Books and Translations
TRANSLATIONS
Paradiso​
Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Paradiso completes her groundbreaking new version of Dante’s masterpiece, begun with Inferno and continued with Purgatorio. In Paradiso, Dante has been purified by his climb up the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory, and now, led by the luminous Beatrice, he begins his ascent through the nine celestial spheres of heaven toward the Empyrean, the mind of God. Along the way, we meet the souls of the blessed—those at various proximities to God, but all existing within the bliss of heaven’s perfect order. Philosophically rich, spiritually resonant, Paradiso is a reckoning with justice and morality from a time of ethical questioning and political division much like our own.
“For as long as I’ve known to look for him, Dante has been far from me. To some extent, this is inevitable—to an American living in the twenty-first century, Dante’s fourteenth-century Florence is a strange world. English has seen beautiful translations of The Divine Comedy, but none can bring today’s reader closer to the poem than Mary Jo Bang’s. This is because Bang has recognized that the Comedy is a living poem, contemporaneous with all poetry that has followed it. Having translated it into a language alive to the very moment in which it is meant to be read, Bang has done the impossible: she has revitalized that which is eternal.” — Shane McCrae, author of New and Collected Hell: A Poem
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Purgatorio
Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Purgatorio is the extraordinary continuation of her journey with Dante, which began with her transformative version of Inferno. In Purgatorio, still guided by the Roman poet Virgil, Dante emerges from the horrors of Hell to begin the climb up Mount Purgatory, a seven-terrace mountain with each level devoted to those atoning for one of the seven deadly sins. At the summit, we find the Terrestrial Heaven and Beatrice—who will take over for Virgil, who, as a pagan, can only take Dante so far. During the climb, we are introduced to the myriad ways in which humans destroy the social fabric through pride, envy, and vindictive anger.
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“Bang's sparkling 21st-century adaptation of Dante's lesser-read masterpiece packs in rewarding surprises at every turn.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
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“By almost any standard, Bang’s translation is the most liberal interpretation of Dante available in English. Her Inferno, when it first reached readers in 2012, scandalized purists and delighted postmodernists — a vision of Hell with references to Pink Floyd, South Park, and Steven Colbert. There was something uniquely 21st century about it — even, one could say, something uniquely 2010s; no small feat for a text first written over 700 years ago. The publication of Purgatorio finds her emboldened in this process; Canto I alone contains allusions to Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Richie Havens, and Cyndi Lauper (as well as more familiar poetic antecedents like Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, Hilda Doolittle, and Lewis Carroll).” —Nolan Kelly, Hyperallergic
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Inferno
Mary Jo Bang has created an idiomatically rich contemporary version of Dante’s Inferno that is accessible, musical, and audacious. In her translation, and in her wide-ranging textual notes, she has matched Dante’s own liberal use of allusion and literary borrowing by incorporating references familiar to contemporary readers: Shakespeare and Dickinson, Freud and South Park, Kierkegaard and Stephen Colbert. Henrik Drescher’s haunting illustrations are both fiendish and modern. This Inferno is an inimitable achievement—faithful to the original and consistent with Dante’s innovative spirit.
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“The only good Hell to be in right now is poet Mary Jo Bang’s innovative, new translation of Dante’s Inferno.” —Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair
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“Like The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy propels both the journey and the poem forward through multiple mechanisms, including its highly dynamic rhyme scheme of interlocking tercets (terza rima, as it’s known in Italian), as well as its narrative drama. Mary Jo Bang preserves the tercet form without attempting to reproduce Dante’s rhyme scheme. Being an excellent poet in her own right, she succeeds in giving the Inferno’s narrative drama an energetic idiom that gets the poem moving, and at times even dancing, on the page.” —Robert Pogue Harrison, New York Review of Books
A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi
(co-translation with Yuki Tanaka)​​​​
In 1923, Shuzo Takiguchi’s first year at Tokyo’s Keio University was cut short by the Great Kanto Earthquake, which nearly destroyed the Japanese capital. When he returned to school two years later, he was hit by a second earthquake—French Surrealism. Takiguchi (1903–1979) began to write surrealist poems, translate surrealist writers, curate exhibitions of surrealist art, write art criticism, and, later, paint, helping introduce Surrealism to Japan. He eventually became a major Japanese artistic and cultural figure whose collected works number fourteen volumes. In A Kiss for the Absolute, Mary Jo Bang, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her fellow poet and translator Yuki Tanaka present the first collection in English of Takiguchi’s ingenious, playful, and erotic poems, complete with an introduction and the original Japanese texts on facing pages. Takiguchi’s obvious interest in style is perfectly wed to his daredevil rhetorical antics. His poems read as if they could have been written today, yet they are so original that they couldn’t have been written by anyone else. Bang and Tanaka’s skillful, colloquial translations offer English readers a long-overdue introduction to this important poet.
