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FOUR WAY REVIEW

TWO POEMS by Ashraf Zaghal trans. Ghada Mourad (from ARABIC)

Tuesday, 15 November 2022 by Ashraf Zaghal

Halloween

Scene 1
Scarves fly
As if a tribe of ghosts carry them to the sky
They fly and land with sin on my neighbor’s head
My neighbor knows neither their names
Nor hers

Scene 2
Scarves run toward the angels
The angels are unusually black
It’s said to be a costume party
It’s said to be a cheerful consolation
Of the deceased who is in the well

Two ghosts are guarding the well

Scene 3
Shoes are set up on the wall according to the angels’ wishes
“Vanilla scented angels”
Shouts the shoe seller
Who was also selling the prayer to enter the ceremony

Scene 4
Who are you?
Satan said when he saw them coming out of the well
Who are we?
They said
When they slaughtered him



A Poet

When a poet dies
His arm goes to a rose he did not pick
The rose becomes pregnant with a word the poet coveted
Then she throws her newborn in the hand of another poet

When a poet dies
His eyes go to the tattoo of a woman in a remote nightclub
His eyes kiss the tattoo and throw their tears in this woman’s desire
The woman’s desire is now in the eye of another poet

When a poet dies
His head goes to a silver plate in Salome’s hand
Salome covers his head with seven handkerchiefs
And a pain borne by the head of another poet

When a poet dies
His feet go into the house of condolences
He drinks coffee and shakes hands with the mourners
While thinking he is at the funeral of another poet

When a poet dies
His chest goes to a war he much wished for
His chest drinks the stabs like an old wrestler, and he dies often
Because the one who writes his death is another poet

 

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Ghada Mourad holds a PhD in comparative literature with emphasis in translation studies from the University of California, Irvine. She translates from Arabic and French into English. Her translations have been published in Asymptote, Banipal, The Literary Review, Metamorphoses, Transference, A Gathering of the Tribes, English Pen, Denver Quarterly, Two Lines, Arablit, among others.

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  • Published in ISSUE 25, Translation
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WHEN OTHER PEOPLE ARE WRITING POEMS by Oh Kyu-won trans. Jack Jung (from KOREAN)

Tuesday, 15 November 2022 by Oh Kyu-won

Sleep does not come for many nights. 
Today I waited for my unclosing eyes again
and sleep fell asleep first and sleep’s clothes and shoes
and door talisman went to sleep too
I alone lowered my gaze and watched sleep
who was sleeping without me.

Exhausted sleep collapsed beside me and curled its body
and snored ever so lightly.
Where is my sleep.
My sleep might be shuffling outside my door now and again 
before it returns to where it comes from
because I hear crumbling sand.
The fact that I am writing my poems when others are theirs
is really an embarrassment
my jolted poems making strange noises

and sleep will not come. Who sleeps my sleep
who won’t come to me.
Other’s sleep is sleep’s peace and
my sleep is sleep’s death and
other’s sleep is sleep’s dream and
my sleep is sleep’s reality and
my sleep for my sake
cried and cried where did it go.

 

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Jack Jung is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books 2020), the winner of 2021 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. He currently teaches at Davidson College.

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  • Published in ISSUE 25, Translation
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FROM NORTH by Baek Seok trans. Jack Jung (from KOREAN)

Monday, 14 November 2022 by Baek Sok

Once upon a time I left behind
The tribes of Buyeo and Suksin and Balhae and Yeojin and Yo and Geum
And Heungahnryeong and Eumsan and Amoowooreu and Soonggari
I betrayed the tiger the deer and the raccoon
And lied to the trout the catfish and the frog I left them behind

At the time
remember how the birch and the larch grieved
I have not forgotten the reed and the beewort pleading with me to stay
And how the Orochon tribe hunted a hog and held for me a departing feast
And how the Solon tribe followed me for ten miles and wept I have not forgotten

