I was very excited to hear that Wave Books planned to publish Joshua Beckman and Alejandro de Acosta’s new translation of Ecuadoran Jorge Carrera Andrade’s Micrograms, an exploration of the miniature poem and its world of possibility. That collection is just one of their three new titles in translation, with Noele Kocot’s selected Tristan Corbière and Sarah Valentine’s selection of Chuvash great Gennady Aygi. I asked Wave editors Matthew Zapruder and Joshua Beckman a handful of questions about their new translations, their forthcoming 3 Days of Poetry: Poetry in Translation in Seattle, and their own work as poets and translators.
Wave has published a handful of titles in translation before, and they’ve been great. I really like Franck André Jamme’s book, for example. What inspired you to make poetry in translation a regular part of the Wave line-up?
MZ The generation of poets to which we belong was profoundly influenced by the poetry of 20th century Eastern and Central Europeans (Herbert, Šalamun, Holub, Ritsos, Popa, Szymborska, Miłosz, and many others), as well as poets from other parts of the world, who wrote at different times. We grew up as poets’ treasuring our translations: they opened up poetry for us, and gave us ways to understand poetic possibility. We wanted to give a space to this very important poetic activity, for the benefit of readers. It’s also a way for us to work with more poets and translators, which is something we think is good for Wave Books, and which we enjoy doing as editors.
The three new titles are pretty diverse: collections of poems by an early 20th Century Ecuadoran, a Russian avant-gardist, and an under-recognized maudite. What brings them together?
MZ We are looking for poems that help us understand better what poems have done, are doing, and can do. It’s interesting to cross over time and space to find those poems. The fact that these poems come from such different places, at different times, yet can be connected to contemporary poetic practice, is fascinating to us, and hopefully to readers.
I know you’ve both worked as translators before. Are you translating now? How does translating affect your own writing and editing?
MZ I am doing a little bit of translating, working intermittently with the poet Valzhyna Mort on a translation of some of Marina Tsvetaeva’s longer, late poems. It’s very difficult: those poems come from a very different place aesthetically than my poems, and contemporary American poetry. Which is precisely why translating them is so fascinating, and worthwhile. I would like to continue to work on some of Eugen Jebeleanu’s poems, but have not found the time, hopefully soon.
JB Over the years I have translated a lot of different work and it has been a regular part of my practice. When I am doing it, it is about being fully immersed in another’s way of writing/creating/speaking etc. and it tends to charge me, but leaves little room for my own writing. And the truth is that for me (I always work on translations collaboratively) the process of translating has many similarities to editing, so since I have been working full-time as an editor I have slowed down and found that for the most part I have room for one or the other.
Joshua, I really like the Latin American avant-gardists that you’ve been co-translating with Alejandro de Acosta. Are you two working on anything related?
JB Thank you. Both of the big projects with Alejandro have been real pleasures. While we are not working on any new projects per se, we have been in dialogue for twenty years and continue regularly to talk about work, translate and look at work together and often it takes a long time before something feels like it is for the public. Now, strangely (or maybe not) we have been focusing on the works of Francis Ponge, but it seems likely that we will wander back sooner or later to another Latin American poet of the early/mid twentieth century.
You’re gearing up for your second annual 3 Days of Poetry event in early November, with a focus on translation. Pretty stellar line-up, including Red Pine, Peter Cole, and Zhang Er. Who are you most excited to watch and interact with, and why? What can attendees expect to learn?
MZ It’s safe to say we are pretty excited about everyone who is coming (you can see the full lineup here), and grateful that so many accomplished people are traveling from all over the place to converge on Seattle. One thing we tried to do with the festival was to create a situation where translators could talk specifically and concretely about what they do, what sorts of choices they have made, how they dealt with challenges in translation, and so on. As translators, we know that bringing a poem over from one language to another is a great responsibility, one that involves compromise and difficult, interesting choices. Those choices also tell us a lot about how poetry, not to mention language, works. So we are very excited to hear a wide variety of translators talk about what they have done, so we can learn from them as we move forward in our work as editors and poets.
JB For us, the festival is going to be a time to think and talk more about the kind of work in translation we are most interested in publishing. Our expectation is to announce an open reading period early in the new year with a presentation of the direction we see things going. People should look on our website in January to find out more. As of now, the one book of translations we have for 2012 is In Time’s Rift by Ernst Meister, and translated by Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick.
Awesome, I hope to be there myself. I’m excited by Wave’s new translations and I can’t wait to see what’s next!
