Contributor Spotlight: Chris Tamigi
I’m excited about seeing “Impure Acts” (my translation of Mauro Covacich’s short story “Atti Impuri” ) in print in the HFR. The idea of an English translation of a contemporary Italian story set in postwar Poland intrigues me in that it interposes several layers of mediation between the reader and the narrator. You have Covacich who conjured up this scene in the mountains outside postwar Krakow and described it in Italian, and then you have the translator (me) importing the story from Italian into English.
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AWP Off-Site Readings You Won't Want to Miss
So I know you'll all be attending the #superblueferry event hosted by Superstition Review, Blue Mesa Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review on April 10th @ 10 AM at The Nicollet. But what other offsite events do you not want to miss? To make your AWP-evenings as fun, social, and productive as possible we've compiled a list of the offsite events we are most excited about.
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Contributor Spotlight: Sarah Pemberton Strong
My poem “Mobile” was inspired by a baby gift for my newborn daughter—a mechanical crib mobile sent by a well-meaning relative I’d never met. This mobile, with its toxic-smelling plastic ponies and its beepy, teeth-grinding rendition of a piece of music I was fond of, struck me at first as the very nadir of technological achievement. As the poem says, whenever I looked at it—and smelled the chemicals coming off the plastic—it made me think of “asthma attacks and Chinese factory workers.” In an earlier draft, the poem went on to ask, “Why would anyone give a naked infant / such a complicated dance of suffering?” Although those lines didn’t make it into the final version, once I had posed that question, I wanted to try to answer it, or at least investigate it. That investigation comprises a large part of the pleasure poetry gives me—the experience of embarking on a quest I hadn’t intended to sign up for.
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Contributor Spotlight: Clyde Moneyhun
I found my voice as a writer, ironically, by speaking in other people’s voices, which is to say when I started translating in earnest. Before about five years ago, I’d dabbled in translation. In college, I once got out of taking a final exam in an Italian class by turning in a translation of the brief memoir “Winter in Abruzzo” by Natalia Ginzburg, and later it was the first translation I ever published. Still in college, I started translating Camus’s The Stranger to teach myself French. Living in Japan years later, I collaborated with my friend Mark Caprio to translate the Japanese novel A Heart of Winter by Miura Ayako, which we did manage to finish and publish, and also some contemporary Japanese Buddhist poetry. I should have given in to my fate long ago, but I spent many years writing short stories, personal essays, even a travel column for a while, before I committed to translation wholeheartedly.
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Contributor Spotlight: Patrick Milian
The first poem I wrote was a libretto, a byzantine elaboration of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” My roommate asked me if I’d try writing the text for an opera he was hoping to write, so I tried. I tried writing the only way I knew how—which meant meter, rhyme, form, and capitalizing the first letter of every line. It took about a year to finish the libretto and, reading it now, it seems like a record of an idiosyncratic education in which arias turn into sonnets, duets are sung is terza rima, and Longfellow makes more than one appearance. These were the best methods I knew of making a poem sound like music.
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This Is It—the End of the Rainbow!
Today is the final day to subscribe or resubscribe and receive four sneak preview proof pages of Hayden’s Ferry Review, Issue 56! Sample or back issues will also receive three proof pages, so no matter what you order, you can be among the first to see the material forthcoming in HFR. Be sure to place your orders now!
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Book Review: Reveille by George David Clark
2015 winner of the Miller Williams poetry prize from the University of Arkansas Press, George David Clark’s Reveille, rings in each poetic section with a reveille, or a wake-up call. Clark defines and creates his own meaning for this term—the title Reveille creates a “call” for the rest of the book, transporting the reader into the author’s painterly world of “a lattice musics,” “a bathing suit red as tomatoes,” “the gloss of lacquered walnut golds and olives jigsaw,” and “the holy face plum-colored.” Clark uses touches of color to guide the reader through this imaginary world that borders on the holy, and the first section opens with “Reveille on a Silent Whistle,” with its angelic imagery of “Two seraphs in the live oak’s highest boughs are sleeping,/constructing minutely their crystalline fretwork.”
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Your Luck Hasn’t Run Out Yet!
St. Patrick’s Day is sooooo last week—but our subscription drive is still going strong! We still have proofs to give out, and you could be so lucky, as long as you subscribe or resubscribe. Or, if you’re feeling lucky but your pot of gold isn’t quite as full, feel free to buy a single sample or back issue and get three rather than four pages from the proofs of Issue 56, before anyone else gets a chance to see it! The offer ends this Tuesday, March 24th.
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