Native Guard: Poems

by Natasha Trethewey

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South. Through elegaic verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South—--where one of the first black regiments, The Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. The title of the collection refers to the black regiment whose role in the Civil War has been largely overlooked by history. As a child in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Trethewey could gaze across the water to the fort on Ship Island where Confederate captives once were guarded by black soldiers serving the Union cause. The racial legacy of the South touched Trethewey’s life on a much more immediate level, too. Many of the poems in Native Guard pay loving tribute to her mother, whose marriage to a white man was illegal in her native Mississippi in the 1960s. Years after her mother’s tragic death, Trethewey reclaims her memory, just as she reclaims the voices of the black soldiers whose service has been all but forgotten. Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.

Genres: Poetry, History, African American, Nonfiction, Race, School, Southern

64 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2006

About the author

Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.

Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who were married illegally at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother as "colored", and the race of her father as “Canadian”.

Trethewey's mother, a social worker, was part of the inspiration for Native Guard, which is dedicated to her memory. Trethewey's parents divorced when she was young and Turnbough was murdered in 1985 by her second husband, whom she had recently divorced, when Trethewey was 19 years old. Recalling her reaction to her mother's death, she said, "that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened".

Natasha Trethewey's father is also a poet; he is a professor of English at Hollins University.

Trethewey earned her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1995. In May 2010 Trethewey delivered the commencement speech at Hollins University and was awarded an honorary doctorate. She had previously received an honorary degree from Delta State University in her native Mississippi.

Structurally, her work combines free verse with more structured, traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle. Thematically, her work examines "memory and the racial legacy of America". Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), for example, is a collection of poetry in the form of an epistolary novella; it tells the fictional story a mixed-race prostitute who was photographed by E. J. Bellocq in early 20th-century New Orleans.

The American Civil War makes frequent appearances in her work. Born on Confederate Memorial Day—exactly 100 years afterwards—Trethewey explains that she could not have "escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented", and that it had fascinated her since childhood. For example, Native Guard tells the story of the Louisiana Native Guards, an all-black regiment in the Union Army, composed mainly of former slaves who enlisted, that guarded the Confederate prisoners of war.

On June 7, 2012, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, named her the 19th US Poet Laureate. Billington said, after hearing her poetry at the National Book Festival, that he was "immediately struck by a kind of classic quality with a richness and variety of structures with which she presents her poetry … she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it." Newspapers noted that unlike most poets laureate, Trethewey is in the middle of her career. She was also the first laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C., when she did so in January 2013. On May 14, 2014, Tretheway delivered her final lecture to conclude her second term as US Poet Laureate.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Rosa Jamali · Rating 5 out of 5]

شعری از ناتاشا ترتوی ( ملک الشعرای آمریکا در سال های ۲۰۱۲و ۲۰۱۳ )

ترجمه : رُزا جمالی

ناتاشا ترتوی که خود از مادری سیاهپوست و پدری سفید پوست به دنیا آمده است از تاریخ سیاهانِ بسیار نوشته است و آن را با شرح حال زندگیِ شخصی اش آمیخته است. کتاب "سرباز بومی" او برنده ی جایزه ی پولیتزر شده است. او شاعری ست که جنوب آمریکا و جغرافیایِ میسیسیپی را به شکلی تاریخ نگارانه و از زبان سیاهان روایت می کند.

وقتی که نوزده ساله بود، ناپدری اش مادرش را که بارها قربانی خشونت های خانگی شده بود را می کشد و ناتاشا این روان زخم را سببِ شاعر شدن اش می داند.

ناتاشا ترتوی متاثر از ییتس، شیمس هینی و اوان بولند است، شاعران ایرلندی که تاریخ ایرلند را به دور از استعمار بریتانیا در شعر احیاء کردند، او زمانی که کتاب "سرباز بومی" را می نوشته، کتاب "شمال" شیموس هینی را بارها خوانده تا تعلق اش به تاریخِ جنوبِ آمریکا را بازگو کند.

ضرب آهنگِ موسیقی بومی سیاهانِ ، ترانه های رپ و هیپاپ در شعرهایش بازسازی و احیاء شده است، سطرهای بسیار بلند و تقطیع کلام بعد از هر چند کلمه از مواردی ست که او به آن ها توجه کرده است.

کتاب "مسیر یادبود" به خاطره نگاری او از زندگیِ مادرش می پردازد که در سال 2020 منتشر شده است و بازتاب های اجتماعی فراوانی را در آسیب شناسی زندگی سیاهان و زنان برانگیخته است.

کتاب ها:

کارِ خانگی (2000)

عکسِ افلیای بلاک ( 2002)

سرباز بومی (2006)

بعد از کاترینا ( 2010)

برده (2012)

بنای تاریخی ( 2018)

مسیر یادبود ( 2020)



شعر زیر به داستانِ تولدِ او اشاره می‌کند چرا که در آن زمان ازدواج سیاهان با سفیدپوستان در جنوبِ آمریکا غیرقانونی بود و او را کودکی نامشروع خطاب می‌کردند.



زناشویی بینِ دو نژاد



در سال۱۹۵۶ پدر و مادرم دو قانونِ میسیسیپی را شکستند

به اوهایو رفتند که ازدواج کنند و بعد به میسیسپی بر گشتند



از رودخانه گذشتند و به سینسیناتی رسیدند

شهری که نامش شبیه گناه (sin) تلفظ می شود

مانندِ زنی به خطا در میسیسیپی (mis)



یک سال بعد به کانادا نقل مکان کردند

مسیری شبیه به آنچه در پیش گفتم

زمانی که قطار صیقل سفیدِ برف را قطعه قطعه می کرد

انگار که بردگان میسیسیپی را ترک می کردند



جو کریسمس شخصیت ویلیام فالکنر هم شبیه مسیح در زمستان به دنیا آمده بود

و این اسم را همان روز روی او گذاشتند

که در یتیمخانه رهایش کردند

همان نژادی که در میسیسیپی به گمنامی پیوست



پدرم داشت "جنگ و صلح" می خواند وقتی که این اسم را به رویم گذاشت

نزدیک عیدِ پاک ۱۹۶۶ در میسیسیپی به دنیا آمدم



وقتی که ۳۳ سالم بود، پدرم گفت:

حالا به سن مسیح رسیده ای

مسیح در سن تو از دنیا رفت

بهار بود

و تپه ها در میسیسیپی سبز بودند



من از جو کریسمس بیشتر می دانم

ناتاشا اسمی روسی ست

گرچه من روس نیستم

ناتاشا یعنی کودکِ کریسمس

حتا در میسیسیپی.




http://rosajamali.blogfa.com/post/151


Miscegenation

Natasha Trethewey translated into Persian by Rosa Jamali

برچسب‌ها: شعر ترجمه, شعر آمریکا, شعر سیاهان, ناتاشا ترتوی, شعر زنان