The Person And The Personal
Who is Aleksandur Kristiansen?The question was simple on the face of it. My co-translator had sent me a biopic note explaining that he was a Faroese poet a generation older than Jóanes Nielsen.
We were working on Nielsen’s “I Brushed the Dust off an Intoxicated Poet,” in which wiping “the dance-floor dust” off a drunken Kristiansen’s jacket serves as a sort of laying on of hands for Nielsen when he is a fledgling young poet. It’s an intensely personal poem.
For me, translating is about entering into the poem and inhabiting its space. It wasn’t enough to know the facts. I wanted the feeling, but without a connection to or experience with Aleksandur Kristiansen, my translation felt wooden.
This story is from the March – April 1018 edition of World Literature Today.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the March – April 1018 edition of World Literature Today.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Turtles
In a field near the Gaza Strip, a missile strike, visions, and onlookers searching for an explanation.
Surviving and Subverting the Totalitarian State: A Tribute to Ismail Kadareby Kapka Kassabova
As part of the ceremony honoring Kadare as the 2020 laureate—with participants logging in from dozens of countries around the world— Kadare’s nominating juror, Kapka Kassabova, offered a video tribute from her home in Scotland.
Chicken Soup: The Story of a Jewish Family
Chickens, from Bessarabia to New York City, provide a generational through-line in these four vignettes.
Awl
“Awl” is from a series titled “Words I Did Not Understand.” Through memory—“the first screen of nostalgia”—and language, a writer pieces together her story of home.
Translating Toshiko Hirata's Ars Poetica
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
Pittsburgh's August Wilson African American Cultural Center
LOCATED IN THE HEART of downtown Pittsburgh, on Liberty Avenue close to Union Station and the David Lawrence Convention Center, the sleek and elegant but unpretentious August Wilson African American Cultural Center (awaacc) cannot fail to capture the eye and the imagination of anybody who is visiting Pittsburgh or, for that matter, of anybody who lives in the city.
Liquid History
Scuba-diving in the Black Sea, a writer contemplates Lenin in the Crimean seabed, the watery landfall from which historical figures are never meant to rise again.
Catania, Sicily
LAST OCTOBER, I chose to use Catania as a base for exploring the towns of southeastern Sicily I had yet to discover.
There Is Also This Civil War Inside of Me
A Conversation with Zisis Ainalis
Not Pregnant
In this work of creative nonfiction from Cuba, plague is something common shared with those who lived in Thebes.