Διάλεξη της Όλγας Μπρούμα: "Μετάφραση και Πρωτότυπο: Η Περιπέτεια της Ποίησης"Το Ίδρυμα Fulbright στην Ελλάδα και η Γεννάδειος Βιβλιοθήκη σας προσκαλούν στη διάλεξη της κ. Όλγας Μπρούμα με θέμα: "Μετάφραση και Πρωτότυπο: Η Περιπέτεια της Ποίησης". Η διάλεξη θα πραγματοποιηθεί την Τετάρτη 19 Νοεμβρίου 2008 και ώρα 19:00 (Cotsen Hall, Αναπήρων Πολέμου 9).
.
Η Όλγα Μπρούμα αποφοίτησε από το Τοσίτσειο Αρσάκειο στην Αθήνα και το 1967 μετέβη στις ΗΠΑ, με υποτροφία του Ιδρύματος Fulbright, για να συνεχίσει τις σπουδές της. Το 1977, η πρώτη ποιητική της συλλογή με τον τίτλο “Beginning with O” κέρδισε το Yale Younger Poets Award, και ήταν η πρώτη φορά που τιμήθηκε με το βραβείο αυτό κάποιος που δεν είχε ως μητρική του γλώσσα τα αγγλικά. Έκτοτε έχει δημοσιεύσει έξι ακόμα ποιητικές συλλογές (Rave, 2000) και τέσσερα βιβλία με μεταφράσεις ποιημάτων του Οδυσσέα Ελύτη (Eros, Eros, Eros, 1999). To 2001 κυκλοφόρησε cd με αναγνώσεις ποιημάτων από τα βιβλία της. Την περίοδο αυτή ασχολείται με τη μετάφραση ποιημάτων της Κικής Δημουλά για τον εκδοτικό οίκο Yale University Press και τη σειρά Margellos World Republic of Letters Translations. Για το έργο της έχει κερδίσει υποτροφίες, μεταξύ άλλων, από τα ιδρύματα John Simon Guggenheim και National Endowment of the Arts. Είναι διευθύντρια του Τμήματος Δημιουργικής Γραφής του Πανεπιστημίου Brandeis (Βοστώνη, Μασσαχουσέτη) και ταξιδεύει πολύ για να παρουσιάσει τη δουλειά της.
Broumas, Olga (b. 1949)
Toni A. H. McNaron (glbtq.com)
Poet and translator Olga Broumas writes openly erotic poems that combine ancient Greek echoes and late twentieth-century idiom.
Born in Syros, Greece, Broumas moved to the United States as a young woman, attended the University of Pennsylvania (B.A. in architecture, 1970) and the University of Oregon (M.F.A. in creative writing, 1973). Her fellowships have included a Guggenheim (1981) and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1978). Broumas has taught at many colleges and universities, taking time out in the 1980s to learn to play jazz saxophone and to develop and practice bodywork skills as a tool for healing and self-expression.
Broumas's first work published in North America was Caritas (1976), an unbound collection of five broadsides declaring one woman's love for another. She chose the Greek word for her title because "none of the available English words signifying affection are free from either negative heterosexist connotations, or limitations of meaning so severe or so totally genital as to render them useless as names for our womanly songs of praise."
In 1976, the poet and literary critic Stanley Kunitz chose Beginning with O as the seventy-second winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. In his introduction to the volume, Kunitz said, "This is a book of letting go, of wild avowals, unabashed eroticism; ... Broumas aspires to be an archaeologist of 'the speechless zones of the brain,' to grope her way back to the language of the ancestral mothers."
This volume most clearly identifies Broumas with the development of lesbian culture in the twentieth century. Openly erotic toward her women lovers, the poet creates a rich world full of ancient Greek echoes juxtaposed to the immediacy of late twentieth-century idiom. Always informed by a distinct musicality, these poems progress from a rewriting of several Greek myths about goddesses to a central section devoted to her former husband to a final group in which she celebrates her lesbian ecstasy and explores the tangled matrix of mother-daughter bonds.
Even when she limns her erotic passion for women, Broumas insists on placing that love within the material context in which she lives. The result is a poetry that is simultaneously politically brash, antiromantic, and yet strikingly lyrical. This electrifying volume also establishes the textured relationship between lesbian love-making and language through the use of "tongue" in both its anatomical and linguistic context.
Broumas defines lesbianism as an epistemological as well as a carnal enterprise. She goes so far as to assert that "braille / is a tongue for lovers" and to flaunt her lesbian affection by taking what she calls "unspeakable / liberties as / we cross the street, kissing / against the light."
