Helene Cardona's Blog, page 2
April 17, 2023
Book Trailer for The Abduction!
Check out the book trailer for The Abduction, my translation of Maram Al Masri's Le Rapt!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jAnY...
"where the sky is made of tales
and where the trees are poems
I will take my little one for a walk."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Thank you Gloria Mindock for the beautiful book trailer😘
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jAnY...
"where the sky is made of tales
and where the trees are poems
I will take my little one for a walk."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Thank you Gloria Mindock for the beautiful book trailer😘
April 11, 2023
Great news about The Abduction
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
Using artfully spare language and repetition, Maram Al-Masri takes us deep into the emotionalcomplexities 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
Great news about The Abduction
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.
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
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
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Using artfully spare language and repetition, Maram Al-Masri takes us deep into the emotionalcomplexities 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
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
April 9, 2023
The Abduction, my translation of Maram Al-Masri is out!
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...
April 6, 2023
The Abduction won an Albertine and FACE Foundation Grant!
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...
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 eruditionthat 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...
January 5, 2023
Birnam Wood wins the NYC Big Book Award
Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona translation, Salmon Poetry) wins the 2022 NYC Big Book Award! Thank you #GabbyBookAwardsProbably the best poetry collection I’ve read all year! A passionate collection. Gorgeous! —Bonnie Hearn Hill’s Great Day Book Club’s Book of the Month
The human condition, exile, love and death, freedom and fate, renunciation and resignation, the homeland of Ibiza and the diaspora are themes dominating Birnam Wood. A very clear thematic unity is discernible in the work of José Manuel Cardona: an unflinching look at identity through heightened language. These poems form part of a major on-going tradition in Spanish poetry. His work is marked by a predilection for the classical Castilian hendecasyllable as well as free verse, and by a strong interest in social themes.
The book reflects a social conscience and expresses great pain and love, in particular the poet’s love for his native island of Ibiza. It is also filled with literary influences. Its title, El bosque de Birnam, is a metaphor drawn from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Birnam Wood speaks against abuse of power and for overthrowing all illegitimate governments. Lady Macbeth is foretold that she will have cause for worry when the Birnam Wood rises and marches against her, yet she does not heed the warning. Franco’s rise to power after a military coup launched a Civil War against a republic democratically elected in peace. Birnam Wood stands for resistance to illegitimate and illegal regimes.
March 23, 2022
Birnam Wood wins the 2022 Independent Press Award!
Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona translation, Salmon Poetry) wins the 2022 Independent Press Award!
Thank you #IndependentPressAward #2022IPA #GabbyBookAwards
"We arrived and the miracle happened.
It was the sea and the wind in the bells.
We came from far, from years
Thirsty as dust, from humble
fishermen’s nets on barren shore."
—José Manuel Cardona
The human condition, exile, love and death, freedom and fate, renunciation and resignation, the homeland of Ibiza and the diaspora are themes dominating Birnam Wood. A very clear thematic unity is discernible in the work of José Manuel Cardona: an unflinching look at identity through heightened language. These poems form part of a major on-going tradition in Spanish poetry. His work is marked by a predilection for the classical Castilian hendecasyllable as well as free verse, and by a strong interest in social themes.
The book reflects a social conscience and expresses great pain and love, in particular the poet’s love for his native island of Ibiza. It is also filled with literary influences. Its title, El bosque de Birnam, is a metaphor drawn from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Birnam Wood speaks against abuse of power and for overthrowing all illegitimate governments. Lady Macbeth is foretold that she will have cause for worry when the Birnam Wood rises and marches against her, yet she does not heed the warning. Franco’s rise to power after a military coup launched a Civil War against a republic democratically elected in peace. Birnam Wood stands for resistance to illegitimate and illegal regimes.
Thank you #IndependentPressAward #2022IPA #GabbyBookAwards
"We arrived and the miracle happened.
It was the sea and the wind in the bells.
We came from far, from years
Thirsty as dust, from humble
fishermen’s nets on barren shore."
—José Manuel Cardona
The human condition, exile, love and death, freedom and fate, renunciation and resignation, the homeland of Ibiza and the diaspora are themes dominating Birnam Wood. A very clear thematic unity is discernible in the work of José Manuel Cardona: an unflinching look at identity through heightened language. These poems form part of a major on-going tradition in Spanish poetry. His work is marked by a predilection for the classical Castilian hendecasyllable as well as free verse, and by a strong interest in social themes.The book reflects a social conscience and expresses great pain and love, in particular the poet’s love for his native island of Ibiza. It is also filled with literary influences. Its title, El bosque de Birnam, is a metaphor drawn from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Birnam Wood speaks against abuse of power and for overthrowing all illegitimate governments. Lady Macbeth is foretold that she will have cause for worry when the Birnam Wood rises and marches against her, yet she does not heed the warning. Franco’s rise to power after a military coup launched a Civil War against a republic democratically elected in peace. Birnam Wood stands for resistance to illegitimate and illegal regimes.
May 10, 2020
Life in Suspension wins the 2020 Independent Press Award
#IndependentPressAward in Poetry
#2020GabbyBookAward
"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
"Life in Suspension is a terrific and singular achievement. Very few poets I know could accomplish anything like it, let alone with such grace and clarity." —Stephen Yenser
"A tour de force of language and phonetics. Hélène Cardona’s pen moves from the human to the divine and back in a single sentence, and the result is uplifting and
magical." —Joanne Harris
https://www.independentpressaward.com...
