Article
Editorial: January 2007
December 27, 2006
Her niche between two blind arcades
seems to be cramped, and the square patch of shadow
on the ground — infinitely miniscule.
A tug — and the wind unplaits her of braids
and the body turns into an axis,
while ancient light beams through her features.
A contemporary of William Shakespeare, Luís Vaz de Camões, is the featured poet from Portugal this month. His great epic poem, The Luciads, about the voyage of Vasco da Gama, was one of the last of its type and made the poet’s name. His melancholic lyrical poems, featured here, are less well-known. Editor Richard Zenith has provided translations by different translators and includes an interesting essay on their various interpretations of the work.
Colombia has three poets to offer – Álvaro Miranda, Jorge Bustamante García and Luz Helena Cordero. The youngest of the three, Cordero describes a disconcerting world: a man sleeping in a park seen as a contradiction of the busy world around him, the ominous sound of ambulance sirens, the unsettling effect of silence, friends whose words are “dead animals you sweep away”. Jorge Bustamante García is a geologist who has yet to write about rocks, but captures autobiographical moments, and Álvaro Miranda is a Carribean poet whom Amilkar Caballero de la Hoz compares to Derek Walcott. His lengthy poem titles have proved a technical challenge to our webmaster!
Our fifth country is Zimbabwe and here we find the work of four Ndebele poets, Dion Nkomo, Eventhough Ndlovu, Gudugwe Mlilo and Jerry Zondo. Nkomo and Ndlovo represent the very young generation, having been born in the 1980s. Jerry Zondo is an academic expert in the field and provides the commentary; he has also been key to the survival of Gudugwe Mlilo’s oral poetry and is the reason we are able to reproduce some of his work here. Mlilo was born more than a century ago and died in 1966; a traditional Imbongi (praise-singer) poet, his work relied on oral transmission and only that which was memorized by others survives.
Few Ndebele poets publish their works, mostly for fear of censorship or persecution, and yet the opinion shared by those in this issue is that they should strive to keep the political in their work and not allow the greater powers to curb their voices. And thus, as the most logical means of self-protection, the oral tradition survives and is perpetuated.
A very happy new year to all of our readers.
An innovative and unique post-war poet from Japan, Yukio Tsuji, leads us into 2007. Although he died in 2000, audio files of the poet reading his works allow him to time-travel into our homes and offices. There is something wonderful about hearing a poet read his poetry aloud, even in a language one doesn’t understand. The words are transformed and receive new emphasis, a quite different experience from letting our interior voices interpret the texts. English translations of Tsuji’s poems are read by Don Mueller who does them great justice.
Ukrainian poet, Halyna Petrosanyak, comes from that quasi-magical provincial city, Stanislav (formerly Ivano-Frankivsk) which has given birth to a suprising number of brilliant postmodern writers, amongst them Yuri Andrukhovych, Yuri Izdryk, Volodymyr Yeshkiliev, and Taras Prokhasko. Holger Gemba’s article, ‘The Stanislav Phenomenon’, explains the background. As well as beautifully drawing the landscapes of the Ukrainian borderlands, Petrosanyak explores classic themes in a manner akin to WB Yeats. In ‘The Caryatid’, she writes: Her niche between two blind arcades
seems to be cramped, and the square patch of shadow
on the ground — infinitely miniscule.
A tug — and the wind unplaits her of braids
and the body turns into an axis,
while ancient light beams through her features.
A contemporary of William Shakespeare, Luís Vaz de Camões, is the featured poet from Portugal this month. His great epic poem, The Luciads, about the voyage of Vasco da Gama, was one of the last of its type and made the poet’s name. His melancholic lyrical poems, featured here, are less well-known. Editor Richard Zenith has provided translations by different translators and includes an interesting essay on their various interpretations of the work.
Colombia has three poets to offer – Álvaro Miranda, Jorge Bustamante García and Luz Helena Cordero. The youngest of the three, Cordero describes a disconcerting world: a man sleeping in a park seen as a contradiction of the busy world around him, the ominous sound of ambulance sirens, the unsettling effect of silence, friends whose words are “dead animals you sweep away”. Jorge Bustamante García is a geologist who has yet to write about rocks, but captures autobiographical moments, and Álvaro Miranda is a Carribean poet whom Amilkar Caballero de la Hoz compares to Derek Walcott. His lengthy poem titles have proved a technical challenge to our webmaster!
Our fifth country is Zimbabwe and here we find the work of four Ndebele poets, Dion Nkomo, Eventhough Ndlovu, Gudugwe Mlilo and Jerry Zondo. Nkomo and Ndlovo represent the very young generation, having been born in the 1980s. Jerry Zondo is an academic expert in the field and provides the commentary; he has also been key to the survival of Gudugwe Mlilo’s oral poetry and is the reason we are able to reproduce some of his work here. Mlilo was born more than a century ago and died in 1966; a traditional Imbongi (praise-singer) poet, his work relied on oral transmission and only that which was memorized by others survives.
Few Ndebele poets publish their works, mostly for fear of censorship or persecution, and yet the opinion shared by those in this issue is that they should strive to keep the political in their work and not allow the greater powers to curb their voices. And thus, as the most logical means of self-protection, the oral tradition survives and is perpetuated.
A very happy new year to all of our readers.
© Michele Hutchison
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