{"id":283226,"date":"2011-04-11T14:15:27","date_gmt":"2011-04-11T14:15:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/04\/11\/child-of-nature-why-this-book-should-win-the-btba\/"},"modified":"2018-05-04T15:13:11","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T15:13:11","slug":"child-of-nature-why-this-book-should-win-the-btba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/04\/11\/child-of-nature-why-this-book-should-win-the-btba\/","title":{"rendered":"Child of Nature [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Starting this week, we\u2019ll be highlighting the five finalists in the poetry category for the BTBA<\/span>. Similar to what we did for the fiction longlist,<\/a> these will be framed by the question: \u201cWhy should this book win?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Click here<\/a> for all past and future posts in this series.<\/em><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s post is by poetry committee member Brandon Holmquest.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Child of Nature<\/em><\/b> by Luljeta Lleshanaku, translated by Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi<\/p>\n

Language:<\/b> Albanian
\nCountry:<\/b> Albania
\nPublisher:<\/b> New Directions
\nPages:<\/b> 108<\/p>\n

Why This Book Should Win:<\/b><\/p>\n

It begins
\nwhen she searches in the darkness
\nfor her likeness, a line of verse awaiting its end rhyme<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and it goes on from there, and in just about every poem there\u2019s something that grabs your attention. As in the quote above, where the rhythm of the use of the letter S is so nice in the first two lines, establishing a beat which then opens up to let the long I come in, \u201clikeness\u201d \u201cline\u201d then the same S in \u201cverse\u201d and the long I again in \u201crhyme.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is English-language poetry, of course. I have no Albanian whatsoever and the book is not bilingual, something which I generally regard as a minor crime, though this book may have persuaded me to be a little less hard-line about it. As I was attempting to explain to a bookseller friend of mine not that long ago: I want the original even in languages I don\u2019t know because I want to see what I can see. Are the original much longer or shorter than the translations? Are they shaped differently? Do they rhyme and if so, do the translations? And so on. I\u2019m suspicious, in short.<\/p>\n

And often, there\u2019s reason to be. But, sometimes, maybe it doesn\u2019t matter at all, because the English is so good I cease to care if it\u2019s even a translation. I just want more of it, whatever it is, however it came to be made.<\/p>\n

Case in point, the poem \u201cMonday in Seven Days,\u201d a longish serial poem of ten parts, which I\u2019m only going to quote once because otherwise the whole thing is going to wind up in what is supposed to be a brief review:<\/p>\n

Preparing for winter
\nisn\u2019t tradition, but instinct. We hurl our spare anxieties
\nlike precious cargo from a shipwreck.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read that again. If you don\u2019t see on your own how good it is, how truly excellent the choice of the word \u201churl\u201d is and how excellently true the observation contained in the lines is, maybe you don\u2019t like poetry as much as you thought. Or maybe you need to read a lot more of it.<\/p>\n

Well, there\u2019s a lot more of it in this book. Both the above quotes are pulled from the first quarter of a 100+ page book. At about the halfway point we find:<\/p>\n

They are dying one after the other;
\nshoveling earth on them has become as common
\nas sprinkling salt on food.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don\u2019t know what anyone could say to work like this except, \u201cHell yes.\u201d I could go on dropping quotes all day, but I can see no real percentage in aggressively preaching to a mixed congregation of the choir and the uncovertable.<\/p>\n

Lleshanaku\u2019s work is in a vein with some other writers from Eastern Europe I\u2019ve run across in the last few years. She reminds me of Mariana Marin with a less severe case of depression, but really most of the good work I\u2019ve seen from Romania or Poland and elsewhere in the region is in the ball park. Lots of images, vernacular language, a tendency to roll around in the lower reaches of the culture, and a level of comfort on the part of the poet with the saying of things, the making of explicit statements about the nature of something, be it the self, the world, or some interaction between the two.<\/p>\n

Point being, there\u2019s something going on over there that we\u2019re only just now getting a chance to see in this country, thanks to books like this and translators like Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi. There are literary cultures less dominated by the inane war between boring middlebrow crap and equally boring academic crap. Child of Nature<\/em> is a book that comes from such a place. Read it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Starting this week, we\u2019ll be highlighting the five finalists in the poetry category for the BTBA. Similar to what we did for the fiction longlist, these will be framed by the question: \u201cWhy should this book win?\u201d Click here for all past and future posts in this series. Today\u2019s post is by poetry committee member […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[39596,39606,20436,37856,39026,39576,39566,56,1646,39586,37876],"class_list":["post-283226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-albanian-literature","tag-albanian-poetry","tag-brandon-holmquest","tag-btba-2011","tag-btba-2011-poetry-finalists","tag-henry-israeli","tag-luljeta-lleshanaku","tag-new-directions","tag-review","tag-shpresa-qatipi","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283226"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397282,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283226\/revisions\/397282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}