Two-Step

Two-Step – a Boolean Comedrama

by Jacques Jouet & Olivier Salon

translated by Emma Ramadan & Chris Clarke

33 pages, paper

cover image is from "Thread," a Coptic textile in the public domain

Toad Press, 2018. $5.00

You can purchase a copy of Two-Step here.

Two-Step is a "simultaneous play" written in 2003 as a collaboration between Oulipo members Jacques Jouet and Olivier Salon. It takes the form of two different plays set in two different eras, both of which share a character during several acts. This character's replies use homographic "hinge" words, allowing his responses to signify something different to either storyline.

We translated Two-Step in communication with Messrs. Jouet and Salon, doing our best to replicate their writing process in our translation process. This had us working across the table from each other for certain sections, apart for others, and exchanging one reply at a time by email for another, all between spring 2016 and summer 2017.

- Emma Ramadan

& Chris Clarke 

"It's clever dramatic fun", writes Michael Orthofer, over at The Complete Review

houses | stripped

houses | stripped

by Paola Loreto

translated from the Italian by Lawrence Venuti

21pp, paper 

poems in Italian and English

cover image is a chine-collé collage by Carol Keller 

Toad Press, 2018. $5.00

You can purchase a copy of houses | stripped here. 

Born in Bergamo, Paola Loreto is currently based in Milan. She is an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Milan, where she teaches American literature. She has published five collections of poems, including In quota (2012) and case | spogliamenti (2016), and has won a number of national awards, including the Premio Antonio Fogazzaro, the Premio Benedetto Croce, and the Premio Umbertide. Among her  publications are book-length studies of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Derek Walcott. Her translations into Italian include the work of Richard Wilbur, A. R. Ammons, Philip Levine, Charles Simic, and Amy Newman. She has held a Copeland Fellowship at Amherst College and been appointed poet in residence at the Centre de Poésie et Traduction of the Fondation Royaumont in Paris.

Lawrence Venuti translates from Italian, French, and Catalan. His translations include Antonia Pozzi’s Breath: Poems and Letters (2002), the anthology Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2003), Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel The Goodbye Kiss (2006), and J. Rodolfo Wilcock’s collection of real and imaginary biographies, The Temple of Iconoclasts (2014). He won the Robert Fagles Translation Prize for his version of Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper: Poems (2009). He is the author, most recently, of Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (2013).

Blue Birds and Red Horses

Blue Birds and Red Horses

by Inna Kabysh

translated by Katherine E. Young

 

39 pages, paper, staple bound

cover image is a detail from a photograph of a Children's World department store in Moscow, taken during the Soviet period.

Toad Press, 2018. $5.00

You can purchase a copy of Blue Birds and Red Horses here.

Inna Kabysh is the author of seven collections of poetry. She was born in Moscow in 1963. Her first collection, Lichnye trudnosti, was awarded the 1996 Pushkin Prize of the Alfred Toepfer Fund (Hamburg, Germany); she has also won the 2005 Anton Delwig Prize; the 2014 Moskovsky schet Prize; the 2016 Anna Akhmatova Prize; and the 2016 Deti Ra Prize. In 2011 Katherine E. Young’s translation of Kabysh’s poem “Yuri Gagarin was a great Russian poet” was awarded joint third prize in the Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender international translation competition; individual poems have appeared in English translation in Tupelo Quarterly, Trafika Europe, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Subtropics, and many others. A digital chapbook for the iPad, Two Poems, appeared in 2014. Several of Kabysh’s poems have been made into short films by Russian and American directors; many have been set to music. Kabysh currently lives and teaches in Moscow.

Poet and translator Katherine E. Young is the author of Day of the Border Guards, 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist, and two chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, Subtropics, and many others. Young is also the translator of Farewell, Aylis by Azerbaijani political prisoner Akram Aylisli and Two Poems by Inna Kabysh. Her translations of Russian and   Russophone authors have won international awards and been widely published in such venues as Words without Borders, Asymptote, The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, and 100 стихотворений о Москве: Антология (100 Poems about Moscow: an Anthology), winner of the 2017 Books of Russia award in Poetry. Young was named a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow and currently serves as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia.

