One personâs âDocumentary Poeticsâ may overlap, to a large degree, with another personâs âPoetry of Witness.â Does it matter why? Does it matter how they differ?
Poetry Northwestâs monthly podcast series, The Subvocal Zoo, features editors and friends of the magazine interviewing poets. Episode 6 features Timothy Donnelly in conversation with Justin Boening.
Her work is agile and present, never miserable, lonely, oracular, or visionary, but even in her essay-precise oratory she acknowledges the counter-poetry, listens to it (albeit with a coldness, a Chekhovian coldness that brings me closer as a reader).
It is not that Bang rejects the challenges and responsibilities typically associated with translation, for even as she radically questions and suspends many long-held assumptions about how Dante should read in English, she does so ultimately in the hope of creating a more truthful rendering of the text. Bang discussed in her lecture how many translations of the Inferno are written in elevated, renaissance-style Englishâa trend she speculates stems from translatorsâ desire to acknowledge the poemâs age and the disparities between modern English and fourteenth-century Italian. Yet Bang argued that such piously old-fashioned renderings of the Inferno were flawed from the start, since the fourteenth-century English of Danteâs contemporaries differed drastically from the seventeenth-century Elizabethan variety favored by these translators. A truly historically accurate translation of the Inferno in this sense would have to sound a lot less like Milton or Shakespeare and a lot more like the Middle English of Chaucer.
Itâs nostalgia for the future that exhausts me.
Congratulations to Tomas Tranströmer, long-awaited and much-deserved winner of The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2011. In honor of the occasion, we’d like to make available a recent piece by the Swedish poet, originally published in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of Poetry Northwest (the “political” issue). — Haikudikter 1. The power-lines stretch through the kingdom of frost north of all music. * The white sun trains alone, running toward the blue mountain of death. * We must live with the small script of the grass and the laughter from cellars. * The sun is low now. Our enormous shadows. Soon, everything will be overtaken. 2. Orchids. Oil tankers glide past. The moon is full. 3. Medieval stronghold, alien city, cold sphinx, empty arenas. * The leaves whispered: a wild boar at the organ. And the bells rang out. * And the night pours from east to west at the speed of the moon. 4. The presence of God. In the tunnel of birdsong a locked gate opens. * Oak trees and the moon. Light and silent …
Translate: To convey to heaven without death
