Whenever a translator feels compelled to present their work as something just a little bit different, as not quite a translation, but as an imitation, or a version, or whatever else they can come up with (“Englished” for “translated” is a favorite), my instinct is to cry bullshit. There is rarely something original enough to justify setting oneself apart from other translators and, intended or not, it smacks of apologetics: a way of excusing any potential infidelities as part of the game. When you actually read the poems, it’s clear why debating the merits of the different translations in terms of relative faithfulness is pointless. Compare these two versions of “The Couple,” originally published in 1962. The first is by Robin Fulton, which we know to be the sober, literal rendition:

They switch off the light and its white shade
glimmers for a moment before dissolving
like a tablet in a glass of darkness. Then up.
The hotel walls rise into the black sky.

The movements of love have settled, and they sleep
but their most secret thoughts meet as when
two colors meet and flow into each other
on the wet paper of a schoolboy’s painting.

It is dark and silent. But the town has pulled closer
tonight. With quenched windows. The houses have approached.
They stand close up in a throng, waiting,
a crowd whose faces have no expressions.

The second, from Robin Robertson, we expect to run roughshod over those lines:

They turn out the lamplight, and its white globe
glimmers for a moment: an aspirin rising and falling
then dissolving in a glass of darkness. Around them,
the hotel walls slide like a back-drop up into the night sky.

Love’s drama has died down, and they’re sleeping now,
but their dreams will meet as colours meet
and bleed into each other
in the dampened pages of a child’s painting-book.

All around is dark, and silent. The city has drawn in,
extinguishing its windows. The houses have approached.
They crowed in close, attentive:
this audience of cancelled faces.

Robertson adds “like a back-drop” in the fourth line, and there is certainly a good case for its not being there, but everything else can be unambiguously found in the Fulton. Robertson isn’t offering anything more new than re-configurations and re-thinkings of what’s already there — which is to say he’s translating. “The town has pulled closer together,” “The city has drawn in.” Word-for-word, one of those might be more accurate to the Swedish, but they nonetheless say the same thing. The question is which says it better.

I would make the case for Robertson here. His translation propels the reader through, where the Fulton in some parts seems to need a breath after every word (“glimmers for a moment before dissolving / like a tablet in a glass of water”). Where Robertson would seem to violate the syntax and exact words of the original, we find justification in the Fulton, such as the problems of “a crowd whose faces have no expressions” (is “whose” the word to use here? does the crowd have faces or is it a crowd of faces? does each face have no expression or no expressions?) which “this audience of cancelled faces” circumvents, though we do wonder what was wrong with “expressionless faces.” Robertson is certainly not blameless, but past reviews have focused on his occasional admittedly superfluous additions (Orr cites his simile “like the mess of a knife-fight” as the most egregious example, since it is absolutely without basis in the Swedish), without giving equal weight to the majority of the time when his changes are perfectly permissible and frequently elegant, adding rhythm to the jerks and offering up Tranströmer’s images in language that flows like water rather than dripping like ice. In a later poem, “The sun scorches. The plane flies low / throwing a shadow in the form of a large cross rushing forward on the ground” becomes “The sun is scorching. The plane comes in low, / throwing a shadow in the shape of a giant cross, rushing over the ground.”

Others cite this as precisely what’s wrong with Robertson’s Tranströmer, that the poems are too poetic, not strange enough. Such an effect may precisely be the hardest to produce: “Sick of those who come with words,” writes Tranströmer through Robertson, “words but no language.”

This book promises to be an interesting read. Take a look at Tim’s review to see why:

Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer’s winning the Nobel Prize brought to light a rare bit of translation gossip: that there’s bad blood between a few of his translators. And as there should be—a lot of people suddenly want to buy Tranströmer’s poetry; of the five plus out there, which book are you going to get? The Deleted World, Scottish poet Robin Robertson’s “versions” of Tranströmer’s poems (Robertson doesn’t like to call them “translations”), is the controversial one. Its first American publication at the end of last year, half a decade after it originally appeared from Enitharmon Press in Britain, drew new attention to the paper war abroad. In the introduction to the slim volume of fifteen poems from across Tranströmer’s career, Robertson makes it clear, “The free versions in The Deleted World were never intended as literal translations.” Not free enough for some. As David Orr chronicled in March in the New York Times Book Review, Robin Fulton, also a Scottish poet-translator of Tranströmer, and who does speak Swedish, “accused Robertson (who doesn’t speak Swedish) of borrowing from his more faithful versions while inserting superfluous bits of Robertson’s own creation — in essence, creating poems that are neither accurate translations nor interesting departures.” Robertson has barbs of his own: in reference to other Tranströmer collections, he dubs Samuel Charter’s Baltics a “good reading” and Robert Bly’s The Half-Finished Heaven “a strong American selection,” while Fulton’s Collected Poems is a delightfully back-handed “useful.” Good for a gloss, but get your poetry elsewhere.

