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Recent Posts
Author Archives: Ann Kjellberg
Sergei Dovlatov
There’s a classic storyline that goes like this: a poor boy peeks through a chink in a wall on a nobleman’s estate. He sees the nobleman’s little boy riding a pony. From that moment on, his life is given over to one end—to get rich. He can no longer return to his former life. His […]
New Translations of Georg Trakl
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 what Karl Kraus called the only honest periodical in Austria, arranged for Wittgenstein to support him with an anonymous stipend. Yet despite his […]
Arrowsmith’s Montale: “Life in the Trojan Horse”
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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Tagged Italian poetry
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Arrowsmith’s Montale: “Flood Tides”
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
William Arrowsmith’s hitherto unpublished translations of the last two volumes of Eugenio Montale’s poems are about to appear from Norton, in a collected edition lovingly prepared by Arrowsmith’s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, […]
Jeet Thayil, poet of the Bombay streets
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 […]
“Flight Into Egypt,” by Joseph Brodsky, translated by Melissa Green
…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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Tagged Nativity Poems, Poetry, Russian
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“mehitabel dances with boreas,” by Don Marquis
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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Tagged American poetry
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“Live Like a Poet! At Home in the Bateau Lavoir,” by Rosanna Warren
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 […]
“He was a kind of nothing,” Fiennes’s Coriolanus
f proof were needed of what verse can still do to us, it is abundant in Ralph Fiennes’s riveting new adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Set in a putative Rome that is actually, though not visibly, Serbia, the blood-soaked story plausibly unfolds against a European backdrop that seems both ancient and itchily contemporary. Coriolanus, hailed for […]