Although subsequent volumes lack the laser-like focus on lesbian love, and her subject matter has become more diffuse, Broumas has continued to combine lyricism with a keen political edge. Whether she is thinking about the endangered environment, musing on her latest massage client, or once again singing the pleasures of her own and her lover's body, Olga Broumas writes athletic poetry that has the capacity to move and educate readers.
In addition to her own poetry, she has translated from the Greek two volumes by the Nobel Laureate, Odysseas Elytis.
Broumas, Olga (b. 1949)
Toni A. H. McNaron (glbtq.com)
Poet and translator Olga Broumas writes openly erotic poems that combine ancient Greek echoes and late twentieth-century idiom.
Born in Syros, Greece, Broumas moved to the United States as a young woman, attended the University of Pennsylvania (B.A. in architecture, 1970) and the University of Oregon (M.F.A. in creative writing, 1973). Her fellowships have included a Guggenheim (1981) and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1978). Broumas has taught at many colleges and universities, taking time out in the 1980s to learn to play jazz saxophone and to develop and practice bodywork skills as a tool for healing and self-expression.
Broumas's first work published in North America was Caritas (1976), an unbound collection of five broadsides declaring one woman's love for another. She chose the Greek word for her title because "none of the available English words signifying affection are free from either negative heterosexist connotations, or limitations of meaning so severe or so totally genital as to render them useless as names for our womanly songs of praise."
In 1976, the poet and literary critic Stanley Kunitz chose Beginning with O as the seventy-second winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. In his introduction to the volume, Kunitz said, "This is a book of letting go, of wild avowals, unabashed eroticism; ... Broumas aspires to be an archaeologist of 'the speechless zones of the brain,' to grope her way back to the language of the ancestral mothers."
This volume most clearly identifies Broumas with the development of lesbian culture in the twentieth century. Openly erotic toward her women lovers, the poet creates a rich world full of ancient Greek echoes juxtaposed to the immediacy of late twentieth-century idiom. Always informed by a distinct musicality, these poems progress from a rewriting of several Greek myths about goddesses to a central section devoted to her former husband to a final group in which she celebrates her lesbian ecstasy and explores the tangled matrix of mother-daughter bonds.
Even when she limns her erotic passion for women, Broumas insists on placing that love within the material context in which she lives. The result is a poetry that is simultaneously politically brash, antiromantic, and yet strikingly lyrical. This electrifying volume also establishes the textured relationship between lesbian love-making and language through the use of "tongue" in both its anatomical and linguistic context.
Broumas defines lesbianism as an epistemological as well as a carnal enterprise. She goes so far as to assert that "braille / is a tongue for lovers" and to flaunt her lesbian affection by taking what she calls "unspeakable / liberties as / we cross the street, kissing / against the light."
Although subsequent volumes lack the laser-like focus on lesbian love, and her subject matter has become more diffuse, Broumas has continued to combine lyricism with a keen political edge. Whether she is thinking about the endangered environment, musing on her latest massage client, or once again singing the pleasures of her own and her lover's body, Olga Broumas writes athletic poetry that has the capacity to move and educate readers.
In addition to her own poetry, she has translated from the Greek two volumes by the Nobel Laureate, Odysseas Elytis.
6 σχόλια:
Olga Broumas
Olga Broumas (born 6 May 1949, Hermoupolis), is a Greek poet, resident in the United States.
Biography
Born and raised in Greece, Broumas secured a fellowship through the Fulbright program to study in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania; she earned her Bachelor's degree in architecture. She later went on to earn a Master's degree in creative writing from the University of Oregon.
Her first collection of poems, Beginning with O, contains erotic poems toward her women lovers.[1] Broumas was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series[2] in 1977, the first non-native speaker of English to receive this award[citation needed]. Other honors have included a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has been Poet-in-Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University since 1995. She spends her summers on Cape Cod, where she, in the Eighties, founded and taught at a school for female artists called Freehand, Inc.
Bibliography
Collections
Beginning with O (Yale, 1977).
Soie Sauvage (Copper Canyon Press, 1979).
Pastoral Jazz (Copper Canyon Press, 1983).
With Jane Miller: Black Holes, Black Stockings (Wesleyan, 1985).
Perpetua (Copper Canyon, 1989).
With T. Begley: Sappho’s Gymnasium (Copper Canyon Press, 1994).
Rave: Poems, 1975-1999 (Copper Canyon Press, 1999).
Translations
What I Love: Selected Poems by Odysseas Elytis (Copper Canyon, 1986).
The Little Mariner by Odysseas Elytis (Copper Canyon, 1988).