At the time
No sorrow or grief weighed me down I could beat them
I came lazily to the distant south
And under the warm sun I dressed in white and ate smooth food
And drank sweet spring and took midday naps

At nights I woke surprised by the distant howling of dogs
During days I bowed down to every passing person
But I did not know my shame

During that time the stone was broken and gold and silver were buried beneath earth
The crow too gave birth to a long line of lineage
And after all this when a new day rose once upon a time
I was chased down by sorrow and grief that I truly could not beat
And I returned to the old sky the land – back to my placenta 

But now the sun is old the moon is pale the wind is insane a wedge cloud
Alone soullessly floats around

O my ancestors my brothers my family my sweet neighbors my longing
My love my worship my pride my strength are no more
They have passed together with the winds and the waters and the years they are gone

 

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Jack Jung is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books 2020), the winner of 2021 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. He currently teaches at Davidson College.

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  • Published in ISSUE 25, Translation
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[UNTITLED] by Vladislav Hristov trans. Katerina Stoykova (from BULGARIAN)

Monday, 14 November 2022 by Vladislav Hristov

the mobilizing of the troops

coincided with the amassing 

of numerous migrating birds

only magpies crows and vultures

will winter here

sparrows titmouses finches

and the rest of the feathered ones

will seek the path to their salvation

some will become too attached to people

others will live in holes and shelters

in both cases

nobody again will call them

birds

 

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Katerina Stoykova is the author of several award-winning poetry books in English and Bulgarian, as well as the Senior Editor of Accents Publishing. Her latest book, Second Skin (ICU, 2018, Bulgarian) received the Vanya Konstantinova biannual national poetry award, as well as a grant from the European Commission’s program Creative Europe for translation and publication in English. Katerina acted in the lead roles for the independent feature films Proud Citizen and Fort Maria, both directed by Thom Southerland. Her poems have been translated into German, Spanish, Ukrainian, Bangla, Farsi, and a volume of her selected poems, translated into Arabic by acclaimed poet Khairi Hamdan, was published in Arabic from Dar Al Biruni press in 2022.

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  • Published in ISSUE 25, Translation
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from HOW DARK MY SKIN IS LEFT BY HER SHADOW by Beatriz Miralles de Imperial trans. Layla Benitez-James (from SPANISH)

Monday, 14 November 2022 by Beatriz Miralles de Imperial Ollero

a poem
where I shatter self 
where I say no

*

no:
no offering
no trembling
no hands
no thirst
no telling
now more

*

no
no longer
this broken language

*

empty of you
these hands
dry pail

*

I am a silent river
for her to pass through 
and unknow her skin
on the water’s skin 
her body inscribed onto mine

*

you’ve left no space for your absence 
in these hands
nothing survives you

 

TRANSLATOR BIO: 

Layla Benitez-James is a 2022 NEA fellow in translation, a 2022/23 National Book Critics Circle Fellow, and the author of God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode but He Had to Make Sure, selected by Major Jackson for Cave Canem’s 2017 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. As Director of Literary Outreach for the Unamuno Author Series in Madrid, she edited its poetry festival anthology, Desperate Literature. Poems and essays are published in Modern Poetry in Translation, Black Femme Collective, Virginia Quarterly Review, Latino Book Review, Poetry London, and forthcoming in Poetry Magazine. Layla received an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston and has published reviews with Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books.

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  • Published in ISSUE 25, Translation
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THREE POEMS by Bronka Nowicka trans. Katarzyna Szuster (from POLISH)

Monday, 14 November 2022 by Bronka Nowicka

INCALCULABILITY 

Things and people often disappear at night, so in the morning you account for yourself with the help of your hand. See if you have incurred losses of yourself. There are ten toes on your feet, five in each flock. None should be missing from the herd. Your eyes are in your head, tucked in alone on each side of your face. Two knees, elbows and two clavicles. The twinless tongue lies in its burrow. One mouth, though cracked in half. Close it when you’re done counting. “I still have me” – affirm and write the result on a paper slip. Or admit: “I have lost my mind.”

