Translating this work I’ve been lucky enough to consult the poet, who has revealed references, explained images and clarified ambiguities. Here, for example, I translated “klinkers” as “brick paving," but was surprised to see that French translator Daniël Cunin had translated it as “voyelles,” “vowels.” Fabias explained that it could be either. I shouldn’t have been surprised. A translator might have to choose, but with Fabias it’s always both.
David Colmer on "i seek you in the city" |
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James Dickey's "The Firebombing"
"It wasn’t until almost 25 years later that I discovered that Officer Dickey had never sat in the pilot’s glass treasure hole of blue light—not on a mission, anyway. (Maybe he sat in there to pose for a photograph.) That the creator of this wonderwork—which, if there is any justice, will be read by lovers of language from here to eternity—had actually washed out of flight school on his first try at soloing as an aviation cadet."
via LIT HUB |
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We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality.
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Black Lives Matter. |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Jonathan Stalling on "Spring Snow"
"The most influential genre of Classical Chinese Poetry is called ‘regulated verse’ (各路诗), and these forms gather the world into words and refold them into inter-resonant patterns on a cosmological scale. Each monosyllabic word must be stacked in relation to the one before and after, above and below until the whole rests upon a final balanced point, as relaxed and exact as a cairn of transparent quartz." |
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