NA: I first heard of Zephyr Press when I picked up The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
years ago. I read on your website that that collection set Zephyr Press on the
path to becoming a publisher of translations.
Could you talk about that transition?
JK: The Akhmatova came to Zephyr through one of
its early editors, Susan Gubernat, who was a friend and colleague of the
translator, Judith Hemschemeyer. But it was the founder of Zephyr, Ed Hogan,
who turned it into the monumental, bilingual authoritative two-volume edition
it became, with the help of Roberta Reeder — at the time, the only complete
edition of Akhmatova’s poetry in Russian or English. And it sparked an interest
in Ed in going further and deeper into Russian literature. He commissioned a
bilingual anthology of contemporary Russian poetry, but died before that book, In the Grip of Strange Thoughts, was
published. The anthology spawned a series of spin-off books, and a shift in
balance for the press to translation.
NA: You
translate poetry from around the world including a Chinese, Russian, and Polish
series. How do you pick your nationality?
JK: Again, one thing led to another. One of the
editors working on an anthology of Polish poetry came to me for advice, based
on my experience with the Russian. She thought she had a publisher already for
her book; but, when that opportunity fell through, Zephyr picked up the book, Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird, which
in turn led to a spin-off of Polish poetry books initially based on the
anthology.
Meanwhile, our new managing editor, Cris Mattison,
brought with him to Zephyr a knowledge of both Russian and Chinese. His
acquaintance with the Chinese poet Bei Dao led us to issue first Fissures, an anthology of contributions
to the Chinese journal Jintian; and
then a collection of Bei Dao’s essays, Blue
House. More Chinese books followed; and, for the past couple of years, Cris
has been living in Hong Kong, working with the Jintian Foundation, and finding
more Chinese poets for us.
NA: How do you find your poets? Your translators? How do you know that you
are working with good translators?
JK: We have sought out some poets and translators,
others have come to us on their own. In one case, I was on a panel at a
conference with Lisa Katz, a translator who mentioned she couldn’t find a
publisher for a poet she was working with. I asked her to send us a proposal,
and that became our first Israeli book, Approaching
you in English, by Admiel Kosman. My editorial co-director on Zephyr, Leora
Zeitlin, who was with Ed from the beginning of the press, is fluent in Hebrew.
We trust Cris and his contacts for the Chinese. For the languages we don’t have
in-house, we have good connections. Our translator of the Romanian poet Liliana
Ursu, Sean Cotter, has won several translation awards; as have two of our
Polish translators, Bill Johnston and Antonia Lloyd-Jones. In fact, Antonia has
just won recognition from the Polish Cultural Foundation for a whole body of
her work. Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, who translated the German poet Zafer
Şenocak, I
met when she won a fellowship from the American Literary Translators
Association. As she worked on her manuscript of Door Languages, she was part of a smaller group of us in the Boston
area; so, she kind of grew into Zephyr naturally.
NA: How did you become involved with the
press?
JK: Ed Hogan and I were friends in the small-press
community of New England during the 1970s and into the 1980s. We gradually
became closer and closer friends. He liked to come to my house in New Hampshire
for work and a retreat, and we would read manuscripts together. Our
interests in Russian, however, were separate but parallel, and drew us even
closer together. I got him invited to Russia to speak with publishers in Moscow
and St. Petersburg during perestroika,
and I went with him on that trip; and he trusted me to put together the
anthology of contemporary Russian poets. But I had no formal relationship with
Zephyr until he asked me to serve on its non-profit board of directors. When he
died in a canoeing accident in 1997, Leora and I, as board members, took over
the press.
NA: Do you do any translating yourself?
JK: I translate mostly from Russian and French, and
mostly contemporary poetry. I also collaborate with an old friend translating
Latin American Jewish poetry — we have produced several books and an online
anthology — a collaboration that has very much enriched my acquaintance with
world culture.
NA: Latin American Jewish poetry? An online anthology?
JK: A Voice
Among the Multitudes isn’t a Zephyr publication, so it’s outside this
conversation, I guess. When we were still trying to make a name for ourselves
with contemporary Russian poetry, Zephyr used a couple of my own translations
to help fill out our list, but we decided early on that enough was enough, and
it was helpful neither for my reputation nor Zephyr’s to publish too much of my
own work. Consequently, I have several strong manuscripts that are going
begging, because nobody else is interested, but we make more room for others’
good translations.
NA: I am a huge fan of translations, of reading
poetry from around the world. I think it
makes one a stronger poet. But I have
heard that poetry translations don’t sell well in the U.S. Is that true?
JK: It is true that selling translations is
difficult in the United States, because the market for literature is driven
heavily now by personal appearances, and translated works can’t usually produce
the writers on stage — and when we do, the foreigners don’t always speak
English themselves — and few people are interested in the translators without
the original writers.
But it’s not true, once we get the books in front
of people’s eyes, that the books don’t sell.
American readers are actually very hungry for literature from around the
world. At those book fairs and conference displays where small presses line up
at table after table, we regularly outsell, sometimes by spectacular
percentages, those presses that are showing only American writers.
