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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

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

Involvement with Latin

March 15, 2012

GiorcesBardo42

Virgil and Mingus, Maybe | By Ian Ganassi

I studied Latin for about seven years, all told. It lay fallow for a decade, but in 1994 I decided to try a translation of an excerpt from Virgil’s Aeneid. It was accepted by NER and I was encouraged to persevere.

A sidelight of my renewed involvement with Latin was the discovery that the great jazz composer and bassist Charles Mingus seems to have dabbled in Latin, based on his occasional use of Latin in song and album titles. These include “Hora Decubitus,” Mingus Ah Um and Pithecanthropus Erectus, among others.

The album title Mingus Ah Um takes its cue from the fact that his name recalls the Latin adjective magnus, meaning “great,”  the feminine and neuter endings of which are a, um. He also no doubt knew of the verb mingere, to urinate, and it perhaps occurred to him that a Latin adjective mingus would mean something like “pissy” (although strictly speaking it would not take the form mingus). Given Mingus’s famous temper, “pissy” is one possible description of his personality.

The tune “Hora Decubitus,” which translates as, essentially, “bedtime,” is oddly named; far from being a lullaby, it is one of Mingus’s up-tempo, driving pieces.

Some musical analyses have perceived a “Latin tinge” (a paraphrase of Jelly Roll Morton’s “Spanish tinge”) to Mingus’s music. Two obvious examples are “Adagia Ma Non Troppo” from the album Let My Children Hear Music and “Trio and Group Dancers” from the album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, which actually uses flamenco guitar. In addition, the Mingus Big Band made an entire album titled Que Viva Mingus, which consists entirely of Mingus pieces based on Latin music. Also, various Latin musicians have recorded Mingus tunes.

However, this “tinge” in Mingus is not only connected to music like Flamenco, Latin Jazz, Mambo and Salsa (especially Mambo), but also to the Latin language.

The common thread in these diverse elements could be exemplified by the Spanish word clave. There’s some disagreement about its etymology, but the likelihood is that it ultimately comes from the Latin word clavis, meaning “key.” The Spanish word also means “key,” but in a metaphorical or figurative sense (as in the keystone of an arch), with the word llave carrying the more mundane meaning. The word “clef,” which helps identify the tonal range of a piece of music, also comes from clave. Finally, and most important, clave is the Spanish name for a West African rhythmic pattern that underlies both West African and much Latin music (especially Mambo and Salsa). It is the “key” to the music’s rhythmic structure. Interestingly, many of Mingus’s compositions, such as “Moanin,” “Hora Decubitus,” and “E’s Flat, Ah’s Flat Too,” could be heard as being “in clave” (rhythmically, at least), a phrase more commonly used with reference to Latin music.

To quote the poet Mark Strand:

I have a key

so I open the door and walk in.

It is dark and I walk in.

It is darker and I walk in.

*

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Ian Ganassi’s translations from the Aeneid have appeared in NER on numerous occasions. Images from a collaboration with a painter friend can be found at www.thecorpses.com. He lives in New Haven, where he works as a percussionist and teacher.

Filed Under: NER Digital Tagged With: Ian Ganassi, Virgil and Mingus Maybe


Vol. 43, No. 2

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NER Digital

David Ryan

Behind the Byline

David Ryan

NER’s Elizabeth Sutton speaks with 43.2 contributor David Ryan about juxtaposition, character development, and writing around gaps in his story “Elision.”

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