 

 

CALCULATION

One is a human, alone under their skin. Ask the foreman what one means – he will point to himself. He also knows what two is: a sparrow’s wings, a pair of shoes, eyes. Human hands: a measure of duality hanging by the sides. Anything they both take at one time means two. Two has its own weight, can be grasped. Immediately after two begins a lot. Far too many: fingers, hair, years. It is difficult for the foreman to tell how much he has. So he does not count and remains incalculable.

 

 

ILLUSION

Apprentice: How is the illusion created?
Foreman: You employ word machines and kaleidoscopes. 
Apprentice: Is the item big?
Foreman: Not very, but stretchy.
Apprentice: What is it?
Foreman: Imaginary in the back of life. A box theater.
Apprentice: And the repertoire?
Foreman: Light. You can’t hear existential refrains. 
Apprentice: What else is not there?
Foreman: Death preliminaries. Just mirabilia, skullduggery of welfare.
Apprentice: Isn’t that a burden?
Foreman: Yes, because there’s no growth.
Apprentice: Why?
Foreman: It’s not real.
Apprentice: Who visits this place?
Foreman: The ones mistakenly in love.

 

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi is a translator. She earned her M.A. in English studies from the University of Lodz, Poland. She has translated various Polish poets into English, such as Miron Białoszewski, Justyna Bargielska, Bronka Nowicka, and Hanna Janczak. Recently, she co-translated Kim Yideum’s Hysteria into Polish. She also rendered Don Mee Choi’s poems into Polish in the collection Odmiany Łapania Tchu[Variants of Catching Breath]. Her newest translations of poems and essays have been published in Conjunctions, Circumference, Hunger Mountain Review, Sextant Review, Denver Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Tripwire, LIT, Berlin Quarterly, and Seedings. Photo Credit: Marta Zgrajka

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  • Published in ISSUE 25, Translation
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AND WHAT HAPPENS IF I WANT TO NAME EVERYTHING?, ASKS THE FEMALE DISCIPLE by Mayra Santos-Febres trans. Seth Michelson (from SPANISH)

Monday, 14 November 2022 by Mayra Santos-Febres

what happens if i want to speak children
say beloved
embrace this solitude?

the signs will kill you, warn far-sighted voices,
the parallel paths of the law will kill you

many women have tried and failed
their names are the names of names

they come from everywhere
are written in every tongue
sing from every tribe of the species 

the voices say the only answer is giving up

the utopian solitude of the amazons
alone in a room

the perpetual battle of the wise woman turned to witch
and ash
or the scribe alone defending her parchment from the fire

old women sing the secret litany of their daughters

Sei Shōnagon
Murakami
Scheherezade, who obtained the prize of silence and love
by defeating predation with her song
Hypatia
Rosalinda
abbess von Bingen
the heretic monk Juana,
Teresa, Alfonsina, Pizarnik,
the strange Gabriela del Rocío,
María Luisa Bombal, Julia, Ángela

the list is long

giving-up, ever so small, the giving-up,

or you choose love, the tiny homeland of the house

or you choose the broad land of words.

 

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Seth Michelson is a poet, translator, and professor of poetry at Washington and Lee University, where he founded and directs the Center for Poetic Research. He has published 18 books of original poetry in English and in Spanish, poetry in translation, and the anthology Dreaming America: Voices of Undocumented Youth in Maximum-Security Detention. His many honors include fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, and the Lenfest Foundation, as well as prizes from Split This Rock, the International Book Awards, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the American Studies Association

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  • Published in ISSUE 25, Translation
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from RED MELANCHOLIA by Helena Boberg trans. Johannes Göransson (from SWEDISH)

