Into English

all their emotional charge, when I look at these images of places I no longer recognize , images that I can no longer locate in the right place in the mental path of those days when I walked around in the old town, lost in the ever-shifting topography of my memory. Like an emigrant returning after many decades to his hometown where everything has changed and he finds himself having to come to terms with the altered landscape of his youth.” Even if we don’t know Ferri’s town or Milazzo’s ghost stations, readers will identify with the imagery. The poems, as specific as the Italian town in the photos, create a view that we can sense as universal loss. In poems about them, words give us another take. “Who was this woman / looking out of her window? / so despondently, so many years ago? // Lives wither, pass like paint, stucco, / peeling from the wall . . . // she lived for many years / but only for the briefest of moments, / so young and suddenly so old, now nothing more / than a specter among shadows . . .” (“Still I Ask and Wonder”). Milazzo writes three ghost station poems. “Ghost Stations II” concerns a lady “for we believed only in a democracy of caresses – / lapping tongues, limbs plumbing / the deepest recesses, the part of the heart / that could be seen only in the dark.” Although the poet is immensely critical of the corrupt ways of the world, he has a sharp wit. “I was an East Berliner / who did not believe in the East, / she was a West Berliner / who did not believe in the West, // We defined democracy / only in the most caustic forms of self-critique.” Several texts are based on the thirtythree photographs as well as on various places Milazzo knows (“Dachau”) and that no one knows (“Tower of Babel”). Six poems are translated into Italian, as are Milazzo’s introduction and Ferri’s note on his photos. There are several fine poems and Ferri’s powerful photos, which will make readers keep the book near. Robert Bonazzi San Antonio, Texas Miscellaneous Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries. Ed. Martha Collins & Kevin Prufer. Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2017. 256 pages. The publication of Into English will soon be considered a watershed moment in the study of literary translation; indeed, the fact that such a book didn’t exist until now proves the increasingly antiquated idea that literary translation is considered a lesser art than the composition of poetry itself. In the anthology, Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer present twenty-five poems, each translated by three different translators, in a wideformat presentation that allows all three translations to appear side by side, followed by a brief commentary. Practicing translators like Willis Barnstone, Kareem James Abu-Zeid, and Karen Emmerich discuss word choice, tone, and how each translator addresses particularly difficult decisions. Because the editors’ rubric for selection required that each translation be previously published, the selection of poems— which includes work from a wide temporal range but features multiple contributions from languages like Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish—is somewhat circumscribed in terms of both gender identity and language, a limitation that Collins acknowledges and addresses in her introduction to the book. A notable exception is the poem, translated from the Haitian Creole, by Félix Morisseau-Leroy. That poem, “Mwen menm ou menm,” which features commentary by Danielle Legros Georges, is presented with four translations commissioned by Legros Georges at a 2012 workshop, along with a trot, or literal translation with notes, prepared by Legros Georges with Jean-Claude Martineau. The poem, selected according to the commentator “because of Morriseau-Leroy’s exploration of colonial legacies, neocolonial or postcolonial challenges , and general commitment to issues of social justice” grapples with issues of implied address, considerably more flexible pronouns than English, and a Creolelanguage meter that begins in iamb and devolves into “a heterogeneous (and wild) company of anapests, trochees, iambs, and spondees.” Even the first three lines of the brief, nine-line poem illustrate that translation is far more complex an art than a simple mathematical process of replacing each word in Creole with its counterpart in English; the trot provided, while fascinating, is clearly lacking as

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