NEWS (11/1/18): Welcome to our annual Translation Feature! This year, our guest editor CMarie Fuhrman selected poems by Igor Barreto (transl. Rowena Hill) and Margaret Noodin. Artists Kate Baird and Meghan Keane responded visually. Also, we have a review of "Our Lady of the Flood" (scroll for more).
Collaborators’ Q&A: Do you see an overlap between the act of translation and the act of responding visually to a piece of literature? Artist Kate Baird: Sure. You’re taking something made using one system of meaning and pulling it into another, emphasizing some parts and losing others. Hopefully you’re keeping some of what animated the original piece and also creating something that has meaning of its own. If this broadside were a type of weather, what would it be? Translator Rowena Hill: A brooding afternoon, fine but with a change not too far off.
Poet Igor Barreto was born in San Fernando de Apure, on the plains of Venezuela, in 1952. Poet, critic, publisher and leader of literature workshops. He has published ten books of poems. Translator Rowena Hill taught English Literature at the Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida, Venezuela, where she has been based for more than forty years. She has published five books of poems in Spanish and has translated into English some of Venezuela’s best known poets. Kate Baird is a visual artist and the museum educator at the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, Missouri.
Collaborators’ Q&A: Do you see an overlap between the act of translation and the act of responding visually to a piece of literature? Poet Margaret Noodin: …The idea moves as words from one language to another and then as color into a pattern. Both respond to the reality of a river and what water and its circulation means to the earth. Artist Meghan Keane: …Responding visually is always a question of legibility to me, how will my drawing be read, what are the multiple readings of it that coexist together? How can I translate the poem into a non-verbal experience yet maintain the poetic integrity and not veer into illustration?
Poet Margaret Noodin is author of Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature and Weweni, a collection of bilingual poems in Ojibwe and English. To see and hear current projects visit www.ojibwe.net Artist Meghan Keane is a painter and printmaker. She is the founding director of meghan.keane.studio and a visiting alumni artist at the Brooklyn College art department printshop.
Space Traveler Benjamin S. Grossberg University of Tampa Press, 2014 $14; ISBN: 978-159732-119-8 Reading the poems in Ben Grossberg’s 2014 book, Space Traveler, is rather like sitting on the couch with an interesting, articulate friend, listening to his stories and…
Our Lady of the Flood Alison Pelegrin Diode Editions $12 Chapbook; ISBN: 978-1-939728-16-6 28 pages Our Lady of the Flood, the title of Alison Pelegrin’s new chapbook, might suggest a collection of poems related to the Blessed Mother in the…
Sundress Publications surveys the best Internet writing each year and selects their “Best of the Net” awardees. This year, we’re nominating six poems published at Broadsided Press. What a difficult decision it was! Each poem or flash prose piece we…
