Artikel
Editorial: 16 July, 2003
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18 januari 2006
In the seventh lecture in our annual Defence of Poetry series , Austrian poet, scholar, playwright {id="367" title="Raoul Schrott"} presents his case as council for the defence, dismissing all accusations that have been laid against his client over the past three thousand years. Yet does poetry still need defending in this time and age, full of "bestseller authors and novelists, headliners and copywriters, all of them cashing in on the high art inherited by my client, treading it underfoot, twisting it this way and that, until it fits their own requirements"?
Schrott also participated in PIW’s {id="356" title="discussion on translation"} with celebrated translators and PIW editors Sibila Petlevski and Lisa Katz. They talked about such issues as the ‘semantic aura’ around a poem, escaping from the original text, the fake distinction between form and content, and the hardest translation of all.
During an event at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, this June, three other editors of PIW – Chirikure Chirikure, Andriy Bondar and Arundhathi Subramaniam – spoke about the {id="391" title="political pressures and complications"} they encounter in their work as poets and editors. The problems they face vary from subtle post-colonial politically correct prejudice to censorship and sometimes quite shocking physical intimidation.
Last but not least, five countries have published new poets of the quarter this month. Germany selected the poetry of {id="2221" title="Volker Braun"}, Colombia published {id="1271" title="Giovanni Quessep"}, France chose work by {id="2037" title="Claude Esteban"} and Slovenia brings us {id="5039" title="Dane Zajc"}. Israel has chosen no fewer than four poets of the quarter: {id="3173" title="Natan Zach"}, {id="3175" title="Nathan Wasserman"}, {id="3174" title="Nathan Alterman"} and {id="3168" title="Gali-Dana Singer"}. We hope you will enjoy discovering their work.
How can we tell whether the translation of a poem is any good, without actually knowing the original? What gets lost in translation? Are some poems untranslatable? Why, indeed, translate poetry at all when, in the same amount of time or less, you can write a poem yourself? These are just some of the questions brought up by the articles on PIW this month.
{id="355" title="Adrienne Rich"} looks at Iraqi Poetry Today with the eye of an American poet, and finds herself grateful for the "multiply-exiled, strongly-identified voices" she discovers. Translation, she says, that "dangerous and indispensable art", is like "making love with a new person, in a new body", in a review that does not shun the issue American foreign policy.In the seventh lecture in our annual Defence of Poetry series , Austrian poet, scholar, playwright {id="367" title="Raoul Schrott"} presents his case as council for the defence, dismissing all accusations that have been laid against his client over the past three thousand years. Yet does poetry still need defending in this time and age, full of "bestseller authors and novelists, headliners and copywriters, all of them cashing in on the high art inherited by my client, treading it underfoot, twisting it this way and that, until it fits their own requirements"?
Schrott also participated in PIW’s {id="356" title="discussion on translation"} with celebrated translators and PIW editors Sibila Petlevski and Lisa Katz. They talked about such issues as the ‘semantic aura’ around a poem, escaping from the original text, the fake distinction between form and content, and the hardest translation of all.
During an event at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, this June, three other editors of PIW – Chirikure Chirikure, Andriy Bondar and Arundhathi Subramaniam – spoke about the {id="391" title="political pressures and complications"} they encounter in their work as poets and editors. The problems they face vary from subtle post-colonial politically correct prejudice to censorship and sometimes quite shocking physical intimidation.
Last but not least, five countries have published new poets of the quarter this month. Germany selected the poetry of {id="2221" title="Volker Braun"}, Colombia published {id="1271" title="Giovanni Quessep"}, France chose work by {id="2037" title="Claude Esteban"} and Slovenia brings us {id="5039" title="Dane Zajc"}. Israel has chosen no fewer than four poets of the quarter: {id="3173" title="Natan Zach"}, {id="3175" title="Nathan Wasserman"}, {id="3174" title="Nathan Alterman"} and {id="3168" title="Gali-Dana Singer"}. We hope you will enjoy discovering their work.
© Corine Vloet
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