special Issue on Loneliness. Our dedicated team of readers and editors culled through a pool of more than 400 submissions that were each uniquely moving.

I remember you as you were last fall.
You were the grey beret and the calm heart.
In your eyes the flames of twilight fought on.

Hay caballos en su pubis, hay caballos en su vientre, en
su pelvis hay una gaita algebraica, hay unos engranajes
de volteo, hay galápagos, en su vientre. Hay galápagos y
golpes: galopes.

knowledge of all things (when well organized)
fits in the tight space of a
cranial

The three poems here are from a new manuscript, A Thousand Oars in the Water – 45 Versions from Sappho to Claribel Alegría, and were rendered from other translations cribs, and notes.

Poet, essayist, and translator Ulalume González de León believed that “Everything has already been said,” and, thus, that each act of creation is a rewriting, reshuffling, and reconstructing of one great work. For this reason, she chose the title Plagios (Plagiarisms) for her book of collected poems. Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz called Ulalume González de León “the best Mexicana poet since Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” recognizing the visionary quality of her work.

He threw the pen aside and collapsed onto the lumpy chair, resting his aching body. Dazed, he silently stared into the distance. Last Monday, a strange ethereal shadow had appeared out of nowhere, settled over his head, and loomed over him ever since. He was able to bat it away, sometimes, but it still peeked out at him from time to time, and he felt as though it might engulf him, all of him, at any moment. Strangely enough, he could not discern what it was or fathom its nature; he didn’t know why this specter had invaded his body and soul. He winced at its presence, his face contorting with both misery and dread. Every time the shadow overtook him, he felt overwhelmed by deep confusion and dejection.

Ascendent Mexican author Fernanda Melchor makes her English-language translation debut with “Hurricane Season,” a whirling novel that rages ahead from the first page, when a group of boys discovers the town’s Witch floating dead in a drainage ditch. In chapter-long chunks of text, Melchor illustrates a troubled town’s response to this socially fraught incident of foul play. Translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes, the book’s profanity-laden pages sustain its sense of dismal fury.

A.
Draw a circle around yourself
and pray seventy years
for rain that it might come

The word BARE.
Everyone
Exposed

Today, Valentine’s Day, we wanted to take a moment to offer our affections to the art of translation. Online Translation Editor Stephanie Philp asked translators two questions about the sometimes grueling, always complicated, forever alive practice. We wanted to know: what do they love about translation?

I can’t find them in abandoned pit mines scattered lakes of
limestone & water łužiska jĕzorina villages on the land
seized treasure your voices of coal and rock crushed

In this interview, Claire Foster spoke to writer and translator Katie Shireen Assef about her recent translation of Black Forest (Deep Vellum), a slim, quiet book of ghosts and grief by French writer, filmmaker and visual artist Valérie Mréjen.

In Crossing, Finnish-Kosovar novelist Pajtim Statovci’s second novel, a queer narrator starts over in every city—sometimes presenting as a man, sometimes as a woman. In each new location 22-year-old Bujar claims a new heritage and a new history. The book opens after Bujar’s unsuccessful suicide attempt in Rome, travelling from place to place, restlessly pulling on and discarding identity after identity—in Germany claiming to be a woman from Bosnia, in New York claiming to be an actor who has acted in small-scale productions all across Europe, in Helsinki claiming to be an immigrant from Italy. He constantly seeks a city in which he can be comfortable, where he can be himself, though what he considers himself to be is sometimes in flux and ambiguous. The one identity he declines to claim is his own: the name Bujar, the life of starvation, deprivation and tragedy in Albania he led and fled ten years ago with his close friend and sometime lover, Agim.

we’re quiet for a moment
don’t sing out loud in pubs
don’t make love in public places

Perumal Murugan grew up in a family of farmers in Tamil Nadu. He is one of India’s most well-known literary writers, having produced ten novels and five collections each of short stories and poetry. Several of his novels have been translated into English, including Seasons of Palm and Current Show. His best-known novel in the west, One Part Woman, was longlisted for the inaugural National Book Award for Translation. It won the prestigious ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman for writing in Indian languages and the Translation Prize from Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters.

Anonymous is the unknown author of the fifty four stanzas of the Fatrasies d’Arras. Along with the eleven stanzas written by Philippe de Rémi, these comprise the total corpus of the poetic form known as the “fatrasie,” written sometime between the years 1250 and 1300. Philippe de Rémi, a knight at the court of the Countess Mahaut, in Arras, is believed to have invented the form alone. But the form immediately lent itself to the kinds of collaborative writing practices— collaborative poems, game poems, competition poems—that were a sensation in Arras of the period. The consensus today is that the Fatrasies d’Arras were written by an unidentified coterie of virtuosic poets, who interpreted Rémi’s invention as a generative structure, one which could permit an infinite number of combinations from a finite set of rules. The exact mechanics of the writing procedure are not known. One poet may have provided some aspect of the finished poem—the rhyme words, for example, or the first six lines, or the pattern of paradoxes—and a second poet may have filled in the rest. Or perhaps they were written by circles of 11 poets, with one poet responsible for each line, in a procedure not-too-distantly analogous to the Surrealists’ cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse).

Love of Distance

I remember when I was in my mother’s house,

in the middle of the plain,

I had a window that looked out

over the meadows; at the end, the woody embankment

hid the Ticino and, beyond that,

there was a dark strip of hills.

Then I hadn’t seen the sea

but that one time, but I kept for it

a fierce nostalgia of the lover.

Toward evening I used to stare at the horizon;

I’d narrow my eyes a little; caress

the contours and the colors between my eyelashes;

and the strips of hills would stretch out,

flickering, blue: it seemed to me the sea

and I liked it more than the true sea.

Milan, 24 April, 1929