Cover by Lucy Wilkinson. Editorial by David and Helen Constantine.ContentsCarmen Bugan, an essay and two poems. Yannis Ritsos, fifteen Tristichs, translated by David Harsent. David Harsent, three poems from Legion . Goran Simic, an essay and four prose poems. Forough Farrokhzad, four poems, translated by Gholam Reza Sami Gorgan Roodi. Marzanna Bogumila Kielar, six poems, translated by Elzbieta Wójcik- Leese. Lyubomir Nikolov, six poems, introduced by Clive Wilmer, translated by Miroslav Nikolov. Adel Guemar, four poems, introduced and translated by Tom Cheesman and John Goodby, with a note on Hafan Books Sándor Márai, 'Funeral Oration', translated by George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer. Versions of Ovid's Tristia, by Paul Batchelor. Olivia McCannon, three poems. Yvonne Green, three poems. Ziba Karbassi, three poems, translated by Stephen Watts. Volker Braun, nine poems, translated by David Constantine. Wulf Kirsten, ten poems, translated by Stefan Tobler. Knut Ødegaard, 'Taking out the Hives', translated by Kenneth Steven. Eugenio Montale, three uncollected poems, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. Reviewsby Bernard Adams of George Szirtes's Ágnes Nemes Nagy by Paschalis Nicolaou of David Connolly's Yannis Kondos. by Will Stone of Antony Hasler's Georg Heym. Josephine Balmer: Further Books Received. Extract from the Editorial to Diaspora Much, though not all, in this issue has to do with what we think of as the hallmark of our age: exile, the search for asylum, the speaking of native languages abroad. But poems by Brecht – leaving Germany for Scandinavia, the Soviet Union and America in 1933 – and by Ovid – leaving Rome for the Black Sea in AD 8 – should site our topic in a long tradition. The abundance and variety of material we received for Diaspora was astonishing, heartening and alarming in equal measure. What are you to feel when an Iraqi poet sends you his latest volume – in English – from New Zealand? It seemed we put out a receiver and signals came in urgently from round the globe. We took all we could of the best and most characteristic writing, so assembling a very mixed company, from Sarajevo via Toronto, from Sofia via Baltimore, from Algiers via Swansea. Tom Cheesman contributes a note on Hafan Books. They publish, in Swansea, work by asylum seekers from Somalia, Cameroon, Chile, Sudan… They might be set alongside the Mother Tongues issue of MPT as testimony of the packed plethora of voices in the British Isles today. We had no wish to exhaust the topic, which is literally inexhaustible, only to establish it as a fact and a constant presence. This magazine will always be listening for and will try to be a staging post for the world's diaspora. The original application of the word 'diaspora', in the Septuagint, was to the threatened dispersal of the Jewish people: that they should be 'a diaspora in all kingdoms of the earth'. In the New Testament, the dispersal, still grievous, has a hopeful colouring too, in that those going abroad will be the carriers of a new faith. The word itself, in its roots, means 'a sowing abroad'. The two senses – exile and seeding – will be obvious in much of the work collected here. Translation itself is an act of beneficent diaspora. It seeds the countries of the world with words from elsewhere. Poetry, even in its native country, is a more or less foreign language, a language of elsewhere. Translation sends it down the tradewinds, lands it anywhere and everywhere, as vital contraband. The translation and dispersal of poetry throughout the world sustains an old ideal of internationalism. It makes for a global solidarity against all the ideologies and globalizations that reduce humanity. Poetry is an act of truthful speech, and as such, by nature and context, is intrinsically an act of opposition to the ruling packs of lies. It is subversive because essentially intractable and irreducible. Poetry can't be ordered into place. If it tried to obey, it would lose its soul. It would continue an existence like that of the living dead, whose souls go below at the very moment of betrayal, leaving their bodies to shift on earth a while longer. The Republic of Letters is, in Louis MacNeice's phrase, 'incorrigibly plural'. In its plurality it faces and opposes all fundamentalisms. And it is a republic: it concerns itself with the res publica, with what we have in common and need for our common good. Translators extend the writ of the Republic of Humane Letters. [top] From 'Why I do not write in my native language', by Carmen Bugan People ask me so often why I do not write in Romanian that I think about it long and hard. First, I do not want to write in the language in which my family suffered interrogations, prison visits, threats of all kinds. I certainly do not want to remember all the times when we wrote to each other and burned our words: we were surveyed twenty-four hours a day for the last five years that I lived in my country and everything we said was recorded by microphones set up around