{"id":306996,"date":"2017-08-31T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-08-31T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2017\/08\/31\/yvette-siegert-on-winning-the-2017-btba-for-poetry\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:09","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:09","slug":"yvette-siegert-on-winning-the-2017-btba-for-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2017\/08\/31\/yvette-siegert-on-winning-the-2017-btba-for-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Yvette Siegert on Winning the 2017 BTBA for Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Having announced the judges and details for the 2018 BTBA<\/span>s just a couple days ago, it’s an appropriate time to revisit last year’s winners—in particular<\/em> Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert, and published by New Directions. Below you’ll find some remarks from Yvette, along with an audio recording. Enjoy!<\/em><\/p>\n

I would like to thank the judges for selecting Alejandra Pizarnik\u2019s Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972<\/em> for this year\u2019s Best Translated Book Award for poetry. (It was 2 AM in Switzerland when I heard the news. I was up late doing my Portuguese homework.) Heartfelt gratitude to my brilliant editors at New Directions\u2014Tynan Kogane, Jeffrey Yang, and Barbara Epler\u2014for everything they did to bring this book into the world. Thank you, as well, to Ana Becciu and M\u00f3nica de la Torre, for their commitment to Pizarnik\u2019s poetry, and to Mieke Chew for accepting the award in my absence. And, finally, thank you, Chad and everyone at Open Letter, for doing the remarkable work you do on behalf of literature and\/in translation.<\/p>\n

There are always those books that obsess you and won\u2019t let you go. Alejandra Pizarnik\u2019s devastating work is like that. I was 20 years old when I entered her tortured world (the lilacs, the dolls, the cadavers and gardens and crows). Sometimes, what begins as an obsession will flourish into an impulse to translate. That impulse becomes a full creative act, akin to writing a novel or gathering the pieces for a poetry collection. It was never my conscious ambition to become a literary translator, but like Pizarnik, I am the daughter of immigrants and have been translating and interpreting since childhood, so nothing could feel more natural, more grounding. Her writing teemed with an urgency that resonated deeply and that practically demanded my advocacy. It felt like a relentless kinship. What\u2019s more, the desire to find an English for these vibrant, harrowing poems came from an almost tactile artistic need. The result is that I grew up while translating Pizarnik. The experience was exhilarating, often brutal. Our minds got very close; our languages matured together; and her solitude inhabited and changed me. As I translated and revised, I was often the same age as Alejandra when she was writing collections like Diana\u2019s Tree<\/em> and A Musical Hell.<\/em> Soon I will be older than she was when she died, and that feels like uncharted territory. It\u2019s at once thrilling and terrifying to receive a prize for something that has been a part of my life like this. <\/p>\n

The book\u2019s title comes from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch called De keisnijding<\/em> (1494; Prado Museum, Madrid), which, in English, is known interchangeably as The Cure for Folly<\/em> or Cutting the Stone<\/em> or The Extraction of the Stone of Madness.<\/em> This work depicts trepanation, a medieval surgical technique believed to relieve various diseases, like migraine, and to remove madness, which was believed to manifest as a tumor in the skull. I opted for the gerund extracting in the title in order to convey the actual process depicted in Bosch\u2019s piece, which in a way parallels Pizarnik\u2019s process of creation.<\/p>\n

C\u00e9sar Aira once said that Alejandra Pizarnik \u201cwas not only a great poet, she was the greatest, and the last.\u201d To hear from readers and writers who have been changed and wrecked by this book has been an extraordinary privilege. I am grateful to the BTBA<\/span> for this opportunity to share Pizarnik\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

\u2014Yvette Siegert
\nMay 2017<\/p>\n

Museo del Prado.<\/a> <\/p>\n