For the Seals

For the Seals

by Juan Manuel Sánchez 

translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Ruth Llana

19pp, paper 

Toad Press, 2019. $5.00 

cover art by Silvia Recharte Hilares

You can purchase a copy of For the Seals at Asterism.

Juan Manuel Sánchez was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1983. In 2010, his book Para las Focas / For the Seals won the first prize in poetry from the Casa de los Escritores del Uruguay. He currently works at the Museo Figari, and also as a teacher and a book reviewer for the newspaper La Diaria.

Jesse Lee Kercheval’s recent translations include The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia and Fable of an Inconsolable Man by Javier Etchevarren. She has authored fourteen books of poetry and prose including The Alice Stories, winner of the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize, and the memoir Space, winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association.

Ruth Llana is a Spanish poet, author of four published collections including Tiembla, which won the Federico García Lorca Poetry Prize, and Umbral. She is also the Spanish language translator of the American poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge whose work Me encantan los artistas  will be published in 2019 by Kriller 71 Ediciones.

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

The Flying Head

The Flying Head

poems by Ioan Flora

translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Elena Bortă

33 pages, paper, staple bound.

Toad Press, 2012, $5.00

You can purchase a copy of The Flying Head here
& add the book to your Goodreads list, here.

Read a couple poems in this book online, at eXchanges, here.

About:

Ioan Flora was the award-winning author of twenty books and anthologies, most recently Lecture on the Ostrich-Camel (1995), which won prizes from the Bucharest Writers’ Association and the Writers’ Union of the Republic of Moldova; The Swedish Rabbit (1997), honored with prizes from both the Romanian Writers’ Union and the rival Association of Professional Writers in Romania—aspro; Medea and Her War Machines (1999); and Luncheon Under the Grass (2005).

Flora was born in Yugoslavia in the Romanian-speaking region of the Serbian Banat between the Danube River and the border with Romania. He attended the Romanian school in Vârșeț, graduated from the University of Bucharest in 1973, and began publishing books of poetry with Waltzes (1970) and Ivy (1975). Other titles include Poetic Records (1977), The Physical World (1977), Work Therapy (1981), The State of Fact (1984), A Young Owl on its Deathbed (1988), Assassin Memory (1989), and Violet Soles (1990). In 1993, after having been an editor for sixteen years, he moved to Bucharest, where he worked for the Museum of Romanian Literature and the Romanian Writers’ Union.

Ioan Flora died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-four in February 2005, only a few days after the publication of his last book of poems.

Adam J. Sorkin is a translator of contemporary Romanian literature, and his work has won The Poetry Society Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His recent books include three collections from the University of Plymouth Press, all translated with Lidia Vianu: Ion Mureșan’s The Book of Winter and Other Poems (2011); Ioan Es. Pop’s No Way Out of Hadesburg (2010); and Mircea Ivănescu’s lines poems poetry (2009), which was shortlisted for the 2011 Poetry Society Prize. Sorkin is main translator of Carmen Firan’s Rock and Dew (2010), in collaboration with the  author. In 2011, he published A Path to the Sea by Liliana Ursu, translated with Ursu and Tess Gallagher, Ioan Flora’s Medea and Her War Machines, translated with Alina Cârâc, and My Dog – the Soul/Câinele meu – sufletul by Floarea Țuțuianu, translated with Irma Giannetti. Sorkin is Distinguished Professor of English, Penn State Brandywine.

Elena Bortă is a free-lance literary researcher and translator who has contributed translations from English and Scandinavian languages to various literary and cultural  periodicals. The recipient of a travel grant from the Soros Foundation, she is working on a book-length manuscript on Mircea Eliade’s fiction, parts of which have been   published in Romania, the U.S., and the U.K.

• Also translated by Adam J. Sorkin: The Factory of the Past (Toad Press, 2008)

The Factory of the Past

THE FACTORY OF THE PAST poems by Mariana Marin translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Daniela Hurezanu 35 pp. paper. staple bound. Toad Press, 2008, $5.00

You can purchase a copy of The Factory of the Past here & add the book to your Goodreads list, here.

About: MARIANA MARIN was considered one of Romania’s most important poets at the time she died at the age of forty-seven in 2003. During the Ceausescu dictatorship, Marin was one of the very few intellectuals who dared to speak up against the regime. As a consequence, she was silenced for much of the 1980s—“an unpublishable poet, a heavy cross,” as she tells us. Her uncompromising attitude can be seen in her poems even when she is not directly political, as is the case with many of her later poems, such as the ones that appear in this book. But during dictatorships everything becomes political, and even her descriptions of the quotidian are pained records of a historical time when private life cannot be separated from the political. Similarly, her “Love Poems” are bitter and unsentimental, not unlike her “Elegies.” For Marin, as for other Eastern European writers, happiness was a foreign country. Mariana Marin published five books of poems in Romanian. The poems here are from her 1999 collection, The Mutilation of the Artist as a Young Woman, which won a number of major prizes. In 2002, the Romanian Writers Museum Publishing House (Bucharest) issued a career retrospective, The Dowry of Gold, including a handful of new, previously uncollected poems—her last, as it turned out. A selection of Marin’s poems, Paper Children, was published in 2006 (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse). Excerpt: Love Poem Do you remember when you used to play Apocalypse with me? When you counted my days, so very few, on the marbles that never brought luck? Why do you keep whining? My little fortune of illusions lies crushed in the dust with the muses tricked out in motley, feasting on dead swans. Now it’s your turn to count the Beast’s heads. Apocalypse for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Apocalypse for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Apocalypse for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Stare hard in your mirror, find me if you can.