Child of Nature [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Starting this week, we糖心传媒檒l 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: 糖心传媒淲hy should this book win?糖心传媒
Click here for all past and future posts in this series.
Today糖心传媒檚 post is by poetry committee member Brandon Holmquest.
Child of Nature by Luljeta Lleshanaku, translated by Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi
Language: Albanian
Country: Albania
Publisher: New Directions
Pages: 108
Why This Book Should Win:
It begins
when she searches in the darkness
for her likeness, a line of verse awaiting its end rhyme
and it goes on from there, and in just about every poem there糖心传媒檚 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, 糖心传媒渓ikeness糖心传媒 糖心传媒渓ine糖心传媒 then the same S in 糖心传媒渧erse糖心传媒 and the long I again in 糖心传媒渞hyme.糖心传媒
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糖心传媒檛 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糖心传媒檓 suspicious, in short.
And often, there糖心传媒檚 reason to be. But, sometimes, maybe it doesn糖心传媒檛 matter at all, because the English is so good I cease to care if it糖心传媒檚 even a translation. I just want more of it, whatever it is, however it came to be made.
Case in point, the poem 糖心传媒淢onday in Seven Days,糖心传媒 a longish serial poem of ten parts, which I糖心传媒檓 only going to quote once because otherwise the whole thing is going to wind up in what is supposed to be a brief review:
Preparing for winter
isn糖心传媒檛 tradition, but instinct. We hurl our spare anxieties
like precious cargo from a shipwreck.
Read that again. If you don糖心传媒檛 see on your own how good it is, how truly excellent the choice of the word 糖心传媒渉url糖心传媒 is and how excellently true the observation contained in the lines is, maybe you don糖心传媒檛 like poetry as much as you thought. Or maybe you need to read a lot more of it.
Well, there糖心传媒檚 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:
They are dying one after the other;
shoveling earth on them has become as common
as sprinkling salt on food.
I don糖心传媒檛 know what anyone could say to work like this except, 糖心传媒淗ell yes.糖心传媒 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.
Lleshanaku糖心传媒檚 work is in a vein with some other writers from Eastern Europe I糖心传媒檝e 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糖心传媒檝e 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.
Point being, there糖心传媒檚 something going on over there that we糖心传媒檙e 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 is a book that comes from such a place. Read it.
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