“The nourishment of the abiding center is inexhaustible” says the IChing. And if you substitute the word “poetry” for “nourishment” you might find sustenance for these uncertain times. If every poem is a translation of one’s perception of that abiding center, then every good translation offers another savoring of the center that is the poem’s hidden succulence.
We are delighted to introduce the Spanish poet Irene Bable Marruffi whose “Skies” in Stephen Kessler’s elegant translation reveals a multi-faceted vision of eternity as it blends the surreal, political, passionate and sacred turning from a sky “bloody with senseless falling missiles” to the “blue of a huge/ twilight under an unknown firmament.”
Piotr Maur values authenticity in his poetics, conveying inner truth of speaking subject in confrontation with an outside world. His poetics is characterized by paradox, caricature, conceptualism. In the poem [actually, I don’t know how to convince you], deftly translated by Katarzyna Jakubiak, we see how the topic of love transpires from the empty fridge image. Maur follows in the steps of the Metaphysical Poets by introducing a witty concept of light (feeding on light specifically), as he yokes incongruous images together producing surprise and delight.
This is Macedonian poet Lidija Dimkovska’s second appearance in Solstice, and she returns with a tour-de-force of a poem “Legacy,” told in the voice of South African poet Ingrid Jonker who died by her own hand in 1965. The force of “Legacy,” translated with verve by Ljubica Arsovska and Patricia Marsh, resides in the voice of the suicide whose tones sharply and seamlessly shift as they navigate the heart’s difficult terrain where “death is an awakening” as much as an ironic and paradoxical vision arising from pain, love, politics, injustice and memory.
-Barbara Siegel Carlson and Ewa Chrusciel
Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Current published by Lily Poetry Review Books, 2026. She is the co-translator (with Ana Jelnikar) of Look Back, Look Ahead, Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel. Her poetry and translations have appeared in On the Seawall, Verse Daily, Mid-American Review, Salamander, 2River, The Poetry Porch, among others. Carlson is a Co-Poetry in Translation Editor of Solstice.
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.
