Literary Magazine Review

For this assignment I went to the library and read a journal of translated poems published by the Poetry Foundation. The one I read was their April 2009 translation issue, which included poems by twenty-four poets of different backgrounds. This literary magazine attracted me first because of the bright abstract picture on the cover, but then fully got my attention when I saw that it was a work of translated poetry.

Last semester I took a Spanish class called Literary Translations, and discussed translation theories and what it means to be faithful to a text. We also tried our hand at translating songs, short stories and poetry from Spanish into English, and it proved to be very very challenging! Thinking of all the work and frustration from last semester’s class, I decided to do my report on this translation issue to see the work of other translators. I wasn’t familiar with any of the poets nor their work, so honestly I wouldn’t have known one way or another just how faithful the translated poem was to the original text, but I did admire the poems (or rather the translation if only because I know how hard it is to do). Each translator wrote a page length note to accompany the poem. I found these to be sometimes more interesting than the actual poem. The translator would provide a biography of the original poet saying where he or she was from, what time period their from, their influences, their other works, and so on. The translator would also include an analysis of the poem, and that definitely helped me to understand some of the poems in which otherwise I would not have understood. Again, it reminded me of my translation class because when we translated poems we spent weeks and weeks picking them apart. One thing I learned in that class was that you can’t be a good translator if you don’t understand what it is you’re translating. I can only imagine how long it must have taken the translators in this magazine to fully grasp the poem they translated, to do the actual translation, tweak it, and then be satisfied with it.

The poems themselves were a little weird and dark for my taste. Some were about death, some just had really sad, melancholic tones. The ones that I enjoyed the most had lots of nature imagery, were more romantic and had different forms. Two poems that I really enjoyed in particular were “Love-Kiss XLI: The Mutability of Human Affairs” translated from German by Russian poet Quirinus Kuhlmann, and “Matinadologoi” translated from Greek contemporary folk poetry of Crete. Kuhlmann’s poem is a weird kind of sonnet with a form of ABCA, ABCA, ADDA, EE, and every other word is separated with a slash. The page folds out, like a poster tucked in a magazine and at the bottom of the page he writes in all caps, then on the back of the page in real small font the he gives this poetic explanation of what he was trying to do with his poem. It caught my eye because the form was different from anything that I’ve seen before, and I liked the theme of love, life and nature (which the translator explains were themes taken from the book Song of Songs in the Bible). What I liked the most about “Matinadologoi” again were the themes about nature, life and creation, as well as the form. The selection is more like a collection of phrases—there are about two lines of poetry and then a series of astrics separating that line from the one that follows and has a different thought. It was very interesting and enjoyable to read, and had I not picked up this literary magazine I probably never would have come across folk poetry from Crete!

I really recommend this magazine, especially if you have a love and appreciation of languages and translations!