The Exile Book of Poetry in Translation: 20 Canadian Poets Take On the World

by Priscila Uppal (Editor)

A groundbreaking multilingual collection promoting a global poetic consciousness, this volume presents the works of 20 international poets, all in their original languages, alongside English translations by some of Canada's most esteemed poets. Providing an introductory statement about the translation process of each poem, translating poets include Canadians Ken Babstock, Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Barry Callaghan, A. F. Moritz, and Paul Vermeersch, among others; while subjects include poems by Pablo Neruda, Horace, Ezra Pound, Arthur Rimbaud, Alexander Pushkin, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Spanning several time periods and more than a dozen nations, this compendium paints a truly unique portrait of cultures, nationalities, and eras.

Genres: Poetry

320 pages, Paperback

First published March 23, 2009

About the author

Priscila Uppal was a Canadian poet, novelist, and playwright. poet, academic, and professor of Humanities and English at the undergraduate and graduate levels at York University. She was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Toronto Arts Council. Her creative and academic interests frequently intersected and she has published work that explores the tensions and dynamics between women (particularly in closed societies: schools, nunneries), the nature of human violence, sexuality (including infertility), multicultural clashes (ethnic, religious, geographical), revisionist mythmaking (classical myth, biblical myth, historical figures), illness (physical, psychological, cultural), mourning rituals and the expression of grief (towards individuals, communities, abstract concepts), the world of readers and the dangers and benefits of reading and the imagination, the world of sport and sport aesthetics, as well as the nature of the artistic process, among other things.

Reviews

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like all anthologies, 20 Canadian Poets Take On The World is a mixed bag. There are some great poems, some good poems, some bad poems, and some translations that simply seem unnecessary. The idea for this book was conceived when editor Priscila Uppal realized that Canada is one of the most multicultural countries in the world yet our authors don't produce many translations. So she reached out to twenty Canadian poets and asked them to contribute some translations to this book. Sounds simple enough, right? I have some issues with the way this was handled. First of all, there were several poets who didn't speak the language of the poem they were translating, and they had to find someone else to translate the original work, which they then polished and made poetic. I suppose this still counts as translation, but it just seems strange. Another problem I had is that the poets were free to choose any poems to translate...I was hoping for a more contemporary focus but some of the poets chose to translate older authors who have already been translated to death (Horace, Rimbaud, Neruda). The third problem I had is some clever guy thought it would be cool to translate Ezra Pound into a QR Code, which I didn't even bother reading.

Thankfully there are still plenty of good poems/translations. I will never read 20 Canadian Poets from cover to cover again, but it's definitely worth a second look.

Poems that I liked:

"Blue signalling silver" (Jan-Willem Anker/Ken Babstock), "Goya" (Andrei Voznesensky/Barry Callaghan), "I Loved You Once" (Alexander Pushkin/George Elliott Clarke), "Ars Poetica" (Leopold Staff/Christopher Doda), "Mythology" (Leopold Staff/Christopher Doda), "Love Song for Difficult Times" (Maria Elena Cruz Varela/Rishma Dunlop), "The Ones I Love Are Leaving" (Maria Elena Cruz Varela/Rishma Dunlop), "Noon on Earth!" (Horace/Steven Heighton), "Love Poems for Her, Dying" (George Faludy/Andrea Jarmai), "The Cockroach on My Desk" (George Faludy/Andrea Jarmai), "Thank You, Death" (Stevan Tontic/Goran Simic), "Dethroned Beauty" (Joo da Cruz e Sousa/Priscila Uppal), "My friend imitates more-or-less everything" (Herman de Coninck/Paul Vermeersch).

=13/

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

what i am enjoying particularly about this book are the introductions by the writers who translated the poems, and the discovery of poets i've never heard of before.