The Thief of Fire: A celebration of Arthur Rimbaud at the Dublin Writer’s Festival

IMRAM and Dublin Writer’s Festival request the pleasure of your company when the newly commissioned translations of Arthur Rimbaud and Jack Kerouac will be presented in two special bilingual events, The Thief of Fire: A Celebration of Arthur Rimbaud and La Nuit est Ma Femme: Jack Kerouac’s Search for a Language and Identity. The bilingual collection, sioc maidine/morning frost, translations by Gabriel Rosenstock on the haiku of Jack Kerouac, will also be launched. The Thief of Fire: A celebration of Arthur Rimbaud The Thief of Fire celebrates Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Ciaran Carson has just published his stunning new English versions, In the Light Of, published by Gallery Press. Liam Ó Muirthile will read newly commissioned Irish versions. The reading will feature on-screen projections by Margaret Lonergan, and commissioned music by Seán Mac Erlaine. Venue: The Sugar Club, 8 Lower Leeson Street, Dublin 2 Date: Wednesday May 22 Time: 8.30pm Tickets: €10/€8 Special group price or individual student price of €5 available. Just use the code scribhenoir when booking.   Ernest Pignon-Ernest – Arthur Rimbaud dans Paris 1978

La Nuit est ma Femme: Jack Kerouac’s search for a Language and Identity La nuit est ma femme will construct a literary exploration of Kerouac’s relationship to French, to Catholicism and Buddhism; of his bi-lingual identity; and of his fraught relationship with America. The selections will draw on his letters, poems, haiku and novels. Two writers – Gabriel Rosenstock and Gearóid Mac Lochlainn – will both translate and respond to Kerouac’s work. The texts will be read to improvised jazz accompaniment by The Dirty Jazz Band and on-screen projections created by Margaret Lonergan. Launch: sioc maidine/morning frost, which presents a generous selection of Kerouac’s haiku, will also be launched on the night.   The collection has been published in Irish for the first time – and translated by Ireland’s doyen of the haiku, Gabriel Rosenstock. He unerringly finds Irish registers that reveal the beauty of these haiku anew. Like Kerouac, Rosenstock makes the haiku sing.   Venue: The Workman’s Club, 10 Wellington Quay, Dublin 2 Date: Thursday May 23 Time: 20:30 Tickets: €10/€8 Special group price or individual student price of €5 available. Just use the code scribhenoir when booking.   Tickets are available from the Dublin Writer’s Festival Box Office: www.dublinwritersfestival.com Festival Box Office, Filmbase, Curved St., Temple Bar, Dublin 2 Opening Hours: Mon – Sat 11am–7pm & Sun 12 – 5pm T +353 (0) 1 687 7977 E boxoffice@dublinwritersfestival.com

Sanctus by Kimberly Campanello

Sanctus And what is death, he asked, your mother’s or yours or my own? – James Joyce I. At the English pub in Indianapolis, we discuss technology. He says he can already hear the robot’s footsteps on his grave. In the worst neighborhoods, the prairie is coming back. Cattails are pushing up through old sidewalks and nearly all the important species of sparrows have returned. A Future Farmer of America—in other words, a 14-year-old white kid from the pesticide-drenched heartland—slips backwards from a mall railing and falls to his death among the Super Pretzels and Dippin’ Dots down in the food court. I get reminded of incest dreams and the two I’ve had, one for each parent. My mother calls and gives me the run-down on which of her friends is on a morphine drip and which is in remission, and she tells me that when I get back to Miami I should get a job and always keep a full tank of gas. The homilitic style of evangelical Christianity is the same in Ghana, San Diego, Little Havana, and on Ellettsville, Indiana’s Hart Strait Road where in the abortion scene of the Halloween morality play she yanks a skinned squirrel soaked in beet juice from the screaming girl’s crotch and holds it up with food-service tongs before tossing it on a cookie sheet. You’ll have a clean slate if you accept Jesus, right now. We’ll all have a clean slate, if you accept Jesus, now. The body of Christ. Amen. The body of Christ. Amen. The body of Christ. Amen. Don’t drop it. Use a metal plate with a handle that could guillotine a communicant’s neck. And on the third day, I drank poitín at an Irish pub in Bloomington, Indiana, in fulfillment of the scriptures. Take this, all of you, and drink it. This is the bloodshine of the newest and most everlasting covenant. Don’t drop it. II. Death is a real bummer. We live through and for our parents and still Freud was wrong. You should hurry up and put your face right in it for an hour and that is definitely a sacrament, more so than that night in Garrucha at the misa flamenca, though the music was nice. Even the Sanctus didn’t offend me. Finally, I would add that the world is falling apart, always has been, ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent, etc., and that my favorite sounds are when you say things like, Everything is fine, or, That cunt is mine. I hear them and I clench and unclench and I. love. you. Tell me it’s too much. Amen. Tell me it’s too much. Amen. Tell me it’s too much. Amen. Let us kneel down facing each other, holding razors. Lather up my head and I will lather yours. I am worthy to receive you. I am your mirror. On which a razor lay crossed. We’ll shave it all off. If our knees can handle it, let’s stay like this until it grows back, softer than before. If they can’t, let’s make love, and say, These are our bodies, which will not be given up for any of you. Let us say our own word and we shall be healed. Sanctus is © Kimberly Campanello, from Consent. Published Doire Press, 2013

