Recent & Notable

This issue of the "Recent & Notable" section features poetry in translation.

Jeongrye Choi, Instances, translated by Brenda Hillman and Wayne de Fremery. (Anderson, S.C.: Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2011). One of Korea's most exacting and innovative poets Jeongrye Choi writes a poetry that uncovers the strangeness of everyday experience. Alert and streetwise, but tuned into the undercurrent of things, Choi's poetry creates environments at once familiar but dreamlike, marked by preternatural clarity. Favoring imagistic condensation and formal trimness, Choi's poetry possesses a highly-suggestive, allusive intensity that locates the startling within the familiar.

Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, An Unchanging Blue: Selected Poems 1962-1975. Translated by Mark Terrill. (Anderson, S.C.: Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2011). Bringing together a Williamesque sense of lineation with an O'Haraesque sense of directness and casualness (to say nothing of eroticism), Mark Terill's Brinkmann observes a post-war German society saturated by consumer culture with a light, ironic touch that refuses both melancholic critique and simple celebration. Brinkmann's poetry surprises one with its nimble observations and formal developments.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Sonnets. (New York: Penguin, 2010). Collecting sonnets from collections published between the early sixties through the mid-eighties, Stephen Kessler's edition usefully brings together translations from a variety of hands (Charles Tomlinson, Mark Strand, John Updike, Willis Barnstone, Kessler himself as well as others) in an edition that demonstrates Borges' mastery of the form. Borges surveys human action and time itself with a dispassionate eye that somehow registers a finely-tempered compassion. As Kessler notes in his introduction, Borges in his poetry "has little interest in "making it new," and little use for that doctrine's leading proponent, Ezra Pound […] but Borges the poet, especially in the sonnets, "made it old" in a way that continues to feel timeless."

Valerio Magrelli, Vanishing Points: Poems. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010). Like Borges, Magrelli's poetry often has a philosophical turn to it, but it is a poetry more grounded in the particularity of the poet's ordinary experience. Favoring short, compact poems, Magrelli's poetry resonates with an uncommon power. Take, for example, "The Calm Surface": The Word skims the water and tots up/
as many as a dozen leaps and bounces./
Hat's off! But what does the calm surface/
know of the dark below?"