Article
Editorial: January 2008
December 28, 2007
Miloš Đurđević, our Croatian editor, describes how structuralism and post-structuralism had a liberating effect on poetry in his country in the 1970s and 1980s. Slavko Jendričko (1947) is an example of one such poet who explored new forms of poetry in his early works (but later returned to a traditional genre, poems that were essentially intimate and confessional). In the poems featured on the site, however, we do see some good examples of his early influences – ‘Landscape of Farm Rental Income’ is a Barthesian poem which subverts the tradition of Romantic poetry and politicises it. The image of the landscape contains not farms but the concept of income from them. In ‘R/evolution’, we read:
I’m speechless mannequin,
I’m essay odysseus
to remind me again
I’m moon’s speechless mannequin
I’m moon’s coupon
mushroom, leaflet.
I can only surmise that this is an able translation, it seems to have captured a certain rhythm, a sound pattern, a surrealist intention, or at least an intention to filter out signifieds. Whether the ‘signifieds’ reflect those of the original is a moot point, we might pause here to wonder whether translation of works of structuralist or post-structuralist intent is possible or whether it simply adds a new, legitimate layer to the text? Derrida’s notion of différance might actually be a better tool for addressing this issue.
Japanese poet Toshio Nakae (1933) has independently devised poetry with an awareness of linguistic play. In ‘Sounds’, reminiscent of the work one of my favourite poets on the site Toon Tellegen, the poet personnifies language, words come alive:
Softly things turn around.
At this, “Who is it?”, a word asks
and, having raised both hands,
runs away into near darkness.
Similarly in one of his prose poems, ‘Words’, the reader is presented with the charming proposition that “we can no longer heal the words ‘love’ and ‘death.’ The words ‘run’, ‘jump’ and ‘walk’ are extremely exhausted, like wounded soldiers.” Nakae lived as a hermit, away from the literary scene, creating his own genres. In his terrifying ‘A Love Song’ – the poet posits that he would like to eat his lover, but where does the metaphor stop? Click on the sound icons to hear the poet reading his works.
Tallulah Flores from Colombia, who spent some years in Romania, has written some beautiful poetry. Her poetry contains the ghosts of places, people and events and is suggestive of a sublime vision of the world. I found the final lines in ‘Craoiva Migrates’ particularly resonant:
Now I remember:
Craiova migrates with the birds
it rises up and every old house creaks.
‘If the River is Named’ also ends very interestingly. She writes of a river: “I do not want it to play at being poor and/ that everything be reduced to the old taste for a spectacle: / to the image of some remembered cinema.” She writing not just about a river but the way the ‘signifier’ of a river can escape its banks.
Miguel Iriarte, the second poet from Colombia in this issue and a professor of semiotics, combines religion and sexuality in his work. Much of the Colombian poetry we publish on the site has an erotic aspect but Iriate’s situation of sexuality within the Church stands out. For him, the Catholicism of his culture is inextricably linked with carnal desire. It had me turning back to ‘Signs’ by Slavko Jendričko: “These are the days / when stains reveal the invisible crime.” Still, I liked the following line of Iriate’s from ‘It is Thursday and she sings’: “The church is closed and inside there is a silence shaped like a song”.
January’s issue is completed by more material from last summer’s Poetry International festival, recordings of poems by South African poet, Danie Marais . His poetry is very narrative, telling stories of people and places and the small tragedies of relationships:
and I’m not to tell you that I think you’re beautiful
because how would I know because look
I just don’t really look for you in a crowded room anymore (‘Sunday late, Barcelona’).
We wish all of our readers a Happy New Year.
Moments of beauty and calm are intercut with chaos, the limitations of language and semantic ‘play’ in this month’s issue of PIW. Linguistic theories come to the foreground in poetry from Croatia, Japan and Colombia. Words, the flesh and blood of poetry, take on lives of their own. The limits of language are translated into limits of place, cities that dissolve, windsqualls that interrupt verse and rivers that phosphoresce.
