We are kicking off Russian literature month on the GLLI blog with a little poetry from acclaimed poet Marina Tevetaeva. From the Glagoslav Publications webpage: Marina Tsvetaeva: The Essential Poetry includes translations by Michael M. Naydan and Slava I. Yastremski of lyric poetry from all of the great Modernist Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s published collections and … Continue reading Title Pick: The Essential Poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva
Today's post is about contemporary Chinese poetry, and is written by Eleanor Goodman, poet and award-winning translator - her translation of Something Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems by Wang Xiaoni published by Zephyr Press in 2014, won the Lucien Stryk Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. Zephyr Press, based in the … Continue reading Contemporary Chinese Poetry – by Eleanor Goodman
Winter Let this winter pass into another winter. No more stately brooding. No bluebird’s eggs. No driven mating or well-built nests. I want the frost to blast the ground forever with every seed or shoot that it conceals. Leave streets as gray as winter has them. The muddy slush of butchered days, two blue mittens … Continue reading The Hunger in Plain View by Ester Naomi Perquin
Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Filkins (Trans.) Zephyr Press, 2006 ISBN 0939010844 LIBRARIES The shelves sag. The volumes are weighted down with the past. Their sweat is dust. Their impulse is rigidity. They no longer struggle. They have saved themselves upon the island of knowledge. Sometimes they've lost their conscience. Here and … Continue reading Darkness Spoken by Ingeborg Bachmann
Reprinted with permission from Returnings: Poems of Love and Distance By Rafael Alberti Translated from Spanish by Carolyn L. Tipton English translation copyright © 2016 by White Pine Press ISBN 1935210912 RETURNING ON A SPRING MORNING With the same uncountable number of waves —wave upon wave—you’ve continually raised from the time of your blue birth, … Continue reading Returnings: Poems of Love and Distance by Rafael Alberti
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 