Other Books
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
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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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.
A Kiss for the Absolute:
Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, a co-translation with Yuki Tanaka
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“Shuzo Takiguchi’s chimeric fever dreams evince the soft brillings of a big big heart, one that is also elusive ‘like the thousand tricks of transparent water.’ Boldly written in a time and place—imperial Japan—where freedom of thought was most imperiled, and translated and collected into this beautiful volume, the poems document the transcendent capaciousness of a restless, passionate spirit. Time to discover anew this major Japanese Modernist poet.”
—Sawako Nakayasu, translator of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa
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“Takiguchi’s version of surrealism is ‘a public park of the retina.’ It has none of the mysticism and solemnity sometimes associated with this mode. His work is a playful, almost campy, flirtation with beauty—which he refuses to put on a pedestal. One object substitutes for another with a kind of giddy hilarity. He romps, in particular, with the icons of Western culture, pointing out ‘The eyes of a Virgin who is devoutly washing a cactus.’ I am happy to meet him.”
—Rae Armantrout, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and author of Go Figure
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“The work of Shuzo Takiguchi, who used phonetic hiragana, katakana, and kanji to create startling images such as ‘Beautiful burning rain countless liberated birds,’ calls to mind both William Blake and László Moholy-Nagy. Bang and Tanaka’s adventurous translations stay faithful to Takiguchi’s original intent, inviting readers to navigate Takiguchi’s ‘labyrinth of air,’ where they’ll discover worlds both unfamiliar and alluring, made exquisite by the alchemy of these enchanting translations.”—Naoko Fujimoto, author of 09/09: Nine Japanese Female Poets / Nine Heian Waka
“Once again fascist forces trouble our sleep and once again a poet reminds us that the imagination is our resisting agent. A Kiss for the Absolute is a timely revelation of an intrepid surrealist, Shuzo Takiguchi, whose every poem plants a flag for pleasure, surprise, and freedom. ‘My miracle was to be pregnant with an enormous cluster of heavenly diamonds,’ he writes—and we’re lucky that Bang and Tanaka have worked this miracle into English.”
—Dana Levin, author of Now Do You Know Where You Are
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PRESS
"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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"Bang and Tanaka’s skillful, colloquial translations offer English readers a long-overdue introduction to this important poet."—Seminary Co-Op
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"The poems in A Kiss for the Absolute . . . are of a distinctly joyous, cheeky surrealism. . . . This splendidly resonating collection. . . . will make you wonder how you’ve been living all this time, and how you might now carry yourself with more rapture, more mystery, and more attention fit for the dizzying world we inhabit."
—Turi Sioson, Only Poems
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"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
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Colonies of Paradise, Poems
by Matthias Göritz, translated by Mary Jo BangNorthwestern University Press, 2022
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“There are no neat stories and anecdotes here: the flashes of perception, of understanding, are given to us via stark metaphors, images, unpredictable syntax, musical structures that are by turns surprising and illuminating . . . This is the kind of art that is never willing to rest, always in motion. Matthias Göritz is an original, talented contemporary German poet, and translator Mary Jo Bang is one of the most interesting poets currently at work in the English language. Bravo.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic: Poems
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“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
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“Matthias Göritz is a poet of tremendous gifts and knowledge. His unique poetic voice is grounded and marked by historical and personal scars and horizons, which make his writing profound, intelligent, musical, playful, and innovative. A must for anyone with interest in contemporary European poetry.”
—Aleš Šteger, author of The Book of Things
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PRESS:
Colonies of Paradise, Matthias Göritz, trans. from the German by Mary Jo Bang. TriQuarterly, $18 trade paper (104p) ISBN 978-0-8101-4581-8
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, “I am/ a more unstable border.” Most important, Göritz pays sublime attention to the world. A father becomes “checkmated/ alone in the armchair.” On his way to a visit to his childhood pool, Göritz wonders “if the paint in the deep end/ is still peeling.” These moments communicate a deep relationship to the world, despite the world’s insistence on being, at times, unforgiving. Ordinary curiosity shines through in these finely crafted poems.
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BOOKS
A Film in Which I Play Everyone
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A Doll for Throwing
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The Last Two Seconds
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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)
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)
“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
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
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