Eros, Eros, Eros: Selected and Last Poems by Odysseas Elytis (Copper Canyon,1989).
en.wikipedia.org
Beginning With O ~ Olga Broumas
I met Olga Broumas in Emma Donoghue's novel Hood, which opens with a quote from Broumas' poem "Little Red Riding Hood":
I kept to the road, kept
the hood secret, kept what it sheathed more
secret still. I opened
it only at night, and with other women
who might be walking the same road to their own
grandma's house, each with her basket of gifts
It was love at first sight, and finally I was able, through inter-library loan ([insert deity of choice] bless whoever thought that up), to track down some of her work. Beginning with O was Broumas' first published book of poetry, and she didn't disappoint.
I've been sitting here thinking, or trying to anyway, about what to say and write about Olga Broumas. I could write reams of essays and theses about her work, it's so rich and steeped in ideas and themes that interest me. My life is so wrapped up in my identity as a student that I have a hard time being anything else. I'm the only person I know who reads poetry for pleasure, in her spare time. I always have, ever since I was a kid clutching my copy of Shel Silverstein. I don't mention it much though; it feels pretentious and snobby, to say you read poetry voluntarily. I keep thinking of Captain Benwick in Persuasion. I read poetry mainly for the pleasure of language, the way words sound, how they fit together, the images and rhythm they create, for the feeling Emily Dickinson describes, as if your head has lifted off your shoulders. I tend to like more traditional forms--I love sonnets--I have difficulty with free verse. But Broumas' work is so wonderful and challenging, sensuous and vivid, I'm starting to warm up to the space and difficulty that free verse offers. Since Broumas is lesbian poet from Greece, the presence of Sappho is (of course) everywhere in her writing. I love these lines from "Caritas," a poem that seems to describe lesbian desire as a kind of mysticism:
Her handsome hands. Each
one a duchess in her splendid gardens
Isn't that wonderful? It's just the most lovely image I've ever read. And this too:
Here the remnants of
an indefatigable anger, the jubilant
birth yell, here the indelible
covens of pleasure, a web
of murmurs, a lace
mantilla of sighs.
I wish I was up on my Greek mythology, since the first part of Beginning With O, "Twelve Aspects of God," is all about Greek female deities. She never refers to them as "goddesses" though, always using the "male" term, which is interesting--she makes "god" a woman (again, some would say). Exploring the spirit of ancient goddesses in the modern world, how they manifest themselves in women. Spirituality, sex, desire, anger are all woven in her meandering, elliptical free verse. Her metaphors twist and turn, her imagery unexpected and sharp. In "Circe," I love how Broumas turns what's usually regarded as a negative experience into an expression of power.
By the time
I get to the corner
bar, corner store, corner construction
site, I become divine. I turn
men into swine. Leave
them behind me whistling, grunting, wild.
In "Maenad" she takes a clever twist on an old adage.
Hell has no rage like this
women's rage.
IIRC the Maenads were female worshippers of Dionysus who would tear men to pieces. Broumas' poem is about the fury of women scorned at every turn, by sons who use them, daughters who reject them, mothers who control them, and by other women as well. In "Artemis" and "Demeter" she addresses female language, a feminine literary tradition:
...a curviform alphabet
that defies
decoding, appears
to consist of vowels, beginning with O...
What tiny fragments
survive, mangled into our language.
I am a woman committed to
a politics
of transliteration ("Artemis")
In "Demeter" she names a literary lineage of women writers:
Anne. Sylvia. Virginia.
Adrienne the last, magnificent last.
Modern Demeters/Persephones maybe?
Broumas ends Beginning With O with poems based on fairy tales. I loved what she did with "Cinderella":
Apart from my sisters, estranged
from my mother, I am a woman alone
in a house of men
who secretly
call themselves princes, alone
with me usually, under cover of dark. I am the one allowed in
to the royal chambers, whose small foot convienently
fills the slipper of glass. The woman writer, the lady
umpire, the madam chairman, anyone's wife.
I know what I know.
Cinderella as the Token Woman! How cool is that? Her "success" only reinforces oppressive structures and isolates her.
The princes spoke
in their fathers' language, were eager to praise me
my nimble tongue. I am a woman in a state of siege, alone
In "Sleeping Beauty", she is awakened by a kiss from Princess Charming:
...your red
lips suspect, unspeakable
liberties as
we cross the street, kissing
against the light, singing, This
is the woman I woke
from sleep, the woman that woke
me sleeping.
"Little Red Riding Hood" is my favorite poem in the book. She manages to put a fresh perspective on the sexual overtones of the story, and focuses on the relationship between mother, daughter, and grandmother. I love the last image the poem ends on:
...you, alone
in your house and waiting, across this improbable forest
peopled with wolves and our lost, flower-gathering
sisters they feed on.
