Selected poetry from verbal acrobat

LIONS AND ACROBATS
Anatoly Naiman
From the Russian by Frank Reeve and Margo Shohl Rosen
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-82-8 (paper) $14.95
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5½ x 8
150 pages

Anatoly Genrikovich Naiman, poet, novelist, critic and literary translator, was born in 1936 into a family of followers of Tolstoy. Having studied as an engineer, he became one of the Leningrad group of young poets (including his friend Joseph Brodsky) around Anna Akhmatova, whose literary secretary he became from 1962 until her death in 1966, and about whom he wrote the invaluable and popular memoir, Remembering Anna Akhmatova. In 2001 two of his novels (most recently Sir in 2001) was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize.

Naiman’s work as critic, memoirist, and translator (of Leopardi, Provençal poets, and T. S. Eliot, among others) has often eclipsed his own poetry. Lions and Acrobats—a selection of work from his first four books of poetry in Russian—displays, for the first time in English, the full breadth of Naiman’s poetic output.

Anatoly Naiman has been a fellow at Oxford University and at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center and has lectured on Russian literature at a host of universities in Europe and America.

F. D. Reeve is a poet, a scholar, an anthologist, and the author of a dozen books of translation from Russian and reportage on Russian affairs, including Five Short Novels by Turgenev, the two-volume Anthology of Russian Plays, The Garden (poems by Bella Akhmadulina), and Robert Frost in Russia, which was also published by Zephyr Press.

Margo Shohl Rosen, poet and translator, is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University’s Department of Slavic Languages Her translations have been published in the London Review of Books and the Mississippi Review. Her own poetry has appeared in Oktiabr’. In 2004 she was co-winner of the Slavic Department’s Pushkin Prize for best poetry translation.

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THE DIVING BELL
Elena Ignatova
From the Russian by Sibelan Forrester
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-85-2 (paper) $14.95
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5¼ x 8
144 pages [bilingual Russian/English]
April 2006

Elena Ignatova was born in Leningrad in 1947. She became an artistic dissident with regard to the hopelessly compromised literary establishment, but never joined the more alienated literary “underground.” She published in samizdat until the appearance of her only officially recognized book, Teplaia zemliia (The Warm Earth) in 1989. In 1990, Ignatova and her family moved to Israel, where she has worked as a screenwriter of cultural documentaries. 

Her poetry exists in a tense balance between her former life in Russia, particularly in the St. Petersburg that was Leningrad, and her subsequent life and its perspectives in Jerusalem. In the last decade it contrasts the new, ancient environs of Jerusalem, described as crystalline and thus distinct from St. Petersburg’s characteristic granite, a more chaotically igneous material. 

Ignatova says, “I am convinced that art is active:  it can reflect the destruction of the world, of the historical connections of eras, of the human soul—or, on the contrary, can strengthen those connections. I have always wanted to write about the internal connection, the harmony of the world even in difficult times, about the connection of the past with our own fates, about Russia, about the connections of spaces: of the world of the Russian village, where I passed my childhood, of St. Petersburg and the Holy Land.”

Ignatova’s work mobilizes remnants of old poetic solemnity, religious, official or even folk locutions, along with Soviet officialese and conversational vocabulary. Her earlier poetry tends to be formally looser and more experimental, but her mature work is much more classical. Thus, her distinctive voice feels familiar, or better, familial, to a reader who knows her predecessors:  she consciously continues their tradition in this and other ways. Her work draws attention to the tragic disharmony between the way things are and the way they should be. Russian history flashes a dark side from the days of Prince Igor or the Mongol invasions, through the oprichniki of Ivan the Terrible, to the Revolution, the Second World War, and beyond. Recent poems reflect current realities from Chernobyl to the current wars in Asia.

Poetry then is the “diving bell” of her title, protecting the poet as well as her readers in a hostile, often toxic environment. It becomes a source of values and ways to approach and understand experience, while still depicting the flaws and compromises of human beings who live in an imperfect world.

Sibelan Forrester translates from Russian, Serbian and Croatian. She is an associate professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Swarthmore College.

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SALT MONODY
Marzanna Kielar
From the Polish by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-86-0 (paper) $14.95
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5¼ x 8
128 pages [bilingual Polish/English]
April 2006

Marzanna Kielar’s systematic investigations of the North (of Poland) resemble concentrated expansions of homelands into the poetic universes of Elizabeth Bishop, Tomas Tranströmer and Eugenio Montale—not surprisingly the authors most important to Kielar. For someone who lists Understanding Glaciers as her favorite non-poetry book, the precise terminology of earth science naturally counterpoints the impressionist re-creation of landscape that occurs time and again in her poems. Stone formations, glacial types, kinds of waves, river shapes—they all have their own, peculiar names: crag, surging glacier, breaker, oxbow. Her recent poems (placed towards the end of this non-chronological selection) frequently take advantage of this peculiarity. The terms testify to the acuteness of Kielar’s focus as well as to the persistence of her exploration.

Unlike Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz, Kielar does not comment on Poland’s past or present. Like so many other young Polish poets who started to publish after 1989, she no longer needs to: confronting history and the state has finally become an aesthetic choice rather than a poet’s moral obligation.