Click here to read the entire review.

Fast-forward two years, and young little Tim has helped launch Brown University’s Undergraduate Journal of Translation.

The first issue is available via the link above, and is pretty damn star-studded: Red Riding Hood by BTBA 2011 winner Ales Steger, translated by fellow BTBA winner Brian Henry; excerpts from A Stroll through Literature by Roberto Bolano, translated by Laura Healy; Etchings by Paul Verlaine, translated by Keith Waldrop; excerpts from Triste Tristan by Paol Keineg, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop; The Voice by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Erik-Dardan Ymeraga; The Philosophy Teacher by the Marquis de Sade, translated by Timothy Nassau; and Since Nine by C. P. Cavafy, translated by Peter Kenros and Emily Oglesby, with assistance from Daniel Mendelsohn, among many others. (And I heard from Tim that Susan Bernofsky has something the new Walser collection in the next issue . . .)

To give you a sense of the vision of this journal, here’s the letter from the editor that Tim and fellow editor Matthew Weiss wrote:

Speaking without fear of repercussions, we can organize contemporary literature around two poles: the literature that marshalls all the faculties of the soul in full cognitive stimulation, the reader’s brain lit globally on the screen of an MRI machine; and the literature of completeness, pages already cut, that tries to make story and identity cohere. These poles have always existed; today’s inheritors are post-modernism, on the one had, and the New Yorker’s fiction section, on the other. The battlelines have been drawn since the end of the last century, yet no one recognizes that today’s readers have long ago erased these lines in the sand, rushing to the shore and the ocean, their attention on the mystery of the lands beyond it.

This situation is nothing new. In 1925, when Russian literature found itself in the same predicament, Boris Eikhenbaum wrote about a recent influx of translated literature into the market. Today, he tells us, “translated literature fills a vacuum which has come about in our native literature—only a seeming vacuum perhaps, but for the reader one unquestionably there. The reader is no historian of literature . . . What he needs is to have an absorbing book on hand for leisurely reading. He needs a finished product, one ready to use.” And how do works in translation fill the space of uncertainty in the literary marketplace? A translated work is always already finished to us; it presents itself as an emissary from a completed world, removed from the pettiness of one’s own language, literature, and culture—and no matter how it is perceived in its own land, it always appears unified in another language. As such, it stands above contemporary controversies, like a manuscript from antiquity or a message from the future. It brings into view the following: that a different kind of whole is possible.

Now, the most exciting things happening in American literature bear the mark of a translator, and the authors need not be named. For when things get tough for letters, one looks abroad for new exemplars, new reminders.

This volume, brings together authors and translators speaking from across time, place, language, and genre. There is no path, exactly; each work opens up a new height and a new abyss. All together, they superpose a globe and a timeline; grasp them before they collapse.

If you want to submit something—a translator or “treatise on a related matter”—email the text (and original) to aldusjournal [at] gmail.com by October 15th.

Such a sentiment is the exact opposite of what you will encounter in Flash Cards, a collection of poems by Yu Jian. Born in 1954, Yu Jian has been writing since the early 1970s. For those who know what such things mean, he is considered one of “The Third Generation Poets” that followed the “Misty Poetry” movement of the early 1980s. Part of the Zephyr Press’s Jintian series dedicated to making available contemporary Chinese works, this is Yu Jian’s first collection to appear in English.

