Author: admin

I’ve always liked reading poetry in translation. In fact, I prefer it that way.

Poetry is the sound one language makes when it escapes into another.

Whatever you think you’ve missed is, as the saying goes, better left to the imagination.

It gives even a mediocre poem an ineffable essence.

Greater involvement on the part of the reader leads to greater enjoyment.

A bad translation, a clumsy one, is especially charming.

The poem is whatever cannot be killed by the translator.

Its will to survive, its willingness to be uprooted and flee its homeland is admirable. I almost want to say virile.

An untranslated poem is too attached to its author. It’s too raw.

An untranslatable poem that hordes its meaning, whose borders are too guarded, is better unsaid.

For years, I copied authors from around the world. Then one day it occurred to me, perhaps it’s the translator I imitate, not the poet. This idea pleases me and makes me want to write more.

It would be great to learn French in order to read William Carlos Williams.

Translators are the true transcendentalists.

Notes on the Poem
We begin the week with "Found in Translation," a poem by Elaine Equi from her 2008 shortlisted collection, Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems  (Coffee House Press). Equi’s sophisticated prose explores the multifaceted and deeply fascinating relationship between poetry and translation. “Poetry is the sound one language makes when it escapes into another,” she writes, equating poetry to the very act of translation.

Of the collection, the judges said: “The words could stand as an accurate description of Equi’s own highly distinct poems. They too move with a bounce and twist; they have their own insouciant, confident wit, their own beautifully poised way of looking outward at the world in all its quirky variousness, while at the same time retaining an uncompromised inwardness: the registering of a complex, sophisticated poetic self.” 

Listen to Equi’s Griffin Poetry Prize reading here.

I saw a Ghost pass in the mirror.
Someone whispered something in my ear.
I said a word, and left.
Graves were scattered with mandrake seeds.
A bleating sound entered the assembly.
Gardens remained hanging.
Straw was scattered with the words.
No fruit is left.
Someone climbed on the shoulders of another.
Someone descended into the netherworld.
Other things are happening
in secret.
I don’t know what they are—
This is everything.

Notes on the Poem
For the next few months, our Poem of the Week will highlight poetry in translation, featuring excerpts from our shortlisted and winning collections. This week’s poem, “What’s New?,” is excerpted from the 2006 shortlisted collection, The War Works Hard, by Elizabeth Winslow translated from the Arabic written by Dunya Mikhail. 

Of the collection, the judges, say; “These are political poems without political rhetoric, Arabic poems without Arabic poetical flourishes, an exile’s letter with neither nostalgia nor self-pity, an excavation of the ruins of her homeland where the Sumerian goddess Inana is followed on the next page by the little American devil Lynndie England. In Elizabeth Winslow’s perfect translations, poetry takes on its ancient function of restoring meaning to the language. Here is the war in Iraq in English without a single lie.”

Listen to Dunya Mikhael read in this 92Y reading.

the sun came out at night
to go for a stroll and the divine crossed
the room. the windows
opened

writing comes from a dialogue
with time: it’s made
of a mirror in which thought
is stripped and no longer knows
itself

in Palermo men are as
strictly trained as horses; or
else they have the shining violence of
flowers

*

it’s more bearable to think of
death than of love

Greek thought explored
all things the way it
explored the islands

when men no longer have
power over women, over whom
will they have it?

*
all Sicily is painted
by the planting
of vines

the shards of grief that a teapot
transforms into inexpressible joy

the Barbary figs ripen
on brilliant mornings, with firm flesh,
with certain steps

Notes on the Poem
We begin the week with “2 PM in the Afternoon” from the award-winning collection Time (Nightboat Books) by Sarah Riggs, translated from the French written by Etel Adnan. For the next few months, our Poem of the Week will highlight poetry in translation, featuring excerpts from our shortlisted and winning collections. The Griffin Poetry Prize is one of the very few international prizes that accepts works in translation (under the condition that the work be translated to English), and by featuring poems in translation, we wish to highlight creative affinities between our shortlisted poets, as well as translation as an act of artistic collaboration. 

“I fell in love with Etel and her work simultaneously, and the exuberance and clarity and engagement you find in her work you find her art and in her person—it’s all one. These poems spoke to me in their brevity, geographical and historical reach, and intensity, and I wanted to hear how they sounded in English,” says Sarah Riggs in a brief interview on translation published on Nightboat’s website.

Listen to Sarah Riggs read from the poem "Return from London" in this beautifully illustrated Griffin Poetry Prize video.

The enemy’s dead think mercilessly of me in their eternal sleep
while ghosts take to the stairs and house corners
the ghosts that I picked off the road and gathered like necklaces
from others’ necks and sins.