(busy-nothings.blogspot.com)
Elegy
Somebody left the world last night, I felt it
so, last minute, last half-breath before the storm
that hit all night last night drew back. Midmorning
windows streakedwith mud like sides of ears. How long
the journey? Sails, the windowpanes the black
thick tarp that kept the woodpile. Dry
Southern wind, in minutes clothes bone-hard, clamped
to the line. Clouds heaving in. The sky, the sky, who did arrive
to kiss the eye behind the windswept sheet? Who was it, solo
no longer, shy and desirous to be clean? What song
arose, what crust between the lids
spat and forgot? I woke, my fingers in my eyes
Rave: Poems, 1975 - 1998 - Olga Broumas
Broumas, Olga 1949–: Critical Essay by Charles Berger
[Broumas'] poems, as everyone will remark, are frankly homo-erotic. I would also add that they are innocently erotic, amazingly unshadowed by guilt, remorse, or even by loss. The innocence comes from her sense of wonder in the presence of her lovers, her women…. Broumas watches and watches other women. This is especially clear in the … opening sequence [of Beginning with O], a group of lyrics entitled "Twelve Versions of God." "Twelve Versions" was written in conjunction with a series of paintings by Sandra McKee. The gods are goddesses, Greek goddesses, and for each one, Broumas (and McKee) have used ordinary women as models, have imagined contemporary equivalents for the classical and pre-classical myths. The sequence works brilliantly. The close of "Circe" is a gem, tough and witty, as Broumas pictures herself in her skirt of wine, walking past a construction site, turning men into swine.
Broumas writes with great clarity, with great natural feeling for how lines must begin and end. Her poetry is both compressed and clear, tied to the seen thing but also sharing and communicative. There is an element of chantlike stasis to the movement of some of her lines, a reciprocity between speaker and audience: "One would know nothing. / One would begin by the touch / return to her body / one would forget …" Not surprisingly, sometimes the lines grow overly taut and then the reader wishes that Broumas would open up a little more, grow more discursive, talk. But she has a strong sense of craft, not to mention of subject matter, and she will do as she must. (...)
She Makes Me Wish I Were Lesbian!
by Padma Thornlyre
Sept. 30, 1997
Olga Broumas's "Beginning With O" was required reading when I attended college in the late 1970s. Having read and re-read the book many times, I came away regretting that I was born male and could not, therefore, be lesbian. For these are love poems of the highest order--exquisitely crafted, dangerously erotic, and even comical, as when Broumas writes: "There are still other fluids/fecund,/tail-whipped with seed...." Broumas clearly owes a great deal to her spiritual ancestor, Sappho. A Greek by birth, Broumas shares Sappho's love for other women and, while more sensuous and erotic and less witty overall than the 7th century BC master whom Plato referred to as the "tenth Muse", her celebration of beauty rivals Sappho's own. Most satisfying is the section of "Beginning With O" titled "The Twelve Aspects of God" wherein Broumas reexplores classical mythology in the light of goddess-worship; her goddesses are potent, sexual, and often real women. The light she sheds is shimmering--more moonlight than sunlight, her words are not "winged" but fall from a wet tongue into dark places which are beautiful not only for their lunar sheen but for the darknesses themselves. Sappho wrote, "If you're squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble." Broumas delights in prodding; seaweed and cunt are words of celebration in her remarkable lexicon.
πολύ ενδιαφέρον.
Lyrical Lesbian
By ANNA MIROCHA (tucsonweekly.com)
Olga Broumas might very well be called a modern-day Sappho. Not only is she a lesbian lyric poet, writing often on the concept of eros, but she's actually from Greece. She loves to make allusions to Greek myth and history, and she often uses poetry to explore love, sex and desire from a feminist perspective. You can't get much more Sapphic than that, can you? Then again, warns Teresa Driver of the Tucson Poetry Festival, we'd better not classify her.
"Olga Broumas' poetry transcends any specific genre, because she has such a wide range of styles, has written on such expansive subjects, and we continue to find originality, innovation and surprise in her books. ... She definitely has a strong following among women, in the LGBTQ community, and among feminists. ... (But) I would say her work chooses not to be classified by its very nature. Her audience is composed of men and women, poets and nonwriters alike."
In fact, Broumas has written and published seven books of poetry, collected in Rave: Poems 1975-1999, which contain everything from elegies, epiphanic fragments, collaborative works and narrative poems to passionate--often sexually graphic--lyrics. Some poems are brief, capturing a single moment or emotional locale within a few lines, while others are drawn out, taking up pages as she plays with language, tears apart syntax and makes up her own rules for narrative. Her subject matter, besides love, sex and desire, also includes death, political torture and the hope for peace and forgiveness.
Δημοσίευση σχολίου