It’s OK to be another, says one of the people populating Linda Aldrich’s sonnet crown, “Scenes from a Single Life, 1985.” And in many ways, the poems in our Fall/Winter issue consider that idea – what it means to be another. We see poets stepping outside of their own experiences to consider the lives of those in Palestine, Burkina Faso and Iraq, poets telling heart-wrenching stories of victims of sexual violence.
My minute looks like your minute but isn’t, writes Denise Bergman, and many of the poets, here, explore the tension between our own experiences and the work it takes to understand the narrative of others – how to be a poet, as Srečko Kosovel writes, involves wells of understanding.
It is with this in mind that we are particularly delighted to feature so many translations of poets from around the world in this issue. To begin, we have Boston’s Poet Laureate, Danielle Legros Georges’s, translations of spare and deeply lyrical poems by Félix Morisseau-Leroy, prolific Haitian writer, educator, activist, and champion of the Haitian Creole language.
Co-translations by Barbara Siegel Carlson and Ana Jelnikar from the Slovenian of Srečko Kosovel’s poems bring us closer to the stark, Rilkean world of one of Slovenia’s first modernists, now considered one of Central Europe’s major modernist poets.
Stuart Friebert’s translations of poems from the German by Austrian poet, Elisabeth Schmeidel’s introduce us to a poet who is now just getting recognition in the English language. (If you haven’t already, please check out our recent blog interview with Friebert on translating Schmeidel’s poetry at http://solsticelitmag.org/dzvinia-orlowsky-interviews-stuart-friebert-translator-elisabeth-schmeidels-poetry/#more-7196. )
In his poem, “1982” Daniel Lawless writes about [t]he year many found the needle but lost the thread. The poems in this issue help us find lost threads – they remind us of what it means to practice empathy and contemplate the relationship between the one and the many. After all, as Félix Morisseau-Leroy writes, When I say me, it’s her/ When I say him, it’s you/ They are me, are him, are you/ We are ourselves ourselves.
Dzvinia Orlowsky and Ben Berman
Ben Berman is the author of three books of poems and the collection of essays, Writing While Parenting, a 2023 Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year. He has won the Peace Corps Award for the Best Book of Poetry, has been shortlisted twice for the Massachusetts Book Awards and has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, New England Poetry Club and Somerville Arts Council. He’s been teaching for twenty-five years and currently teaches creative writing classes at Brookline High School. He lives in the Boston area with his wife and two daughters.
Dzvinia Orlowsky is Pushcart prize poet, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She’s published six full-length poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press including her most recent, Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry and Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones (2009) for which she received a Sheila Motton Book Award. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was selected by Robert Pinsky as the 2019 co-winner of the New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize. In 2014, Dialogos published Jeff Friedman’s and her co-translation of Memorials: A Selection by Polish poet Mieczysław Jastrun for which she and Friedman were awarded a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s selected poems, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, (Lost Horse Press), was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, ALTA’s National Translation Book Award in Poetry, and winner of the 2020-2021 American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize. Her and Ali’s co-translations from the Ukrainian of Halyna Kruk’s poetry is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in 2024 and her new poetry collection, Those Absences Now Closest, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in fall, 2024. Dzvinia is a contributing poetry editor at Solstice Literary Magazine, founding director of Night Riffs: A Solstice Literary Magazine Reading and Music Series. and Poet-in-Residence at the Solstice MFA Program for Creative Writing.