Sin goes to the neck… there I raise my ghosts, feed them
and they swim like black horses in my sleep.

With the energy of a dead person the last blues song rises
while I think of jealousy
the door is a slit open and breath enters through the cracks, the river’s
respiration, the drunks
and the woman who wakes to her past in the public garden

and when I fall asleep
I find a horse grazing grass
whenever I fall asleep
a horse comes to graze my dreams.

On my desk in Ramallah there are unfinished letters and photos of
old friends,
a poetry manuscript of a young man from Gaza, a sand hourglass,
and poem beginnings that flap like wings in my head.

I want to memorize you like that song in elementary school
the one I carry whole without errors
with my lisp and tilted head and dissonance
the little feet that stomp the concrete ground with fervor
the open hands that bang on the desks

All died in war, my friends and classmates…
and their little feet, their excited hands, remained
stomping the classroom floors, the dining tables and sidewalks,
The backs and shoulders of pedestrians…
Wherever I go
I hear them
I see them.

Notes on the Poem
For the next few months, our Poem of the Week will highlight poetry in translation, featuring excerpts from our shortlisted and winning collections. Today we are sharing “Black Horses” by Fady Joudah, translated from the Arabic written by Ghassan Zaqtan from the collection Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (Yale University Press), the 2013 Griffin international winner. Joudah and Zaqtan have a longstanding collaboration. Of his encounter with the collection, Zaqtan writes, “A few years ago, I came across what would eventually make up half of Ghassan Zaqtan's tenth and most recent poetry collection, Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, in Al-Karmel, the international quarterly literary journal that Mahmoud Darwish edited for more than two decades….  I was so taken by the long poem that I still remember clearly the sense of having encountered one of the finest poems I have read: its private and collective enunciation, versatile diction, adjacency of classical and modern aesthetics, narrative and lyric, its insistence on dispelling dimensions of time and place in search of new language where what is learned is constantly destabilized.” (from Fady Joudah on Ghassan Zaqtan, in Asymptote)

The dead without faces

run out like patients

when the door of the intensive care unit opens

carrying pouches of heart, pouches of urine

The dead running toward the path to the underworld

turn into stone pillars when they look back and their eyes meet
their past

The dead in their sacks look out with eyes brimming with salt
water

The dead become pillars of water as their tears melt their bones
The dead, gone forever, departed before you,
pull amniotic sacs over their heads and get in line to be born
again
and say that they need to learn their mother tongue all over
again
You’re not there when they awake or even when they eat
breakfast
When the dead swarm down the mountain
like children who pour out of the door of the first-grade room
carrying their notebooks and shoe bags

a four-ton bronze bell with a thousand names of the dead
engraved on it dangles from the helicopter
The helicopter flies over a tall mountain to hang the bell at a
temple hidden deep in the mountains

Notes on the Poem
This week’s poem launches our Poem of the Week’s new focus on the poet-translator. Over the next few months, we will be featuring material (interviews, poems, essays) exploring the complex relationship between poetry and translation. The Griffin Poetry Prize is one of the very few international prizes that accepts works in translation (under the condition that the work be translated to English). By featuring poems in translation, we wish to highlight creative affinities between our shortlisted poets, as well as translation as an act of creative collaboration. 

We begin the week with “Underworld,”  from the 2019 winning collection, Autobiography of Death (2019), translated by Don Mee Choi and written by Kim Hyesoon. 

“In the grievous wake of the Sewol Ferry incident of 2014, the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon composed a cycle of forty-nine poems – one for each day the dead must await reincarnation – to produce a harrowing work of shock, outrage, and veneration for the children lost to this disaster. Through Don Mee Choi’s extraordinary translations, we hear the clamorous registers of Kim’s art – a transnational collision of shamanism, Modernism, and feminism – yield ‘a low note no one has ever sung before.’ That otherworldly tone may sound like life itself, the poet sings, ‘for even death can’t enter this deep inside me,'" the judges said.

Listen to Don Mee Choi and Kim Hyesoon read poems from Autobiography of Death here.

Black hair like youth
Runs wild in March.
Dark papery leaves fly
Teeming, swarming,
Bum-rushing March.

Black hair in March
Is gentle, strangers’ eyes
Softer. Memory:
A feast on offer. Youth,
Born of the primordial sea—
Embrace me. Drape my skin
Old as clouds
In something suppler.

Black hair
Blown free, rootless,
Wanders the desert’s
Countless tombs, sways
Across a vacant sky,
Whips at fresh mud in rain.
Days blaze past. I have
Lost sight of my own black hair
In the mirror. Let me
Watch it now
For the next thousand years.

