Skip to content

Index: Poetry and prose in translation

Corporation Street.

Julia Deakin: ‘Down on the gritty strand
which did for one more beach you watched
four generations, shoulder to shoulder,
thigh to bronze thigh between coolbox food,
clutter, chatter, glitter.’

Nine poems.

Veroniki Dalakoura :’From the pile of rubbish, you went up with your dual essence, with what ultimately gives substance to the quest of man. Melodies were heard everywhere. Heaps, a pile of dirt, indeed dried-up earth. A fruitless search. Voices, joyful screams—what little songs—all together bleating with moans.’

For once.

Susana Martín Gijón: ‘When the potholes in the road made me bounce, I started to imagine it.  When the vehicle stopped unexpectedly, I felt it coming.  When he got up from his seat with deliberately slow movements, I knew it with certainty.’

Tristia.

Peter McCarey: ‘The title was an afterthought, from Ovid, foreign also to its author, an ‘ostranenie / estrangement’, though the deep theme of yearning is not. The poem echoes Dante, Blok, folk tales and the aubade; it reads like a testament, which perhaps it was.’

Thirteen poems.

Anna de Noailles: ‘A languor now extends itself across the space between us.
Can you feel invading you the scent of drooping grass?
A damp breeze translates the dusk into some garden of despond.’

On Women.

Natalia Ginzburg: ‘I have met so many women, and now I always find something worthy of commiseration in every single one of them, some kind of trouble, kept more or less secret, and more or less big: the tendency to fall down the well and find there a chance for suffering, which men do not know about — maybe because they have a much stronger health or they are smarter in forgetting about themselves and fully identifying with their jobs, they are more assertive and actual owners of their own body, and of their life, and are freer in general.’ (Nicoletta Asciuto, trans.)

Eight poems from ‘Mala kruna’.

Franca Mancinelli: ‘The morgue is a calm lake: the boats
oval like a woman’s seed,
the flesh where a son ever sleeps.’

More new translations from ‘The Dice Cup’, tranche 4.

Max Jacob: ‘When I went inside, two women wanted to know which of them I liked best and I liked both of them best. A fine gentleman showed us how to dance the English Chain and the lesson went on and on. While the dance was being organised, the gas lamp (did we have a gas lamp?) was turned down and then the flame was increased as the music grew louder, thanks to a technical innovation as bold as it was ingenious…’

Even more new translations from ‘The Dice Cup’.

Max Jacob (Ian Seed’s translation): ‘He had come down…but how? Then couples larger than life descended too. They came from the air in cases, inside Easter eggs. They were laughing, and the balcony of my parents’ house was tangled in threads dark as gunpowder. It was terrifying. The couples settled in my childhood home and we watched them through the window. For they were wicked.’

A Poetic Sequence from ‘Trás-os-Montes’.

José-Flores Tappy: ‘When concentrating she is unaware
of our calling out to her, doesn’t even raise
her head when we speak to her’

Leaving Sidi Bou Said.

Lorand Gaspar: ‘Things and events are at every moment what they are and nothing else. We are, each and every one, like the furrow of a drop of bird-life looking for a passage in the currents that alternately lead and threaten us.’

New translations from ‘The Dice Cup’.

Ian Seed: ‘In 1894 Jacob left Quimper to study law in Paris, but abandoned his studies two years later to become an art critic. In 1899 he decided to become a painter, supporting himself through a series of menial clerical jobs. When he met Picasso in 1901, the two became friends immediately. Picasso expressed his admiration for some poems Jacob showed him. From this time on, Jacob regarded poetry as his true vocation.’

Three récits by Georges Limbour.

Georges Limbour: ‘However, as soon as the first white-painted houses appeared, as though sensing it would have been dangerous to go further, they stopped and scattered amid the cacti and fig trees. I entered the village. A woman rooted to the spot by the pitcher she carried on her head raised the edge of her cloak to her eyes. ‘

Rrose Sélevy.

Rrose Sélevy: ‘Marcel Duchamp: In the lane there was a blue bull near a white seat. Now explain the motive for the white gloves.’

New translations from ‘The Dice Cup’.

Ian Seed: ‘Max Jacob’s father was a tailor and the owner of an antique shop. Jacob’s large family, including uncles, aunts and cousins, often make an appearance in his poems. In 1894 Jacob left Quimper to study law in Paris, but abandoned his studies two years later to become an art critic. In 1899 he decided to become a painter, supporting himself through a series of menial clerical jobs. When he met Picasso in 1901, the two became friends immediately.’