Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

I have chosen, for this issue, to comment on a small selection from the many significant translations that have been published in recent months. That indispensable journal Modern Poetry in Translation (published by King’s College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS and distributed by Central Books Ltd., 99 Wallis Rd., London, E9 5LN) continues to produce issue after issue of enduring interest and immediate fascination. Given present circumstances (though these wouldn’t be the only reasons for taking an interest), readers might like to be reminded that issue 19 was devoted to Iraqi Poetry Today (287; £9.95), edited by Saadi A. Simawe. Work by Iraqi poets writing in both Arabic and Kurdish is represented, in versions produced by a team of translators. Of the 40 poets included, all but five live outside Iraq. It will hardly come as a surprise that exile and war should be everywhere on these pages. The sufferings of the Iraqi people are given powerful expression here, as is their resilience and determination. Many of the poems are peopled by tyrants – mythical or real; but there are celebrations, too, of the beauty of women and the power of love. The inheritance of Sumer, Assyria and Babylon lies side by side with a world where

Behind a locked door
In a locked prison
In a locked desert
Of a locked homeland
A human being is kept in chains:
None of us know him.
                                                (Fadil al-Azzawi)

A major figure such as Muhammad Mahdi al Jawahiri is well represented. It is fascinating to read a transcribed and translated text of one of the rhapsodic, musically repetitive and structured poems of Muzaffar al-Nawwab, poetry which “exists and circulates as a performance, either live, or listened to by its audience on cassette tape”. Carol Bardenstein and Saadi A. Simawe have produced a version of ‘Bridge of Old Wonders’ which has great energy (and is helpfully annotated). This issue of MPT is an important document – but to say only that would be to overlook the forcefulness and immediacy of much of the work it contains. Issue 20 of MPT is given over to Russian Women Poets ( 303pp.; £9.95), edited by Valentina Polukhina. With versions by such as Daniel Weissbort, Peter France, Richard McKane, Elaine Feinstein, Ruth Fainlight and Derek Walcott, the expectation (fulfilled in the reading) is of work of very high quality. Some 70 poets are represented, almost all of whom established their reputations from the mid 1980s onwards. There are some interviews, biographical and bibliographical notes, and a number of interesting essays. Very strongly recommended – a major piece of work.

   I have greatly enjoyed two other ‘Russian’ texts of late. Mayakovsky, Russian Poet. A Memoir by Else Triolet (best known as a novelist) is now published for the first time in English (translated by Susan de Muth, Hearing Eye, 99 Torriano Avenue, London, NW5 2RX. 104pp; £8.95). Triolet (1896-1970) wrote her memoir of Vladimir Mayakovsky (who had committed suicide, aged 36, in 1930) in 1939. Mayakovsky was her first love – the poet later became the lover of her older sister Lili Brik. The first French edition (1939) was largely destroyed by the Gestapo. Scarcely an objective account, Triolet’s view of Mayakovsky is largely a piece of hero-worship, full of vitality, rich in anecdote, short on serious analysis (especially of the complex problems of political and poetic morality raised by Mayakovsky’s career). Triolet never ceased to be an admirer of Stalin, and that governing admiration conditions what she can (and cannot) see and say about her other hero – Mayakovsky: Russian Poet. The quality of much of the writing (and translating) here is clear from Triolet’s opening paragraph, in her Preface: “Mayakovsky was born on the 7th July 1893 in the Georgian village of Bagdadi. His father was a forester. He was the son of tall trees and the beauty of the Caucasus. He grew to be taller, stronger, more remote than other men. He died in 1930, felled at his height”. This memoir is vividly written, biased, partial, incomplete, self-serving – and all the better for all of these things. Hearing Eye deserve our gratitude for making available this first English translation.

   Gennady Aygi’s Child-And-Rose comes from New Directions (80 Eighth Avenue, New York, New York 10011. 192pp; $14.50). Peter France is well-established as Aygi’s major English translator and this latest volume will only enhance his reputation (and Aygi’s reputation in the English-speaking world) still further. The collection is in six parts. The first, ‘Veronica’s Book’, is focused on the poet’s involvement with, and reaction to, the early months of his daughter’s life, in poems full of tenderness and wonder. Never all that far from Aygi’s mind is a recognition, in his daughter’s behaviour, of an image of his own vocation as a poet: “You do not speak in words. You express yourself – with your face, your smile, your “new-born” (as yet unlearned) movements – and this often reminds me of the state of the poet before beginning to write (many know this quietness which “contains something,” this kind of “buzz,” the still unformed intonation, and the special searching power; the gaps in the rhythm and the tense pauses fuller of meaning than any particular “sense”) – in a word, you are a creator, not yet “speaking out” … and I have tried, as far as possible, to write down from these “unspoken words” something which is prompted essentially by you” (‘In Place of A Preface’). Some of the later parts of the book (such as ‘Sleep and Poetry’, ‘Silvia’s World’ and ‘Poetry-as-Silence’) have clear thematic continuities and one of the many pleasures of the volume is in the implicit connections between the poems it contains. Aygi is clearly a poet of considerable substance; his use of his resources is often complex and innovative (and Peter France does not shy away from trying to represent this), but his central concerns are the great common truths of human existence.