Black hair weedy
In dirt-poor soil.
Thirsty, deluded,
Squandering its spoils.
Black hair has no idea.

The story of black hair
Is my story.
When I die, let me drift
Like a dandelion
Of black hair.

Black hair
Like holy water
No way, there is no way
To be saved except to die.
When black hair cries,
Itsw tears snuff themselves out
Like candles.
So will my life cease to flicker.

Black hair
Exhausted brush fire
Fanned by misery
Whistling
Through the last century.

Black hair, ?Shredded black flag
Of a women’s glory
Ragged and battered
In March wind.
Forsaking dignity
Absolved of chastity
With its pride in knots
Black hair smiles easily
In March.

If waterfall, it will plummet.
If cloud, it will scatter.
Eyes plaintive, wide,
Black hair waits to be spun
By hardened hands
Into rock.

March 25, 1987

Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week continues to celebrate the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poets. This week’s poem, “Black Hair,” is from the shortlisted collection, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi translated from the Chinese written by Yi Lei—a collection that “gathers poems of eros and grief, each page bursting with attentiveness to our world.” (Judges' citation)

Listen to Tracy K. Smith read the Poem of the Week in a beautifully illustrated excerpt from the Griffin Poetry Prize Winners Announcement Film

The moon temple ghosts, swinging on heavy doors.
They ride rabid dogs in the alleys of ill repute.
They decipher the language of crows at dawn
in ancient trees, the blueness of a god’s skin.
They tiptoe power lines, rope bridges around the city.
They throw stones at the ambassador’s sedan.
When afternoon prayers begin, they grown silent,
Lying in each other’s arms, dreaming of clemency.

The monkeys are no rounding up street boys.
At least, at first, it seems this is true, but in no time
The boys learn to single out a monkey in the throng
& wrestle him to the ground. He may try to bite
& to scratch, to howl, & cry ceremoniously, to plead
with the one word he knows, but then the fight
goes out of him when the rest of his great clean
returns to jabbering & the sacred picking of lice.

The boys zap him with a small laser gun.
A garnet of mute bells is tossed into the dust,
& chants go aeons back to the beginning & die.
The fearless illumination goes out of his eyes.
The boys tag him. He rises to wander freely.
As naked unholiness crawls into the night,
they’re wrestled one by one to the ground
& castrated for the music of coins jangling in a pocket.

Notes on the Poem
This week, we celebrate our 2021 Lifetime Recognition Award Recipient, Yusef Komunyakaa with “Last of the Monkey Gods,” a poem from his 2012 Griffin-shortlisted collection, The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). “Like the chameleon poem described by Keats, Komunyakaa draws in his work on a deep well of empathetic imagination, peopling his poems with an array of characters for whom ‘truth’ takes on wildly different hues. His poems tell a story, too, about the synthesis of disparate influences: the Southern idiom of Bogalusa, Louisiana where he grew up harmonises in them with a literary language seasoned by a lifetime’s vast and attentive reading,” writes Griffin Trustee Sarah Howe in her powerful tribute to Komunyakaa. 

In an exclusive Griffin interview, Komunyakaa answers Howe’s brilliant questions on a literary career that spans several decades and that keeps evolving. Stay tuned for this week’s release on our website and social media channels!

At metro Joliette with my jolicoeur,
we walked to the depanneur,
discussed dasein while buying
a Perrier and a block of beurre.
Outside, minus twenty-three,
with windchill it’s real fuckery,
your back pockets warm my fingertips,
your cherry ChapStick so summery.
Take me to the everglades,
a place where flowers never fade,
but pans inside your basement wait
to fry us scrambled eggs, real buttery.

Blue sunrise on my palms, a peignoir,
a neighbour grows peonies in a baignoire,
I dreamt a homeless peintre
revealed Hochelag in a Renoir
Make love inside these old maisons
until condos sail across the St-Laurent,
The vieux-accent is extinct,
And the cordonier’s window plein noir.
Morning flurries, très légère,
someone’s shovel scrapes fragile air,
a chasse-neige is herding cloud,
The hunched man salts his spiral stairs.

Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week continues to celebrate the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poets. This week’s poem, “Joliette,” is from Canadian finalist Yusuf Saadi’s shortlisted collection Pluviophile (Nightwood Editions).  

“Where other poets find moon, Saadi sees ‘moon's kneecap,’ where others see mere daffodils, Saadi asks: ‘Do daffodils dissolve in your / unpractised inner eye?’ This is the poet who is unafraid of play: ‘Outside of Kantian space and time, do you miss dancing / in dusty basements where sex was once phenomenal?’ This, too, is the poet unafraid of the daily grind, of ‘writing poetry at night / with the rust of our lives’. Pluviophile is a beautiful, refreshing debut,” the judges say. 

