It's terrible to be possessed by brittle things: Elena Fanailova's The Russian Version wins the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry

From Love the Book.com:

"'The Russian Version obliterates the stereotype of what Great Russian Poetry should sound like,' wrote Idra Novey, Chair of the Best Translated Book Poetry Panel. 'Fanailova has the candor and compassion of Akhmatova and a gift for striking metaphor that might bring Mandelstam to mind. She is also ruthlessly quick to fire 'from the hip,' as she says in the title poem, and her aim is impeccable.'

The Best Translated Book Award is administered by the University of Rochester's Three Percent, an organization that promotes international literature. Only about 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation according to the Three Percent website. That figure includes all books in translation, for works of literary fiction and poetry, the number is closer to 0.7%.

It’s terrible to be possessed by brittle things.

How can you learn here who taught people to draw

Stars between eyebrows, butterflies over the gristle

Of throats, weeping eye between breasts.

And anyway, who taught them to live with strange

Chasms, with their nocturnal beasts,

With this yawning, this singing, this delirium –

unreachable

Even with open palms outstretched: take them

If you are not afraid of such embraces.

If the faces floating up from an amalgam

Of sploches, from the molding, black, silvery depths

Don’t frighten you.

- from The Russian Version by Elena Fanailova"

The translation statistic is unsurprisingly depressing, and so is the poem, but the poem is depressing in a good way, and very, very striking. I'll have to keep an eye out for this.