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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]

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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SAY THANK YOU
Mikhail Aizenberg
From the Russian by J. Kates
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-88-7 (paper) $14.95
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5¼ x 8
136 pages [Bilingual Russian/English]

With this book, American readers are introduced to the work of an important contemporary Russian poet, whose world-view and aesthetic will seem at once welcome in its otherness and pertinently familiar. Aizenberg's poetry brings the surreal into the quotidian, is of the present moment while partaking of an urban world-view that would have been recognizable to Benjamin or Baudelaire. In J. Kates' translations, these poems have a new and discrete life in English.
—Marilyn Hacker

The young Mandelstam did not know what to do with his body. M. Aizenberg does not know what to do with his soul.
—Vladislav Kulakov

Fresh & marvelous … a philosophical innovator always pressing new thoughts out of language, each poem a repeated surprise … These poems and their skilled translations are our antennae through the darkness.
—F. D. Reeve

Mikhail Aizenberg has lived and breathed and had his being at the heart of the last generation of poets that came to maturity under the regime of the Soviet Union. He has been not only one of its most eloquent practitioners, but also its chronicler and interpreter.

In his own poetry he articulates the wildly erratic internal, personal climate of the political global warming that Russia has undergone. When the cultural history of Russia's turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century is written, the epigraphs to the chapters will be drawn from Aizenberg's verses.

He has published four books of poems and two of criticism. In English translation his poems have appeared in Russia (Glas and Hungry Russian Winter) England (Novostroika), New Zealand (Takahe) the United States (Delos, Dirty Goat, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, International Quarterly, Kenyon Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Onthebus, Plum Review, River Styx, Mr. Cogito, Salamander) and Australia (Salt) as well as in the anthologies Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1992), Crossing Centuries (Talisman, 2002), and In the Grip of Strange Thoughts (Zephyr Press, 1999) to which he also contributed an introduction.

***
Light rain falls as quietly
as the footfall of an Indian guide.
Nettles here, buckwheat there.
Who tends these? Not I, the mushroom-gatherer.

A cloud of spruce needles,
scales from a dragon,
but I see nothing, not I.
I hear nothing, not I.

I only hear, softer than a breath,
the wind blowing over me,
an alder-elder rustles
distantly beyond the stillness.

From the level pale blue sky
from a corner not so far away
an arrow has been fashioned
destined for anything alive.

Who will escape its barely
perceptible flight?
See how the invisible bird
sings like a bowstring.

***
A cicada saws the air thus
(Shakespeare reproaches it for that).
What is saying djiga-djiga—
the wind? The turn of a key?

Suddenly there is no sound.
Silk emerges from the ground.

The firmament has turned gray
pricked all over with pins.
The abyss of heaven, a passageway
Into weightless quicksilver cold.

J. Kates, poet and literary translator, lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, and in Brookline, Massachusetts. Alone and in collaboration, he has translated six books of poetry from French, Spanish and Russian, including poems by Tatiana Shcherbina, The Score of the Game (Zephyr, 2002) He also edited In the Grip of Strange Thoughts (Zephyr Press, 1999). His translations of Aizenberg's poetry are underwritten by an NEA translation grant for 2006.

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GOLDSMITH MARKET
Liliana Ursu
From the Romanian by Sean Cotter
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-79-8 (paper) $16.95
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5¼ x 8
208 pages [Bilingual Romanian/English]

These poems are luminous, numinous, they have the power to change The Black Sea with a splash of a palm into a spring. Liliana Ursu is a dancer, an archeologist of light. How she makes The Black Sea again, how she expands the places of myth is beyond grasping: your skin, your mind, your heart rejoice. Gracious, hard-edged, generous and moving.
—Tomaž Šalamun

Liliana Ursu's poems are like flowers at the edge of the abyss. They are beautifully clear and precise, but behind them one glimpses the presence of an ineradicable dark.
—Mark Strand

Ursu's book focuses on a place that is at once a literary crossroads and at the same time isolated in the Carpathian mountains. The eighty poems that make up the three sections of Goldsmith Market are all marked with the longing for travel. The first section, unnamed, presents a series of portraits and scenes, from Nobel Prize winners to busboys, all uneasy in their present place. “False Landscapes,” the second section, explores the images of the Mediterranean we receive through writers such as Sappho and Cavafy, and shows us how isolated we are from the actual places by the mythology surrounding Carthage, Lesbos, and Alexandria. In the third section, “Goldsmith Market,” Ursu follows the connections between Sibiu's history as a meeting place for poets and its contemporary location, with the same attention to distance and longing. The three sections are united by Ursu's interest in precise, provocative portraiture.

