Helene Cardona's Blog - Posts Tagged "shape-shifting"
Dreaming My Animal Selves (Salmon Poetry) reviewed in Poetry Salzburg Review Spring Issue 25
3 new poems in Poetry Salzburg Review Spring Issue 25, along with a review of Dreaming My Animal Selves (Salmon Poetry) by Caitríona O’Reilly:
Hélène Cardona’s Dreaming My Animal Selves / Le Songe de mes Âmes Animales is a work written in English and then translated into French by the author.
Cardona’s antecedents are certainly exotic; born in Paris to a Greek mother and an Ibizan father, she seems at home in many languages and many countries.
Amongst the prefatory puffs – of which there are a significant number – the poet Thomas McCarthy remarks “it is always risky business for a poet to self translate: it may seem like wanting both the work of art and the reader’s response.” Well translated work takes on another life in its new language, and surely the multi-lingual author with a foot in both camps occupies a privileged position with regard to the ability to convey meaning in the most precise and appropriate idiom possible.
The poems in this collection do concern themselves explicitly with movement, shape-shifting and liminal
states of consciousness. As Cardona writes in “dancing the Dream”, “This is a story of flight, / a story of roots, / a story of grace. / I am the wandering child. “
The tone of these poems is often breathless, enraptured, and to borrow a phrase once used by Charles Tomlinson brilliantly to describe the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, ‘self-wearing’…
Hélène Cardona’s Dreaming My Animal Selves / Le Songe de mes Âmes Animales is a work written in English and then translated into French by the author.
Cardona’s antecedents are certainly exotic; born in Paris to a Greek mother and an Ibizan father, she seems at home in many languages and many countries.
Amongst the prefatory puffs – of which there are a significant number – the poet Thomas McCarthy remarks “it is always risky business for a poet to self translate: it may seem like wanting both the work of art and the reader’s response.” Well translated work takes on another life in its new language, and surely the multi-lingual author with a foot in both camps occupies a privileged position with regard to the ability to convey meaning in the most precise and appropriate idiom possible.
The poems in this collection do concern themselves explicitly with movement, shape-shifting and liminal
states of consciousness. As Cardona writes in “dancing the Dream”, “This is a story of flight, / a story of roots, / a story of grace. / I am the wandering child. “The tone of these poems is often breathless, enraptured, and to borrow a phrase once used by Charles Tomlinson brilliantly to describe the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, ‘self-wearing’…
