Voice of Ice

Translation, a sometime fascination of mine, has in the last year become an obsession. In bookstores I now look most for translations, or books about translation by novelists not generally associated with the craft. I am most delighted when I find a press that focuses on translation. I feel most connected when I discover a foreign journal that publishes translations from English. Fernando Pessoa, translator, poet, critic, now seems to me the paradigmatic literary artists of my newfound Romantic sensibility. Nabokov, I've just learned, wrote a staggering essay about translation. My favorite discovery of the past six months is that Edgar Poe was a translation critic; it makes him so much more, well, sexier.

This is the attitude with which I came across Alta Ifland's Voice of Ice, published in 2007 by Les Figues, a small press based in Los Angeles. The book, a side-by-side French/English publication of prose poems and their translations, found a ready audience of high expectations. I was not disappointed. For the past few months I've been looking for a book that I, in my cynical attitude toward the publishing industry, thought could not find a publisher smart enough to put it to press.

These poems are well-suited for their venue. In addition to being simple, precise and colloquial in style, their content discusses a separation of the body from the mind that imagined it into being. This process, in short, is what translation does, always. Like the best Modernism, the matter of the poems rehearse and dissect their mode of production. The risk is of writing poems that are an abstruse mess of symbols, incoherent in their quantity, devoid of a controlling narrative--the story we always want told. In these poems, though, a mirror is a mirror first. Everything else it becomes comes later, after its practical role as a tool for reflecting images has been dealt with. Through the mirror we see the poet speak plainly about herself, about the world around her. She is not shifty-eyed or winking in the mirror. We see her, hear her, clearly. Where she takes us next is all the more rewarding because of this. When a mirror becomes something else, we know the voice that guides us through the ink-blackness is strong and true, though she doubts much that she sees and says.