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Kimberly Campanello was born in Elkhart, Indiana. She now lives in Dublin and London. She was the featured poet in the Summer 2010 issue of The Stinging Fly, and her pamphlet Spinning Cities was published by Wurm Press in 2011 . Her poems have appeared in magazines in the US, UK, and Ireland, including  nthposition , Burning Bush II, Abridged , and The Irish Left Review .

Pic by Brian Kavanagh

Poems by Mary O’Donnell

Marriage Advice, 1951 Glossy women made her tremble, every word shiny and sure, we’re going to give Jenny a make-over, Jen, the decaying building, the clueless relic. They made her sweat, even more, those women with Dior skirts and nipped-in waists, who warned the night before the wedding about being prepared. But it was 1951. Next day, she tried not to faint at the altar although the neighbours whispered, later forced herself to stuff some morsel of the wedding breakfast through her lips, like bad language or something a woman never did masticate, masticate, chew, chew, swallow, the fist of the still-hidden child walloping her gorge as the best man rose, twinkle-eyed, yellow card in hand, a twist of jokes she’d be bound to appreciate.   Marriage Advice 1951 is © Mary O’Donnell   Waiting It has grown, not darkly, like mould, that sunless green. Sitting provides the habit of air. Children – trees, coats, limbs, the bounce of long hair as they troop the school road –   means stillness, expansion, despite unspeakable radio news on the murder of infants in temperate suburbs. Muffled, gloved, I grow in a car at the end of an eight-year planting, half of me   mulling the latest distant shooting. I would like to book a flight, transplant skills, solutions, get there fast. Instead, I wait, the smell of cooked dinner impregnating denims, boots, my cap, which she   inhales as she steps inside the car. I hold myself together beneath iced winter branches in grey couteur, feel an invisible frieze of buds stirring slowly, steady in deep cold. . Waiting is © Mary O’Donnell

Mary O’ Donnell Mary O’Donnell is the author of eleven books, both poetry and fiction, and has also co-edited a book of translations from the Galician. Her titles include the best-selling literary novel “The Light-Makers”, “Virgin and the Boy”, and “The Elysium Testament”, as well as poetry such as “The Place of Miracles”, “Unlegendary Heroes”, and her most recent critically acclaimed sixth collection “The Ark Builders” (Arc Publications UK, 2009). She has been a teacher and has worked intermittently in journalism, especially theatre criticism. Her essays on contemporary literary issues are widely published. She also presented and scripted three series of poetry programmes for the national broadcaster RTE Radio, including a successful series on poetry in translation during 2005 and 2006 called ‘Crossing the Lines‘. Today, she teaches creative writing in a part time capacity at NUI Maynooth, and has worked on the faculty of Carlow University Pittsburgh’s MFA programme in creative writing, as well as on the faculty of the University of Iowa’s summer writing programme at Trinity College Dublin. Mary O’Donnell Index of Women Poets

