Helene Cardona's Blog - Posts Tagged "white-pine-press"

An excerpt from Beyond Elsewhere by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac (White Pine Press, 2016), Hélène Cardona's translation of Plus loin qu'ailleurs (Editions du Cygne, 2013) in The ORIGINAL Van Gogh's Ear Anthology:

http://theoriginalvangoghsearantholog...

A new excerpt from "Beyond Elsewhere" by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac (White Pine Press, 2016), my translation of "Plus loin qu'ailleurs" (Editions du Cygne), followed by the original French in Fjords Review:
http://www.fjordsreview.com/monthly-f...

"I invoke heaven’s seal that is Breath, indomitable Breath, Breath that pierces, purifies, resuscitates all it embraces in its elusive dance; and the fiery bush burning our finiteness, our servitudes and our dust, to reawaken in its heart, freed from space and time, their laws rendered powerless."
To read the whole excerpt:
http://www.fjordsreview.com/monthly-f...

I'm thrilled to bits to announce that BEYOND ELSEWHERE (White Pine Press, 2016) by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, my translation of Plus loin qu'ailleurs (Editions du Cygne) has been awarded a prestigious Hemingway Grant, huge thanks to the Cultural Services | French Embassy in the US. With all my gratitude to Dennis Maloney.
Cover Art: “Mystery” by Barbara Zaring.
Advance praise:
"This incandescent metonym of light is, writ small, a marriage of eastern and western wisdoms—a Bildungsroman describing the arc of a young man's journey from innocence, through passion and despair, to the great clarity of spiritual understanding. Arnou-Laujeac's intensely visual account, clothed in lyrical image and visionary flame, in Cardona's transcendent translation, easily carries us along in his brightly burning chariot in quest of the Divine."
—Sidney Wade
"Beyond Elsewhere by French poet Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, and translated by Hélène Cardona is a wonderfully lyric, mesmerizing poetic meditation on desire, love, the soul, and spirituality. Beyond Elsewhere defies definition, hovering in that physical space somewhere above us, just beyond reach, but visible in a breathless lyrical cloud. As Arnou-Laujeac states: “I now know human passion is exclusive, symbiotic, psychotropic, but that the key is the spell eluding it, the time that tears it to pieces.” Arnou-Laujeac's poems are psychotropic — a beautiful new voice in poetry."
—Victoria Chang
"This is the absolute dawn," Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac declares in the final pages of Beyond Elsewhere, a dazzling hymn to the currents of desire that shape each individual life. This is a testament to the ways in which love lights an invisible path to the morning when "Everything here is an Elsewhere." Do not miss the chance to take this exhilarating journey.
—Christopher Merrill
"Hélène Cardona’s new translation confirms again her exquisite powers and imagination in turning Arnou-Laujeac’s amazing work into an English classic. She X-rays the original, and comes out with an inner picture faithful to beauty and the author’s flowing dexterity. Her singing flare illumines the English version, which is now the original. Discover Hélène's invitation to voyage."
—Willis Barnstone

Poetry, Translation, Prizes & Publishing

Come hear renowned poet, translator, actress, and recent PEN USA translation prize judge Hélène Cardona ("Life in Suspension," "Beyond Elsewhere") and poet and publisher Dennis Maloney (White Pine Press) read from their work and discuss the process of bringing international poetry to readers.

Hosted by Chad W. Post and Open Letter Books.

Venue:
ButaPub
315 Gregory St.
Rochester, NY 14620

Free and open to the public - Food and refreshments available

http://www.openletterbooks.org/blogs/...

"Dappled with transparent imagery, like the Mediterranean sunlight she grew up with, Hélène Cardona's poems offer a vivid self-portrait as scholar, seer and muse." —John Ashbery

Hélène Cardona's most recent books include the Award-Winning "Dreaming My Animal Selves" (Salmon Poetry), and the Hemingway Grant recipient "Beyond Elsewhere" (White Pine Press). She also translated Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings for the Iowa International Writing Program’s WhitmanWeb. Her own work has been translated into 13 languages, including Romanian, Italian, Arabic, Macedonian, Serbian, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, and Hindi. She also co-edits "Fulcrum: An Anthology of Poetry and Aesthetics," is Co-International Editor of "Plume," and contributes articles to numerous literary joiurnals and magazines.

Dennis Maloney is a poet and translator. A number of volumes of his own poetry have been published including "The Map Is Not the Territory: Poems & Translations" and "Just Enough." His book "Listening to Tao Yuan Ming" was recently published by Glass Lyre Press. A bilingual German/English volume, "Empty Cup," will appear in Germany in 2017. His works of translation include: "The Stones of Chile" by Pablo Neruda," "The Landscape of Castile" by Antonio Machado, "Between the Floating Mist:Poems of Ryokan," and the "The Poet and the Sea" by Juan Ramon Jimenez. He is also the editor and publisher of the widely respected White Pine Press in Buffalo, NY. and divides his time between Buffalo, NY and Big Sur, CA.

Hélène Cardona conceives poetry as « a gesture, a movement, an opening towards a greater truth or understanding ».

http://frenchculture.org/books/events...

I'll read from "Life In Suspension / La Vie Suspendue" and "Dreaming My Animal Selves / Le Songe de mes Âmes Animales" in English and in French, as well as my translation Beyond Elsewhere (by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac), winner of a Hemingway Grant.

Huge thanks to the French Consulate in Los Angeles and the Cultural Services | French Embassy in the US for listing my event at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, April 22 @ 1:40 PM. On the Poetry Stage.