#2020GabbyBookAward
"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
"Life in Suspension is a terrific and singular achievement. Very few poets I know could accomplish anything like it, let alone with such grace and clarity." —Stephen Yenser
"A tour de force of language and phonetics. Hélène Cardona’s pen moves from the human to the divine and back in a single sentence, and the result is uplifting and
magical." —Joanne Harris https://www.independentpressaward.com...
November 20, 2019
Birnam Wood wins the 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry!
From American Books Fest:
http://www.americanbookfest.com/gener...
Birnam Wood is one of the most impressive collections of poetry I’ve read in recent years.
It is a work that can sit easily beside Seferis’s great poems of exile and return, or beside Elytis’s gigantic sequence of the Albanian campaign. This is Europe yearning: ‘Exalted were you in my dreams,/ Almost inaccessible like an island/ Sought and sought for years.’ —Thomas McCarthy, Poetry International
http://www.americanbookfest.com/gener...
Birnam Wood is one of the most impressive collections of poetry I’ve read in recent years.
It is a work that can sit easily beside Seferis’s great poems of exile and return, or beside Elytis’s gigantic sequence of the Albanian campaign. This is Europe yearning: ‘Exalted were you in my dreams,/ Almost inaccessible like an island/ Sought and sought for years.’ —Thomas McCarthy, Poetry International
November 18, 2019
Birnam Wood wins the 2019 Readers' Favorite Book Award in Poetry!
Birnam Wood by José Manuel Cardona is an elegant, epic, fecund odyssey of lyrical imagery, steeped in time-honored mythic tradition and yet endlessly inventive.
https://bookawards.com/book-award/bir...
Reviewed by Rich Follett for Readers' Favorite
Cardona is alternately stentorian and coy – his imagery swells like distant thunder even as it dances. In the truest Shakespearean tradition of using the oxymoron to forge new synaptic pathways, Cardona offers implacable, sublime juxtapositions of language which defy categorization. From Ode to a Young Mariner: "The sea is a bride with open arms/with stout rubber balls for breasts." This perfect union of seemingly unmarriageable images is closely followed by “Handsome men, hard as anchors torn/from the chests of a barbarian god.” This is the second sight of a true poet—a true master of incontrovertible word and image pairings which simultaneously sear and expand the brain. Birnam Wood is mind-expanding in the manner of the world’s finest literature—an epic adventure in verse, beckoning us to abandon all that we know for the promise a new way of seeing the world.
Birnam Wood by José Manuel Cardona has been lovingly and painstakingly translated from the Spanish by Cardona’s daughter Hélène. It is a rare pleasure in the world of poetry to read such an expert and devoted translation. Hélène Cardona’s affection for her father and respect for his genius orbit each other in every line. The magical bond between father and daughter is perhaps nowhere better expressed than in her father’s words, translated by a poet in her own right: “We arrived and the miracle happened.”
José Manuel Cardona’s Birnam Wood is a paean to the importance of awe to human survival. With its roots firmly planted in classical mythology, Birnam Wood leaps into the air time and time again and absorbs itself thoroughly in the mystery of returning to earth. Birnam Wood is inexplicably suspended between mortality and immortality; groundedness and blind faith; past and future; courage and fear—it is a song for the ages, fascinating anew with every turn of an eclectic, sirenic page.
2019 Readers' Favorite Book Award Gold Medal Winner in Poetry,.
https://bookawards.com/book-award/bir...
Reviewed by Rich Follett for Readers' Favorite
Cardona is alternately stentorian and coy – his imagery swells like distant thunder even as it dances. In the truest Shakespearean tradition of using the oxymoron to forge new synaptic pathways, Cardona offers implacable, sublime juxtapositions of language which defy categorization. From Ode to a Young Mariner: "The sea is a bride with open arms/with stout rubber balls for breasts." This perfect union of seemingly unmarriageable images is closely followed by “Handsome men, hard as anchors torn/from the chests of a barbarian god.” This is the second sight of a true poet—a true master of incontrovertible word and image pairings which simultaneously sear and expand the brain. Birnam Wood is mind-expanding in the manner of the world’s finest literature—an epic adventure in verse, beckoning us to abandon all that we know for the promise a new way of seeing the world.
Birnam Wood by José Manuel Cardona has been lovingly and painstakingly translated from the Spanish by Cardona’s daughter Hélène. It is a rare pleasure in the world of poetry to read such an expert and devoted translation. Hélène Cardona’s affection for her father and respect for his genius orbit each other in every line. The magical bond between father and daughter is perhaps nowhere better expressed than in her father’s words, translated by a poet in her own right: “We arrived and the miracle happened.”
José Manuel Cardona’s Birnam Wood is a paean to the importance of awe to human survival. With its roots firmly planted in classical mythology, Birnam Wood leaps into the air time and time again and absorbs itself thoroughly in the mystery of returning to earth. Birnam Wood is inexplicably suspended between mortality and immortality; groundedness and blind faith; past and future; courage and fear—it is a song for the ages, fascinating anew with every turn of an eclectic, sirenic page.
2019 Readers' Favorite Book Award Gold Medal Winner in Poetry,.
