Helene Cardona's Blog - Posts Tagged "love"

Saint Julian Press presents an evening of music and poetry:
Poet and actress (Chocolat) Hélène Cardona and poet John FitzGerald
read from their new poetry collections Dreaming My Animal Selves (Salmon Poetry, 2013) and The Mind (Salmon Poetry, 2011)
at Trinity Episcopal Church, 1015 Holman Street at Main, Houston, Texas 77004 on October 5, 2013
from 7-9 PM.
Composer and pianist John Hardesty will accompany them.
A book signing will follow the free reading.

This event is supported by Poets & Writers, Inc.

Press release:
http://saintjulianpress.com/press-rel...

Book Review in World Literature Today by Erna Cooper
Myth, Memory, and Transcendence in Hélène Cardona’s Dreaming My Animal Selves:
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/b...

An excerpt from Beyond Elsewhere by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac (White Pine Press, 2016), Hélène Cardona's translation of Plus loin qu'ailleurs (Editions du Cygne, 2013) in The ORIGINAL Van Gogh's Ear Anthology:

http://theoriginalvangoghsearantholog...

I'm thrilled to bits to announce that BEYOND ELSEWHERE (White Pine Press, 2016) by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, my translation of Plus loin qu'ailleurs (Editions du Cygne) has been awarded a prestigious Hemingway Grant, huge thanks to the Cultural Services | French Embassy in the US. With all my gratitude to Dennis Maloney.
Cover Art: “Mystery” by Barbara Zaring.
Advance praise:
"This incandescent metonym of light is, writ small, a marriage of eastern and western wisdoms—a Bildungsroman describing the arc of a young man's journey from innocence, through passion and despair, to the great clarity of spiritual understanding. Arnou-Laujeac's intensely visual account, clothed in lyrical image and visionary flame, in Cardona's transcendent translation, easily carries us along in his brightly burning chariot in quest of the Divine."
—Sidney Wade
"Beyond Elsewhere by French poet Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, and translated by Hélène Cardona is a wonderfully lyric, mesmerizing poetic meditation on desire, love, the soul, and spirituality. Beyond Elsewhere defies definition, hovering in that physical space somewhere above us, just beyond reach, but visible in a breathless lyrical cloud. As Arnou-Laujeac states: “I now know human passion is exclusive, symbiotic, psychotropic, but that the key is the spell eluding it, the time that tears it to pieces.” Arnou-Laujeac's poems are psychotropic — a beautiful new voice in poetry."
—Victoria Chang
"This is the absolute dawn," Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac declares in the final pages of Beyond Elsewhere, a dazzling hymn to the currents of desire that shape each individual life. This is a testament to the ways in which love lights an invisible path to the morning when "Everything here is an Elsewhere." Do not miss the chance to take this exhilarating journey.
—Christopher Merrill
"Hélène Cardona’s new translation confirms again her exquisite powers and imagination in turning Arnou-Laujeac’s amazing work into an English classic. She X-rays the original, and comes out with an inner picture faithful to beauty and the author’s flowing dexterity. Her singing flare illumines the English version, which is now the original. Discover Hélène's invitation to voyage."
—Willis Barnstone

To celebrate the release of Beyond Elsewhere (White Pine Press) I've created a Goodreads giveaway:

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

"A wonderfully lyric, mesmerizing poetic meditation on desire, love, the soul, and spirituality. Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac's poems are psychotropic — a beautiful new voice in poetry." —Victoria Chang

"A dazzling hymn to the currents of desire that shape each individual life... Do not miss the chance to take this exhilarating journey." —Christopher Merrill

"Hélène Cardona’s new translation confirms again her exquisite powers and imagination in turning Arnou-Laujeac’s amazing work into an English classic."
—Willis Barnstone

"Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac's intensely visual account, clothed in lyrical image and visionary flame, in Hélène Cardona's transcendent translation, easily carries us along in his brightly burning chariot in quest of the Divine.”
—Sidney Wade

Rachael Daum's transcendent review of BIRNAM WOOD by José Manuel Cardona (Salmon Poetry) on Bookaccino:
https://bookaccino817043219.wordpress...
"In a world that needs more witches, this collection is a joy to read: the author gives the power to the reader to create the witch, our Circe, and carry her name and spells with us."
To read the full review:
https://bookaccino817043219.wordpress...

Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona translation, Salmon Poetry) wins the 2022 Independent Press Award!
Thank you #IndependentPressAward #2022IPA #GabbyBookAwards

"We arrived and the miracle happened.
It was the sea and the wind in the bells.
We came from far, from years
Thirsty as dust, from humble
fishermen’s nets on barren shore."
—José Manuel Cardona

The human condition, exile, love and death, freedom and fate, renunciation and resignation, the homeland of Ibiza and the diaspora are themes dominating Birnam Wood. A very clear thematic unity is discernible in the work of José Manuel Cardona: an unflinching look at identity through heightened language. These poems form part of a major on-going tradition in Spanish poetry. His work is marked by a predilection for the classical Castilian hendecasyllable as well as free verse, and by a strong interest in social themes.
The book reflects a social conscience and expresses great pain and love, in particular the poet’s love for his native island of Ibiza. It is also filled with literary influences. Its title, El bosque de Birnam, is a metaphor drawn from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Birnam Wood speaks against abuse of power and for overthrowing all illegitimate governments. Lady Macbeth is foretold that she will have cause for worry when the Birnam Wood rises and marches against her, yet she does not heed the warning. Franco’s rise to power after a military coup launched a Civil War against a republic democratically elected in peace. Birnam Wood stands for resistance to illegitimate and illegal regimes.

Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona translation, Salmon Poetry) wins the 2022 NYC Big Book Award! Thank you #GabbyBookAwards

Probably the best poetry collection I’ve read all year! A passionate collection. Gorgeous! —Bonnie Hearn Hill’s Great Day Book Club’s Book of the Month

The human condition, exile, love and death, freedom and fate, renunciation and resignation, the homeland of Ibiza and the diaspora are themes dominating Birnam Wood. A very clear thematic unity is discernible in the work of José Manuel Cardona: an unflinching look at identity through heightened language. These poems form part of a major on-going tradition in Spanish poetry. His work is marked by a predilection for the classical Castilian hendecasyllable as well as free verse, and by a strong interest in social themes.
The book reflects a social conscience and expresses great pain and love, in particular the poet’s love for his native island of Ibiza. It is also filled with literary influences. Its title, El bosque de Birnam, is a metaphor drawn from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Birnam Wood speaks against abuse of power and for overthrowing all illegitimate governments. Lady Macbeth is foretold that she will have cause for worry when the Birnam Wood rises and marches against her, yet she does not heed the warning. Franco’s rise to power after a military coup launched a Civil War against a republic democratically elected in peace. Birnam Wood stands for resistance to illegitimate and illegal regimes.

I'd delighted to share that The Abduction, my translation of Maram Al-Masri's Le Rapt, won an Albertine and FACE Foundation Grant from Villa Albertine.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Using artfully spare language and repetition, Maram Al-Masri takes us deep into the emotional
complexities of losing her young child to a patriarchal society. Hélène Cardona’s deft translations capture both the stark immediacy and haunting music of these moving poems, almost letting us believe they were written in English.
—Martha Collins, author of Casualty Reports and Because What Else Could I Do, winner of the
Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

With a tender eloquence that equals the French original, Hélène Cardona brings into English a
harrowing tale, The Abduction by Maram Al-Masri, of a new mother devastated by the abduction of her son, kidnapped by his father to be raised in Syria. Now, as the distraught mother powerfully notes, “war rages within me.” Cardona vividly conveys both palpable love and the wisdom learned from tragic loss: “To love, it is to prepare yourself / to be abandoned.” As The Abduction proves, Hélène Cardona is a translator who has the exquisite sensitivity and erudition
that this brave, vulnerable work deserves.
—Cynthia Hogue, winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy
of American Poets, author of In June the Labyrinth
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

The Abduction won an Albertine and FACE Foundation Grant.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

Each small stanza of The Abduction picks at the torn seam between parent and child. As the narrator peers “out a window/ I haven’t cleaned for a long time,” we also see what has been snatched away. Arabic poet Al-Masri writes of the changed shape of her future, a devastation eloquently translated by Hélène Cardona.
—Lauren Camp, 2022 to 2025 New Mexico Poet Laureate and author of Took House
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

Maram Al-Masri’s Le Rapt, as translated by Hélène Cardona, opens with the simple delights of a mother engaging with her young child, speaking to him as if he is a confidant. “He is occupied / making his ten fingers move / to convince me that love is the natural fruit / of the tree of life,” she writes, and what could be more wonderful than that? Bliss, however, is followed by unbearable grief, when her child is abducted and separated from her for years by her then-husband. The poems become the vessel for her dialogue with her missing child, and with her sorrow. Even when mother and child experience a complex reunion years later, each has learned to fear loving the other, and her son must face a second infancy, this time as an immigrant, much less blissful than the first. As a reader of poetry, I am compelled by the raw spareness of these poems, their keen honesty, and their refusal to provide us with a restoration arc. As a parent, I feel empathy, and awe at Al-Masri’s survival.

—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...