(Keith Ekiss is Artistic Director of TWO LINES. His first collection of poems, Pima Road Notebook, will be published next year by New Issues Poetry and Prose.)

When translating closed form poetry, the formal elements (meter and rhyme) are often the first thing the translator abandons. It’s common to read sonnets in translation, for example, that dispense with the rhyme and meter of the original. I’m no neo-formalist, but when a translator comes along who’s able to convey not only the sense of the original, but an approximation (or recreation) of the rhythm and rhyme, I pay attention. George Szirtes, a prolific writer and translator born in Budapest, who has lived in Britain for most of his life, is that kind of poet.

“This Day,” Szirtes’ translation of the Hungarian poet Anna Szabó’s “A mai nap,” subtitled “Wherever I lie is your bed,” gives the new TWO LINES anthology it’s title. It’s a cinematic poem, jump cutting between scenes and years in the poet’s life. We follow the writer as a seemingly casual search for a new apartment turns into uncertain panic and terror.

“Fog everywhere: anxiety was a tight
cold sleepless night;
that’s my life I thought and felt it glide
swiftly away but I wasn’t part of the ride;
my life went on without me inside.”

The form is important. The irregular, though pronounced, rhythm and the rhyme attempt to reign in, if only slightly, the poet’s inner turmoil. To lose the form would decrease the tension. A quick glance to the left-hand side of the page, without knowing any Hungarian, confirms that Szirtes’s translation preserves these patterns.

Szirtes’s second translation, “Dog” (“Kutya,” in the Hungarian), is by the Budapest born Krisztina Tóth. In his introduction, Szirtes describes Tóth as writing “love poems with a [ ] disillusioned bitter, haunted edge to them.” The poem bears agonizing, protracted witness to a couple who come across a severely injured dog, one recently struck by a passing car, though not their own. The poem is unflinching in its description of the wounded animal’s suffering, “mouth wide open, it sat there, a half-dog / though I could tell from its eyes that it saw everything.”

But it’s the poem’s second half where the tension increases, when it becomes clear that the man’s hesitant refusal to save the dog stands in, from the poet’s perspective, for the couple’s broken relationship, with “the constant fury / and resignation involved in even love-making, and the way / you asked me just what it was that I wanted you to do.”

Szirtes is also an active blogger, whose posts are well worth reading.

Prize-winning Russian translator and steadfast TWO LINES supporter Marian Schwartz always seems to have an interesting new project on her hands. From her recent translations of classics like Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard or Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov to her forthcoming forays into Russian noir, detective, and train stories, Schwartz is consistently poised to introduce great Russian writing to English readers.

Schwartz has contributed several translations to TWO LINES over the years, including stories by Julia Nemirovskaya, Sergei Task, and Oleg Radzinsky, and she co-edited with Geoff Brock Power, the eleventh volume in the TWO LINES series, which includes some excellent translations from Eavan Boland, Donald Yates, and A.E. Stallings, among many others.

Schwartz’s latest translation appears in a new anthology of Russian short fiction entitled Life Stories, which compiles short stories by nineteen of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary writers—all but one of the stories appearing in English for the first time. Hailed by Russian critics as “the best of contemporary Russian fiction,” the Russian edition of the anthology just came out in March of this year and is already topping Russian bestseller lists. For the anthology Schwartz translated a story by Leonid Yuzefovich, a biographer and novelist, whose historical thrillers are wildly popular and have even been adapted for television.

Life Stories is published by the same people as the new literary journal Chtenia:Readings from Russia, and all proceeds are being donated to benefit hospice care in Russia.

The Naked Eye, Yoko Tawada’s latest novel to be published in English translation (by Susan Bernofsky for New Directions) is about a young Vietnamese woman set adrift in Paris who takes refuge in the films of Catherine Deneuve.

Tawada, who was born in Japan but has spent most of her adult life in Germany, writes in both Japanese and German—and has won prizes in both languages. Her previous books have been written either in one language or the other, but when she sat down to write The Naked Eye she began first in German, then continued in Japanese, alternating languages as the narrative struck her. Ultimately, she wound up with two complete, separate manuscripts.

