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Search Results for: ganassi

Behind the Byline

Ian Ganassi

July 14, 2016

RealPeopleIan Ganassi’s new translation of the Aeneid, Book 7, appears in the current issue of NER (37.2), and editor Carolyn Kuebler caught up with him recently to talk about his project of translating the great Latin epic. Ian’s translations of books 1–6 of the Aeneid have appeared previously in NER, and his poems have appeared in New American Writing, Yale Review, and other journals. His poetry collection Mean Numbers is forthcoming from China Grove Press later in 2016.

In addition to writing and translating, Ian also collaborates with painter Laura Bell on a series of collages they call “The Corpses,” which they have been working on since 2005. We’ve included two here: “Grandma’s Ancient Wine” (below) is a cut-up that Laura made based on a page of Ian’s rough draft of one of the books of the Aeneid. “Real People” (at left) takes off from the Laocoön story from Book 2. Just click the images to see them in detail.

CK: You mentioned that your fascination with antiquity dates back to childhood, to the stories of the gods and heroes, and that your unconventional undergraduate program led you to studying Latin. Why did you decide to translate the Aeneid, which strikes me as a particularly ambitious (and not exactly lucrative) undertaking?

IG: Translating, at least for me, is the best possible way to read the poem. I know the books I’ve translated much better than I would had I simply read them in translation. Also, since I write mostly lyric poetry, the translation is an enjoyable way to be involved in narrative.

I find Virgil particularly interesting because in many ways he is more like an author in the modern sense than Homer is, for instance. The Aeneid is original to Virgil in a way that more traditional epic can’t be to its authors/compilers. In that sense, the Aeneid is the first literary epic. Its frame of reference is vast, and the writing is beautiful, both of which attest to Virgil’s genius. He makes much of the traditional material he uses his own, either by the power of his poetry and/or by changing, and improvising with, the many stories and characters that are his source material. He also introduces stories and characters that are his own creations.

GrandmasAncientWineThe poem has an almost novelistic feel, in that it works on several different levels of discourse. It is a political act—a study of the relationship of individuals to society and a consciously created myth of the origins of the Roman Empire. But it is also a study in individual human psychology and emotion. Aeneas is an exceptional man called to a divine mission. A constant tension in the poem is the extent to which a human being can transcend the weaknesses of his or her constitution in order to fulfill a role that approaches being super-human. As a man (or strictly speaking, as a hero, since his mother is a Goddess) and as a warrior Aeneas is constantly torn between his duty to the gods—his role as the creator of a new Troy—versus the complications and weaknesses of his own humanity and his personal psychology.

I feel I should also say that I am a very slow reader of Latin. It doesn’t come easily to me; I can’t “sight read” it, for instance. But I feel that the fact that I have to work hard to get the Latin right also helps me to get to know the text more intimately.

CK: It seems to me that Latin doesn’t have much place outside of educational institutions, and yet you’re not a professor or scholar of Latin. How did you go about learning the language, and then continue to pursue it outside of the university setting?

IG: I studied Latin for two years in high school and enjoyed it, so when it came to fulfilling a language requirement in college, Latin seemed a natural choice. I took first year Latin at SUNY Purchase and then continued studying privately with the same professor—R.M. Stein, with whom I also became friends, and to whom the translation is dedicated. I studied with him for an additional year to fulfill the language requirement. Since he knew I was a poet, and he appreciated contemporary poetry himself, he thought the best approach would be to read through the Classical Roman poets. We read primarily in Catullus, Ovid, and Martial.

After completing the language requirement and getting my BA I found that I had become “addicted” to reading Latin and I proposed to Bob that we continue our tutorial. At this point he thought it would be a good challenge to tackle Virgil. I found the idea of reading a great epic exciting. We spent about four additional years and read the first three books of the poem fairly intensively. We then read selections from several of the other books (though mainly we stuck with the first half of the poem). My goal in all this was not initially to translate the poem, but rather to use the discipline of reading Latin as a way of enriching my own poetry, and as a way of reading one of the great works of the Western canon.