One hundred years ago in Geneva, Ferdinand de Saussure began to teach a new formalist theory of language, structuralism. Saussure separated linguistic signs into two parts, the signifier (the sound pattern of a word, either the way we ‘speak’ words in our mind - or the physical realization of the word as part of the speech act) and the signified (the concept or meaning of the word). This was quite different from previous approaches to language which had focused on the direct relationship between words and things. Naturally, this was to have consequences for modern poetry: the poet could explore the ambiguities of language without just trying to bring to life finite description.Miloš Đurđević, our Croatian editor, describes how structuralism and post-structuralism had a liberating effect on poetry in his country in the 1970s and 1980s. Slavko Jendričko (1947) is an example of one such poet who explored new forms of poetry in his early works (but later returned to a traditional genre, poems that were essentially intimate and confessional). In the poems featured on the site, however, we do see some good examples of his early influences – ‘Landscape of Farm Rental Income’ is a Barthesian poem which subverts the tradition of Romantic poetry and politicises it. The image of the landscape contains not farms but the concept of income from them. In ‘R/evolution’, we read:
I’m speechless mannequin,
I’m essay odysseus
to remind me again
I’m moon’s speechless mannequin
I’m moon’s coupon
mushroom, leaflet.
I can only surmise that this is an able translation, it seems to have captured a certain rhythm, a sound pattern, a surrealist intention, or at least an intention to filter out signifieds. Whether the ‘signifieds’ reflect those of the original is a moot point, we might pause here to wonder whether translation of works of structuralist or post-structuralist intent is possible or whether it simply adds a new, legitimate layer to the text? Derrida’s notion of différance might actually be a better tool for addressing this issue.
Japanese poet Toshio Nakae (1933) has independently devised poetry with an awareness of linguistic play. In ‘Sounds’, reminiscent of the work one of my favourite poets on the site Toon Tellegen, the poet personnifies language, words come alive:
Softly things turn around.
At this, “Who is it?”, a word asks
and, having raised both hands,
runs away into near darkness.
Similarly in one of his prose poems, ‘Words’, the reader is presented with the charming proposition that “we can no longer heal the words ‘love’ and ‘death.’ The words ‘run’, ‘jump’ and ‘walk’ are extremely exhausted, like wounded soldiers.” Nakae lived as a hermit, away from the literary scene, creating his own genres. In his terrifying ‘A Love Song’ – the poet posits that he would like to eat his lover, but where does the metaphor stop? Click on the sound icons to hear the poet reading his works.
Tallulah Flores from Colombia, who spent some years in Romania, has written some beautiful poetry. Her poetry contains the ghosts of places, people and events and is suggestive of a sublime vision of the world. I found the final lines in ‘Craoiva Migrates’ particularly resonant:
Now I remember:
Craiova migrates with the birds
it rises up and every old house creaks.
‘If the River is Named’ also ends very interestingly. She writes of a river: “I do not want it to play at being poor and/ that everything be reduced to the old taste for a spectacle: / to the image of some remembered cinema.” She writing not just about a river but the way the ‘signifier’ of a river can escape its banks.
Miguel Iriarte, the second poet from Colombia in this issue and a professor of semiotics, combines religion and sexuality in his work. Much of the Colombian poetry we publish on the site has an erotic aspect but Iriate’s situation of sexuality within the Church stands out. For him, the Catholicism of his culture is inextricably linked with carnal desire. It had me turning back to ‘Signs’ by Slavko Jendričko: “These are the days / when stains reveal the invisible crime.” Still, I liked the following line of Iriate’s from ‘It is Thursday and she sings’: “The church is closed and inside there is a silence shaped like a song”.
January’s issue is completed by more material from last summer’s Poetry International festival, recordings of poems by South African poet, Danie Marais . His poetry is very narrative, telling stories of people and places and the small tragedies of relationships:
and I’m not to tell you that I think you’re beautiful
because how would I know because look
I just don’t really look for you in a crowded room anymore (‘Sunday late, Barcelona’).
We wish all of our readers a Happy New Year.
© Michele Hutchison
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