Category Archives: News

New Translations of Georg Trakl

By Ann Kjellberg | Published February 3, 2012

Rilke said that for him a Trakl poem is “an object of sublime existence” and Heidegger considered him to have achieved a true poetry of unmediated being. Ludwig von Ficker, publisher of the what Karl Kraus called the only honest periodical in Austria, arranged for Wittgenstein to support him with an anonymous stipend. Yet despite [...]

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Arrowsmith’s Montale: “Life in the Trojan Horse”

By Ann Kjellberg | Published January 23, 2012

Life in the Trojan Horse was no picnic. We were packed in like anchovies in a can. When the others left, I stayed inside, unsure of the rules of war. Now I know what I didn’t then, when I hoarded my noblest powers for the final, the decisive act. Which was an act that had [...]

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Arrowsmith’s Montale: “Flood Tides”

By Ann Kjellberg | Published January 20, 2012

Frantic with love, I knelt at the Castalian Spring but no freshet reflected my image. I have never seen the piranha’s native waters where swimmers wash back ashore, bones picked clean. And yet other waters work with us, for us, and on us, with an indifferent monstrous effort of recuperation.

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Arrowsmith’s Montale: Late poems first seen

By Ann Kjellberg | Published January 19, 2012

William Arrowsmith’s hitherto unpublished translations of the last two volumes of Eugenio Montale’s poems are about to appear from Norton, in a collected edition lovingly prepared by Arrowsmith’s friend and student Rosanna Warren.  The volume represents a life’s work for both poet and translator. Writes Warren: By the time Montale reached his fruitful old age, [...]

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Jeet Thayil, poet of the Bombay streets

By Ann Kjellberg | Published January 19, 2012

He handed me the headphones. The music was high- pitched, like the sound track of a movie in which random scenes had been strung together, or cut up and played backwards, or deliberately placed out of order. Bottles clinked and a door creaked open. A shot rang out. A child whispered, is he here? Where [...]

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“Flight Into Egypt,” by Joseph Brodsky, translated by Melissa Green

By Ann Kjellberg | Published December 24, 2011

…where the drover came from, no one knew. Their affinity made the heavens slate the desert for a miracle. There, they chose to light a fire and camp, the cave in a vortex of snow. Not divining his role, the Infant drowsed in a halo of curls that would quickly become accustomed to radiance. Its [...]

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“mehitabel dances with boreas,” by Don Marquis

By Ann Kjellberg | Published December 13, 2011

On a hibernal note, a cockroach types, regarding his friend Mehitabel the cat: well boss i saw mehitabel last evening she was out in the alley dancing on the cold cobbles while the wild december wind blew through her frozen whiskers and as she danced she wailed and sang to herself uttering the fragments that [...]

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“Live Like a Poet! At Home in the Bateau Lavoir,” by Rosanna Warren

By Ann Kjellberg | Published December 6, 2011

On April 13, 1904, Pablo Picasso and his friend the Catalan painter Sebastià Junyer Vidal travelled from Barcelona to Paris and installed themselves in Montmartre in the studio just vacated by the Basque ceramicist and sculptor Paco Durrio. Junyer Vidal paid the rent. Called “La Maison du Trappeur” (The Trapper’s House), later renamed Le Bateau [...]

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“Arcanum” by William Logan

By Ann Kjellberg | Published October 8, 2011

As soon as I see the word arcanum in any proposition, I begin to suspect it. —Descartes   Like Hegel’s cows, chewing in the final dark of reason, a domestic passion lies within the salus of a language. Writing is a privacy. I seal up that child of silence; it turns its blank, dull face [...]

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More Rozewicz!

By Ann Kjellberg | Published September 23, 2011

We considered the work of Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz in February, when Norton published a major new selected poems translated by Joanna Trzeciak. Now arrives from Anvil the third edition of their selection of Rozewicz, They Came to See a Poet, translated by Adam Czerniawski and first published in 1982. How interesting!  There is rather [...]

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