RICHARD J. REISNER: Poet & Translator

Photograph courtesy of the author

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A GRINFUL OF DYNAMITE                                            (Letters to the World)

                                                                                                                                For Les Murray

                                               

That round pointed fuse

                                    several miles of raw earth in truth

                                    you took hands full farmer shovels

                                    and slowly that smile lit

a grinful of dynamite

bonafide stretched ear to

ear native

though never quite the Cassandra

the prophesies too rested

                                    punch line too well bred

                                    worn loose but well fitting

                                    now  full gallop road hump smooth

                                    a blast of simply human.

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VOYAGES WITH MY SELF

                                               

                                                (i)                                                        For Boris Pasternak

                                                And roar howl spin-to spin-to fly

                                                out of thrusting grateful earth

                                                through passing storm almighty rain

                                                loud to breathing noise and constant birth.

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To Yehuda Amichai                                   (Rovigo, 1992)

by Zbigniew Herbert

             For you are king and I but prince

             with no country just trusting followers

             do I blunder by night

             sleepless

             And you are king and look me in friendship

             and disquiet  how many seasons

            can I thus wander

             the world?

             Many seasons Yehuda  To the very end

             Even our hands speak other tongues – the hand

             of grace the hand of scorn and that

             of understanding

             No thing do I ask of you save for understanding

             Into sleep by hearth I fall elbow a pillar

             as night dies in its embers dogs howl

             and along hills walk

             sentinels

             Trans. Richard J. Reisner

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THE KISS                                (Still Lives of the Living, 2001)

                                    by Mariusz Rosiak 

                                    If your father dies

it’s as if death lent over you

tenderly and kissed you on the cheek.

If your mother dies

it’s as if death

kissed your other cheek.

After this kiss you remain alone

wedded to death.

And wait. Wait for that wedding night,

the first night after your own death.

Trans. Richard J. Reisner

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Richard J. Reisner is a Polish-Australian poet of Jewish extraction, whose personal history is in part interwoven with his literary vocation, a legacy that informs his work. His parents, as others, found themselves captive in the Warsaw Ghetto and managed to escape, using Aryan IDs. Towards the end of the Ghetto Uprising his father, fluent in German, worked in the Nazi-controlled field hospital outside Warsaw, in charge of materials provisions. After a period in Melbourne, where Richard worked in the Spielberg Interview Documentation project at the Holocaust Museum and organised literary evenings, he returned to Poland on a translation grant.

As a translator and scholar, Reisner has built an extensive body of work. He has edited significant bilingual anthologies, such as The City of Home, an English-Polish collection of Australian poetry co-edited with Thomas Shapcott. His translations into English encompass major Polish literary figures, including Ewa Lipska, Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Różewicz, and Czesław Miłosz’s cycle Swiat. Poema naiwne (The World). His collaborative projects are wide-ranging, from theatre translations to the multilingual Songs on Canvas project based on Marek Grechuta’s interpretations of paintings, and more recent work translating Russian poets like Regina Derieva.

Reisner is currently completing several major projects: a Polish translation of selected works by Australian poet Les Murray (A Grinful of Dynamite), an English translation of aphorisms by Ludmila Petrushevskaya, and a volume of his own poetry titled Letters to the World.