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Synopsis
After-Images features work which has been inspired in the first place by the work of other poets and artists. 'After-images' are the impressions retained of a vivid sensation after the external cause has been removed. We see how this concept may be applied in a variety of ways to the idea and practice of translation. Includes: Poems from the Aldeburgh Festival and Poetry International; A commemoration of the poetry of Bertolt Brecht fifty years after his death; A selection of recent translations of the poetry of the Far East. Contents: • Brecht on the South Bank: Translations and Poems ‘after Brecht’ by Adrian Mitchell, Andy Croft, Lavinia Greenlaw, Ulrike Draesner, Iain Galbraith, David Constantine, Bert Papenfuss, Andrew Duncan, Albert Ostermaier and Tom Cheesman – introduced by Karen Leeder • Bertolt Brecht, four new Herr Keuner Stories and a short Reflection on the Constitution, translated by Tom Kuhn • Gonçalo Tavares, five stories, translated by Desirée Jung • Thomas Brasch, five poems, translated by Ken Cockburn • Mimi Khalvati, five ghazals • Damian Walford Davies, ‘Kilvert’, with illustrations by Lucy Wilkinson • Ellen Coverdale, two poems after Lorenzetti and Courbet • Pascale Petit, two poems after René Magritte and Leonor Fini • Jeff Nosbaum, ‘Ukiyo-e’, after Ryoi • Alison Brackenbury, ‘1.15 a.m.’ • Tara Bergin, ‘Himalayan Balsam for a Soldier’, after Christina Rossetti’s ‘Winter: My Secret’ • Oliver Reynolds, ‘MVM’ • David Hart, ‘He came mute…’ • Andrea Zanzotto, ‘Hypersonnet’, translated by Peter Hainsworth • Tom Cheesman, ‘Owain Glyndwr Explained to an Algerian Asylum-Seeker – Act V’ • Robert Hull, two poems • R. Cheran, ‘I could forget all this …’, translated by Lakshmi Holmström • Waldo Williams, ‘The Dead Children’, translated by Damian Walford Davies • Mario Luzi, two poems, translated by Elizabeth MacDonald • Dorothea Grünzweig, three poems, translated by Derk Wynand • Vyacheslav Kupriyanov, four poems, translated by Dasha Nisula • Poems from Aldeburgh: • Naomi Jaffa, Poets and their Translators at Aldeburgh • Joan Margarit, six poems, translated by Anne Crowe • Durs Grünbein, three poems, translated by Michael Hofmann • Peter France, In Memory of Gennady Aygi: Translation and Community • Francis Jones, Stroking Hands over the Heart Reviews: • Anna Reckin on Yang Lian and Zeng Danyi • Belinda Cooke on Clive Scott and Ruth Fainlight • Josephine Balmer, Shorter Reviews and Further Books Received Betolt Brecht 'About the child-murderer Marie Farrar' (Von der Kindesmörderin Marie Farrar), translated by Adrian Mitchell 1. Marie Farrar, aged sixteen. No criminal record up to now, Orphan, with rickets; birthmarks, none – Killed a baby – this is how: In her second month, as she reports it, A woman in a basement room Gave two injections to abort it. Which hurt, she says, but the child stayed in her womb. But you, please don’t be angry or upset. We all need all the help that we can get. 2. Anyway, she says, she paid, Then laced her corset very tight, Drank schnapps with pepper, but that only made Her vomit half the night. Now her belly was visibly swollen. Doing the washing up was agony. She was, she says, a young girl and still growing. She prayed to Mary, optimistically. You too, please don’t be angry or upset. We all need all the help that we can get. 3. Her prayers, apparently, were useless. Maybe she’d asked too much. She put on weight. At early mass her head was full of dizziness, She knelt at the altar covered in cold sweat. But still she kept her condition secret Till, later on, birth took her by surprise. She was so plain that nobody imagined Sexual temptation could arise. And you, please don’t be angry or upset. We all need all the help that we can get. 4. On the day itself, she says, just about dawn She was scrubbing the stairs, when suddenly Great talons clawed at her guts. She was all torn. But still, she kept the secret of her pregnancy. All the time she was hanging out the washing, She thought it out – she had to be delivered And very soon. Her heart was heavy. She finished work late, then went up to bed. But you, please don’t be angry or upset. We all need all the help that we can get. 5. As she lay down, they called her. Right away! Sweep up the newly-fallen snow! That took until eleven. It was a long day, No time to give birth till past midnight. And so She brought forth, so she says, a son. This son was like all others that are born. But she was unlike other mothers – though I find I cannot think of her with scorn. You too, please don’t be angry or upset. We all need all the help that we can get. 6. So now I’d like to go on telling The story of what happened to this son, (She wants, she says, not to hide anything), So what I am and what you are is clear to everyone. She’d just climbed into bed, when she felt sick. She was all alone. She wanted to shout. She didn’t know what was going to happen But managed to stop herself crying out. And you, please don’t be angry or upset. We all need all the help that we can get. 7. Her room was cold as ice, so she, With her last strength, crawled to the lavatory And there, she doesn’t know when exactly, Gave birth to a son without ceremony Just before morning. She was, she says, All muddled up. She didn’t know If her freezing hands could hold on to the child Because the servants’ toilet was adrift with snow. You too, please don’t feel angry or upset. We all need all the help that we can get. 8. Between her own room and the outdoor privy. (Nothing happened till this point, she insists), The child started crying unbearably, so she Beat it, blindly, without stopping, with both fists, And went on beating it till it was quiet, she says. And then she took it into bed And kept it with her all through the night And hid it, the next morning, in a shed. But you, please don’t be angry or upset. We all need all the help that we can get. 9. Marie Farrar, aged sixteen, Died in the Meissen jail. What does this guilty mother’s story mean? It shows all creatures of the earth are frail. You who give birth in clean and comfortable beds And call your pregnancy a blessed state, Do not condemn the wretched and the weak – Their sins are heavy, but their suffering is great. And so, please don’t be angry or upset. We all need all