Read "Cat and Mouse," a poem included in Blue Birds and Red Horses, online in Trafika Europe, and visit Katherine E. Young's site for more information about her translations on Inna Kabysh.

 

2018 Chapbook Series

We are delighted to share that the Toad Press International chapbook series will publish three new translations this year:

Two-Step, a play by Jacques Jouet & Olivier Salon

translated by Emma Ramadan & Chris Clarke

houses / stripped, poems by Paola Loreto

translated by Lawrence Venuti

Blue Birds and Red Horses, poems by Inna Kabysh

translated by Katherine E. Young

Look for these titles coming your way in Summer / Fall 2018.  

Thank you to all who submitted your work --we feel lucky to have had the opportunity to read so many wonderful translations during our recent open reading period, and we wish we could bring more of these titles out into the world!

Poet Blood

Poet Blood

by Kim Kyung Ju

translated by Jake Levine

33 pages, paper, staple bound

cover image courtesy of the author

Toad Press, 2017. $5.00

You can purchase a copy of Poet Blood here.

Kim Kyung Ju was born in space. He arrived on earth in the late 1970s in Korea. He stayed there and wrote poems and some say he became the most important poet of his generation. He won the Kim Soo Young prize and a whole bunch of other prizes. He was blacklisted by the government though, so sometimes he writes using a pen name.

 
Jake Levine ended up in Korea and started translating poems there. Which is strange. There is no logic or reason. It was just something to do, so he did it. Kim Kyung Ju liked radiohead and he likes radiohead and they met at the radiohead fan club after Kim Kyung Ju translated Radiohead philosophy. He misses Tucson and his family at Spork Press.

"i was so enthralled and puzzled. i was terrified and brave. i’d close the book and open it. i opened it more than i closed it. for me, at times, it was more important than anything else and i’d delay life just to read it a fifth time.
i liked it when reindeer crawled across my lips the most." -John Thompson

shadowslongshoreman

shadowslongshoreman

by José Daniel García

translated by Jesse Tangen-Mills

28 pages, paper, staple bound

cover image is from Thomas Geminus's "Tertia ossium tabula [Skeleton in aiming position]," available from the New York Public Library's Digital Collections

Toad Press, 2017. $5.00

You can purchase a copy of shadowslongshoreman here

José Daniel García was born in Córdoba, Spain in 1979. With his first book, El sueño del monóxido (DVD, 2006), García won the Andalucía Youth Poetry Award. His second collection, Coma (Hiperión, 2008), was awarded the prestigious Hyperion Prize. The cannibal notebook Estibador de sombras (Cangrejo Pistolero Ediciones) was released in 2010.  From 2008-2010, García was a fellow in the iconic Residencia de Estudiantes-CSIC in Madrid. Last year he published his first novel, Fundido a rojo (ediciones En huida, 2016). Included in numerous national and foreign anthologies, his poems have been translated into Italian, Danish and German.

Jesse Tangen-Mills was born in Manhattan, New York. His chapbook of prose poems Alienating Space was released by Publishing Genius. He has written for various anglophone magazines and journals including Guernica, The Believer, and The Times Literary Supplement. His translations have appeared in Letras Libres, Spoila and MAYDAY (forthcoming). He lives in Bogotá, Colombia, with his family.

• "Serge Gainsbourg’s 1958 song “Le poinçonneur des Lilas” narrates the distress of the anonymous ticket-puncher who gradually loses his mind in the bowels of the Métro, trailing “a carnival of confetti” back to his bed and seeing only transfer maps shine in his “earthenware sky.” Like Gainsbourg’s ticket-puncher, Cordoban poet José Daniel García’s chapbook shadowslongshoreman also participates in a sort of subterranean affect-labor relation in which the speaker invites damage into body and psyche as a means of generating the unproductive expenditure that is poetry." - Zack Anderson reviews shadowslongshoreman at American Microreviews and Interviews.