Poetry's Translation Issue Podcast

Hear some of the poems from Poetry's April translation issue at the Poetry Foundations podcast. First, reads "Our sweet companions -- sharing your bunk and your bed" by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Sasha Dugdale, who notes that, perhaps Tsvetaeva had been reading Pushkin's narrative poem "The Gypsies" or had otherwise been momentarily yearning for a nomadic life.

Hear a poem by Swedish "retrogardist" (akin to Neo-Formalist) poet, Håkan Sandell. The Translator, Bill Coyle, claims that Sandell does not enslave himself to the past, but gives himself the resources to plunder from tradition at will. Sandell's "Poetry rejoices..." reflects on the universality of poetry that transmits itself across geographic space--"on the Faroe Islands, over rendezvous on the Champs-Elysée [...] over Japan, over Korea"--and also across time, "over arts refined over a thousand years." Poetry, here, even transcends form, and is found in the arts of swordmanship and drinking tea.