Of the Same Mind

-- click book cover to read OF THE SAME MIND online --

OF THE SAME MIND

poems by Jóhann Hjálmarsson
translated from the Icelandic by C.M.Burawa

41 pp. paper. staple-bound.
cover photograph by Jóra Jóhannsdottir
Toad Press 2005, $5.00

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Even better, you can read it online via ISSUU, here.
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About:

JÓHANN HJÁLMARSSON is one of Iceland’s premier poets. He has published 18 books of poetry and seven collections of international poetry in translation. In 1961, after his first book, Hjalmarsson moved to Spain to study romance languages at the University of Barcelona, where he began translating the French post-symbolists, French and Latin American surrealists, modernist and post-modernist American poets into Icelandic. He returned to Iceland and began a career as an arts reviewer and travel writer for the country’s largest circulating newspaper, Morgunblaðið. He was presented with an Icelandic Parliament Award in 2003 in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Icelandic literature as a poet and translator.


Read more about Jóhann Hjálmarsson and see some translations by C.M. Burawa on the Project for Innovative Poetry blog.

Read an interview with C.M. Burawa at The Writer's Center.


Lyle Daggett writes that these are "Remarkable poems, quiet and meditative, by a poet of contemporary Iceland, filled with ocean waves and rock, gray sky and birds' wings, blackberries and silence, mingled with sudden scenes of the modern busy world." Read more on his blog.




Excerpt:



OF THE SAME MIND


I once saw birds of like mind arrive.
I hid

as they flew in from the south
bound for the north
to their summer on the glacier.

Those that made it were met by storm,
yet still sang to each other
as they recovered by the bare trees.

The trees began shooting the youngest birds
when I—
who had intended to flee with them—
noticed that July was over.

A young girl with red lips
laughed at me
from below the surface of a blue spring.

I drank from her shadow.

Martial Artist

MARTIAL ARTIST, Martial's epigrams translated from the Latin by George Held 

31pp. paper. staple-bound Toad Press 2005, $5.00. In English and Latin.

You can purchase a copy of Martial Artist here & add this book to your Goodreads list, here.

 

MARCUS VALERIUS MARTIALIS (A.D. 40-104), or Martial, was born in Spain and flourished in Rome. His greatest achievement remains his 1500 epigrams, in which he depicts, often satirically, the behavior of his fellow Romans and perfects the form in Latin. His influence appears in the work of virtually every epigrammatist since. The poems in Martial Artist collect some of his many epigrams about his own work and his life as a poet. This book includes both the English and the Latin. Excerpt: VII.90 Mathew says my book is unbalanced. If it’s true, Mathew praises my poems. Calvin and Shade write balanced books. A balanced book, Curtis, is a bad book. Iactat inaequalem Matho me fecisse libellum: si verum est, laudat carmina nostra Matho. aequales scribit libros Calvinus et Umber: aequales liber est, Cretice, qui malus est.