Monday, 14 November 2022 by Helena Boberg

They have grabbed me     opened up

cut loose     reshaped my nature

spared a cypher from being extinguished

begun a protracted illness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The room tightened

brought my life sphere

one step closer to my body

underneath     was a blind area





 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As if I voluntarily donated

my silent tissue to these violent 

cells    entrusted me as a mother ship

host animal    for endgames and destruction





 

 

 

 

 

 

The I function     non-sovereign in this drama

why talk about function     as if I

with language     could control      these whispering

crystal spores     mythological stalactites

without intent     or anthropomorphic characteristics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Melancholic pursuit of pleasure

eats up the time

I should spellbind     dusk

which always starts over





 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If only     the magical organs

were here     capable of

placing me     in the orbit     that

refines all organic material

 

 

 

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Johannes Göransson is the author of nine books of poetry and criticism, most recently Summer (2022), and the translator of several books of poetry, including works by Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund, Kim Yideum, and, most recently, Eva Kristina Olsson’s The Angelgreen Sacrament (Black Square Editions, 2021). His poems, translations and critical writings have appeared in a wide array of journals in the US and abroad, including Fence, Lana Turner, Spoon River Review, Modern Poetry in Translation (UK), Kritiker (Denmark) and Lyrikvännen (Sweden). He is a professor in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame and one of the editors of Action Books.

 

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  • Published in ISSUE 25, Translation
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Rajiv Mohabir: FROM “SWAGGERMAN, FLYMOUTH” A DEVIANT TRANSLATION

Monday, 14 June 2021 by Rajiv Mohabir

Introduction by Rajiv Mohabir:

The poems that follow are from a forthcoming manuscript. These poems are a type of translation of a Caribbean chutney song called “Na Manu” by the Surnamese singer Bidjwanti Chaitoe Rekhan in the early 1960s.

The song “Na Manoo Na Manoo Re” from the 1961 Bollywood film Gunga Jamuna in which Lata Mangeshkar sings a song of similar lyrics may have been an inspiration to the Sarnami Hindustani song of Bidjwanti Chaitoe Rekhan. 

Still, adding more layers and complications, is this song, remade by Babla and Kanchan– a duo from India who took Caribbean songs and remade them for worldwide distribution in the 1980s– that was very popular in my family and the community of Guyanese and Caribbean Indians that we interreacted with in Orlando, New York City, and Toronto, so my move to translate them is one that is intimate given my own linguistic history of erasure and reclamation. This is the version that I grew up dancing to, knowing it intimately in the twisting of my body in feral dance.

What is remarkable about each remake and each rebranding is the change in lyrics and instrumentation, translated each time to fit the contexts of the viewers/singers/dancers/audience. To start with the Surinamese version, the regularization in Rekhan’s lyrics allows for a predictable structure that is easily replicable, though it maintains the play and irony of the original. I keep the play and irony of the original in mind as I work through the various pieces in this section of the translation process I am presenting here.

The process that I use to translate this song I’m calling “deviant:” these are deviant translations. I want to destabilize language and the ideas around final realization and “arrival”, in order to resist stasis and provide space for all of the queer slippages of language and their worldviews in their very particular speech communities. When I was younger these songs in Hindustani would be translated into a Creole iteration with a different poetic orientation. The English interpretations were up to me. All of the poems are retranslations of retranslations of retranslations in and out of Guyanese Hindustani, Guyanese Creole, and English. In this way I envision each incarnation as a possible emanation from the text as even the idea of primacy and the original are dubious. I approach each iteration with a different idea of what I want to communicate: what affective dimension is available in the language that has similar resonances throughout while not always being literal. What are the affective hauntings of these lyrics, languages, and musics? This is the central question driving my experiment.

I’m also obsessed with Creole and Bhojpuri indeterminacies in English and the ways these languages use grief, humor, and joy in differing ways. Using Guyanese Bhojpuri, English, and Guyanese Creole, the deviant translation is nonbinary and ever migrating. (In live performances of these songs, performers sing as the spirit moves them with lexical fluidity an incarnation of their own creative magic). What results are translations that are not translations as such in that there is no resting place but rather motion with the deviant driving the multiple crossings.


https://fourwayreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/From-Swaggerman-Fly-mouth.m4a


From “Swaggerman, Fly-mouth” A Deviant Translation

 

       Swaggerman, fly-mouth
       what is true?