Then in the late 1990s I decided, on a whim, to try my hand at a translation of Book II, Lines 668–804, a passage that had always fascinated me. I sent it to a few magazines, including NER. I was lucky in that Stephen Donadio, the editor at the time, found it interesting enough to publish. Stephen’s acceptance encouraged me to translate more selected passages and to put more energy into them and make them truer (in every sense of that word) to the original. It was only subsequent to publishing a couple more excerpts in NER that I decided to try a whole book, and started with Book 2. This was a big challenge, and helped me to develop a more realistic and accurate approach to the poem. Since then I have translated the entire first half of the poem (though not in numerical order), and have published all six books in NER. I feel extremely fortunate to have done so.

CK: Do you plan to finish translating the epic in its entirety?

IG: I’m keeping an open mind. One thing I do know for certain is that I want to keep translating the poem. Since there are six more books, and it takes me a year or two to translate one, it could be quite a while before I finish a version of the whole poem (though I could probably do it faster if I had some sort of external incentive). I am mainly translating the poem for pleasure, for its positive impact on my own work, as an ideal way of reading the poem, and for the satisfaction of publishing in magazines, when and as that happens.

CK: What other translations of the Aeneid have you read, and how do you think yours is different?

IG: I have read the major recent translations of the Aeneid (Fagles, Fitzgerald, and Mandelbaum) and while translating I often refer to those translations, as well as to a literal prose translation (Fairclough) to see how other translators have handled passages that give me difficulties, or simply to see how another translator approaches a particular passage. Translation is obviously an approximate practice. In fact I would say that translation, on the most fundamental level, is an impossibility. No language can be expressed in the terms of another language. They are not equivalent. The most successful translation is one that best balances the technical demands of the language being translated with the attempt to create an effective approximation of the spirit of the original in the language of the translation. Of course my translation is as different from any of these others as their translations are different from each other. However, if I had to articulate distinctions I would say that mine is a bit more American, a bit less ornate, and probably a bit less accurate from a scholarly point of view.

CK: Do you have a favorite passage in Book 7?

IG: The book is full of great passages, but I think my favorite is lines 406 ff (in the original), in which Alecto, one of the Furies, whom Juno (Aeneas’s divine nemesis) has brought up from the underworld to stir up war, disguises herself as an old and trusted priestess of the temple of Juno, and appears to Turnus in a dream. She tells him that the Trojans have arrived and are a threat to Latium. In the dream, Turnus scoffs at the old woman and says she is senile and stirring up trouble. He tells her that, especially as a female, she should mind her own business (tending to the temple), in part because it is the men who must do the fighting if there is a threat. This enrages Alecto and she drops her disguise and appears as her true self—her wild face alive with horrid snakes. She screams at Turnus, pushes him, and snaps her whip. Turnus is terrified and shaken out of his complacency, startled into a more warlike mood.

In general Virgil’s depiction of Alecto is, for me, a highlight of his writing in the book, and shows that although the latter six books of the epic are less finished, Virgil’s writing in them retains much of its power.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Aeneid, Behind the Byline, Ian Ganassi, Laura Bell

Contributors’ Notes, Vol. 37, No. 3

Andreas Altmann was born in Hainichen (Saxony) and now lives in Berlin. He studied social pedagogy and works as a social worker. He has published seven collections of poetry and won several poetry prizes, among them the 2012 Prize for Literature of the Saxon Ministry of Art.

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) was an English political analyst and social theorist who in his later years served as editor of the Economist. He was also a co-founder of the British quarterly National Review (1855–1864), in which he published his political analysis as well as his literary assessments of Shakespeare, Shelley, Dickens, Gibbon, Scott, Macaulay, and others. His books include The English Constitution (1867), Physics and Politics (1872), and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873). His essays were collected posthumously in the volumes Literary Studies (1879), Economic Studies (1880), and Biographical Studies (1881).

Laura Bell was born in Ohio and graduated from Douglass College, Rutgers University, studying with Robert Watts. At Goddard College, in Vermont, she did graduate work with painter Anne Tabachnick. For more than a decade she has used photos and found images in her paintings, and has created a collaborative collage series, “The Corpses,” with poet Ian Ganassi. Her work has been exhibited in New York City, Provincetown, New Haven, Philadelphia, Berlin, and elsewhere, and she has been an artist-in-residence at the Millay Colony. She lives and works in the Bronx, New York.

Linda Bierds’s ninth book of poetry, Roget’s Illusion (Putnam, 2014), was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her poems have appeared in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry, among others. In addition to being awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, Bierds has received the PEN/West Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the Grace Pollock Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington and lives on Bainbridge Island.