Listen to Yusuf Saadi read the poem of the week in a beautifully illustrated excerpt from the Griffin Poetry Prize Winners Announcement Film here.

In the deepest part of the river
there lived a great sturgeon
and she swam along the bottom
and fed upon the dead who had fallen.
She was about three hundred years old
and when she was full, she came to
the surface and jumped as high as
she could and all the males came
to her and she kissed each male
and let them have her. Months later
she quietly went to her favourite part
of the river and there she released
her eggs in the millions and then began
again to swim the bottom and to search
for any new bodies that had fallen
from upriver, which she feasted upon
with her old softly kissed lips.

The legend goes that a fisherman
had fallen into the waters and was drowning
when the great sturgeon came to him
and asked him for a kiss. He agreed
and the two fell in love and together
they would feed upon all the food
at the bottom of the river. One day
her eggs came to life and created
the people across the water.
The people lived there for centuries
and the sturgeon and man would visit
from time to time, bringing them food
to survive the cold wet winters
until the people too walked into
the water and fell to the bottom
as the man kissed his lover.

Today we do not fish for sturgeon
as their numbers have been decimated
by overfishing and loss of spawning
grounds. Whenever I catch a sturgeon
in my net I let her go and she always
turns back and smiles as she flicks
her mighty tail and splashes me.
My son always laughs as I stand there
stunned and wet, while the great sturgeon
slowly swims away and turns back
to blow us a kiss. We both wipe
our lips as the great sturgeon
falls to the bottom of the water.
There, waiting for her, is her lover.
He kisses her one last time.
She cries as she begins to eat him.

Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week continues to celebrate the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poets. This week’s poem, The Sturgeon’s Lover, is from Canadian finalist Joseph Dandurand’s shortlisted collection The East Side of It All (Nightwood Editions). Inspired by his fishing experience on the Fraser River, Dandurand writes of a sturgeon who feeds on the dead and falls in love with a man. Dating back to more than 100 million years, sturgeons are now on the edge of extinction. Through his "tragic, wonderful gift of storytelling," Dandurand's poem pays homage to this great fish, who reclaims her river. Watch this conversation  between Joseph Dandurand and our Trustee Ian Williams and to hear more about the poet's process and connection to Kwantlen oral stories.

“Dandurand is a member of Kwantlen First Nation, located on the Fraser river near Vancouver. His origin and roots are the sources of wisdom and myths, which he masterly embeds in a drama of a dysfunctional modern society. His crystalline clear and remarkably multilayered poems are written in an unforgettable voice of someone who is telling a story in order to survive and to go on. A story of a man who has become a sasquatch, through writing” the judges say. 

Listen to Joseph Dandurand read the poem of the week in a beautifully illustrated excerpt from the Griffin Poetry Prize Winners Announcement Film here 

Oxygen—died on March 12, 2012. At
first, it came in heavy green canisters.
Then a large rolling machine that
pushed air day and night. When my
mother changed her clothes, she
had to take the tube out of her nose.
She stopped to catch her breath, as
if breath were constantly in motion,
as if it could be chased. I’m not sure
when I began to notice her panic
without the oxygen, in the way we don’t
notice a leaf turning red or an empire
falling. One day, it just appears, as if
it had been there all along. Like the
hospice staff with their papers, bags
of medicine, their garlands of silence.
Like grief, the way it dangles from
everything like earrings. The way grief
needs oxygen. The way every once in
a while, it catches the light and starts
smoking. The way my grief will die with
me. The way it will cleave and grow
like antlers. 

Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week continues to celebrate the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poets. The announcement of this year’s winners is an occasion to delve deeper into the work of all our shortlisted poets. In a recent interview on CBC's Q, Canisia Lubrin mentions gratitude for the “conversations” created by the constellation of the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted books. When juxtaposed, thematic threads and images begin to surface: the underworld, grief, a celebration or mistrust in the lyrical “I”, and the rhythmic summoning of ancestry, to cite but a few shared concerns among this year’s shortlist. 

This week’s poem is from Victoria Chang’s shortlisted collection Obit.  “In this book ‘grief takes many / forms, as tears or pinwheels...’, ‘dying lasts forever / until it stops’ and ‘our sadness is plural, but grief is / singular,’” the judges say. Listen to Victoria Chang read the poem of the week in a beautifully illustrated excerpt from the Griffin Poetry Prize Winners Announcement Film here.