“Meticulously harvested from a cache comprising a ten-year period of intense literary composition from 1927-1937, this edition of thirty-five poems gives needed shape to Takiguchi’s wide-ranging legacy as an eclectic visionary—critic, translator, poet, artist, collector, curator." —Michael Londra, Asian Review of Books
"A Kiss for the Absolute isn’t only an important cultural project; it is vivid, ambitious work. . . . A book to remind us about the potential of poetry." —Fiona Sampson, Guardian
"A Kiss for the Absolute introduces Shuzo Takiguchi’s surreal, mythical world to English readers, inviting them into a poetic landscape where Japanese culture and French surrealism meet in a celebration of beauty, desire, and wonder. This collection is more than an introduction to Takiguchi’s poetry; it’s an invitation into a cultural and linguistic dialogue that feels deeply mysterious and illuminating." —Georgia McInnes, The Indiependent
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Colonies of Paradise​
Very few books of poetry by contemporary German writers are available to English-speaking readers. In Colonies of Paradise, acclaimed poet and translator Mary Jo Bang introduces the poems of novelist, poet, and translator Matthias Göritz, one of the most exciting German writers publishing today. The poems in this book, which originally appeared in German under the title Loops, take the reader on a tour of Paris, Chicago, Hamburg, and Moscow as they explore childhood, travel, and the human experience. Unsettling our expectations about adulthood, the book permeates the quotidian with a disquieting strangeness that leads us deeper into our own lives and histories. Göritz’s sly humor, keen insight, and artistry are brought to the fore in Bang’s careful and innovative translation, allowing an English-language audience to enter fully the intricate interiority of Göritz’s work.
“Matthias Göritz’s Colonies of Paradise is unlike any book of American poetry I can recall reading. It’s a close-up, high speed tour of life, passing through various world cities—none of them home, yet each haunted by the gargoyle-like figures of Mother and Father. This may be the ‘Giant Redeye Cicada’ eye view of modern human existence—what one can see when one gives up thinking one understands. The book is rendered into sharp, pithy, idiomatic English by the poet and translator Mary Jo Bang, who has recently translated Dante. With her help, Göritz asks, ‘Isn’t it time we went missing?” —Rae Armantrout, author of Finalists
“Göritz explores the mundane, quotidian, and absurd in his English-language debut, skillfully translated by Bang. Composed of four sections that are situated in the cities of Chicago, Hamburg, Moscow, and Paris, the work is alive with questions and details. Göritz asks: “Am I getting carried away by springtime?” In “Alexander Garden,” he notices “the white carts, hot sausages, ices, pierogies.” In Chicago, he longs “to buy a pizza pie and even more// to sit in the back seat of a taxi.” Deceptively simple, these poems are, in actuality, concerned with “how bizarre we must be made out to be.” They fluctuate between the familiar, “Still, what’s up with living the life?”—and the philosophical … Ordinary curiosity shines through in these finely crafted poems.”
—Publishers Weekly​​​​​
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BOOKS
A Film in Which I Play Everyone
A Film in Which I Play Everyone takes its title from a response David Bowie gave to a fan who asked if he had upcoming film roles. “I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized autobiography that I am writing,” Bowie answered. “Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.” Mary Jo Bang’s brilliant poems might be the soundtrack to such a movie, where the first-person speaker plays herself and everyone she’s ever met. She falls in and out of love with men, with women, and struggles to realize her ambitions while suffering crushing losses that give rise to dark thoughts. She’s drawn to stories that mirror her own condition: those of women who struggle to speak in a world that would silence them. Embedded in these poems are those minor events that inexplicably persist in the memory and become placeholders: the time she lied and had her mouth washed out with soap; the time someone said she wasn’t his “original idea of beauty but something. / Something he couldn’t quite // put his hands on”; the time she stood in indifferent moonlight on a pier as a cat lapped at the water. Tinged with dark humor and sharpened with keen camerawork, A Film in Which I Play Everyone stars Bang at her best, her most provocative.
