The path through the woods is freshly covered with yellow pine needles. Soon they will settle into the forest floor. These yellow needles another reminder of our transience. In William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Yellow Flower” the speaker asks, “What shall I say, because talk I must? / That I have found a cure / for the sick?” Williams’s yellow flower like the yellow needles is unrecognized but powered somehow to free us through our speaking of it, honoring what is real as Michelangelo “had the same, if greater, / power” in carving the tortured bodies of the slaves, expressing their beauty and grace. This is transcendence—the terrain and gift of poetry.
Poetry that arrives from one language to another is always thrilling. It is testament to the power of the unspoken that comes through the words and beyond them, hovering in a kind of radiance cast by the poem’s interplay of language, image and sound. The energy of the poem moves us, enlarging our perception. Which is the case in the poems in translation presented in this issue.
Teemu Helle’s two poems translated from the Finnish by Niiana Pollari hold a quiet power with seamless transition from myth to the everyday—how myth is created from life as much as life creates myth. Through spare imagistic language and understatement, we arrive at a luminosity we can’t quite grasp, shaped by the mythical (Sisyphus just out of sight), nature and spirituality where raindrops have a secret knowledge.
“Where the Walls of the House Knot Together,” translated from the French by Kathryn Kimball, blends realities where the walls meet. The one dark current of this life will meet the other, taken by the rhythms and cadences, for the world is also us who float as the unborn into a dark river to that other world. It is a rough violent journey where “[a] lashing wind tolls the knell for leaves.” But where our mortal and immortal selves conjoin.
The Suffering of Young Hana by Katja Gorečan is a spoof of, as well as feminist re-writing of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. On the one hand, it is a portrayal of neurosis; on the other hand, a feminist critique of the chauvinistic and condescending poetry scene in old Europe. The book was nominated for the Jenko Award, the highest poetry award in Slovenia. Gorečan’s poems in this collection are subtly ironic and penetratingly direct at the same time.
Enjoy!
–Barbara Siegel Carlson and Ewa Chrusciel
Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of What Drifted Here (Cherry Grove, 2023), Once in Every Language (Kelsay, 2017) and Fire Road (Dream Horse, 2013). She is the co-translator (with Ana Jelnikar) of Look Back, Look Ahead, Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel and co-editor (with Richard Jackson) of A Bridge of Voices: Contemporary Slovene Poetry and Perspectives. Her poetry, translations and essays have appeared in Verse Daily, Cortland Review, Mid-American Review, Salamander, Slovene Studies and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. A fourth book of poems The Current is forthcoming in 2026.
Ewa Chrusciel is a poet, translator, and educator. She has four books of poems in English with Omnidawn Press: Yours, Purple Gallinule (2022), Strata, Of Annunciations, Contraband of Hoopoe, as well as three books in Polish: Tobołek, Sopiłki, and Furkot. Her book Contraband of Hoopoe was translated into Italian by Anna Aresi and came out in Italy with Edizioni Ensemble in May 2019. Her poems have been included in curricula at institutions such as Harvard University, University of Wisconsin, Dartmouth College, Salem State University.
She also translated various authors into Polish, including books by Jack London, Joseph Conrad, and I.B. Singer, as well as book of selected poems by Jorie Graham (2013), and aforthcoming book of selected poems by Vievee Francis (2027), and selected poems of Kazim Ali, Lyn Hejinian, Cole Swensen, Mathew Olzmann and other American poets.
She is a Professor of Creative and Professional Writing and M. Roy London Endowed Chair at Colby-Sawyer College.
