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Editorial: July 2004
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18 januari 2006
“He who loves language loves things, he who knows how to listen to language knows how to listen to the silence of things. There is no love without the physical and there is no poetry without a physical relationship with things and with language,” wrote Italian poet {id="3547" title="Stefano Dal Bianco"} in an {id="3529" title="essay"} published here. Wonderfully attentive to the essence of things, his poems mix matter-of-fact observation with contemplation.
Now also available to non-Spanish-speaking poetry lovers for the first time: the extraordinary, dark verses of Colombian poet {id="1285" title="Raúl Gómez Jattin"}, a barefoot destitute for much of his life and a true poète maudit. “And a piece of advice/ don’t ever meet me”, he wrote in his poem {id="1690" title="I have for you my good friend"}. Equally bleak is the outlook of the other Colombian poet featured this month, {id="1280" title="María Mercedes Carranza"}. Her poem {id="1608" title="The motherland"} concludes: “In this house we are all buried alive.” Both poets ended up committing suicide.
Portuguese poet {id="4654" title="Nuno Júdice"} writes thoughtfully about precisely this phenomenon in {id="4911" title="Epitaph"}:
(. . .) As if life
depended on so little: a few
lines scribbled on scraps of paper,
phrases that might or might not rhyme,
thoughts . . . which they might have
kept to themselves. But when
I read them I understand their
despair. It’s not every day
beauty appears to man;
perfection does not always seem
to be of this world.
Júdice is one of three new offerings that make up the Portuguese magazine this month: in addition, there’s also the work of {id="4655" title="Paulo Teixeira"}, and eleven different {id="4639" title="Galician-Portuguese troubadour poets"} (who for practical reasons have been grouped together here). Their songs, written between the 12th and 14th centuries, range from mournful love themes to the comically sexually explicit.
While her formal experiments tend to disguise the stark subject matter of her work, new German poet {id="2210" title="Anja Utler"} undeniably takes a poetic interest in pain, or rather the phonetics of pain. Presented here is her cycle of poems about the flaying of Marsyas.
Finally, from Zimbabwe comes {id="5755" title="Dambudzo Marechera"}, controversial throughout his short life:
I’m against everything
Against war and those against
War. Against whatever diminishes
Th’ individual’s blind impulse.
No “grand public voice articulating an African reality,” as Brian Chikwava writes in his {id="5733" title="essay"}on the poet, but “a private, often anarchic, voice that magnified his personal experience and ideas and cast the grand visions of the African experience into the shade.”
This month, we’ve got no less than five excellent poets, from Colombia, Italy and Morocco, presented here with a substantial selection of their work, that have never before been published in English translation. And, as another special feature of this issue, we're excited to bring you our annual Defence of Poetry lecture, this time by South African poet Antjie Krog.
After the highly successful first Moroccan women’s issue, the Moroccan magazine has now published two more Moroccan women poets. {id="3827" title="Touria Majdouline"} and {id="3816" title="Amina El Bakouri"}, both steeped in the classical Arabic poetic tradition, can now be read here in English for the very first time. In addition, El Bakouri has written an interesting {id="378" title="Poets' diary"} for us about her life and work in Rabat.“He who loves language loves things, he who knows how to listen to language knows how to listen to the silence of things. There is no love without the physical and there is no poetry without a physical relationship with things and with language,” wrote Italian poet {id="3547" title="Stefano Dal Bianco"} in an {id="3529" title="essay"} published here. Wonderfully attentive to the essence of things, his poems mix matter-of-fact observation with contemplation.
Now also available to non-Spanish-speaking poetry lovers for the first time: the extraordinary, dark verses of Colombian poet {id="1285" title="Raúl Gómez Jattin"}, a barefoot destitute for much of his life and a true poète maudit. “And a piece of advice/ don’t ever meet me”, he wrote in his poem {id="1690" title="I have for you my good friend"}. Equally bleak is the outlook of the other Colombian poet featured this month, {id="1280" title="María Mercedes Carranza"}. Her poem {id="1608" title="The motherland"} concludes: “In this house we are all buried alive.” Both poets ended up committing suicide.
Portuguese poet {id="4654" title="Nuno Júdice"} writes thoughtfully about precisely this phenomenon in {id="4911" title="Epitaph"}:
(. . .) As if life
depended on so little: a few
lines scribbled on scraps of paper,
phrases that might or might not rhyme,
thoughts . . . which they might have
kept to themselves. But when
I read them I understand their
despair. It’s not every day
beauty appears to man;
perfection does not always seem
to be of this world.
Júdice is one of three new offerings that make up the Portuguese magazine this month: in addition, there’s also the work of {id="4655" title="Paulo Teixeira"}, and eleven different {id="4639" title="Galician-Portuguese troubadour poets"} (who for practical reasons have been grouped together here). Their songs, written between the 12th and 14th centuries, range from mournful love themes to the comically sexually explicit.
While her formal experiments tend to disguise the stark subject matter of her work, new German poet {id="2210" title="Anja Utler"} undeniably takes a poetic interest in pain, or rather the phonetics of pain. Presented here is her cycle of poems about the flaying of Marsyas.
Finally, from Zimbabwe comes {id="5755" title="Dambudzo Marechera"}, controversial throughout his short life:
I’m against everything
Against war and those against
War. Against whatever diminishes
Th’ individual’s blind impulse.
No “grand public voice articulating an African reality,” as Brian Chikwava writes in his {id="5733" title="essay"}on the poet, but “a private, often anarchic, voice that magnified his personal experience and ideas and cast the grand visions of the African experience into the shade.”
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