Poetry Magazine : April : 2009

by Christian Pannier

I’m a bit disappointed. The Translation issue is usually the best of the year, but this one failed to live up to the standard of the last couple.

Sergei Gandlevskii : Stanzas

Two sections from from the poems of Dahlia Ravikovitch:

An orange did love 
With life and limb 
The man who ate it, 
The man who flayed it. 

An orange did love 
The man who ate it, 

-from The Love of an Orange

and:

If I could only get hold of the whole of you, 
How could I ever get hold of the whole of you, 

-from The Second Trying

Yang Lian : Island #2

A couplet from the Cretan Folk Poetry Collection:

The everything of the world is zero, the life of the world is naught; 
It is from nothing to nothing that eternity is wrought. 

Victor Teran : The north wind whips

Biddy Jenkinson, an Irish poet, writes a poem of a Chinese mother binding her daughter’s feet. The first two lines go:

Pull in your feet, little darling, 
so I can kiss your wee trotters 

and I love the picture a Chinese mother using the phrase “wee trotters”.