Dreaming the World in Translation: A Conversation with Hélène Cardona. Interview by Alison Williams in World Literature Today:
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...

"When you understand and know other cultures, you don’t fear the other. There is no other. We should be shepherds of the Earth."

"Translation is necessary to know oneself—to know where one comes from. Every language is a key into the psyche of its people."

"Through translation, we bring cultures together, we create bridges. Becoming familiar with another culture transcends otherness. We are many and diverse."

You're invited to join Martha Rhodes, Hélène Cardona, John FitzGerald, Carolyn Tipton, Stephen Kessler at Beyond Baroque for An Enchanted Reading of Poetry & Translations!

Saturday January 20th @ 8PM at Beyond Baroque
beyondbaroque.org/calendar.html

Martha Rhodes, Carolyn Tipton, Stephen Kessler, John FitzGerald and Hélène Cardona will read from recents works.
Please join us with Richard Modiano at Beyond Baroque.

Martha Rhodes is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Thin Wall (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is the director of Four Way Books and lives in New York City.

John FitzGerald’s most recent books are Favorite Bedtime Stories and The Mind, both from Salmon Poetry. Other works include Primate and The Essence of Life.

Hélène Cardona’s 7 books include Life in Suspension, the translations of Dorianne Laux’s What We Carry, Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings, Birnam Wood, and Hemingway Grant winner Beyond Elsewhere. Acting credits include Chocolat, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Hundred-Foot Journey, For Serendipity.

Carolyn L. Tipton teaches at U.C. Berkeley. She has won fellowships from both the N.E.H. and the N.E.A. Her first book, To Painting: Poems by Rafael Alberti, won the National Translation Award. Her new book of translated poems by Alberti, Returnings: Poems of Love and Distance, won the Cliff Becker Translation Prize.

Stephen Kessler's translations of Luis Cernuda have received a Lambda Literary Award, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and the PEN Center USA translation award.

Regular admission. Members FREE

I'd delighted to share that The Abduction, my translation of Maram Al-Masri's Le Rapt, won an Albertine and FACE Foundation Grant from Villa Albertine.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Using artfully spare language and repetition, Maram Al-Masri takes us deep into the emotional
complexities of losing her young child to a patriarchal society. Hélène Cardona’s deft translations capture both the stark immediacy and haunting music of these moving poems, almost letting us believe they were written in English.
—Martha Collins, author of Casualty Reports and Because What Else Could I Do, winner of the
Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

With a tender eloquence that equals the French original, Hélène Cardona brings into English a
harrowing tale, The Abduction by Maram Al-Masri, of a new mother devastated by the abduction of her son, kidnapped by his father to be raised in Syria. Now, as the distraught mother powerfully notes, “war rages within me.” Cardona vividly conveys both palpable love and the wisdom learned from tragic loss: “To love, it is to prepare yourself / to be abandoned.” As The Abduction proves, Hélène Cardona is a translator who has the exquisite sensitivity and erudition
that this brave, vulnerable work deserves.
—Cynthia Hogue, winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy
of American Poets, author of In June the Labyrinth
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

The Abduction won an Albertine and FACE Foundation Grant.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

Each small stanza of The Abduction picks at the torn seam between parent and child. As the narrator peers “out a window/ I haven’t cleaned for a long time,” we also see what has been snatched away. Arabic poet Al-Masri writes of the changed shape of her future, a devastation eloquently translated by Hélène Cardona.
—Lauren Camp, 2022 to 2025 New Mexico Poet Laureate and author of Took House
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

Maram Al-Masri’s Le Rapt, as translated by Hélène Cardona, opens with the simple delights of a mother engaging with her young child, speaking to him as if he is a confidant. “He is occupied / making his ten fingers move / to convince me that love is the natural fruit / of the tree of life,” she writes, and what could be more wonderful than that? Bliss, however, is followed by unbearable grief, when her child is abducted and separated from her for years by her then-husband. The poems become the vessel for her dialogue with her missing child, and with her sorrow. Even when mother and child experience a complex reunion years later, each has learned to fear loving the other, and her son must face a second infancy, this time as an immigrant, much less blissful than the first. As a reader of poetry, I am compelled by the raw spareness of these poems, their keen honesty, and their refusal to provide us with a restoration arc. As a parent, I feel empathy, and awe at Al-Masri’s survival.

—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

I'd thrilled to share that The Abduction, my translation of Maram Al-Masri's Le Rapt, won an Albertine and FACE Foundation Grant from Villa Albertine.
Using artfully spare language and repetition, Maram Al-Masri takes us deep into the emotional
complexities of losing her young child to a patriarchal society. Hélène Cardona’s deft translations capture both the stark immediacy and haunting music of these moving poems, almost letting us believe they were written in English.
—Martha Collins, author of Casualty Reports and Because What Else Could I Do, winner of the
Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award

With a tender eloquence that equals the French original, Hélène Cardona brings into English a
harrowing tale, her son, kidnapped by his father to be raised in Syria. Now, as the distraught mother powerfully notes, “war rages within me.” Cardona vividly conveys both palpable love and the wisdom learned from tragic loss: “To love, it is to prepare yourself / to be abandoned.” As The Abduction proves, Hélène Cardona is a translator who has the exquisite sensitivity and erudition
that this brave, vulnerable work deserves.
—Cynthia Hogue, winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy
of American Poets, author of In June the Labyrinth