7 AUG 07
There's an ongoing "translations" project happening at Konundrum Engine Literary Review, where two poets exchange work and create interpretations of each other's poems. Zach Schomburg & Mathias Svalina did it, so did Paula Cisewski & Sarah Fox, and Stacy Szymaszek & Anselm Berrigan. Just up are the translations Bob Hicok & I did--you can check them out here.
Thinking about how to approach the project led me back to a book I love, Goran Sonnevi's A Child Is Not A Knife, to reread the essay "Sonnevi: A Translator's Retrospective Montage" by Rika Lesser. She's been his translator for more than 20 years.
Of course, then I started rereading the poems as well. I was struck by the way that the first lines of my favorite poem in the book could have been a translation of my feeling as I read the poem of Bob's that I was working on. I put those opening lines into my "commentary" (notes on process we were asked to include), but I'd like to give you the whole poem.
from A Child Is Not A Knife by Goran Sonnevi, tr. Rika Lesser:
Whose life? you asked
And I answered
my life, and yours
There are no other lives
But aren't all people
different?
There's nothing
but difference
It makes no difference!
People live in different conditions:
internal, external
I can hold no one
in contempt, for then
you have the instrument
What about those
who don't want to change their conditions,
those who believe
change
is impossible?
It makes no difference
There's nothing but
you, and you
Only when you become explicit
when you
question me, and I
answer, when there's
an exchange Only then is there language
only then are we human
And this doesn't happen
very often?
No, most everything
remains difference, without seeing
the difference
Will we talk again some time?
Yes
Do you believe change is possible?
Yes, that too
. . .