The world of the poet presented here is one of constant alienation, dissociation, and feeling out of place. But all this in a sea of people—everyone is forced together by necessity, but this does not create a feeling of connectedness. The far ends of heaven are not next door: everyone is crammed together and one does not have a close friend: one has 1.3 billion people. The poems are described as constituting “a primer of modern Chinese life,” and it is hard to escape the fact of the political and social reality from whence they emanate while reading these poems, especially when several seem to reference it directly:

Morning in the park
Thousands of retired women are exercising
They’ve given birth their children are grown
scattered across the wilderness of life
The Dishes have been washed
With leisure time they want to do something for themselves
In the winter sunlight
a thousand mothers are dancing
One of them gave birth to me
Mother I call out
They all turn their heads

This is surreal, and it is skillfully ambiguous whether it is meant to be funny or horrifying (as those seem to be the main things surrealism can do), but it is quite real as well. A commentary on a nation’s desire for children it cannot have, a single man’s obsession with his own mother, a meditation on the indistinguishability of the self in a communist regime . . . It’s as if Yu Jian grafted the stereotype of the Westerner who thinks all Chinese look alike onto himself.

Of course, the only possible outcome of this is clear: poems about being yourself and poems about how poems can let you do this. A general warning sign for me when reading a book of poetry is if the poet spends too long writing poems about writing poems. In this case, the stakes are higher so it is more forgivable: in America, the concept of dissident poetry is somewhat laughable (“You mean like America?”) because though you may be jailed for indecency, you will not disappear. I do not think Yu Jian is a dissident poet (because if he were I feel like it would have been mentioned somewhere prominent), but he recognizes that poetry as self-expression in China is not just about solipsism:

The poet is hosting a meeting
but she doesn’t know how to begin
Her poems are far away
planted at Black Leopard Farm
Time’s up everyone is looking at the clock
“Stand up, everyone” she says
“Let’s sing the national anthem”

The implication that nationalism is what fills in the gap left by poetry (or art in general) is powerful and important. This is what gives Yu Jian a feeling of belonging: not the forced comradery of communism, but that “A letter traveled a thousand miles / not to explain Ulysses / but to let me know / that somebody understood / my words.” Unfortunately, a large portion of this book passes by without making much of an impact. Many poems muse on daily life and present it enigmatically, but the exotically oblique meditativeness that seems to dominate our view of Chinese poetry rarely extends past the surface; each poem gives the strange impression of being both mysterious and making perfect sense, though the latter sensation often comes to dominate, and not in a good way; ambiguities are too tidily resolved. Perhaps this feeling is strictly my own, but I think it may come from a tension in how we view works from China: on the one hand we think of political oppression and work produced in exile, and on the other we imagine quatrains seeped in nature and Confucius. The reality of Chinese literature must be different and the oversimplification comes from my end, yet Yu Jian writes,

On the garden’s eyelashes
a butterfly is catching the twilight
The evening paper has arrived
Among reports of murder and the stock market
is a poem about the butterfly

What can we do with this? Can a poem about a butterfly also be about the economy (like this one)? The question is not even Chinese: can you be philosophical while writing about the actual world you live in? It has been done, but the tension between these two strains is not dealt with satisfactorily here: most “political” poems are abstract to the point of toothlessness while the “poetic” ones feel weighed down by inescapable ideological readings. For now, I’ll read the paper and then get to that poem about the butterfly.

Most notably, Flash Cards is a finalist for this year’s BTBA for poetry. I’ll try to handicap the poetry titles tomorrow, but based on Tim’s review, I’m not so sure this book is going to pull it off . . .

Speaking of Tim, he was an intern here some summers ago and thanks to our special brand of Open Letter guidance, he’s going to be launching a student-centric literary translation journal out of Brown University. Our quixotic nature strikes again! (And as soon as the first issue drops, we’ll have more information.)

In the meantime, here’s the opening to Tim’s review:

A few weeks ago I was visiting my grandparents in the tiny town of Kewanee, Illinois. Their house, because it is the same house where my mother grew up with her brothers and sisters, is crammed with the detritus of several childhoods and adolescences. While looking through a closet, I found a sheet of paper hand painted with beautiful calligraphic Chinese characters. It surely belonged to my uncle, but curiosity, and the feeling that it might otherwise remain in that closet forever, compelled me to take the sheet back to Providence against what some might consider the standards of being a good guest. None of my friends who speak Chinese could read the characters, so I took the mystery to Xue Di, Brown’s resident dissident poet. He of course sent me to Wikipedia, where I learned that what I had was a famous line from 7th century poet Wang Bo. It translates to: “When one has a close friend, the far ends of heaven are next door.”

