Poetry Magazine and Translations

April is National Poetry Month, so we’ll be highlighting more works of translated poetry over the next few weeks than we normally do. (In case you’re wondering, in the database there are 11 collections of translated poetry scheduled to come out this month.)

Interestingly, Poetry magazine’s April issue subtitled “The Translation Issue” and features a ton of works in translation, including an anonymous poem translated from Catalan by Lydia Davis.

There are a lot of great translators included in this issue, such as Jonathan Galassi, Fiona Sampson, Michael Hofmann, Forrest Gander, and many many more, along with poets (both recognized and more obscure) from China, Sweden, Greece, Germany, Norway, Italy, France, and elsewhere.

And if that wasn’t enough translation coverage at Poetry, the Foundation’s weblog has a very interesting article by Paul La Farge about Felix Feneon and Victor Segalen.

In case the actual description of Feneon’s Novels in Three Lines (and the fact that it’s translated by the amazing Luc Sante) isn’t enough to get you interested, here’s a description of Feneon’s life that might do the trick:

One might suspect that Fénéon was a fictional character, if only his biography did not contain so many improbable contradictions. A Frenchman born in Turin, Italy, he placed first in a civil service exam and went to work for the War Department, where he delighted so much in writing reports that, when he had completed his own, he would write those of his colleagues. At the same time, Fénéon was a committed anarchist. He took over the Anarchist Review when its editor went into hiding, and he was a friend to Émile Henry, who threw a bomb into the aptly named Café Terminus near the Gare Saint-Lazare, killing 20 strangers. Fénéon himself was suspected of bombing a different café, and was arrested when the police found mercury and detonators in his office at the War Department. (He claimed his father had found them in the street.)

Segalen—whose Steles is featured in this piece—is also the author of Rene Leys, which is available from NYRB and has been on my “to read” shelf for ages . . . He sounds pretty fascinating as well:

ike Fénéon, Segalen has a biography worth recounting: Born in Brest in 1878, he worked as a naval doctor in Tahiti, where he bought paintings from Gauguin’s widow and began a novel about the decline of the Maori people. He returned to France in 1904, finished his novel, married, had a son, collaborated with Debussy on two projects that never went anywhere, and, at age 30, worried that life was passing him by. “In France,” Segalen wrote, “with my current projects brought to completion, what will I do next, but ‘literature’!” The very idea of it was appalling, so he left for China.