#5 Mint Street

In Alexandria a red cat
in the window of a sick poet
and books sadder than the sea under fog.

Wild dogs bark in his brain
At another window, the bourgeois dine
clinking glasses, white bones on china plates
whiter than the bones of a drowned man...

On a blue chair a flickering candle
All that remains after paying his creditors here
and in Hell.
No one whispers his name.
There is no one.

In Alexandria a red cat
in the window of a sick poet…

 

Song for the Spice Seller

Under the withered cherry tree
the spice seller counts the days
he has remaining.
Dried peppers, clove, cinnamon
amber, myrrh, the untamed musk rose.
Only the barren clink of gold keeps him warm.

“Let's put cherries, cool cherries over his ears
just for him” whisper virgins of Egina.
He who long ago stopped seeing
he who long ago stopped hearing.
Only the barren clink of gold keeps him warm.

Romanian poet Liliana Ursu was born in 1949. She was a Fulbright fellow at Pennsylvania State University in 1992 and 1997. Goldsmith Market is Liliana Ursu's third book of poetry in Romanian, and her third book to appear in English (after the two anthologies: The Sky behind the Forest [Bloodaxe] and Angel Riding a Beast [Northwestern UP]). It is also the first translation of an entire book as it appeared in Romanian. Three poems have appeared in Sean Cotter's translation in the journal Beacons, and two poems from this book were included in The Sky behind the Forest (“Rain in Sibiu” and “In the Town that Was”), both of which appeared, translated by Ursu, Adam Sorkin, and Tess Gallagher, in The New Yorker.

Sean Cotter has translated three books of Romanian poetry. He worked in Romania from 1994 to 1996 as a Peace Corps volunteer, and from 2001 to 2002 on a Fulbright-Hays research grant.

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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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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]

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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SO TRANSLATING RIVERS AND CITIES
Zhang Er
From the Chinese by Bob Holman, Arpine Konyalian Grenier, Timothy Liu, Bill Ransom, Susan Schultz and Leonard Schwartz
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-93-3 (paper) $14.00
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6 1/8 x 8
152 pages [bilingual Chinese/English]

In So Translating Rivers and Cities, Zhang Er offers a glorious scroll or map of transformations. Everywhere in these poems, the image of enchantment becomes luminous fact of enlightenment. Wisdom proceeds through the enchanted eye into pure mind, finding no obstacle, broaching no impediment. The effect is of a sudden, entirely true transparency.
—Donald Revel

Shuttle, ferry, transport, transfer, transformation, translate. And so this book goes, these are its qualities and actions as it performs our world—many landscapes. Strange tales of our tribe, like dangerous tangled scarlet kisses and fire-red slippers, are caught in these wending lines. We are shuttled between periphery and center, exploring all that might lie there—smooth ovum at center, lying in wait, reproductive; at the outskirts, the mind, a restless wind. The poems move us back and forth from past to future, future to past, always fingering an unstable and gripping present.
—Eleni Sikelianos

So Translating Rivers and Cities is a bilingual selection of work from Zhang Er's three most recent Chinese manuscripts. As with her previous Zephyr book, Verses on Bird, an intriguing aspect of this project is the list of translators involved in the project—among them Bob Holman, Timothy Liu, Susan Schultz and Leonard Schwartz—all well-known poets and critics. Their participation is necessary in capturing the multiple layers of Er's work throughout her varied poetic sequences.

Zhang Er was born in Beijing, China and moved to New York City in 1986. Her writings of poetry, non-fiction, and essays have appeared in publications in Taiwan, China, the American émigré community and in a number of American journals. She is the author of multiple books in Chinese and in English translation. She has read from her work at international festivals, conferences, reading series and universities in China, France, Portugal, Russia, Peru, Singapore, Hong Kong as well as in the U.S. She currently teaches at The Evergreen State College in Washington.