Such a sentiment is the exact opposite of what you will encounter in Flash Cards, a collection of poems by Yu Jian. Born in 1954, Yu Jian has been writing since the early 1970s. For those who know what such things mean, he is considered one of “The Third Generation Poets” that followed the “Misty Poetry” movement of the early 1980s. Part of the Zephyr Press’s Jintian series dedicated to making available contemporary Chinese works, this is Yu Jian’s first collection to appear in English.

Click here to read the full piece.

And stay tuned to find out how Flash Cards fares in the BTBA . . .

So, as expected, the things described in this book are defamiliarized and here, often, Šteger is at his best. The way he personifies an object, or the metaphor he uses, is never obvious, but it always makes complete sense. That when you open an umbrella “he unbuttons his too-tight tuxedo” is an image that could very well become engrained my experience of walking in the rain. The description of a cat as a “castrated transvestite in fur” also belies a strain of humor, or at least a taste for the uncanny. The effect of such language, however, can at times be discomfiting. In “Sausage” we are asked “Is your stomach rumbling again? Come, put it in your mouth. / Between the anus and the mouth the appetite of a body for a body.” Though destined to be a lifelong carnivore, the reminder that a sausage is a body in the same way that I am a body is sobering.

Yet this aspect, this theme of Šteger’s poetry is actually not quite as prevalent as one could expect. It’s hard to generalize about the poems because each thing is treated differently and what they may lack in cohesion as a whole is made up in variety (and of course, how can you treat Salmon and Shit the same?). But there are unifying themes: loss, escape from yourself, confusion perhaps, though I may just be projecting . . . For poems ostensibly about things there is certainly a lot of human in here. Consider this, entitled “Grater”:

You remember how your mother, Jocasta,
Returned from the pigsty with a gaping palm.

Inside the madness of pain a window opened.
She stepped out and stepped out of her body.

You remember how your startled father was changing a bandage,
How, mid-escape, the edges of the bandage turned red.

This time the grater’s whisper is yours. The world is being whittled away.
The apple wedge is getting smaller, but who is there for whom?

Are you merely an instrument of the apple in your palm?
Silently it grates you, a ripe Buddhist, idared samsara.

When it vanishes you, you open your eyes, like your mother
That time, on the other side of the wound.

This is, certainly, poetry—an oblique allusion, two words in a row I don’t know (“idared samsara”), a little melodrama (the madness of pain), perhaps even (though we’ll give Šteger the benefit of the doubt) a reference to the Buddhist Beats—but it is beautiful and it has power. The feeling is of a view into a private world that is not our own, a view mediated by things, here a bandage, a grater, an apple. There is something behind them: memories that are not ours and that we cannot understand, so it is a testament to Šteger’s writing (and Brian Henry’s constantly lucid translation) that we feel them. And what is important beyond that is this idea: that objects might not just be there for us or, perhaps less crazy, that they grow past functionality to become the talismans of our lives, that they are imbued with our personal histories. We create the private lives of objects, but, as Šteger writes in the poem “Ant,” they are “the invisible moving through the visible world.” The poem ends thusly: “And there aren’t names for what it is. / When it disappears into its maze, only hope remains / That at least there are names for what it isn’t.” Stein showed in Tender Buttons that the names of things cannot contain them by proving to us that language is not tantamount to the world is ostensibly describes. Šteger shows that the names of things cannot contain them because they merely denote a function rather than connoting anything richer. The epigraph to these poems is “A word does not exist for every thing.” No, but a poem does, and we all write them every day.

If you don’t know BOA Editions, they’re one of the premiere publishers of poetry in the U.S. and do a number of books in translation. They also happen to be based here in Rochester and their publisher is my good friend In addition to guiding this admirable non-profit, Peter is a poet himself and author of two very cool works of nonfiction: Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead and the more recent The White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg. (Yes, there is a theme here.) Anyway, Peter’s not really the focus of this, so shout out over.

is one of those European poets whose name comes up time and again, be it in the or or in Graywolf’s New European Poets anthology of a couple years back. I was actually a bit surprised to find out that The Book of Things is his first collection to be published in English translation.