The Cézannization of what wasn’t left, an excerpt from ‘Machinations’

untitled image , oil on canvas by © Michael McAloran 2003

histology slice 3

[ a tissue cloth so delicately coloured in mauves and purples indigo
and ivory cells become tissue whereas this isn't at all the case
all is one in febrile disequilibrium not excluding momentary states
of euphoria and relative equilibrium the macabre beauty of histology
like a travelogue along enlarged detailed drawings of funghal spores
or sporoform zoophytes white exquisitely and hypersensitively drawn
by haekcle against a black CSO corps sans organes the hubris debris
humus against which lines flightlines maps nomadologic trails micro
politic events pointillistic gestes rhizomatic ghanaean junglean infra
branchings dadaistic or ba'akan pygmee refrains establish unfold
glare and disappear amongst glacis' of ice basalt slate sapphire or
northsea grayness and mist histology is that : the slice with obsolete
or ephemereal or contingent a truth to leave the observor with her's
his's own ponderings of carcinogenic intimacy or clean tissue missive
towards the ones receptive the ones donating slices out of their body
to be mapped navigated coloured in mauves grays deep purples
to indigo ]

Text is © Aad de Gids

• Discussion of the paintings and texts of Machinations is here
• Purchase link for Machinations

Ilya Kaminsky on Paul Celan, Poetry Magazine

Of strangeness that Wakes us by Ilya Kaminsky

Published Poetry Magazine, January 2013.  A Publication of the Poetry Foundation

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Todesfuge, by Paul Celan is a poem that I have mentioned here on Poethead in a variety of guises since I first read the poet Paul Celan in Fathomsuns’ and ‘Benighted’ (Carcanet, Trans. by Ian fairley)

Later, I went on to acquire the book, Paul Celan  Poet, Survivor, Jew by John Felstiner which has a chapter entitled, ‘A Fugue After Auschwitz (1944-45 ) /your ashen hair Shulamith’, detailing Felstiner’s approach to the translation of Todesfuge. I blogged my reading of Todesfuge  here .

In many ways I do not feel as if I will ever finish with the reading of that poem. I feel that this blog space is too limited to write about Paul Celan and his dedicated translators including, Ian Fairley, Pierre Joris, and John Felstiner. However, when an interesting article or translation of Celan emerges I link to it here. Poetry Magazine (January 2013) has an article on Celan’s poetry, including some discussion of Felstiner’s translation of Todesfuge. The text of the Felstiner translation of Todesfuge is included in Of strangeness that Wakes us by  by Ilya Kaminsky.

Here Kaminsky discusses Celan’s alleged hermeticism , which the poet himself denied. He looks at the issues of expressing the experience of the Jewish poet Post-Holocaust and at Adorno’s exhortation that ‘it is barbaric to write poetry after the Holocaust’.

Poetry had to be written after the Holocaust, as art had to occur. Weil or Tuominen would describe poetry written in cataclysmic times as a poetry of necessity. 

The expression of the WWII diaspora poet in the great Todesfuge becomes, in Felstiner’s words an encapsulation of or/ the Guernica of Post-War European Literature. Those readers of Celan who come to Poethead to link to Celan’s works will be intrigued by Kaminsky’s discussion on Celan’s poetic-process, his approach to language, to the creative-process, and to his expressing of  human catastrophe

On Felstiner’s translation of Todesfuge Kaminsky says,

‘In my private library, this is one of the great translations of the twentieth century. But the word “translation” to my mind is misleading. This translation (or any great translation, for that matter) is not a mirror. While one appreciates Felstiner’s haunting use of German words interspersed with English, this striking and powerful juxtaposition of languages doesn’t happen in Celan’s poem.’ (Of strangeness That Wakes Us )

The sheer brokenness of the mother-tongue in Celan’s expression is precisely what allows for linguistic multi-layering within a translator-approach to the poet’s work. It is precisely this that Felstiner divines and uses in his translation, and whilst it may not appeal to the purist, it is that seamless juxtaposition and use of the German that gives the Felstiner translation its evocative quality.

Get Poetry Magazine and read the entire Felstiner translation which is embedded into his wonderful article on Paul Celan.

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Note:  I linked a Pierre Joris essay on Paul Celan here in August 2010, regarding Todtnauberg , as well as numerous references to Celan’s work. Essays on Celan and his translators are too all-encompassing to limit to (or add to) existent blog-posts. I recommend that readers with an interest in Celan  visit Poetry Foundation, Pierre Joris’ Nomadics blog, and Jacket 2 for further discussion on the work of Paul Celan.

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YouTube of Todesfuge.

Text Translation of Todesfuge

My blog on Todesfuge