       I take in the raven moon’s glow
       so when you deny me 
       I’m still opalescent.

       Why veil this shine
       for a liar’s night, a mind
       wipe serum?

       My churas are not shackles—
       It’s morning and I’m gilded.

*

Things Not to Forget in the Morning (Liar Though You Be)

       moonlight moonlit night full moon light

       my veil with kinaras of gold

             golddupattagold
             golddupattagold
             golddupattagold
             golddupattagold
             golddupattagold
             golddupattagold
             golddupattagold
             golddupattagold
             golddupattagold
             golddupattagold
             golddupattagold
             golddupattagold
             golddupattagold
             golddupattagold
             golddupattagold 

       my silver bera

*

 

a song from laborer to recruiter is that why it is so sonorous and resonantly all these years later summoning the ghosts of tide and bond how even as the language receded from us like a tide coolies couldn’t release still can’t let fly this story or rather it possessed us in the dance halls as soca chutney a music salve for the pain of forgetting for getting into the boats and we are haunted by the memory of a promise of return but it wasn’t about the physical return but a return to wholeness-as-India that our masters and owners reneged on denying generations any passage not rum-doused and sun-scorched is this why we dance so fiercely in the moonlight is this

*

What part of me is memory?
The skin and muscle, 
neuron and fat—? 

Don’t believe in god.
It’s a mean lie to lay you down
to strip you of cloth and gem. 

You are not headed any place
but into the ocean as cremains

and pearls of bones
not quite machine smashed.

Did you forget? Is it beautiful
this morning where you think you are?

*

       चूड़ा बीढा काढ़ा

       काँगन बाँगल जिंगल

                  चान्दी की चान्दनी जइसन

       दुपट्टा चुनरी ओढ़नी

       निक़ाब परदा रूमाल

                 बदन की बदनिया जइसन

*

       Look. Wha’ me know me go tell yuh
       De man come 
                   an’ tief all me ting dem

       ‘E come cana me 
       an’ talk suh lie-lie talk
       an’ me been haunted

                   fe lie dung 
       whe’ ‘e put de ordhni

       But wha’ matti hable see a night?

       Come daylight 
                   dopahariya 
       ‘e na remembah

       me na me bangle, 
       how de moon a shine,

       O gas—
             how de moon been a shine

* 

       Sugar floss melts in dew
       forgets its thread’s any spun yarn

       So what thing is moonlight
       who deposits amnesia

       for even a woven veil
       to dissolve from your memory

       despite my ornaments
       exquisite and golden forged

       all lost in the ephemeral jewels
       globes of hundreds of tiny suns 

       bending grass leaves
       into pranam which is both 

       greeting and leave taking

        

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  • Published in home, Monthly, Translation
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THE CITY by Helwig Brunner, translated by Monika Zobel

Monday, 15 April 2013 by Four Way Review

Die Stadt zu Linien vereinfacht,
abgeschminkt das eigene Gesicht.
Häuser, Schritte und Gedanken
sind aus demselben Material,
Grafitstaub und Diamanten.
Die Zeit steht, senkt deine Lider,
um einmal jetzt zu sein, inmitten
der schlafenden Welt, hellsichtig
zugewandt den tappenden Fragen
der Somnambulen.

 

Helwig Brunner‘s work has been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies in Europe and elsewhere, including New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008). Brunner has published eight books of poetry, most recently Vorläufige Tage (Leykam Verlag, 2011) and Die Sicht der Dinge: Rätselgedichte (edition keiper, 2012), as well as some novels, short stories, and essays. He has been the recipient of several literary prizes in Austria and Germany.

