Natures: Now on Wordplay: Nan Watkins translates Yvan Goll

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Now on Wordplay: Nan Watkins translates Yvan Goll

This week on Wordplay, translator Nan Watkins shares her work on Alsatian poet Yvan Goll. Goll helped define Surrealism, and wrote some of the most enduring poetry to spring from that movement, though little of it has appeared in English. Nan's been working on Goll's last book, Das Traumkraut (she translates the title as The Dream Weed), and, after we review the basic contours of his work and the lineaments of his life, reads from her fresh, and often stunning, versions.

The show's rebroadcast streams Tuesday at 6:00 pm and Wednesday at 7:00 am - but the show is available 24/7 from the station archive page as both a stream and podcast.

Definitely worth a listen.
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Update: The translations from Das Traumkraut that Watkins read during our interview are, sadly, for the most part not yet in print - though a few, as she mentions, appear in the new issue of the Asheville Poetry Review.

Watkins has published other translations of Goll, though, and of Claire Goll, including those in 10,000 Dawns (published in 2004), on which she collaborated with Thomas Rain Crowe.

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The photo of Goll comes from findagrave.com. Yes, there's a site for everything on this ole internet thingy.

Labels: Nan Watkins, surrealism, translation, Wordplay, Yvan Goll

Praise for NatureS

"Way back when, a literary gent by the name of E.L. Pound, from Hailey, Idaho, announced to the world: 'I divide poetry into what I can read and what I cannot read.' I am new to Jeff Davis's work but hit'll read!!! It reminds me that writers named Robert Creeley and Charles Olson once taught at Black Mountain College in Buncombe County NC - and made a difference."

~Jonathan Williams

"These poems are succinct in language and insights - no waste of words here - lovely and moving jewels of the Eleusinian luminous darkness, a magnificent shining in the dark. Poems (all of them) that are gifts, with a sassy bit of awareness to ground them all. At their best, they show an excellent eye and ear for the images and rhythms of nature - fresh, clear, as any sparkling mountain stream - and sing with that limpidity Olson was always trying to drum into my head at Black Mountain. Jeff Davis is a poet who knows what most males thirst to know - and die, not knowing. 'I am written,' Rimbaud said, and he is just that in these poems."

~Michael Rumaker

"Being human and part of nature, what we have in common with the natural world is something we gain then lose, gain then lose, over and over. The continual process of holding and letting go makes up the world we smell, we taste, we see, we feel, we hear, we share. As the custodian of this experience we have none better than Jeff Davis. He has been tireless in his practice of recording these dark and luminous encounters: the flicker of love, or the shadow of leaves in the wind."

~Thomas Meyer