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The Exile Book of Poems in Translation: 20 Canadian Poets Take on the World

by Priscila Uppal, ed.

If, as W.H. Auden once asserted, a writer’s only political duty is “to translate the fiction and poetry of other countries so as to make them available to readers in his own,” then, based on the small number of prolific literary translators in Canada, we can assume that most Canadian writers are apolitical creatures. The Exile Book of Poems in Translation, Priscila Uppal’s new anthology of translations by Canadian poets, is a rallying cry to those disenchanted citizens who, while they may have dutifully trundled down to the polling station during the last federal election, have yet to fulfill their political duties as writers.

In her illuminating introduction, Uppal bemoans the state of translation in Canada “at a time in global history where access to information about other cultures and our ability to encounter and engage with other cultures and languages is at an all-time high.” She goes on to explain that her intention in compiling this anthology was to create “a space where one could find a community of talented poets translating other talented poets across languages, across borders, across oceans, across time.”

Uppal has succeeded in creating this utopian microcosm: poets such as Ken Babstock, Christian Bök, George Elliott Clarke, and Sonnet L’Abbé channel everyone from deceased greats (Rimbaud, Neruda, Pushkin, Rilke) to living writers (Jan-Willem Anker, María Elena Cruz Varela).

In addition to the poems, each translator contributes a brief introduction. These notes on process are worth reading, not only for what they say about the poems, but for what they say about the art of translation. Writing on his attempts to translate Anker’s Dutch, Babstock describes how he “fled into the poems and, in certain lines, said them as me.” Barry Callaghan, addressing the work of Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky, charts the translation of a single poem, revised and republished over a period of some 40 years.

Uppal herself, who contributes translations from the Portuguese of João da Cruz e Sousa, clearly lays out the painstaking, collaborative nature of her work. With any luck, her enthusiasm, and the artistry of the poems in this anthology, may make activists of us all. – Mark Callanan, a poet and the managing editor of Riddle Fence.

 

Reviewer: Mark Callanan

Publisher: Exile Editions

DETAILS

Price: $24.95

Page Count: 300 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-55096-122-5

Released: April

Issue Date: 2009-7

Categories: Poetry