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Editorial: March 2006

April 24, 2006
PIW offers not just excellent poetry from around the world but also articles, interviews and critical appreciations of the poets and their work. Visit the new pages from India and you will find not only some stunningly translated poetry which appears to have found a natural second home in the English language but also an essay by one of these poets, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, on bilingualism and writing simultaneously in two languages. He quotes Pablo Neruda who writes that poetry may have come from local soil but must “come out of that landscape . . . to roam, to go singing through the world.”
Joining Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih is Thangjam Ibopishak Singh from Imphal whose dark world vision produces some incredibly powerful imagery. He explains this and some of his motivations in a related article. Finally from India, Kutti Revathi, a Tamil feminist poet whose aim is to reclaim the female body, “to weave the body’s history” (‘Angels we are not’). An accompanying interview explains her politics, politics I should add that don’t detract from the sheer beauty of her poems.

On the Dutch pages you’ll find the prolific and celebrated Toon Tellegen. Also known for his animal stories, his delightful poems invite us into a strange world not unlike that of a child’s mind, yet endowed with a profound logic. In the comic poem ‘No’, that word comes alive:
It was not a stupid word.

One day it crept into the kitchen,
climbed onto the sink,
grabbed a knife
and ate it.
(Words can eat things.)
In the accompanying essay by Tellegen’s translator, Judith Wilkinson, she shares her passion for his poetry and talks about the universal qualites she believes Tellegen has to offer in translation.

Ireland is of course a country with two languages and this month’s issue offers us one poet from each. John Ennis has been described by Seamus Heaney as Ireland’s most undeservedly neglected poet and it is perhaps because his poems are so rich in erudite references that readers might be deterred, yet read them and discover an equal ability for depicting a scene and for sonority of verse. “You, high up, stretching to each fruited twig/a rising October moon east of our damson tree/a nip then, in the freshening east wind from Murtagh’s/ you, shirt-sleeved, up the branches after the tartiest.” (‘Boy Amongst Sparrows’).

Ennis’ compatriot Celia de Fréine, translates her own poems from Celtic. Again she is a poet with a wide range of references but in the poems here, three contain mentions of the common cabbage (a theme of one of her collections), demonstrating perhaps a desire to encompass the real and quotidien as well as the trancendental.

From Italy, we meet the poet Paolo Ruffilli whose poems chart complex emotions in simple ways. In ‘Nowhere’ he writes, “Could they be piled/one on the other/ all those roads/ and stack those destinations/ leaf upon leaf/ what a continual drifting/ what a monstrous tangle/of distances.” His wish seems to me to be to “project myself/ beyond myself” (‘Love’) and see through the lies we tell ourselves about love and desire. Ruffilli has been described in his home country as a “neo-lyricist” and his poems are accessible prisms of thought.

Finally, the Croatian pages return after a short absence and bring us one of the country’s most celebrated post-war poets, Milorad Stojević. Stojević’s dense postmodern inventions are a translation challenge using as they do an intensely personal form of his local dialect and blending the profane with classical literary references. It is interesting to compare his verse with that of the Belgian postmodern poets of our last issue and see how wide that umbrella term actually is.

We hope you will enjoy yet another diverse and thought-provoking issue of PIW.
© Michele Hutchison
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