 

 

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The city simplified to lines,
makeup removed from your face.
Houses, footsteps, and thoughts
are made of the same material,
graphite dust and diamonds.
Time stalls, lowers your lids,
to be now for once in the midst of
a sleeping world, clear-sighted
turned toward the groping questions
of the somnambulists.

 

Monika Zobel‘s poems and translations have been published in Redivider, The Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, Mid-American Review, The Adirondack Review, Guernica Magazine, West Branch, Best New Poets 2010, and elsewhere. A senior editor at The California Journal of Poetics and recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, she currently lives in Vienna, Austria. 

 

 

 

Helwig BrunnerMonika ZobelThe City
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  • Published in Issue 3, Poetry, Translation
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ECHOLOCATION: AERIAL SCRIPT by Helwig Brunner, translated by Monika Zobel

Monday, 15 April 2013 by Four Way Review

Echolot. Luftlinienschrift

Die Fledermäuse, an ihre Laute gedacht,
unhörbar, das Horchen also hinein in eine
Stille, die keine ist; sie ziehn den Blick
in den Dämmerhimmel, das Zickzack ihres
Flatterfluges, samtpelzige Beinahvögel,
die mit den Ohren schaun: Bilder hören.
Wenig später sind sie entzogen, entflogen
hinter die schwarze Jalousie der Nacht,
gesättigt an den Blindstellen des Echos
und ich denke sehr banal, wie wenig ich
auslote mit Worten.

 

Helwig Brunner‘s work has been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies in Europe and elsewhere, including New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008). Brunner has published eight books of poetry, most recently Vorläufige Tage (Leykam Verlag, 2011) and Die Sicht der Dinge: Rätselgedichte (edition keiper, 2012), as well as some novels, short stories, and essays. He has been the recipient of several literary prizes in Austria and Germany.

 

 

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Echolocation: Aerial Script

The bats, reflecting on their sounds,
inaudible, thus eavesdropping on a
silence, which is none; they drag the gaze
through the twilight sky, the zigzag of their
flutter flight, satin-fur nearly birds
that see with their ears: listen to images.
A little later they diminish, vanish
behind the black blinds of night,
satiated by the blind spots of the echo
and I think how little I sound out
with trite words.

 

Monika Zobel‘s poems and translations have been published in Redivider, The Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, Mid-American Review, The Adirondack Review, Guernica Magazine, West Branch, Best New Poets 2010, and elsewhere. A senior editor at The California Journal of Poetics and recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, she currently lives in Vienna, Austria. 

 

 

 

 

EcholocationHelwig BrunnerMonika Zobel
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  • Published in Issue 3, Poetry, Translation
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JANUARY by Sara Uribe, translated by Toshiya Kamei

Tuesday, 15 January 2013 by Toshiya Kamei

ENERO

 

en las calles hay testigos que juran haberme visto caminar por ciertos sitios dicen que vivo ahí del otro lado de la palabra que tengo un jardín donde en lugar de flores todas las noches siembro olvido pero no los conozco y no sé si mienten o si la memoria es un rostro un ojo de murmullos que nos sigue y nos acecha cuando los días son más oscuros y la vida apenas comienza

 

On the above left, listen to the original version of “January”…

 

Sara Uribe was born in 1978 in Querétaro, Mexico. She is the author of Lo que no imaginas (2004), Palabras más palabras menos (2006), and Nunca quise detener el tiempo (2007). English translations of her poems have appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Harpur Palate, and So to Speak, among others.

 

JANUARY

 

on the streets there are witnesses who swear they have seen me walk around certain places they say I live beyond the other side of the word that I have a garden where instead of flowers every night I sow oblivion but I don’t know them and don’t know if they lie or if memory is a face an eye of murmurs that follows us and lies in wait when days are darker and life barely begins

 

 

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Four Way ReviewJanuarySara UribeToshiya Kamei
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  • Published in Issue 2, Poetry, Translation
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