Alexander Booth is a writer and translator currently living in Berlin. A recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler’s in field latin (Seagull Books, 2016), he has also published his own poems and other translations in numerous print and online journals.

Ron Carlson is the author of six story collections and six novels. His fiction has appeared in the Atlantic, Esquire, Harper’s, the New Yorker, and many others, and has been selected for The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and more. He is the Director of the Graduate Program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in Huntington Beach, California.

Gerald Chapple taught German and Comparative Literature at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and is a freelance literary translator. He has published translations of almost a hundred of Günter Kunert’s poems, along with works by Barbara Frischmuth, Josef Haslinger, Stefan Heym, and others. Some have appeared in Fiction, Modern Poetry in Translation, Agni, Grand Street, Osiris, the Literary Review, Antioch Review, and Words without Borders. The winner of an Austrian government Translation Award in 1996, he is at work on a book of translations of Kunert’s poems with the working title A Stranger at Home: Selected Poems 1979–2009.

Peter Chilson teaches literature and writing at Washington State University. His essays, journalism, and fiction have appeared in American Scholar, Audubon, Ascent, High Country News, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Foreign Policy, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. In 2012 he went to Mali for Foreign Policy magazine to write about the civil war.

David Chorlton was born in Spittal-an-der-Drau, Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived for several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. As much as he has come to love the Southwest, he has strong memories of Vienna, the setting for his work of fiction, The Taste of Fog (Rain Mountain Press, 2011). His most recent work includes Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2014) and A Field Guide to Fire, his contribution to the Fires of Change exhibition shown in Flagstaff and Tucson.

Daniela Danz is a German poet and novelist. Her poetry includes the volumes Pontus and V, and her most recent novel is Lange Fluchten. She is widely published in German anthologies and journals. Danz lives in Kranichfeld and is head of the Schillerhaus museum in Rudolstadt.

Tamas Dobozy is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. He has published three books of short fiction, When X Equals Marylou (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003), Last Notes and Other Stories (Arcade, 2006), and most recently Siege 13: Stories (Milkweed Editions, 2013), which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust of Canada Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for both the Governor General’s Award: Fiction and the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He has published over fifty short stories in journals such as One Story, Fiction, Agni, and Granta, and won an O. Henry Prize in 2011.

Iain Galbraith was born in Scotland, and studied languages and Comparative Literature at the universities of Cambridge, Freiburg, and Mainz. A winner of the John Dryden Translation Prize and Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation, he is also editor of five poetry anthologies. His own poems have appeared in Poetry Review, PN Review, Times Literary Supplement, New Writing, and other journals. His book-length translations include Alfred Kolleritsch’s Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2006), W. G. Sebald’s Across the Land and the Water (Penguin, 2012), and Jan Wagner’s Self-portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015), for which he received the Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize.

Durs Grünbein, born in Dresden, has published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, most recently the poetry collection Cyrano oder Die Rückkehr vom Mond (Suhrkamp, 2014) and the volume of memoirs Die Jahre im Zoo: Ein Kaleidoskop (Suhrkamp, 2015). His many awards include the Georg Büchner Prize (1994), Premio Internazionale di Poesia Pier Paolo Pasolini (2006), the Great Cross of Merit with Star (2009), and the Tomas Tranströmer Prize (2012). He lives in Berlin and Rome.

James Allen Hall is the author of Now You’re the Enemy (University of Arkansas Press, 2008), winner of awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Hall’s memoir in lyric essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, was named the winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s essay competition, and will be published in 2017. He teaches creative writing and literature at Washington College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Henry Kearney, IV is from Robersonville, North Carolina, and he received his MFA from Warren Wilson College. His work has appeared in Midwest Quarterly, Ghost Ocean Magazine, Spoon River Poetry Review, Cortland Review, and the Collagist.

Esther Kinsky, born in Engelskirchen and currently residing in Berlin, is a poet, novelist, photographer, and translator of Russian, Polish, and English. She has lived in London and Hungary, and studied Slavic Languages and Cultures and English in Bonn and Toronto. In 2009 she was awarded the Paul Celan Prize for translation. Her most recent volume of poetry is Am kalten Hang (2016); her many novels include Sommerfrische (2010) and Am Fluß (2014), for which she was awarded the 2015 Kranichsteiner Literaturpreis. In 2016, Kinsky received the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize for her life’s work.