the house. I hated subtexts, lies, the fear of words. Now I belong to those people who write in a learned language. And I belong to those who strive to define their responsibilities as people who were born in one country and live quite willingly in another. This might seem to many the kind of thing one 'grows out' of. But the reason why one writes in one's native language, from exile, is that the native language has beauty and truth in it. Poets write in their native language to remember the warmth of their home, the customs of their villages and towns, their happy youth. They want to recreate a sense of home, a warm cocoon around the icy experience of exile. But my exile is my cocoon. I like it here in English more than I like remembering kids calling me 'daughter of criminal' in my native language: that never sounded safe or good or home. When I stopped looking behind my back to see if anyone was following me to harm me, I stopped looking at writing poetry in my native language. I think the poems themselves make my choice seem less harsh or less impertinent. In my situation it is not that bad to be on the side of forgetting. [top] From Ziba Karbassi 's 'Death by Stoning', translated by Stephen Watts Last night wolves were howling I heard their voices last night they brought me your torn clothes the blue shirt your auntie made you I wish her dear hand had been broken your blue shirt is red with blood and I cannot make out its print or pattern they said their skirts were filled with stones their hands were full of stones, their skirts everywhere stones were being rained down the world was become a world of stone I wish I wish I wish your mother were dead I wish I were your sisters' skirts are full with blood your brother is burning the cradle of wood, can't you smell the smoke ? look, I am not scared any more the wolf of my fear is hunted by the tiger of my venom and I've become a fire monster if I open my mouth the whole earth will burst [top] From 'Funeral Oration' by Sándor Márai, translated by George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer 'With your very eyes, my brethren, see what in truth we are: We are but dust and ashes.' Like pieces of old cloth our memories fall apart. Do you still have St Margaret's Isle by heart? It is all odds and ends now, splinters, fusty lumber. The dead man's beard has grown, your name is just a number. Our language, torn, frays too; the loved words we so trust Under the roof of the mouth dry out, turn to dust. 'Butterfly', 'pearl' and 'heart' are not what they used to be When the poet drew his language from his near family, And his song was understood as the nurse's lullaby Is by the drowsy child, who's fractious, ready to cry. The heartbeat's a secret speech, dreams go the thieves' way, You read Toldi to your child, who then responds: 'OK.' And the priest will mumble in Spanish over your bier: 'These are the torments of death, and they surround me here!' In the Ohio mine your hand slips, the pickaxe Thuds down and your name loses its diacritical marks. The Tyrrhenian Sea roars, we hear Babits' word and, hark, That's Krudy's harp that twangs in the Australasian dark. They still communicate in astral voices, live In your body's memory like distant relatives. You exclaim: It cannot be that consecrated will… But it can: you know it now… You get no mail In the iron-mines of Thuringia. To write they are afraid. With no katorgas marked, you cannot mourn the dead. The Consul's chewing gum. Fed up, he wipes his glasses. You can see that he's quite bored with papers, stamps and passes. He gets a car and a thousand bucks a month. His child and wife Are photos on his desk. [top]
Modern Poetry in Translation: Diaspora, edited by David and Helen Constantine (Modern Poetry in Translation, £22 for two issues) Poetry, David and Helen Constantine write in their introduction, is "essentially intractable and irreducible". Yes, and untranslatable, one is tempted to add. But translations might be acts of personal interpretation. There is a long tradition — one that takes in Ted Hughes, co-founder of this paperback series — of translating Ovid in this spirit, and Paul Batchelor contributes to it here with his "versions", produced from memory, of Ovid's Tristia Other poets in the volume write, as Ovid did, about exile: a state in which a native language can become slippery and provisional. Carmen Bugan, a Romanian, explains why she writes in English, abandoning a language that had become associated for her with oppression. A piece called "Funeral Oration" by the Hungarian writer Sandor Marai, whose rediscovered novel Embers became a bestseller recently, reports of the exile's experience: "Our language, torn, frays too; the loved words we so trust / Under the roof of the mouth dry out, turn to dust." Diaspora also includes original work by British poets: David Harsent, Yvonne Green and, most strikingly, Olivia McCannon, whose three poems are affecting evocations of flight and loss.
Nicholas Clee
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