Editorial: 15 April 2012

April 12, 2012 In the meantime, we present a varied line-up of poets in this issue. The Zimbabwe domain showcases the literary magazine Tsotso, which was founded in Zimbabwe and ran from 1990 until 2001. Tsotso was set up with the aim of providing aspiring writers with a forum for their work. “Like the twigs of a well-established tree, its contents indicate a fresh start, a budding, the promise of ever new attempts to demonstrate that the old tree is still full of life,” wrote the founders in the editorial of the first issue. Joyce Chigiya, one of the poets whose work found a home in Tsotso, introduces a selection of poems in English, Ndebele and Shona that were published in the journal. As Chigiya points out, many of the poets were young, and so, unsurprisingly, a lot of the poems focus on relationships, from the joyous proclamations of new love through lamentations over lost love or lovers’ arguments, to love overshadowed by the spectre of HIV/AIDS.

On the Germany domain, we have wonderful poems and audio recordings by poet and translator Uljana Wolf. Her attention to the possibilities of transfer and dialogue at linguistic borders is prominent in the selection of poems and accompanying translations here. A number of her poems are presented with two translations, the second of which departs further from the literal meaning of Wolf’s original, yet, through its conversation with and (mis)interpretation of the German, captures and riffs upon its vibrant language-play. Compare for instance the opening of ‘B’: “am anfang bald, und bald am ende wieder: unsere haare, und dazwischen sind sie nicht zu fassen, nicht in sich und nicht in griff zu kriegen, weder im guten noch im bad” with the first translation: “in the beginning bald, bald at the end once more: in between, this hair is hard to grasp, tricky to pin it up or down, for better or for bed” and the second: “In the beginning hareless and unhared again in the end: our hare—even a dachshund can do nothing against it, neither by itself nor by wearing its war claws, neither in good weather nor while it rains cats and dogs.” As editor Heiko Strunk notes, Wolf’s “free and flexible understanding of translation includes the possibility of misunderstanding, which is ultimately just another type of understanding. The concept of ‘translation as poetic practice’ encompasses the idea that translations of one’s own ‘untranslatable’ poems are considered as authentic to the original work, even when they were made by fellow authors who do not have a strong command of the source language and when the poems are in part rewritten.”

Finally, Lisa Katz, editor of the Israel domain, presents Zali Gurevitch, whose work also inhabits a kind of borderland – “even at home I’ve made myself a sort of camp”, he notes in one poem; and in another, he declares that “poetry is on the margins” and that he is “on the margins of poetry”. And so a theme of untethered transition runs through the evocative images in his poems, from a dream in which he is a woman, leaping with joy “in a square near a church” as the world watches on, and the sight of words dancing and hovering just above the page, “half a millimetre, less even”, to an excerpt from ‘Time Baba’, in which Gurevitch observes “everyone wants their feet/ on the ground; but what about being in the air”. We hope these poems lift you out of your seat, even if only by half a millimetre – and as we move from one website to another, here’s to being in the air! Image © a2gemma. Reproduced under a Creative Commons License.