Marzanna Kielar (b.1963, Goldap), a graduate in Philosophy from Warsaw University, works at the College of Special Needs Education in Warsaw and co-operates with the literary magazine Krasnogruda. She has published two collections of poetry and has received the Kazimiera Illakowiczówna Prize for the best debut of the year, and the Kocielski Foundation Prize; she has been nominated for the NIKE Prize.

Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese teaches translation and contemporary literature in English at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She co-edits Przekladaniec, a journal of literary translation; her translations of contemporary Polish poets have appeared in numerous journals, and the Zephyr anthology Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird.

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A BILINGUAL ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY POLISH POETRY

CARNIVOROUS BOY CARNIVOROUS BIRD
Selected by Marcin Baran
Edited by Anna Skucińska
and Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-72-0 (paper) $19.95
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6 x 9
336 pages [bilingual Polish/English]

Since the lyric beginnings of Polish poetry, writers have been burdened with duties typically delegated to politicians, soldiers, priests or journalists. The political, social and cultural changes of the last decade have allowed Polish poets to cast off these burdens, and focus instead on individual expression and varied aesthetic movements. Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird focuses on the core group of this movement—poets born between 1958-1969.

…in a constant confusion of mystification and authenticity, distance and directness, representational skepticism and mimetic euphoria, game-playing and honesty, the poets presented here perform their informal, singular duties towards language and the human condition.
—from the introduction by Marcin Baran

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DARKNESS SPOKEN: COLLECTED POEMS OF INGEBORG BACHMANN
Ingeborg Bachmann
From the German by Peter Filkins
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-84-4 (paper) $24.95
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5½ x 8¼
688 pages [bilingual German/English]
March 2006

Darkness Spoken gathers together Bachmann’s two celebrated books of poetry, as well as the early and late poems not collected in book form. This new, expanded edition contains 129 poems recently released from Bachmann’s archives and which have never before been translated. Twenty-five of these also appear in German in this bilingual edition for the first time anywhere. The addition of these new poems will help expand awareness of Bachmann’s development as a writer, as well as the fact that she continued to write poetry throughout her career, even while developing the ideas for her groundbreaking novels. Just as Bachmann’s Malina sought to expand the possibilities of the novel, Darkness Spoken contains the bedrock of a vision as far reaching as it is indelible, and as uncompromising as it is bound to hope. Through translation of the poems, scholarly notes, and a critical introduction, this volume will supply the foundation necessary to draw attention to Bachmann’s achievement on the part of readers and critics alike.

Ingeborg Bachmann was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria. She studied philosophy at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna, where she wrote her dissertation on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In 1953 she received the poetry prize from Gruppe 47 for her first volume, Borrowed Time (Die gestundete Zeit), after which there followed her second collection, Invocation of the Great Bear (Anrufung des großen Bären), in 1956. Bachmann also went on to write short stories, essays, opera libretti, and novels, including The Thirtieth Year, Malina, and The Book of Franza. At the time of her death in a fire in Rome in 1973, Bachmann was at work on a cycle of novels titled Todesarten (Ways of Dying), of which Malina was the first published volume.

Along with her close friend Paul Celan, Bachmann was considered the premiere German language poet of her generation. Her various awards include the Georg Büchner Prize, the Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Award, and the Austrian State Prize for literature. Her work remains highly influential to this day, and she is now regarded as a pioneer of European feminism and postwar literature. Influencing numerous writers from Thomas Bernhard to Christa Wolf, Bachmann’s poetic investigation into the nature and limits of language in the face of history remains unmatched in its ability to combine philosophical insight with haunting lyricism.

Peter Filkins has published two volumes of poetry, What She Knew (1998) and After Homer (2002), and has translated Bachmann’s The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. He is the recipient of an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association, and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches at Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

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Personal epic from Taiwanese poet and calligrapher

DRIFTWOOD
Lo Fu
From the Chinese by John Balcom
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-83-6 (paper) $16.95
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5¼ x 8½
200 pages

Traces of Rilke are unearthed in Lo Fu’s long poem sequence, Driftwood, along with his affection for surrealism and the early modernists such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and the more contemporary verse of Wallace Stevens. On New Year’s Day 2001, the poem appeared in the literary supplement to the Liberty Times in Taiwan and was serialized for three months straight. Lo Fu has won almost every literary award in Taiwan and has published more than three-dozen volumes of poetry, essays, criticism, and translations. Despite his prolific output, Lo Fu considers Driftwood to be the book that sums up his experience of exile, his artistic explorations, and his metaphysics; Driftwood is a personal epic and the greatest achievement of his old age.

Lo Fu is the pen name of Mo Luofu, who was born in Hengyan, Hunan Province, in 1928. He joined the military during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and moved to Taiwan in 1949. While stationed in southern Taiwan in 1954, he founded the Epoch Poetry Society with Zhang Mo and Ya Xian, serving as the editor of the Epoch Poetry Quarterly for more than a decade. He immigrated to Vancouver in 1996, where he still lives.

John Balcom has translated more than a dozen books into English from Chinese. He is Associate Professor and Chinese Program Head at the Monterey Institute. Balcom previously collaborated with Lo Fu on the translation of his book of poetry Death of a Stone Cell (Taoran Press).