New England Review

Peter Waterhouse

Zakid’s Delicatessen, Bremen

"Man Making Music in the Forest" by Rebecca Pyle, rebeccapyleartist.wordpress.comPoetry from NER 37.3

The apple tree hangs full of issues
my child has issues
and I have them, such issues
huge problems, or pompoms
hard problems dead persons and field flowers

—translated from the German by
Iain Galbraith

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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).

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.

Auguste Lacaussade

Le Piton des Neiges

To my friend A. Lionnet
Translation from NER 36.1. 

Ocean, Ocean, when your fuming waves
Lift, roaring, making one majestic wave
From foaming heads, rearing up to air,
Appearing to touch the sky with its sublime crest;
We see its peak smoking like a vast
Crater, its huge mass mastering the waters!

The furrows that its volume compresses,
Come in fury to smash themselves at its base;
The wave rises and leaps towards its arrogant
Brow; but this one—see!—like the God of the tempest,
With foam and vapors crowns its crest,
And seems to dominate its furious aspect.

 

—translated from the French by John Kinsella

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Auguste Lacaussade (1815–1897) was born on the French Indian Ocean possession of Bourbon, later named Ile de la Réunion. He published his first volume of poems in 1839, Les Salaziennes, followed by Poèmes et Paysages (1852), and Les Épaves (1861).

John Kinsella’s most recent books include the poetry collection Jam Tree Gully (W. W. Norton, 2012) and the collaborative work Redstart, with Forrest Gander (Iowa University Press, 2012). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. 

Xiao Kaiyu

Our Poets

Translation from NER 36.2

When in our indignation Chinese
becomes pallid and ossified
as in hotels, markets, banks,
computers, going through customs, open-bar parties. . . .
we, benighted, alien students of Borges,
tin-eared impersonators of Rilke’s theism,
victims of the gawky translation of Joseph Brodsky’s verse,
producers of goose eggs out of Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero,
fraudulent drunks who feign lunacy and conceal our spiritual numbness,
we curse English. In New York, Paris,
and all the meat-eating cities, we chase the dollar,
and the endorsement of self-important professors,
and we use antiquated Chinese to represent China.

—translated from the Chinese by Christopher Lupke

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Xiao Kaiyu was born in the village of Heping, Zhongjiang County, Sichuan Province, in 1960. Beginning in his youth, he was interested in literature and traditional Chinese culture, although he pursued Chinese medicine in college, graduating with a degree in 1979. After several years of practicing traditional Chinese medicine in Sichuan and writing poetry on the side, he moved to Shanghai in 1993, where he served as an editor, taught at university, and began publishing his poems. He spent several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Germany, learning the language and reading widely in European literature. After returning to China, he accepted a position as Professor of Chinese at Henan University in Kaifeng, where he currently works.

Christopher Lupke is professor of Chinese at Washington State University, where he coordinates Asian Languages. He was classically trained in Chinese in Taiwan and at the Middlebury College Chinese School, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Cornell University, where he received his PhD in 1993, writing his dissertation on modernism and the diaspora. His scholarship has focused on modern China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and he has published books on the notion of ming (“fate, destiny, or life’s allotment”), contemporary Chinese poetry, and the cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, and articles on a broad range of subjects pertaining to modern Chinese culture. He has steadily published translations of Chinese literature in English but still considers himself “early in his career” (if not young), as he hopes to publish the poetry of Xiao Kaiyu as a book.

Goran Petrovic

The Sixty-Nine Drawers

Translation from NER 35.2. 

Screen Shot 2015-11-17 at 11.40.07 AMAll around, as far as the eye could see, stretched a garden of ravishing beauty. The road first wound between rows of larches, and then red oaks prevailed, and then, in perfect harmony, in a fireworks of form, the wholes were interchanged, skillfully joined by bends of brushwood and low, shrubby vegetation. One could hardly take a step without this next angle of observation giving rise to some new delight. From the primeval lichens, tranquil mosses, stubborn mistletoes, and trembling ferns in the hollows, through the young ivy and mighty trunks, to the round, pyramidal, branchy, conical, sadly drooping and bushy outlines of the treetops. Isolated here and there. Then grouped in small clusters of birch or conifer. Divided by forked trails of settled dust . . .

Solitary, disheveled English oaks—on grassy plateaus swarming with mushroom caps. Then pastures, gentle slopes edged by wild blackberry bushes and low walls of dry-stacked stone, overgrown with creepers of ivy. Quite unexpectedly—steeper inclines and endemic flora nestled against bare, blanched rocks, as in the Alps. In seemingly carelessly arranged contours, but always in such a way that the shady side never encroached on the sunny, so that each blade of grass had sufficient light and cool . . .

—translated from the Serbian by Peter Agnone

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Goran Petrovic has published dozens of books, including five collections of short stories, three novels, several plays, a book of essays, and a novella. His books have been translated into more than sixteen languages and have been adapted for theater, television, and radio. His awards include the NIN Award for the Novel of the Year, the Ivo Andrić Award for the Book of Short Stories of the Year, and the National Library of Serbia Award for the Most Read Book of the Year. He is the member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Serbian PEN Centre. The novel excerpted in this issue of NER has been published in sixteen languages other than English, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish, and Russian.

Peter Agnone (1948–2011) studied Serbian at the University of Pittsburgh and visited the former Yugoslavia numerous times. He translated David Albahari’s novel Bait (2001) as part of the Northwestern University Press Writings from an Unbound Europe series, and was nominated for the 2003 American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages book prize. He also translated short stories by Goran Petrović, Vidosav Stevanović, and Mihajlo Pantić, which appeared in The Man Who Ate Death: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Stories (2006), and completed a translation of Petrović’s novel The Sixty-Nine Drawers before he died in 2011. 

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