Sarah Kirsch (1935–2013) was one of Germany’s most powerful lyric poets of the postwar era. She lived and worked in East Germany until 1979, when, after political persecution, she moved to the West. In Ice Roses (Carcanet, 2014), comprising around a hundred poems from the ten collections Kirsch published between 1967 and 2001, the translator Anne Stokes introduced Anglophone readers to the full range of Kirsch’s poetry. “Winter” features many elements of what was dubbed the “Sarah sound”: speech cadences, colloquialisms, and a free-flowing syntax that reflects Kirsch’s lifelong resistance to constraint and convention.

Marie Luise Knott has authored, edited, and translated over twenty books. She is a former editor-in-chief of the German edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. Knott has translated and edited volumes into German, including the work of poets Anne Carson and John Cage. Her recent books include Unlearning with Hannah Arendt (Other Press, 2014) and, as editor in both German and English, the Hannah Arendt–Gershom Scholem Correspondence (Suhrkamp, 2010; University of Chicago Press, 2017). She lives and works in Berlin.

Günter Kunert was born in Berlin in 1929, where he survived World War II before being “encouraged” to leave for the West in 1979. In addition to lyric poetry, he has written short stories and a novel, essays and autobiographical works, satires, fairytales, science fiction, radio plays, speeches, travel writing, film scripts, and drama. The poems here, “Legacies” (1974) and “Historical Consciousness” (1980), reflect both Kunert’s debt and his reaction to Brecht, an early mentor. Kunert has received numerous literary awards, including the Heinrich Mann Prize in 1962, the Becher Prize in 1973, and the America Award in Literature in 2009 for “a lifelong contribution to international writing.”

Christine Lavant (1915–1973), from Groß-Edling, Carinthia, southern Austria, was a student of religious, mystical, and philosophical literature. Known by the pen name she took from her native valley, she was the recipient of several major Austrian literary awards, including the Georg Trakl and Anton Wildgans Prizes. The originals of the poems featured in this issue first appeared in Die Bettlerschale [The Begging Bowl] in 1956.

Karen Leeder is a writer, critic, and translator, and is Professor of Modern German Literature at New College, Oxford. Recent publications include Volker Braun, Rubble Flora: Selected Poems (Seagull Books, 2014), with David Constantine, which was commended for the Popescu Poetry Prize in 2015, and the edited collection Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Her translations of Durs Grünbein have appeared in a number of magazines including Poetry Review and Poetry. She was awarded the Stephen Spender Prize in 2013, an English PEN award, and an American PEN/Heim award in 2016.

Margitt Lehbert has published translations of Elizabeth Bishop, Les Murray, Paul Muldoon, and many other poets in German. Her translations into English include The Poems of Georg Trakl (Anvil Press Poetry), Sarah Kirsch’s Winter Music (Anvil Press Poetry), and Michael Augustin’s Koslowski: 52 Pointers from Hearsay (Arc Press). She lived in Sweden for twelve years, where she founded the small press Edition Rugerup. She currently lives and works in Berlin.

Birgit Bunzel Linder has received degrees from the University of Cologne, Germany, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She teaches Chinese and comparative literature, Gothic literatures, madness and literature, and Medical Humanities at the City University of Hong Kong. She has published poetry and photography in Asian Cha, the International Literature Quarterly, Cerebration, Kavya Bharati, Clockwise Cat, Mad Poets Review, and various other anthologies. In 2012, she won the International Proverse Prize for Unpublished Poetry for her 2013 collection Shadows in Deferment, and in 2016 she received the Arts Development Council Award for Literary Arts for her forthcoming collection of poetry Bliss of Bewilderment.

Marius von Mayenburg’s work, which includes The Ugly One, The Stone, Perplex, Martyr, and A Piece of Plastic, has been translated into thirty languages and performed in Germany and abroad. Alongside his activities as playwright, Mayenburg is also a theater director and has translated plays by writers such as William Shakespeare, Martin Crimp, and Sarah Kane.

Leah McCormack is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Dakota. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Redivider, Prairie Fire, Fiction, North Dakota Quarterly, REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters, and Portland Review, among others. She has her PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Cincinnati and her MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York.

Jane Mead is the author of four collections of poems and the recipient of grants and awards from the Whiting, Guggenheim, and Lannan foundations. The selections presented here are from her new book-length poem, World of Made and Unmade (Alice James, 2016). She farms in northern California.

