What better report from afield than the kinds of takes we are currently making on poets from other languages? My premiere installment of "Report from Afield" features two of my favorite poets: Katrine Marie Guldager (translated from the Danish by Anne Mette Lundtofte) and Alexander Ulanov (translated from the Russian by the author and Michelle Murphy). Guldager, who lives in Copenhagen, came to NY and read from her work in the Fall of 97 under the auspices of "Poetry In Transit," directed by Susanna Jorn and Lundtofte. The translations presented here are from her collection Crash (Styrt), published in 95 by Gyldendal. A chapbook of her work in English translation, including these pieces, will be appearing with Goats and Compasses in the fall of 99.
The second poet whose work is offered here is Alexander Ulanov, who lives in Samara and by unusually common agreement is one of the most exciting new poets to emerge in Russia during the 90s. These translations were prepared along with the California poet Michelle Murphy, and will be featured later in the year in the anthology, Crossing Centuries: The New Russian Poetry, to be published by Talisman House. Ulanov is the author of several collections of work and reads widely from his poetry throughout Europe.
Both Guldager and Ulanov are here working with the prose poem—a form that, at least when translated into the English, takes us back to the French origins of such form (through Rimbaud to Bertrand) and the various efforts of the New York School and others to collapse the dueling claims of prose and poem into a single act of writing—in which prose is redeemed, and poetry advanced.
I'd like to dedicate this Report From Afield to Paul Schmidt, the great translator of Rimbaud and Khlebnikov, who died on February 19th of complications from AIDS. He was 65.
—Leonard Schwartz






Katrine Marie Guldager
translated from the Danish by Anne Mette Lundtofte


Cut

You've got to give as good as you get, fast and flat as iron, don't stand anything from anyone: You've got to give as good as you get, if in the middle of traffic, in the middle of a clash of details, a clash of concerns, surfaces and I want to go home, completely home, gathered in as the saying goes, even if it's out of the question: You just have to give as good as you get, that's why you are there in the first place, in the middle of traffic, deadlocked in a red light that just gets redder and redder, redder and redder, until it flows over, over and down onto the asphalt, the asphalt that looks like itself.



Packed Lunch

It feels a little silly, of course, to be the one who hangs about the station after all the others have left: To sit there, clasping your head between your hands as if it was your own fault, as a kind of No that suddenly overwhelms you, and you cannot rid yourself of: You can just sit there for a while, open your bag forwards and backwards get your hands wrapped up in packed lunch, tinfoil, and crumpled rolls: Just look at the butter which has given up the idea of being butter and runs down the hands while it's sticky and you cannot rid yourself of it: Glimpsing the trail which turns off into the woods.



Red

That's what it's like to be born: You never get the day off, you never have one minute for yourself, not a second where you can look the other way, or one where you can turn your back: That's what it's like to be born, there it is, the whole time you're just born, you can't quit, get off, be unborn again: There it is, you are born, born in fluttering red, in a howl that remains in the body like an echo, and sleep, sleep doesn't make a difference, it can be replaced by something else that then fits right in where sleep had been, there it is, it's there the whole time, the whole thing, yourself.






Alexander Ulanov
translated from the Russian by the author and Michelle Murphy


In Memory of Valeria Simina

A crow is eating snow and cleaning her beak against a branch. Honesty of upper temperatures. Winter presses against the river's elasticity. There's not enough space for everybody; everyone has their own hell. Yellow fanfares, notes of wheat grains. Only for the hurled stone is everything transparent. A gleam of lonely snow is a splinter though the other five are the same. "A" is a letter, aa a question, aaaaaaa a cry. A barberry tree strokes the air with its branches, pulling the air slowly to its trunk. Captives of fatigue with their hands on the backs of their heads. It becomes the past when one understands that it no longer is. What no one can change no longer exists. A thousand flickering eyes of water. The old one, by night, won't stumble against the sea.

*****

Winter slowly surfaces from the comet's first snow. Night pulls the horizon into a soup bowl of thickets. The snow grows bolder, fevers crumple and fall. No water-logged telegrams come from September's harbor, telling of the golden siege in the leaves' voices. Now the windows are losing their hinges—every night—and a fly is crying in a petrified garden.
Farther on there are walls of elastic dust, cold salt, on which the elbows of light are leaning. Still farther, a lost moth and cherry mice. However why are they measuring the dull east, when a face is getting cold under a net, when an acrobat is standing in the doorway of a scream on the very brink of a ravine and the crater is filled not with wine but steel filings. But next to evening there are the shoulders of trees, a whisper of cold raspberries. Seduce me or transform me. Night is the promise of moon snails; a frog swallowing stars left floating on the river. Sails flapping over chalky water. Beyond the pyramid of frozen copper, weeks of sun are coming, the sun is biting through leaves, a salt temple stands over a cheek of landscape.
But somebody's canvas is thawing, the cold is cocking its trigger, steet lamps are scattering, and a mirror is breaking on knives.

*****

Time moves steadily, in the body of a snake. Not like stairs or a wheel—rather like scarcely visible waves under its rough skin, the same undulating trace. Achilles won't catch up with the tortoise—the snake will, effortlessly enduring, and slipping away at every point. Time contains all, a snake knows all. She writhes through narrow paths, striking precisely. The sound of her scales is the rustle of fine sand.
Time rests, rolling up into a snail. In her hushed padding it dreams. The quietest dreams are those under water, and for that reason sea shells are the most beautiful. Clots of time are scattered on the sea bottom, on vine leaves, on pages, hiding in O and moving out of V, hornlike.
When a snake and a snail meet, they remain quiet. A conversation between one awake and one asleep is impossible. The snake knows the snail—like everything else. The snail often dreams about the snake—with all the snake's knowledge. Therefore they smile and skim along, each going its own way.