What stays with us after we have read a text? Which phrases, images, incidents linger in our memory? What contributes to the incessant reshaping of our reading selves?
Reviews, such as riveting book presentations published regularly in The Riveter, record not only our reading tastes, but also our gradual transformations as readers. And writers. They register our delights and queries, our impatience and attentiveness.
When a response, such as a review, turns into a poem, our reading becomes a trans-reading: the read text transforms in our mind, under our pen, on our screen. The new text intensifies our perceptions, demonstrates partiality, highlights disciplined selection.
The poets who responded to the writings showcased in The Baltics Riveter, read during the ‘Transreading the Baltics’ course I ran for the Poetry School in London in summer 2018, experimented with translation as well. They played games which borrowed reading and writing strategies used by translators in their creative re-imaginings of originals.
The sample transreadings presented in The Riveter intimate their authors’ sensitivities as readers and writers. These new poems invite us to return to their source texts – to read them once again.
By Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
Conservation is A C Clarke‘s ‘transreading’ of Krišjānis Zeļģis‘s untitled poem about hitting a deer, translated by Jayde Will and published in The Baltic Riveter. A C Clarke’s response derives from rewriting the poem from memory, Alys Conran’s first method of ‘expanded translation’. It is, in Conran’s words, ‘wilfully inaccurate’ and has become more so with reworking. The poem has been written during ‘Transreading the Baltics’ course ran by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese at the Poetry School.
CONSERVATION
I slammed into a young deer
while you were laughing
in the back of the car.
I hung the gralloched carcase
a week for tenderness,
served it with olives and beer.
The numbles I stirred
into the gravy. Not a thing
wasted, thrift’s the word.
Would an ecopoet cheer?
I think the deer
might applaud.
By A C Clarke
A C Clarke is a poet and translator living in Glasgow who has won a number of prizes over the years and been widely published in anthologies and magazines. Herfifth full collection, A Troubling Woman(Oversteps Books), centred on the Medieval visionary Margery Kempe, came out in 2017. It is a companion book to Fr Meslier’s Confession, which is centred on the atheist priest Jean Meslier. She was one of four joint winners in the Cinnamon Press 2017 poetry pamphlet competition with War Baby, which was published in January 2018.
Scored with a Moon is Lydia Harris‘s poem written in response to Doris Kareva’s *** (A house by the sea; translated by Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov) and Madara Gruntmane’s lines from *** (She loves so demandingly; translated by Marta Ziemelis and Richard O’Brien): “sticking her stories into the cracks of the fissured wall”. The poem has been written during ‘Transreading the Baltics’ course ran by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese at the Poetry School.
SCORED WITH A MOON
A house on the shore to lodge what is dumb:
a her or a him fills this vessel of stone.
We mortared the roof, planed the way in,
welcomed no-eye, no-hoof, no-skin.
We leave and return. Our words scuffle the air.
What’s within remains calm or not there.
Here is a bird scratched on a bone,
a comb scored with a moon, a stick for a loom.
The tide drags the sea up, then down.
Nothing is uttered or born.
By Lydia Harris
Lydia Harris has made her home in the Orkney island of Westray. In 2017 she held a Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award for poetry.
Hilary Dyer‘s The Pictures was written in response to an excerpt from Plague Grave (“Katkuhaud“) by Ene Mihkelson translated by Christopher Moseley. The poem has been written during ‘Transreading the Baltics’ course ran by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese at the Poetry School.
THE PICTURES
Radio waves
Hate
Pity Pity
my pity/mind lies miserable
and knowing
seeing
listening
I you her
whose flight did not
he has the radio and a soul
she came after she surveyed
KAATA KAATA
forest
fierce
dreaming
was there
we who have thrown ourselves down
fully clothed against this cold
and with newspapers
lie straight
die straight
we are cold dreaming now
where
By Hilary Dyer
Hilary Dyer studied printmaking in Wales and then Writing on Art at Reading University. She moved to Netherlands in 1976. She worked in English teaching and in anthroposophic art therapy. Currently retired and she is trying to fit reading, writing and picture making together.
Life on Mars is Anna Blasiak’s response to I Can’t Remember My Future Name by Ilzė Butkutė, translated by Rimas Uzgiris, which made Anna think of the “American Horror Story. Freak Show”. The poem has been written during ‘Transreading the Baltics’ course ran by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese at the Poetry School.
LIFE ON MARS
I stumble upon Elsa’s blond perm wig,
her red lipstick and wooden leg.
I walk past a jar with pickled Ma Petite.
This is home.
I am the third Siamese sister
to Bette and Dot.
My sink is blocked
with shaved-off beard, like Ethel’s.
I am a permanent resident of Jupiter,
a regular freak.
I wear a suit and eye-shadow
in David Bowie blue.
Here all talk is Meep,
all talk is throwing daggers,
pinheads end up in Briarcliff
on the other side of the story.
And only in the afterlife
life goes on on Mars
and wooden limbs
grow back.
By Anna Blasiak
Anna Blasiak is an art historian, poet and translator. She runs the European Literature Network with Rosie Goldsmith. She has translated over 40 books from English into Polish and, as Anna Hyde, Polish into English. She has worked in museums and a radio station and written on art, film and theatre. annablasiak.com.
Read Anna’s #Riveting Review of CARAVAN LULLABIES by Ilzė Butkutė
