{"title":"Martin Bennett","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"modern-poetry-in-translation-series-3-no4-between-the-languages","title":"Modern Poetry in Translation (Series 3 No.4) Between the Languages","description":"\u003ci\u003eBetween the Languages\u003c\/i\u003e is concerned with questions of language and identity. It features work by Itzik Manger, Dimitris Tsaloumas, Gwyneth Lewis … Poets whose mother tongue is itself an issue.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlso poems by \u003cb\u003eBrecht\u003c\/b\u003e on exile.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBetween the Languages\u003c\/i\u003e focuses on poets who, by choice or by force of circumstances, move among the languages. Must a poet write in the mother tongue? Will a second language serve just as well? We look at poets who translate themselves. Others who might but won’t. Others who defend their mother tongues by refusing all translation. Highlights include the poetry of Dimitris Tsaloumas, who moves between Melbourne and Leros, and Itzig Manger (1901-69) who wrote in Yiddish in his wanderings across the world. This volume of MPT asks questions about language and identity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAmong the featured poets are: Bertolt Brecht, Dimitris Tsaloumas, Gwyneth Lewis, Itzik Manger…  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ca name=\"contents\"\u003e\u003c\/a\u003eCover by Lucy Wilkinson.  Editorial by David and Helen Constantine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cli\u003e\n\u003ca href=\"#e0\"\u003eKapka Kassabova Polyglot Peregrinations \u003c\/a\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003eAmarjit Chandan Inhabiting two Planets\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003eItsik Manger Four Poems, with three translations and a literal version, introduced by Helen Beer\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\n\u003ca href=\"#e1\"\u003eMichael Hamburger Afterthoughts on the Mug’s Game\u003c\/a\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003eMary-Ann Constantine ‘To let in the light’: Gwyneth Lewis’s Poetry of Transition. \u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003eGwyneth Lewis Two Poems, translated by Mary-Ann Constantine and the author \u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003eChoman Hardi ‘Switching Languages: a Hindrance or an Opportunity?’\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003ePoet to Poet The Scotland-China Project.  Introduction by Polly Clark\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003eAntonella Anedda Five Poems, translated by Jamie McKendrick\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003eDimitris Tsaloumas Four Poems, translated, with an introduction, by Helen Constantine\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\n\u003ca href=\"#e2\"\u003eExtracts from Mourid Barghouti’s Midnight, translated by Radwa Ashour\u003c\/a\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\n\u003ca href=\"#e3\"\u003e'Dear Fahimeh’, translated by Hubert Moore and Nasrin Parvaz\u003c\/a\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003eExtracts from Sherko Berkes’s The Valley of Butterfly, translated by Choman Hardi\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003eIngeborg Bachmann Ten Poems, translated by Patrick Drysdale and Mike Lyons, with an introduction by Karen Leeder\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003eRimbaud Versions of Three Poems, by Martin Bennett\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003eBertolt Brecht Ten Poems of Exile, translated by Timothy Adès\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003eIvan Radoev Three Poems, translated by Kapka Kassabova\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003eAnthony Rudolf ‘Any Ideas?’ Calling all Poetry Detectives\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\u003cli\u003eJosephine Balmer A Note on Reviewing Translation\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eReviews\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003cli\u003eOlivier Burckhardt on Claire Malroux’s Birds and Bison, translated by Marilyn Hacker\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSasha Dugdale on  Ileana Malancioiu’s, After the Raising of Lazarus, translated by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003chr size=\"1\" color=\"a0a0a0\"\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ca name=\"e0\"\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003cb\u003eKapka Kassabova\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePolyglot Peregrinations\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA foreign language is a paradoxical escape: it takes you out of yourself, but also back into yourself to places you didn’t know existed. To translate is to travel this unpredictable landscape. To live between languages, as in my case, is to be constantly moving over untrodden territory, negotiating internal and external boundaries of identity and meaning. I was born an escapist and a traveller, which is why I was gripped from the moment my Russian teacher wrote on the blackboard a funny-looking sentence in Cyrillic, then turned her bespectacled face to the class and said: ‘Today, we are going to learn Russian.