Tim Nassau was a summer intern back in the day, and is a bit Open Letter fan and regular contributor to Three Percent. He’s also supposed to stop by the office in the next few hours, so I feel compelled to say nice things about him.

Here’s the opening of his review:

Literary critic Edmund Wilson, writing in the 1930s, said that the pieces of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons were intended to be “prose still-lifes to correspond to those of such painters as Picasso and Braque. A pattern of assorted words, though they might make nonsense from the traditional point of view, would be analogous to a Cubist canvas composed of unidentifiable fragments.” The first two sections of that book are entitled “Objects” and “Food,” and those are the main subjects of Slovenian poet Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things (with a few animals thrown in as well). The collection, which consists of 50 poems—a poem followed by seven sections of seven “things,” from raisins and bread to tapeworms and windshield wipers—is the poet’s fourth and the first to appear in English translation. While Stein sought to portray her things by breaking them down into tiny linguistic pieces and collaging those bits back together, Šteger’s cubism is in the addition of angles: like in Toy Story, objects are given literal lives of their own that are here drawn out; the things we so often overlook become the repositories of our own human fears and dreams. The effect is often disarming and although the individual success of each poem is inconsistent, there is enough beauty and surprise in these lines for Šteger’s stature as one of Slovenia’s best young poets to be amply justified.

So, as expected, the things described in this book are defamiliarized and here, often, Šteger is at his best. The way he personifies an object, or the metaphor he uses, is never obvious, but it always makes complete sense. That when you open an umbrella “he unbuttons his too-tight tuxedo” is an image that could very well become engrained my experience of walking in the rain. The description of a cat as a “castrated transvestite in fur” also belies a strain of humor, or at least a taste for the uncanny. The effect of such language, however, can at times be discomfiting. In “Sausage” we are asked “Is your stomach rumbling again? Come, put it in your mouth. / Between the anus and the mouth the appetite of a body for a body.” Though destined to be a lifelong carnivore, the reminder that a sausage is a body in the same way that I am a body is sobering.

Click here to read the full review. (And for the official count, this is the fourth review of 2011 . . . Only 96 more to reach our goal . . .)

To lay any doubts to rest, however, I must say that this anthology brought me joy. All the major and well known poets of the twentieth century are here represented (Rilke, Apollinaire, Akhmatova, Reverdy, Pasternak, Lorca . . . all in the first one hundred pages), but more importantly the selections made by Kaminsky shy away from their most famous and obviously anthologizable work to present us with equally impressive B-sides (just to pick one example, rather than choose Apollinaire’s “Le Pont Mirabeau,” we get “Zone,” the spectacular five page opener of Alcools and “The Little Car” from Calligrammes, the collection of Apollinaire’s more technically experimental concrete poetry). Thus each poet we thought we knew before becomes more multi-faceted with every page of this collection. And this principle extends out to those we don’t usually think of as poets: we find a Kafka parable, poems by Brecht, Raymond Queneau, Günter Grass, and Pier Paolo Pasolini (the latter’s work as a poet often getting overshadowed by the controversy of his films). It as if this anthology singlehandedly seeks to remind us that our greatest novelists and playwrights are, at heart, simply poets.

What I have yet to mention is that, to me at least, the majority of the poets in this collection were unknown, and therein lies its greatest pleasure. Be forewarned that while reading this anthology you may feel compelled to immediately go and snatch up the collected (or selected) works of every new find. Though this may be unorthodox in a review, the best way to convey this sense is to open the book to a random page and transcribe what is found there, though every page will be different—in theme, in style, in country . . .¹ Thus, on page 343, we find the poem “Destiny” by the Romanian Marin Sorescu:

The hen I’d bought the night before,
Frozen,
Had come to life,
Had laid the biggest egg in the world
And had been awarded the Nobel Prize.

The phenomenal egg
Was passed from hand to hand,
In a few weeks it had gone round the world,
And round the sun
In 365 days.

The hen had received who knows how much strong currency
Valued in pails of grain
Which she never managed to eat

Because she was invited everywhere,
Gave lectures, granted interviews,
Was photographed.

Often the reporters insisted
That I should be there too
In the photograph
Beside her.

And so, after having served Art
All my life

Suddenly I’m famous
As a poultry-breeder.