David Mura has written four books of poetry, most recently The Last Incantations (Northwestern University Press, 2014). He is the author of two memoirs, Turning Japanese (Grove Atlantic, 1991), which won the Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality & Identity (Anchor, 1996). Mura teaches at VONA and is Director of Training for the Innocent Classroom, a program that addresses the racial achievement gap by training teachers to improve their relationships with students of color.

Ricardo Pau-Llosa has published seven collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Man (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014). He is also an art critic and curator.

Joseph Pearson was born in Canada and has lived almost a decade in Berlin, where he is a writer and cultural historian. He runs a writing workshop at the Universität der Künste and teaches at New York University Berlin. He is the essayist of the Schaubühne, Germany’s most prominent theater; the voice of the city blog, The Needle; and author of the forthcoming Berlin Cityscopes, a creative nonfiction portrait of the metropolis (Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Stanley Plumly is the author of the forthcoming collection Against Sunset (W. W. Norton, 2016) and The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb (W. W. Norton, 2014). He is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland.

Lia Purpura is the author of eight collections of essays and poems, most recently It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin, 2015). She is Writer in Residence at the University of Maryland and teaches in the low residency MFA program at the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington.

Harry Roddy is a poet, translator, and associate professor of German at the University of South Alabama. He has published scholarship on twentieth- century German literature, as well as translations of the poets Farhad Showghi and Daniela Danz. He lives with his family in Mobile, Alabama.

Ulrike Almut Sandig was born in Saxony in the former East Germany and now lives in Berlin. She has published four volumes of poetry as well as short stories and radio plays. Her newest collection is ich bin ein Feld voller Raps, verstecke die Rehe und leuchte wie dreizehn Ölgemälde übereinandergelegt (2016). She has collaborated on various projects with musicians and sound artists, producing the CD Märzwald (2011). Sandig has won numerous prizes including the Leonce-and-Lena Prize (2009) and the Droste Prize for Emerging Talent (2012).

Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, a town in the eastern part of the state of Thuringia in the former German Democratic Republic. He has published a novel (winner of the German Book Prize in 2014) and over six volumes of poetry, short stories, and essays. He is a member of the Saxon Academy of the Arts, Dresden, and the Academy of Arts, Berlin. He lives outside of Berlin and Stockholm.

Sophie Seita’s published works include Meat (Little Red Leaves, 2015), Fantasias in Counting (BlazeVOX, 2014), 12 Steps (Wide Range, 2012), and I Mean I Dislike That Fate That I Was Made To Where, a translation of Uljana Wolf (Wonder, 2015). Her play Don Carlos, or, Royal Jelly has been performed at Company Gallery in New York. She has received fellowships and awards from Princeton, Buffalo, Cambridge, Columbia, DAAD, and Studienstiftung, and a PEN/Heim award for her translation of Uljana Wolf’s Subsisters: Selected Poems (Belladonna, 2017). She is a Junior Research Fellow in English at Queens’ College, Cambridge.

Anne Stokes’s most recent book-length translation of poetry by Sarah Kirsch, Ice Roses: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2014), features over one hundred poems from Kirsch’s ten collections, and was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld and the Popescu European Translation Prizes in 2015. Her translation of Monika Rinck’s poem “pfingstrosen” [“peonies at pentecost”] was commended by the Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize in the same year. She recently translated into English the German bestseller This House Is Mine (St. Martin’s Press, 2016) by Doerte Hansen. Stokes teaches German and Translation Studies at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of eight collections of poetry and prose, most recently Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2010) and Six: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2016), selected by C. D. Wright as the winner of the AROHO/To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. A recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and reviews regularly for the Rumpus and Lambda Literary Review. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives on Hollywood Beach.

Jan Wagner studied English in Hamburg, Dublin, and Berlin, where he has lived since 1995. A poet, essayist, and translator of British and American poetry, he has published six volumes of poetry including, most recently, Regentonnenvariationen (Rain Barrel Variations, 2014). His collection of essays, Die Sandale des Propheten [The Prophet’s Sandal ], appeared in 2011, and a selection of poems in English translation, Self-portrait with a Swarm ofBees, came out from Arc Publications in 2015. He has received many awards, including the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize (2009), the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (2011), and the Prize of the Leipzig Bookfair (2015).