the help that we can get. Mimi Khalvati 'Ghazal: To hold me' I want to be held. I want somebody dear to hold me in the wind and the rain when nobody's near to hold me. I want to be touched as the tree touches sky and sky touches earth so horizons appear to hold me. I want to strike out as a flock strikes for home and home is now this, now that, warm hemisphere to hold me. I want to uncoil a long river of hair, my beloved to sleep, to cross sleep's frontier to hold me. I want all that has been denied me. And more. Much more than God in some lonely stratosphere to hold me. I want hand and eye, sweet roving things, and land for grazing, praising, and the last pioneer to hold me. I want my ship to come in, hopes to run high before my back's so bowed even children fear to hold me. I want to die being held. Hearing my name thrown, thrown like a rope from a very old pier to hold me. I want to catch the last echoes, reel them in like a curing-song in the creel of my ear to hold me. I want Rodolfo to sing, flooding the gods, Ah Mimi! as if I were her and he, here, to hold me. Jeff Nosbaum ‘Ukiyo-e’, after Ryoi (Note: Ukiyo ('the floating world') was originally a Buddhist term for the transience and unreality of material existence. The term gradually came to be used for the lifestyle of wealthy pleasure-seekers in 17th-century Edo (now Tokyo), and the woodblock prints of life in Edo that were popular among this milieu became known as ukiyo-e, 'images of the floating world'. Over the course of the 18th and early 19th centuries landscape prints by artists such as Hiroshige and Hokusai became a defining feature of ukiyo-e. I first came across these landscape prints at an exhibition in the National Museum and Gallery of Wales in 2001, where the exhibition was prefaced by a definition of the floating world by the 17th-century Japanese writer Asai Ryoi, and this quote seemed to me to be a poem in waiting.) Turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossom and the maple leaves; singing, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in merely floating, we, upon the bridge, stare down, see only the sun at the ripples, the glint of light a sugared glaze; a gourd is carried along with the river current: this is what we call the floating world. Damian Walford Davies ‘Kilvert’ I came late to the famous diary of Francis Kilvert (1840–79). Published 1938–40, it was immediately acknowledged by readers as a classic. Valued for its detailed observations of nature and social life, it is an important social document; it is also resonantly lyrical. I found it disturbing. Kilvert’s brilliant writing betrays a fascination with the darker side of rural life, and the entries are charged with suppressed desire. The borderland location of Clyro, Radnorshire, amplifies the oddnesses recorded. I was drawn to these vignettes. Something in the writing suggested the need for amplification, and the ‘Kilvert’ sequence enters into dialogue with its subject, responding to short quotations from the diary with poems that both extend and crystallise. (Two other so-called ekphrastic enterprises come to mind: Geoffrey Hill’s response to lines from Cesare Pavese’s diary in Without Title, and R. S. Thomas’s The Echoes Return Slow, in which autobiographical poems and prose pieces fascinatingly play off each other.) I chose entries that worried me; they sit above the poems as both epigraphs and epitaphs. The poems function as a ‘commentary’ – replying, excavating, developing. I aimed for a spareness of language in tune with Kilvert’s economy. The voice shifts, and the line-breaks are meant to cut open and reveal – which, I hope, adds to the strangeness of the portraits of barely contained desire (numbers 2, 4, 5, 6, 9), violence (4, 5, 10, 12), madness and death (2, 3, 7, 11). 1. The baby was baptised in ice which was broken and swimming about in the font. There was awkward- ness, but he broke the ice- crust delicately as a brûlée; these, he said, the sweet shards and bergs that save our souls. 2. At Rhos Goch Lane House no one was at home so I stuck an ivy leaf into the latch hole. Improvised, so you’d know I’d been: a dying trefoil calling- card, my meaning veined on green vellum pushed into interior space. When you come in, press it between your pages so it stains. 3. Her pretty portrait still on the dining room mantelpiece . . . On the bookshelves stood two cases of stuffed birds . . . He thought they’d please her. She thought it cruel, that embarrassment of birds, that parliament of fowls between Hansard and Hazlitt, posed passerine, wired for flight. So early dead, she said that one close day she heard them cry for air in the evacuated cases. 4. It was the first time I had seen clergyman’s daughters helping to castrate lambs . . . they carried it off uncommonly well. They held them like cellos, the kneeling hands bent to their relieving work. It was wrong all round. Still, they played beautifully, drawing something like music from the bleating between their legs. Dorothea Grünzweig Since winter’s eartime, translated by Derk Wynand Since winter’s eartime our house on the hill hearkens far out into the land where shrill piercing sounds flail down to earth In the riot of sound as if some quiet sweetpleading thing were issuing now from shafts and then from towers It must be that church’s pealing one day on our departure dashed and now resounding in its struggle to rise again from the depths Struck to an image by the bells father at the altar in the shadow of wings spread out over the children us holding heavy black hymnals offering ourselves smiling our thin voices strings to the same pitch sisterly strung serving the Lamb Winter because we want to grasp it it’s the pealing is it not of that fatherchurch turns into waiting bound to the window’s crosspiece a fleeting finding
"...some of Michael Hofmann's brilliant translations of German wunderkind Durs Grünbein and exquisite ghazals from Mimi Khalvati. A Feast."
Christina Patterson
Thank you so much for your translation of Brecht's poem about Maria Farrar. I recently had to use this poem to create a play and this version of the poem helped me understand it more. Thanks x
Nicole Annereau
Have you read Modern Poetry in Translation (Series 3 No.6) After-Images by Helen Constantine, David Constantine? - Add your own review
