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Items15
1
If Not, Winter (2002)
9.3/10on Open Library
Published
Anne Carson lets the missing papyrus interrupt the English. In Fragment 22, square brackets and gaps sit among the surviving words, sometimes leaving a phrase without the sentence that would tell you how to hear it. The blank space asks you to set your own pace.
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The Odyssey (1918)
Published
Emily Wilson calls Odysseus complicated before you hear what he did. The adjective could come from an ordinary conversation, while the five-beat verse carries you straight into an epic. Read the opening aloud and notice how easily the sentence moves from its opening request into the story.
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Phantom Pain Wings (2023)
Published
In Don Mee Choi’s translation, what a bird can do to a person changes from line to line. In one passage it cuts out the speaker the way light makes a shadow, and then the hole itself comes in. Read the short verbs aloud to hear how calmly the English delivers each impossible action.
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In Such Hard Times (2018)
Published
Red Pine keeps the lines short in the poem about lying awake at a monastic residence. Falling leaves, rain, and missing fireflies hold your attention until a summer robe makes the cold personal. The plain admission of loneliness at the end lands differently after so many lines spent looking outward.
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Songs of Kabir (1916)
Published
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra gives the Hindi songs an English voice that can go from teasing to devotional in a breath. In the last poem, brief refusals pile up through everyday contractions. Try reading it once as an argument and once as a song. The same clipped rhythm can carry both.
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Duino Elegies (1939)
Published
Edward Snow lets the opening question of the First Elegy run over a line break before it tells you who might hear the cry. The sentence keeps climbing through a terrifying embrace, then the passage ends with a short statement about angels. Read the first and last sentences aloud to feel the change in breath.
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The half-finished heaven (2001)
Published
In Robert Bly’s translation of “Kyrie,” an unseen speaker first imagines a crowd pressing through dark streets. The scale contracts to a child listening to his heartbeat, then morning enters in the language of locks and doors. Notice how long the poem keeps you waiting before it lets in light.
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Poet in New York (1940)
9.3/10on Open Library
Published
In Mark Statman and Pablo Medina’s “Back From a Walk,” the same accusation against the sky opens and closes the poem. Between those lines, the English keeps returning to a simple preposition as the speaker gathers up a tree, a boy, and a butterfly. Read down the page to hear how the repeated grammar holds the strange images together.
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The Masnavi, Book One
Jawid Mojaddedi starts the Persian poem with a reed flute mourning the place it was cut from. The English rhymes arrive in pairs, making it easy to hear when one thought gives way to the next. In the opening song, listen for how that regular pattern carries a voice preoccupied with separation.
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Inferno (1767)
8.5/10on Open Library
Published
Mary Jo Bang’s first canto opens with the repeated m sounds of a traveler stopped in midstep. The immediate problem is a tangle of leaves and twigs, described with the ordinary vocabulary of someone trying to see out. That close attention to a few sounds makes the descent tangible before the poem moves into the larger geography of Hell.
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The collected poems of Chika Sagawa (2015)
Published
In Sawako Nakayasu’s translation of “Backside,” night eats, daylight falls among the leaves like fish, and darkness writhes. Follow those verbs in order. The sentences are easy to move through even as their images keep changing what can act and what can be acted upon.
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Adonis: Selected Poems
Khaled Mattawa can give a large idea the sound of a plain statement. In one short passage, childhood becomes a village and travel cannot take the person beyond its limits. Listen to the steady second-person address as a familiar image of home turns into a boundary.
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The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches
Nobuyuki Yuasa’s translation moves between travel prose and short poems. In the verse about sunlit green leaves, four English lines give the speaker time to register awe before naming the sight, and the repetition slows down the glance. It is a good place to see how the verse changes the speed of the journey.
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Extracting the stone of madness (2015)
6.0/10on Open Library
Published
Yvette Siegert keeps the lines short in “The Short Cantos,” where the same word for the middle keeps leading to another middle. The breaks make you wait for each answer. Read to the bare final answer of absence, then return to the start and hear what the repetition has been doing.
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The Complete Poetry (2007)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
In Clayton Eshleman’s translation of the second poem in Trilce, everyday words for time arrive in blocks of repetition, spaced far enough apart to hear each one. Near the end, an unexpected capital letter makes the final word snag the eye. The facing Spanish page lets you see how that small disturbance carries over.
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