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Bang’s poems have a characteristic clockwork precision — they tick and spin like mechanical music boxes. Listen, to these first lines of the title poem: “In scene two, silence is a sleeve, I’m an arm in it./In an outdated Hollywood magazine, I found a photo/of someone wearing my hair. How can that be?” The rhymes are regular but slantish, internal: sleeve, -zine, be. The rhythms seem to get inside me, like a virus, or a secondary heartbeat. —Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times Book Review
In her ninth book of poems, A Film in Which I Play Everyone, Mary Jo Bang continues her exploration of thought itself, asking the most vital questions about the self and its nuanced elaboration of truths. As is typical of her work, she shares with the readers of A Film her authoritative and incisive scholarship of art and literature as well as her stark yet whimsical sense of exploration and erudition. In the poem “A Miniature,” the speaker boldly asserts, “I’m a version of a self. I speak the truth.” Then, she immediately qualifies this seemingly simple claim with a nod to the deeper realities of selfhood, saying, “As if speaking French. Haltingly. / Fast-forward and it’s me asking air / to save me from the synaptic patterns // that dictate who I am . . .”
—Judith Harris, Literary Matters
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A Doll for Throwing
A Doll for Throwing takes its title from Bauhaus artist Alma Siedhoff-Buscher’s Wurfpuppe, a flexible and durable woven doll that, if thrown, would land with grace. A ventriloquist is also said to “throw” her voice into a doll that rests on the knee. Mary Jo Bang’s prose poems in this fascinating book create a speaker who had been a part of the Bauhaus school in Germany a century ago and who had also seen the school’s collapse when it was shut by the Nazis in 1933. Since this speaker is not a person but only a construct, she is also equally alive in the present and gives voice to the conditions of both time periods: nostalgia, xenophobia, and political extremism. The life of Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy echoes across these poems—the end of her marriage, the loss of her negatives, and her effort to continue to make work and be known for having made it.
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“Bang’s beguiling poems, presented in well-ordered boxes, consider the relationship between the spaces people inhabit and narratives of self, nation, and identity. These carefully constructed and curated rooms display shifting cultural definitions of beauty, efficiency, and order. Bang calls readers’ attention to the inherently unstable nature of both “a well-defined building” and the mythologies that justify its glass and metal. What’s more, she reminds readers that these ostensibly private spaces function as stages for transforming shared beliefs about the external world. “They said without saying that what we were building must be destroyed,” she writes, evoking the danger and necessity that this kind of metaphysical transfiguration entails. . . . Bang’s impeccable collection reads as a “circular mirror of the social order,” reflecting the historicity of our current moment with wit, subtlety, and grace.” —Publishers Weekly
“Mary Jo Bang bends and tosses ideas as easily as one would a Wurfpuppe, a flexible doll created by Bauhaus artist Alma Siedhoff-Buscher that always landed with grace when thrown.”
—The Washington Post
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The Last Two Seconds
The Last Two Seconds is an astonishing confrontation with time—our experience of it as measured out by our perceptions, our lives, and our machines. In these poems, full of vivid imagery and imaginative logic, Mary Jo Bang captures the difficulties inherent in being human in the twenty-first century, when we set our watches by nuclear disasters, species collapse, pollution, mounting inequalities, warring nations, and our own mortality. This is brilliant and profound work by an essential poet of our time.
