>On 28/03/2008, Barry Alpert <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Leevi Lehto is
the most useful figure in Finnish poetry today, especially now that Anselm
Hollo passes
as an american.<
He certainly is industrious. This his biog from Jacket magazine:
'Leevi Lehto is a Finnish poet and translator. He has published five
collections of poems and a novel. He has translated among others Althusser,
Deleuze&Guattari, George Orwell, Ian MacEwan, Josef Skvorezky, and Stephen
King. In 1994, he published John Ashbery's *Flow Chart* in Finnish as *
Vuokaavio*. He is currently working on a selection of Charles Bernstein's
essays and poems in Finnish, as well as translating John Keats's poems and
letters.'
- such strange conjunctions there.
I can't say the four poems in Jacket did anything for me, but, even if the
translator is the original author, it doesn't mean that they might not be
something really stimulating in Finnish. But Global Glitch, I mean Global
English, is such a drained toneless language everything can seem like
discard sandwich wraps in it. That the poems seem also about, to an extent,
the banality of the dialects of power doesn't except them from repeating the
same numbing anodyne effects.
The list of his translations gives an impression of a huge hungry
indiscriminate intelligence.
Here's a revision of my poem for him, Kasper, which is well meant:
A Poem for Leevi Lehto
I proposed translation's finest final
frontier: Finnegans Wake in Voynich. "I likes it,"
she said "from what language?"
Best
Dave
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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