Peter Waterhouse, born in 1956 in Berlin to an Austrian mother and British father, has lived in Vienna since 1975. He studied English and German at the University of Vienna, where he completed a doctorate on the poetry of Paul Celan. He is the recipient of the country’s highest literary honor, the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2012). In addition to novels, plays, and essays, he has published half a dozen books of poetry. He is also a translator from English and Italian, and the co-founder of the Viennese translation movement Versatorium, whose collective translations of Charles Bernstein won the City of Münster Prize for International Poetry (2015).

Uljana Wolf lives and works in Berlin and Brooklyn. She has published three volumes of poetry, kochanie ich habe brot gekauft (2005), falsche freunde (2009), and Meine schönste Lengevitch (2013), as well as the essay “Box Office” (2010) and a joint sonnet erasure project with Christian Hawkey, “Sonne from Ort” (2012). Among the English-language poets she has translated into German are Matthea Harvey, Erín Moure, John Asbery, Yoko Ono, and Cole Swensen. Her own work has been translated into more than thirteen languages. She has received numerous prizes for her literary works and translations, including the Peter Huchel Prize and the Dresden Poetry Prize. Wolf teaches German and literary translation at New York University and the Pratt Institute.

Chelika Yapa received her MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where she was awarded a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. Her personal essays have appeared in Glamour, Mamm, and Now. “Follow-Up” is her first published fiction, drawn from the experience of having been diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of twenty-two. She is grateful to her writing instructor, Lou Mathews, for his friendship and support.

Maja Zade is a dramaturg at the Schaubühne Berlin, where she has worked with directors such as Thomas Ostermeier, Ivo van Hove, Luk Perceval, Benedict Andrews, and Marius von Mayenburg. Her translations into German include works by Lars von Trier, Arnold Wesker, and Caryl Churchill, and she has translated into English works by Marius von Mayenburg, Roland Schimmelpfennig, Lars Norén, and Falk Richter.

 

New Books by NER Authors

September 2, 2016

Cannibal“Safiya Sinclair writes strange, mythological, gorgeously elaborate lyric poems, with a diction that is both arcane and contemporary …. Her language is distinctive, assured, and a marvel to read.
—Cathy Park Hong, from her introduction to Safiya Sinclair in Boston Review

NER author and 2016 Bread Loaf Fellow Safiya Sinclair has had her first full-length collection, Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), published. Sinclair received the 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award, and Cannibal won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile.

 Sinclair was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, New England Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.  She is also the author of the chapbook Catacombs (Argos Books, 2011). She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia, and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.

Sinclair’s poem “Good Hair” was published NER 37.2. Cannibal is available from University of Nebraska Press and other booksellers.

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World-of-Made-and-Unmade-JPEG-200x259

“Mead’s earthiness sometimes morphs into otherworldliness …. In addressing the relationship of mortality to ideas of resolution, celebration, and homecoming, Mead asks, “How will you spend your courage?”
–
Publishers Weekly

NER poet Jane Mead’s fifth collection of poetry, World of Made and Unmade, will be published by Alice James Books in September 2016. Selections from World of Made And Unmade will appear in NER 37.3.

Mead is the author of four full-length books of poetry, most recently Money Money Money | Water Water Water, from Alice James Books. Her poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals and she is the recipient of grants and awards from the Whiting, Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations. She has taught at many colleges and universities including Colby College, The University of Iowa and Wake Forest University. She now manages the ranch her grandfather purchased in the early 1900’s in Northern California, where she grows zinfandel and cabernet wine-grapes. She teaches in the Drew University low-residency MFA program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.

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The_Exit_Coach_Staffel_front_cover-330“The Exit Coach is a book of wonderful, astute stories. Staffel’s characters keep falling upon whatever they least expect. . . . A remarkable collection.”
—Joan Silber

NER author Megan Staffel‘s collection The Exit Coach will be published by Four Way Books in September 2017. The Exit Coach is a compilation of six short stories and a novella, all “linked through reoccurring characters, settings, and themes. The protagonists experience deeply personal transformations and struggle to reconcile their various personas and shifting identities” (Publisher’s Weekly). “Tertium Quid,” one of the stories in the collection, was published in NER 32.4. Staffel’s work has also appeared in NER 31.1, 34.2, and on NER Digital.