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The follow-up to her critically acclaimed Elegy, Mary Jo Bang’s The Last Two Seconds is a brilliant collection exploring the ravages of time in a world plagued by both manmade and natural doom. With sharp imagination and brutal honesty, Bang paints a vision of human history that is unflinchingly honest in its reversion from the optimistic. The language of her poems is as intense and wry as her subject matter—irrefutably arguing that the past, no matter how recent, is man’s most unforgiving reflection.” —Meriwether Clarke, The Adroit Journal
“In focusing on time, Bang also blurs it, summoning authors, artists, and ideas from across history into often rapturous design. . . . A lively, lovely poetry forward thinking.” —The Boston Globe
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The Bride of E
In her follow-up to the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Elegy, Bang is up to some of her old tricks again, but the previous collection’s tour of a loss-inflected world has also taught her some new ones. The book takes the alphabet as its jumping-off point, with one or more poems titled for each letter (A Equals All of a Sudden, Beast Brutality, etc.). Here again are Bang’s quirky poetic leaps (In another corner, Freud says, Yes/ In the dark of primitive desire means yes/ Forever), but somehow they are more foreboding than before, the wild associations of a haunted mind: The note rises from something awful./ A woman in a jam. Train wreck of crumpled cars. Poems vamp on literature, fables, fairy tales, pop culture icons (like Cher) and shards of a lost childhood world. One poem rewrites Poe’s most famous work (Her name is Lenore Nevermore), while B is for Beckett sums up the Nobel laureate’s work in one line: There is so little to say. The book concludes with a short series of prose pieces that flirt with memoir. This book bridges a gap between an experimental tradition in American poetry and an older high lyric tradition. This is some of Bang’s best writing, and one of the most exciting books of the year. —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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Elegy
“Mary Jo Bang’s remarkable elegies recall the late work of Ingeborg Bachmann—a febrile, recursive lyricism. Like Nietzsche or Plath, Bang flouts naysayers; luridly alive, she drives deep into aporia, her new, sad country. Her stanzas, sometimes spilling, sometimes severe, perform an uncanny death-song, recklessly extended—nearly to the breaking point.” —Wayne Koestenbaum
“A work of startling breadth, one that explores what is essential to all losses.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“[A] powerful fifth collection . . . Writing to mourn the death of her adult son, Bang interrogates the elegiac form and demands of it more than it can give, frustrated, over and over again, with memory, which falls pitifully short of life . . . Bang offers, if not hope, a kind of keeping company, a way, however painful, to go on.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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“Bang tears asunder and reassembles the elegy, an ancient vessel, infusing it with feelings pure, piercing, and cauterizing.”
—Booklist
“Had the jacket not said Elegy chronicles the year following the death of her son, Bang’s book would still move you for its grace, not its real-life poignancy.” —Entertainment Weekly
The Eye Like a Strange Balloon
Bang is an adventuresome and dynamic poet, and consequently each of her collections is distinctive and animated. Her fourth is especially commanding in its metaphysical puzzles, tart irony, antic yet adamantly channeled energy, and devil-may-care poise. The eye is a reigning image and metaphor, Alice in Wonderland a companion and muse, and the workings of the brain, the “alchemy of mind,” to use Diane Ackerman’s phrase, a subject of wry analysis. “Experience returns as memory,” the poet tells us, but personal occurrences do not occupy Bang; instead, she performs ekphrasis, the writing of an intense pictorial description of an object, usually a work of art. And Bang has chosen her inspirations well, riffing with supple imagination and spiky wit on paintings by such provocative artists as Paula Rego, Sigmar Polke, Max Ernst, and Redon Odilon, the source of the collection’s title. Although these works are the keys to Bang’s sharply intelligent and gorgeously textured poems, her fresh, exploratory, and superbly crafted work takes off on its own blazing trajectories, creating its own mental pictures. – Booklist
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The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans
“Mary Jo Bang’s poetry is vivacious and at the same time mysterious. Its surface glitters with the sparkle that the brightest American writing has always given off, and in the depths it reveals a mixture of smoky, quirky complexities, a blend that is hers alone. Characters are driven to distress or exuberance by the fate she has prepared for them—their stories bloom on the page, ripen strangely, and quickly disappear. I love it.” —John Tranter, editor of Jacket Magazine
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Louise in Love
Bang, author of the prize-winning Apology for Want (1996), unveils an enrapturing series of poems about a woman named Louise; Ham, the man she’s sweet on; her sister, Lydia; Ham’s brother; and a child. Amorphous characters, they are figments born of romanticism and figures out of paintings or film, yet Louise, who is more mood and musings than body, is driven into a fugue state by desire. These sly, subtly narrative poems manage to be both languid and epigrammatic, sensual and ironic as Bang conjures a diaphanous yet edgy realm in which Louise and her companions travel by train and motorcar to mansions and mausoleums, lakes and rivers, beaches and mountains, perhaps for real, perhaps in their dreams. Bang pays tribute to Keats and Woolf in scenes of emotional and physical opulence that are underpinned by reflections on death, just as flesh covers bone. Her language is musical; her consonance consummate; and the depth and complexity of her thoughts take on different configurations with each rereading of these playful yet serious, coy yet passionate poems. –Booklist
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Apology for Want:
Never weakened by self-pity, these are the poems of a shrewd clinician making the psychological rounds, and their feminism is the more powerful for being implicit…. —The New Yorker