“I don’t want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.”
– Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red (Translated by Erdağ M. Göknar)

Stranger, this is spring in my village:
from the very start, the east wind has opened every enclosure,
occupying each street corner and patio,
moving through the village locust trees to the fields beyond.

Too many voices, they puddle in the ear and the megaphone
stalks. The water’s cloudy, so much lost, sunk, floating,
turns into phone data parasite bacteria. The intricate road looks full
of intersections that form the wrinkles on your face.

My epitaph is a wild plant that grows
in the kingdom of sadness and regret—
A smile slinks past like a fox
and is lost among gray stones.

Muse of my ancestors, tell me how the plowman,
grabbing the crooked horns of his plow,
tears the barren breast of the earth;

Doa
To the devoted
My Lord

If crossing Dionysian boundaries is true poetry, then no one makes the poetry demon swoon like Douglas Kearney does. Kearney is a star-studded poet, performer, and librettist. Accolades include a Whiting Award and fellowships from Cave Canem and the Rauschenberg Foundation. Kearney has published six collections, including Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), Someone Took They Tongues (Subito, 2016), and Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press 2015). His latest poetry collection, Sho (Wave Books, April 2021), provides a kaleidoscope of splintered selves and voices. In Sho, the speakers of Kearney’s poems are at once the antagonistic tricksters who enchant you (“I aspire to be a CVS: Lord”) and at once the documenters of historical and current wrongs (“Black wench! Clipped finches’/ shrill in brass lattice.”)

I pricked her lips with the pin
she remained anesthetized
sleeping at my father’s side

How can we look at translation as art? How can a translator develop their own relationship and mode of translation based on their aspirations? What can translation simultaneously encompass and transcend?

When there was nothing else they could do and Dad was discharged, I thanked the doctors with a weak handshake. Then I went downstairs to the hospital cafeteria and stuffed my face with two servings of ravioli with tomato sauce. Mom came down a bit later and ordered a coffee, which she stirred with a spoon for what seemed like an eternity. She drank the coffee cold in a single gulp, and while signaling the waiter for the bill, she asked me to take care of the transfer arrangements. She was beyond handling things.

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.

We’ve changed. In May, it hadn’t yet happened; in May, we hadn’t come so far. But now we know how we can use the summer: to create good window seats that look out into the garden, which we seldom enter, and then only in rubber boots. And only if we have to reposition the dolls after a night of wind or rain. The largest doll that we could find rests in the hammock. If you look at it through the wrong end of the binoculars, you can deceive yourself well enough. It seems as if a child really is dangling in the net stretched between the red maple (whose leaves are enormous this year of all years!) and the eastern white pine.

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.

Speak to lightning, a memento of my beloved

—plunging into still dark—

if he remembers how he thundered me:

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.