Staffel is the author of the collection of short fiction, Lessons in Another Language (Four Way Books) and two novels, The Notebook of Lost Things (Soho Press) and She Wanted Something Else ( North Point Press) and a first collection of short stories, A Length of Wire and Other Stories (Pym-Randall Press). Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals including New England Review, The Northwest Review, Ploughshares, Gargoyle, The Seattle Review, and The Kansas Quarterly. Her stories have been short listed in Best American Short Stories and nominated for The Pushcart Prize.

Staffel teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Previously, she taught at the University of Iowa, Kansas State University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Vermont College. She has two adult children and splits her time between Brooklyn, New York and and a farm in a small town in western New York State.

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younMonica Youn, a three-time NER poet, will have her third collection of poetry published this September. Blackacre: Poems (Graywolf Press) “is virtuosic: poems so sharp and fine they cut deep past the body or the self or the mind—they’re needles of rain carving out a canyon. Death is as close as birth, and as far. Youn dazzles with her enigmatic loopholes—the taut noose, the elusive umbilicus, the Möbius qualities of longing and lack and love—which shadow or shape who we are, and what can be called ours” (Brenda Shaughnessy).

Youn is the author of two previous poetry collections, Barter and Ignatz, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. A former lawyer, she teaches at Princeton University and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poetry has previously appeared in NER 21.1, 22.3, and 37.1.

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ganassiNER translator Ian Ganassi‘s poetry collection, titled Mean Numbers (China Grove Press), will be published on September 15.  Ganassi writes, “I would like my poems to change people’s experience of reality, to help free them, if only briefly, from what Wallace Stevens called the ‘malady of the quotidian.'”

Ganassi’s new translation of the Aeneid, Book 7, appears in the most recent issue of NER (37.2). Ganassi’s translations of books 1–6 of the Aeneid have appeared previously in NER. He is the inaugural winner of the China Grove Prize in Poetry. His poetry and prose have appeared in more than 50 literary journals. Critical essays have appeared in Octopus, American Letters & Commentary, The Gettysburg Review, and Boulevard, among others. Selections from “The Corpses,”a collage series in collaboration with painter Laura Bell, have been included in art and literary publications and exhibited in galleries in New York City, New Haven, CT, and elsewhere. Ganassi has worked as a percussionist, accompanying Modern, Caribbean, and African dance in New Haven, and as a teacher of writing and literature.

Mean Numbers is available online and from China Grove Press.

 

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books Tagged With: Ian Ganassi, jane mead, Megan Staffel, Monica Youn, Safiya Sinclair

Announcing NER 37.2

June 28, 2016

NER37-2 front coverBuy your copy today!

A sneak peek of our Editor’s Note,
from the just-barely-released NER 37.2:

First publication, which is what you see here, is a moment of capture. It’s the moment the work leaves the writer’s private world and becomes public. The version that appears here may be fixed for NER 37.2—and we believe it’s in its prime—but some works will go on to be part of a book, and then maybe years after that will be revised again for a “new and selected.”  —CK

Read more!

NONFICTION
♦ Mary Ebbott on pain’s resistance to language, from Homer to the McGill Pain Questionnaire

♦ Rob Hardy presents the life of an antebellum politician-turned-poet, in an age of hoaxes and counterfeits

♦ Playwright to playwright: Nathaniel G. Nesmith interviews Steve Carter

♦ Ning Ken (trans. by Thomas Moran) calls for a Chinese fiction that contends with contemporary China, where reality exceeds imagination

♦ Eric Severn tallies up the failures so far

♦ John Keats introduces his work

♦ Plus Ian Ganassi’s new translation from Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the Trojans eat their tables and the princess’s hair catches fire

FICTION by Leslie Bazzett, Ben Eisman, Becky Hagenston, Kate Petersen, Anne Raeff, and Tyler Sage.

POETRY by Cortney Lamar Charleston, Martha Collins, Ben Jackson, Wayne Miller, Derek Mong, Mark Neely, Maxine Scates, Safiya Sinclair, Bruce Snider, Brian Teare, Ryan Teitman, and Kara van de Graaf.

Filed Under: News & Notes

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Vol. 43, No. 4

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Serhiy Zhadan

Literature & Democracy

Serhiy Zhadan

“That’s the appeal of writing: you treat the world like a potential text, using it as material, setting yourself apart, stepping out.”

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