Uncanny Conversions: Poetry 2015

Poetry has the unfortunate reputation of being inaccessible or even willfully obscure to the general public, hence its tendency to fly under the radar even in its strongest years. And then there’s poetry in translation, which is even further from the public eye: it falls to poetry lovers to keep its doors open wide, even if those who pass through them decide that translations are not for them. For National Poetry Month this year, we’re offering a small taste of what’s shaping up to be a strong season.

Among the notable works of poetry in translation being published in 2015, two projects stand out for their place in the minds of poetry lovers. At the time of her death in 2012 at age 88, Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska had received a number of awards, including the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. For some time, the English-speaking world has been able to access her work through the diligence of translators Clare Cavanagh and the late Stanislaw Baranczak. The two recently completed Map, Szymborska’s collected and final works, which is to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in May. In our profile of Cavanagh, she discusses the art of translation, and how you can tell when you’ve nailed it: “It doesn’t rattle.”

The prolific German poet Ernst Meister, on the other hand, remained relatively obscure throughout his career and only learned he would receive the Georg Büchner Prize—Germany’s highest literary honor—two days before his death in 1979, at age 68. Later this year, Wave Books will release the third installment of Meister’s final three works, all translated by Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick. We talked to Foust and Frederick about the intricacies and perils of bringing a “sonically interesting” poet famous for his syntactically difficult German into English.

Below, more on the subject of poetry books.