Building the Barricade and Other Poems by Anna Swir

Manoj Kumar Panda The Bone Garden and Other Stories Rupantar: A Centre for English Translation “What is there in a story, after all?” So begins the introductory author’s note for this first collection of short stories translated in English by Panda. In 2010 the collection was long-listed for the prestigious Cork City–Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, one of ten Asian short-story collections represented. Translator Jayanta Mahapatra remarked that the stories are “evocative and poignant” and leave readers with “a vitality and energy that make them well worth reading.” One Step Towards the Sun Valerie Henitiuk & Supriya Kar, eds. Rupantar: A Centre for Translation Collected in this anthology are short stories by women from Orissa, India, spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Uniting the stories is each woman’s experiences, and the stories delve into such issues as violence, religious persecution, and poverty . “The reader need not lose all hope though,” writes reviewer Bhaswati Ghosh. “For sharing the pages with such grim tales are characters that refuse to bow down to social prejudices, despite undergoing the greatest torment.” Nota Bene down / where the autumn sun still gives warmth. / No one can tell their name or kind / before the autumn wind scuffs them out of the year, / out into homeless oceans of air. // If each one of them could be called a word, / then a life’s language blows away on the wind. / Life and death, those two grand wasters, / play in the night with high stakes. / Uncounted and numberless most of what we see whirls / always away, a ceaseless scattering.” We find him where he’s most at home: in thrall to facts but coolly recessed at the threshold where sense shapes thought. His inimitable voice, his “life’s language” retained its measured intensity to the very end. For the first time in English, thanks to Robin Fulton’s chiseled translations, we can now read this important poet at length. George Messo Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia Anna Swir. Building the Barricade and Other Poems. Piotr Florczyk, tr. Los Angeles. Calypso. 2011. isbn 9780983099918 Reading the poetry of Anna Swir is always a pleasure. Her extraordinary ability to marry concision with frankness , a sense of speaking directly from the heart without the manipulations of mediation, is refreshing and fascinating . She is an author who makes us long to read more. Building the Barricade and Other Poems is a small yet noteworthy selection of Swir’s work, translated from the Polish with care and honesty by Piotr Florczyk. Because of her unfussy concision and straightforward phrasing , it is important to translate Swir without undue rhetorical flourishes or poeticism, and Florczyk succeeds admirably at this task. He is brave to take on this project, since Swir has been translated by none other than Czesław Miłosz, Nobel Prize–winning poet and professor, together with poet and professor Leonard Nathan. Miłosz’s accompanying essay on Swir will not be supplanted by the brief introduction in this volume (by Jericho Brown), which is nicely enthusiastic but does not offer much information on Swir’s life or offer a critical account of her place in Polish or world poetry, which might be welcome for an English-language reader. The poems themselves are the stars of the show. They speak urgently about Anna Swir, her wartime experience , and her groundbreaking view of the female body. Luck is survival; statistics prove the overwhelming probability of one’s imminent death. Sometimes , one asks pardon for such luck: “I apologized to these corpses / for being alive,” relates the deadpan speaker of “Talking with Corpses.” Such situations lead to an endless ramification of questions about guilt and innocence, absurdity and the relativism of absurdity, and, overwhelmingly, what we expect to see and hear in poems about war, and how we react when such expectations are subverted. The layout of the volume itself, however, might be improved. For one, it lacks a title-by-title table of contents . For readers familiar with Swir’s work, the interest of such a volume may be debating the principle of selection at work, yet this is hard to gauge at first glance. In fact, the volume focuses on

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