Carrying Over [Paperback]

Carolyn Kizer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1988

poetry from various countries, tr Kizer

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this unusual collection, Pulitzer Prize-winner Kizer translates verse from several languages and juxtaposes works by known and less familiar writers with journals she kept while living in Pakistan. This is a book lush in its varieties of language and writing styles, and it is Kizer's deftness that controls the material, keeping the cultures discrete, while at the same time ensuring that they complement each other, that they "carry over." For the most part, Kizer serves up the poems in ideal proportionshowever, her personal journal entries take up many pages in the middle section. While the diary observations are astute and her comments witty and candid, she includes information that is too intimate to be relevant to the book's intention. Also, there are only two Yiddish poemsmore of these and fewer of the Yugoslavian would balance the whole. Kizer sustains a sense of travel throughoutthe poetry is supple and the exoticism of each society is limpid, and memorable: "No matter: this remains Lahore, / Oxcarts and tongas, as before, / Jingling along or lumbering back."
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

World traveler, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and founder of Poetry Northwest , Kizer presents translations of hard-to-find international poets: e.g., Tu Fu (8th century A.D. China); Rachel Korn (contemporary Yiddish); M. Safdar Mir (Pakistan, translated from Urdu); Bogomil Gjuzel (Yugoslavia, translated from Macedonian); Edouard Maunick (French-African, from Madagascar); and Shu Ting (contemporary China). These carefully crafted translations are accompanied by an intimate prose journal of a trip to Pakistan (1969) and a poem of her own in tribute to Dennis Brutus, the exiled South African poet. In this mini-anthology, made of "sharply individual voices, but togetheran orchestra," Kizer broadens our Western self-preoccupation with her urbane vision. Frank Allen, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press; First Edition edition (October 1, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556590172
• ISBN-13: 978-1556590177
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,064,059 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pulitzer Prize, July 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Carrying Over (Hardcover)

This book is NOT the book she won her Pulizer Prize for (now, you go hunting) but it shows that class of art. One of the few "free" translators of Chinese poetry whose work has been approve (in public and in publication) by Chinese scholars. And there's more. You would do well to simply buy everything this poet has in print. Try Mermaids in The Basement.

4.0 out of 5 stars 1 poet, voices from 5 nations, May 27, 2008

By 

Gary Sprandel (Frankfort, Kentucky) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Carrying Over (Paperback)

Carolyn Kizer is a skilled poet in her own right (Pulitzer prize, 1985 for Yin), but here translates works in 5 different languages. She says she is "only an occasional and amateur translator", but the poems here all ring true. I was most impressed with the poems from 8th century China, by Tu Fu. They have a Taoist sound "Clouds drift among the towers. Along again,
I burn the draft of another memorandum" that somehow refresh this modern office worker. "Like a knife in a melon, Autumn slices Summer." The book ends with modern Chinese poems from Shu Ting, which meld with the modern "Wild swan: my temperament, / You vow to confront winter, unprotected /
Even with a bullet wound /
Rather than linger in the cage of Spring."

The two Yiddish poems are from the modern poet Rachel Korn "Let me pillow myself on the book of my peregrinations".

The Pakistan "journal" appears from 1969, and seems a little too personal, dusty, and gritty, but somehow complements the exotic Faiz Ahmed Faiz poems "Every drop is the fury of a cobra."

For an unknown reason, the African poems include the French originals, and speak of exile and roots "know the substance of exile;/ on the sea, wind and thunder/ recognizing all the roots / of the trees that rejects me".

This book is a good poetic travelogue.