NA: Do you
have a favorite book of translations? A
favorite unknown poet? By unknown, I
mean unknown in this country.
JK: Are you asking me personally, or as the
publisher of Zephyr? As publisher, I refuse to choose among my children. I love
them all.
And personally, as with all reading, my preferences
veer by mood and whim, as much as by any value judgment more substantial. Right
now, for instance, you catch me re-reading Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir, Hope Against Hope. The first time I read
it, I knew little Russian, and took Max Hayward’s translation on faith, finding
the book magnificently written. Now I’m going through it with the original
Russian at hand, and my appreciation for both Mandelstam and Hayward has only
skyrocketed. It’s brilliantly done.
But I guess you meant poetry?
NA: No, that sounds really interesting. His life was quite a story. Could you offer a little snippet or an
insight into Mandelstam?
JK: I think others — including or especially his
widow — can speak and have written far more knowledgeably and eloquently than I
can about Osip Mandelstam! I just read with appreciation.
NA: Zephyr Press also publishes some books by
American poets?
JK: Yes.
Zephyr’s origins are in the little magazine Aspect,
part of the incredibly innovative and productive poetry community of Boston in
the 1970s. Cris Mattison helped us revive that for a while with a collaboration
with the Adventures in Poetry program out of New York for a few years, but
that’s pretty much faded away. The urgency of poetry from other literatures
does seem to be our calling. But, right now we’re preparing a book in the
earliest spirit of Aspect/Zephyr — a Boston-based book of light verse by a
sports commentator. That will come out in fall 2014.
NA: What is the title of the book? Could we have a poem from it?
JK: Not yet. Too soon. The final manuscript hasn’t
even been edited, and that takes time. Zephyr prides itself on the care we put
into editing — something that’s more and more lacking from contemporary
publishing.
NA: What are some of the happiest or proudest
moments for the press? Feel free to
provide links to reviews, events, readings, etc.
JK: I think the proudest day for Zephyr — so far —
was when Ed Hogan buttonholed me in Harvard Square to tell me that he had just
learned that The Complete Poems of Anna
Akhmatova had been named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review. It was a
wonderful moment for all of small-press publishing, breaking into that bastion
of the Establishment. But, of course, that was well before my time at Zephyr.
NA: Is there anything else you would like to say
about Zephyr Press?
JK: I could
go on for a very long time. But if I have a pitch to make, it’s threefold:
Support independent presses — that is, buy our books; seek out literature from
abroad (even, or especially, if you have to work at it) and buy books through
independent booksellers whenever possible. Mail-order when necessary, but from real
people by choice.
NA: Maybe you could give us a link here to make it
very, very easy to order a Zephyr title?
JK: www.zephyrpress.org.
A reminder, too, that, as a 501(c ) (3) nonprofit, we’re dependent on public
grants and private donations to keep us going. Literary presses in general sure
as hell don’t survive on sales alone. Nevertheless, what we’d like best is that
people order our books through their local bookstores — that encourages
bookstores to stock our titles, and it supports the store as well as the press.
NA: I would like to end with a poem of your choice
from one of your collections of poetry.
JK: Since one of our commitments is to publishing
women from cultures that all too often, even now, back-bench their female
poets, let’s just choose one poem by the Polish poet, Marzanna Kielar,
translated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese in Salt Monody:
A RENTED ROOM
bit of a roof with a crooked aerial, and a wall
with a door
slightly opened onto the empty balcony —
we are like this reflection carried into the room
on the wing of the window, opening.
Light in the corridor lures moths, the glass image
darkens and love
speaks a language of scattered syntax;
memory, like a prism, refracts the past — we are
pulled
by its returning whirls, and the hum of the railway
station.
We barely perceive that, apart from pain,
there’ll be nothing dear. Apart from the hand which
will turn
the brass handle on the window frame
J. Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president
and co-director of Zephyr Press, a non-profit press that focuses on
contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia. He
received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in
Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual
Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He
has published three chapbooks of his own poems: Mappemonde (Oyster River Press) Metes
and Bounds (Accents Publishing) and The
Old Testament (Cold Hub Press) and a full book, The Briar Patch. (Hobblebush Books). He is the translator of The Score of the Game and An Offshoot of Sense by Tatiana
Shcherbina; Say Thank You and Level with Us by Mikhail Aizenberg; When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree and Secret Wars by Jean-Pierre Rosnay; Corinthian Copper by Regina Derieva; Live by Fire by Aleksey Porvin; and
Genrikh Sapgir’s Psalms. He is the
translation editor of Contemporary
Russian Poetry, and the editor of In
the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former
president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the
co-translator of four books of Latin American poetry.
Nin Andrews received her BA from Hamilton College
and her MFA from Vermont College. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council
grants, she is the author of several books including The
Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife
Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do
You Live in a Vacuum. She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux. Her book, Southern Comfort was published by CavanKerry Press in 2010. Follow Nin's blog here. Follow Nin on Twitter here.