I had never heard of Marin Sorescu before this book, yet the biographical fact that he “was the most translated Romanian writer of the latter half of the twentieth century” says much more (I hope) about the status of translation in America than about my personal ignorance. In his introduction Kaminsky writes that “It is not unusual these days to hear an American translator say that she translated partly because she lives in an empire and sees translation work as a chance to educated the American readers about the voices of the larger world.” In this, the anthology succeeds admirably and both Kaminsky and Words Without Borders are to be commended for this contribution to that effort. But there is something more at stake, something that touches on the very reason we translate. Kaminsky puts it better than I ever could: “Languages are many, says Voznesensky, poetry is one. If this is true, then perhaps an avid reader of poetry from around the globe may have a chance to glimpse into the heart of the art of poetry itself—of that which exists between languages.” What we have here are “poems of perversion and praise and lament from a century of destroyed cities, molten borders between states and nations, apartheid, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, totalitarianisms, racism, world wars, massive destruction, torture, epidemics, struggle, resistance.” This is the world we still live in, and it does not end at, or exist solely outside of, America’s frontiers. To show us, through poetry, that we all feel the same pains and love as everyone else is the essential task of this work.

And Kaminsky may be the poet best suited for this task: forced to flee Russia with his family when the Soviet Union fell, his own life crosses the borders of his work. Unlike Homer he is partially deaf, literally tuned out of the glossolalia that makes us think we are different from anyone else. But perhaps we should say he is only second best, for the collection ends with an anonymous poem:

Listen, O earth; we shall mourn because of you
Listen, shall we all die on the earth?

¹ Since I can’t think of anywhere to put this in the body of my review, here seems as good a place as ever. I do have one complaint about this book. Poems are grouped by author and the authors are ordered chronologically by birth date (rather than by country), yet there is no date given to each poem, which I found extremely frustrating and which fact Ilya Kaminsky’s note in the introduction, that “we decided against accompanying poetry with lengthy biographical and critical information (only very brief notes are available at the end of the book), because those materials often affect the way poetry is read, and we feel that information ranging from awards to world wars has little to do with a ‘soul’s search for a release in language,’” though nice, hardly seems to adequately justify.

Anyway, Tim was an intern here in the summer of 2009 (which seems oh so long ago now), and is studying translation at Brown. (And he’s planning on starting some sort of translation magazine, but I’ll let him tell all of you about that once he’s got things set-up and underway), and has reviewed a bunch of books for us. He’s a lively writer, and his pieces are fun to read . . . Here’s the opening of the this review:

The joy of an anthology is similar to the joy of a college course in literature, of listening to the radio, of attending an art exhibition: it is the pleasure of having someone else tell you what is good and important and how it all connects together. You may find the joy of a discovery or an insight that you would probably never have stumbled upon on your own, a joy that puts them in the right. When they are wrong, your ego comes out unscarred, the validity of your own taste has been vindicated; for the reader, it is a riskless situation. Yet with an anthology such as The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris, the stakes are higher on both ends. Reading it is the equivalent of attending a class taught by Nabokov or Nicholson Baker. Access is granted to the private preferences of one of our most promising young poets, so the fruits to be gained may be more succulent, but the disappointment more sour should they prove rotten. After all, how many friendships have ended because someone listens to too much Simon and Garfunkel? Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers . . .

To lay any doubts to rest, however, I must say that this anthology brought me joy. All the major and well known poets of the twentieth century are here represented (Rilke, Apollinaire, Akhmatova, Reverdy, Pasternak, Lorca . . . all in the first one hundred pages), but more importantly the selections made by Kaminsky shy away from their most famous and obviously anthologizable work to present us with equally impressive B-sides (just to pick one example, rather than choose Apollinaire’s “Le Pont Mirabeau,” we get “Zone,” the spectacular five page opener of Alcools and “The Little Car” from Calligrammes, the collection of Apollinaire’s more technically experimental concrete poetry). Thus each poet we thought we knew before becomes more multi-faceted with every page of this collection. And this principle extends out to those we don’t usually think of as poets: we find a Kafka parable, poems by Brecht, Raymond Queneau, Günter Grass, and Pier Paolo Pasolini (the latter’s work as a poet often getting overshadowed by the controversy of his films). It as if this anthology singlehandedly seeks to remind us that our greatest novelists and playwrights are, at heart, simply poets.

To read the full piece, just click here.