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was eight. The year was 1981, the place Sofia. Leonid Brezhnev, the last serious Soviet dictator, died soon after. My Russian teacher wept into her black shawl while we stood freezing in the school courtyard, listening to records of Soviet army songs. By then, I understood the songs. I also understood, with a child’s instinct, that something was wrong with us, with these songs blaring out of megaphones, with the way we had to understand them. So, as an unconscious act of protest, I tried to be bad at Russian. I gave idiotic answers in class, infuriating the poor teacher. Being an idiot was unrewarding, but I persevered. But it wasn’t to be. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne day I found myself entertaining my little sister with a slide-show of Russian stories. I had to translate as well as I could for her benefit. My mother came in at one point, and praised me for my translation. I was secretly chuffed. I kept up my slide-shows, ostensibly for my sister. I started looking up Russian words in the dictionary, and that is how I stopped wanting to be bad at Russian – being good at it was much more fun. Around that time, I started writing poetry in Bulgarian – about railway stations and going away. I also read Evgeni Onegin in a bilingual edition, and was transfixed by the miracle of sustained rhyming translation. Gradually, books became the centre of my world. I stopped showing my sister slide-shows because I was too busy reading. It was a way of forgetting what was wrong with us, and travelling to other worlds in the only possible way. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ca name=\"e1\"\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003cb\u003eMichael Hamburger\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAfterthoughts on the Mug's Game\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy first translations may have been my way of bridging the displacement from that country, separation from the relatives and friends left behind, from the open spaces around Kladow to which I owed my first moments of freedom and exhilaration, the diverse animals I had collected and looked after there, and what had been my family’s culture – though it was music, not language, that was my earliest love in the arts, and one practised by my father and mother.  Had I been a few years older when the displacement occurred, I might well have had to return to my first language as a writer of poems.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy friend Franz Wurm, born in Prague into a German-speaking family also fluent in Czech, was shipped to England in a children’s transport at the age of thirteen and educated at an English boarding-school, then Oxford.  Because, unlike me, he had lost his immediate family, when told by an English friend that he would never make a good English poet, he reverted not to German but to French for his early verse – his German lost to him by association with the more grievous loss.  ‘It was only then that I turned to German, which for quite a while came from my reading rather than from the language spoken at home,’ he writes in a letter.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe was then moved to re-emigrate to a German-speaking part of Switzerland, a neutral country by association, and became a German-language poet as linguistically inventive and idiosyncratic as his friend Paul Celan – who was even more multilingual by circumstance, but clung to German for poetry when he talked and corresponded with his wife and son in French, out of his very obsession with his mother tongue and the wound inflicted on his family and friends under German occupation.  Erich Fried, one of the most widely read German-language poets of his time, came to England at the age of sixteen, remained resident there, but never became wholly bilingual other than as a translator of texts ranging from Shakespeare to Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath.  Many other cases could be cited, each distinct for reasons too intricate to be unravelled here.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen towards the age of thirty, I was induced to write unambitious critical pieces in German, they proved acceptable, though my syntax, like my attitudes, tended to be more English than German and my grammar could be shaky; but the attempt to function bilingually, at least in prose, precipitated an identity crisis for a year or two, leaving me stranded in a no-man’s land. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ca name=\"e2\"\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003cb\u003eMourid Barghouti\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eExtracts from Midnight\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTranslated by Radwa Ashour\u003c\/b\u003e                                                                         \u003cbr\u003e       \u003cbr\u003eMy grandfather, still harbouring the illusion \u003cbr\u003ethat all is well with the world,\u003cbr\u003efills his countryside pipe\u003cbr\u003efor the last time\u003cbr\u003ebefore the advent of the helmets and bulldozers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn the bulldozer’s teeth\u003cbr\u003emy grandfather’s cloak gets hooked.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe bulldozer retreats a few yards,\u003cbr\u003eempties its load,\u003cbr\u003ecomes back to fill its huge fork \u003cbr\u003eand has never had enough.