Bob Holman's eighth book, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, a collaboration with Chuck Close, was published in 2003. He was a founder of Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, the first major label devoted to poetry. He is Chief Curator of the People's Poetry Gathering, Poetry Guide at About.com, and Proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club (bowerypoetry.com). He was recently appointed Visiting Professor of Writing at Columbia University, and received the 2003 Barnes & Noble “Writers for Writers” Award.

Arpine Konyalian Grenier, author of St. Gregory's Daughter and Whores of Samarkand, is a graduate of the American University of Beirut and the MFA Program at Bard College, New York. Her work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Phoebe, and Kiosk.

Timothy Liu's first book of poems, Vox Angelica (Alice James Books, 1992), received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His subsequent books of poems are Burnt Offerings (Copper Canyon Press, 1995) Say Goodnight (Copper Canyon Press, 1998), and Hard Evidence (Talisman House, 2001). Tenured at William Paterson University, Liu lives in Manhattan.

Bill Ransom has published six novels and six collections of poems, including Finding True North from Copper Canyon Press, which was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His novel Jaguar was recently re-released by Wildside Press. He is a member of the faculty at The Evergreen State College.

Susan M. Schultz is the author of multiple poetry and essay collections, most recently And Then Something Happened (Salt, 2004) and A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Alabama, 2005). She edited The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (Alabama, 1995). She founded Tinfish Press, which publishes a journal and chapbooks featuring experimental work from the Pacific. Schultz is Professor of English at the University f Hawai`i-Manoa.

Leonard Schwartz is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Ear and Ethos and The Tower of Diverse Shores (Talisman House). He is also the author of a collection of essays A Flicker At The Edge Of Things: Essays on Poetics 1987-1997 (Spuyten Duyvil) and co-editor of two anthologies of contemporary American poetry: Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and An Anthology of New(American) Poets ( both from Talisman House). He teaches at The Evergreen State College in Washington.

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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]

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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RUSSIAN POETRY IN A NEW ERA

IN THE GRIP OF STRANGE THOUGHTS:
RUSSIAN POETRY IN A NEW ERA
Edited by J. Kates
ISBN 0-939010-56-9 (paper), $19.95
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ISBN 0-939010-57-7 (cloth), $30.00
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6 x 9
444 pages
Cover painting by Eric Bulatov
118 poems by 32 contemporary poets
Bilingual on facing pages
Annotated for the general reader
Introduction and afterword on translation by J. Kates
Biographical notes on poets and translators

In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era is a Russian and English bilingual edition of thirty-two contemporary poets writing amidst the upheaval of the Russian 1990s. The collection conveys a sense of the profound freedom and energy of a unique moment in Russian history, as well as the diversity of experience in the years before and since. Edited by poet and translator J. Kates and with a foreword by poet Mikhail Aizenberg, the collection includes poems written long before 1990 but which could not be published, and those of more recent vintage. These thirty-two poets represent a phenomenal range of styles and perspectives. Beginning with the poet and popular songwriter Bulat Okudzhava, who started accompanying his poems on his guitar in the 1950s, the anthology includes poets whose work is deeply rooted in established conventions, avant gardists experimenting with new forms, and adherents of Russian free verse.

In the Grip of Strange Thoughts is an enjoyable and admirable work. Its thirty-two poets show a tremendous thematic and stylistic range, but are united in their feeling for the vitality of language.
—The Times Literary Supplement

This book is an absolute gift to students and lovers of poetry.
—British East-West Journal, September 1999

Kates's commentary on various approaches to translating Russian poetry will be especially illuminating to the anglophone readers for whom the volume is intended. With its range of reverberating voices, the present title will be welcomed by Russian- and English-speaking readers of contemporary poetry.
—N. Tittler, Choice, October 1999

It is exceedingly rare to come across a collection of contemporary Russian poetry, and even more so with the original in Cyrillic en face. Taking up In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era is just such an experience, and not less so given the quality of the translations.
—Publishers Weekly, February 1999

The range of subject and of mood is as great as that of style, and printing the Russian originals as well as the translations increases the potential audience for the book and lets English-only readers see when rhymed Russian becomes unrhymed English.
—Ray Olson, Booklist, March 1999