Booklife Review

This incandescent anthology of poems in translation illuminates the “exhilaration and frustration” of the act of translation itself. The editors present five pairs of global poets and translators, printing selections in both languages and inviting the collaborators to address, in essays and conversation, the challenges of recasting poetry across cultures and languages. Sometimes poet and translator even switch roles, participating in reciprocal acts of illumination, casting shared themes and concerns in telling new light. Most crucially, The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow also proves a rousing success at its simplest level: here’s a bracing, incisive, and moving collection of global verse.

The title, referring to what can be discovered in the “sense of mysterious awareness” demanded by empathetic translation, comes from the editors’ rewarding introduction. The selections that follow exemplify it: Cecilia Vicuña’s searching poems, translated from the Spanish by Rosa Alcalá, thrum with fibers, yarn, and other connections as the poet connects present to lineage, often with outrage: “but the memory of who I was and will be /in the tongues of my raped Indian mothers.” Alcalá’s entries also tug at threads binding the poet and her forbears, expressing a yearning to tell “the dead I am / sorry” and that “I shouldn’t have told your story.” A conversation between the two reveals biographical sources for the imagery of textiles, though the poems themselves stand alone.

The selections are urgent throughout. Kazim Ali and Ananda Devi’s French-to-English and English-to-French works often center uncertainties of language itself (Ali on words: “They speak but at the same time speak back, dissemble, dissent. They are the sails and rudder of our unmoored craft.” Yu Xiuhua causes a sensation in China with the publication of her rousing, sexually frank poem of desire “cross half of china to sleep with you,” translated here with sensitive ingenuity by Amanda Lee Koe, who elsewhere brings a politely comic defiance to Xiuhua’s work. (One title: “sorry not sorry, i’m still writing poetry.”) This compact collection reveals worlds.

Takeaway: Revelatory collection of new global poetry in translation.

Comparable Titles: Katherine M. Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding’s Poetry’s Geographies, Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer’s Into English.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A