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTwenty times, the bulldozer \u003cbr\u003ecomes and goes, \u003cbr\u003emy grandfather’s cloak still hooked on it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter the dust and smoke\u003cbr\u003ehad cleared from the house that had been standing there \u003cbr\u003eand as I was staring at the new emptiness\u003cbr\u003eI saw my grandfather \u003cbr\u003ewearing his cloak,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ewearing the very same cloak,\u003cbr\u003enot one that was similar\u003cbr\u003ebut the very same.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe hugged me and maintained a silent gaze\u003cbr\u003eas if his look \u003cbr\u003eordained the rubble to become a house,\u003cbr\u003erestored the curtains to the windows,\u003cbr\u003ebrought my grandmother back to her armchair, \u003cbr\u003eand retrieved her coloured pills,\u003cbr\u003eput back the sheets on the bed,\u003cbr\u003ethe lights on the ceiling,\u003cbr\u003ethe pictures on the walls,\u003cbr\u003eas if his look brought the handles back to the doors\u003cbr\u003eand the balconies to the stars,\u003cbr\u003eas if it made us resume our dinner,\u003cbr\u003eas if the world had not collapsed, \u003cbr\u003eas if heaven had ears and eyes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe went on staring at the emptiness.\u003cbr\u003eI said:\u003cbr\u003eWhat shall we do after the soldiers leave?\u003cbr\u003eWhat will he do after the soldiers leave?\u003cbr\u003eHe slowly clenched his fist\u003cbr\u003erecapturing a boxer’s resolve in his right hand,\u003cbr\u003ehis coarse bronze hand,\u003cbr\u003ethe hand which had tamed the thorny slope,\u003cbr\u003ethe hand which holds his hoe lightly\u003cbr\u003eand with ease like prayer,\u003cbr\u003ehis hand which can split a tree stump with a single blow,\u003cbr\u003ehis hand open for forgiveness,\u003cbr\u003ehis hand closed on sweets to surprise his grandchildren,\u003cbr\u003ehis hand amputated \u003cbr\u003eyears ago.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ca name=\"e3\"\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003cb\u003eDear Fahimeh\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTranslated by Hubert Moore and Nasrin Parvez\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe poem, originally in Farsi, is for Fahimeh Taghadosi, executed in Iran, 1982. The writer is unknown. Farkhondeh Ashena, who recently escaped from Iran, heard it when she was in solitary confinement, and memorised it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDear Fahimeh\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat day,\u003cbr\u003ethat hot day in July,\u003cbr\u003ewhen the Evin loudspeakers\u003cbr\u003ecalled out your beautiful name and your lips\u003cbr\u003esmiled, your eyes said to your friends,\u003cbr\u003e'So today is the day.'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou went and your walk\u003cbr\u003ewas a perfume filling the corridor.\u003cbr\u003eEveryone gasped, everyone asked with their eyes,\u003cbr\u003e'Is today then the day?' The Pasdar\u003cbr\u003eflung back an answer : 'Where is her bag?\u003cbr\u003eWhere are her veil, her socks, her money?'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA rumour went round that you'd given a sign\u003cbr\u003ethat yes, today was the day :\u003cbr\u003e'I don't need my food,' you had said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo tonight is the night.\u003cbr\u003eA silence hangs in the heart of it.\u003cbr\u003eFriends look at friends and tell themselves\u003cbr\u003ethat perhaps you'll come back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFahimeh dear, tell us, spare\u003cbr\u003ea word for your friends. Is\u003cbr\u003ethe sky sad where you are, does it weep?\u003cbr\u003eAnd the wind, does it ruffle your veil?\u003cbr\u003eBack here, the ward sweats for your news.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd a message gets through : \u003cbr\u003ewind-blown breathless dandelion\u003cbr\u003ecomes from the mountains to say that clouds \u003cbr\u003eare massing up there and they're big with child.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHead held high, you are standing and waiting for this,\u003cbr\u003efor the clouds to open, for you \u003cbr\u003eto be mother of change.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRifles crack.\u003cbr\u003eThe moorland holds its breath\u003cbr\u003eat a star shooting across it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt would be good to sing and go with friends\u003cbr\u003eto face the firing squad, to dance,\u003cbr\u003eto float in the rain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the long sea-silence,\u003cbr\u003ea wave lifts, oars clip at the water.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA young fisherman bringing his boat to land,\u003cbr\u003erice-growers trudging home,\u003cbr\u003ethey shape their lips to your name.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYour name is beautiful for young girls born in July.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e","brand":"Modern Poetry in Translation","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1040751320,"sku":"9780954536749","price":9.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_2491335d-2269-4bf0-bfd6-2a69d98d27d8.jpeg?v=1752237541"}],"url":"https:\/\/inpressbooks.co.uk\/collections\/martin-bennett\/gwyneth-lewis.oembed","provider":"Inpress Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}