I asked Susan Bernofsky about what Tawada’s writing is like in German and what’s challenging about it to translate:

Yoko’s writing in German always seems to be teetering on the brink of “I don’t know how to say that,” and this slight built-in alienation is thematically critical to her work. It’s tricky to translate, too: as a writer and translator I’ve learned to write English as fluidly as possible - after all, that’s what “good style” is all about - but too much fluency/fluidity kills these texts. Of course, if they come out sounding awkward and wooden, that would also be deadly! Yoko’s texts in German aren’t at all awkward - there’s a kind of neutral elegance to her writing that seems not quite to belong to German style but rather somehow exists in the space between languages. She uses less figurative language than most other German-language writers I’ve worked with. It’s as if the utterances have been reduced to their bare essentials, but in a way that is at the same time completely beautiful - what emerges from this approach to language is a sense of sparse, scaled-back expression, which makes you notice and savor each word as if seeing it for the first time. I love the way she makes me think about what it means to express oneself in a language in the first place, and the way she makes me actually see the words themselves.

Bernofsky went on to say, “I know Yoko’s book was also written partly in Japanese, but it makes most sense to me as a German-language book.”

The Naked Eye is newly out from New Directions. You can also read a chapter from it, along with a diverse selection of other new international fiction and poetry in the Center’s forthcoming anthology Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed.

José Manuel Prieto began his June Lit&Lunch reading in San Francisco by commenting on the light—namely, how the light in San Francisco reminded him of the light in St. Petersburg. This fascination with light—and the illusions it casts—comes to play a remarkable role in his novel Rex, where a diamond’s brilliance reveals nothing of its authenticity. One of Rex’s main characters is a Russian scientist, living with his wife, their son, and their son’s tutor on the Costa Brava, where he has not only managed to manufacture artificial diamonds but also to pass them off as real to Russian Mafiosi. Having heard Prieto discuss Rex on a few occasions now, I’ve noticed how animatedly he speaks about the subject of diamond forgery, and considering that Prieto studied engineering in Novosibirsk, Russia, this doesn’t come entirely as a surprise.

As Prieto went on to explain, and Esther Allen to translate, at their reading with the Center, the history of manufacturing artificial diamonds goes back a couple hundred years. Although there had been many previous attempts throughout the world, the first diamond to be successfully manufactured was in the U.S. in 1953 by General Electric (to be used for industrial purposes like cutting hard materials). Chemists and scientists have always known that diamonds are made of carbon, but a French scientist put a fine point on this once by concentrating the sun’s rays on a diamond through a magnifying glass (like a child might do to set fire to ants)—and the diamond went up in flames.

It wasn’t until 1981, though, that Japanese scientists produced the first diamond of gem quality, one that replicated the immaculate sparkle and transparency of a real diamond. By the beginning of the 1990s, artificial diamonds that were absolutely indistinguishable from natural diamonds were being manufactured—and in none other than Novosibirsk, where Prieto had studied engineering. Even expert jewelers have been unable to distinguish between real diamonds and artificial diamonds, which, as Prieto has pointed out, is disturbing to a company like De Beers, which buys the entire annual production of diamonds in Russia.

Although Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is an evident motif in Rex, Prieto also makes a deliberate nod to Proust’s novella The Lemoine Affair, which just came out last year in English translation by Charlotte Mandell from Melville House. In The Lemoine Affair, a man approaches De Beers, claiming he knows how to manufacture artificial diamonds and threatens to flood the marketplace and destroy DeBeers’ monopoly. Proust’s own family owned shares in DeBeers and lost money in this famous swindle. As Prieto ironically pointed out, Proust was able to write his great novels in part because of the wealth afforded his family by diamonds.

Prieto, too, has cited inspiration from Jules Verne’s 1852 novel The Star of the South, about the discovery of diamonds in Kimberly, South Africa.

As Prieto advised the audience in San Francisco, if you’re in the market for a precious stone, don’t waste your money; buy the fake diamond.

Annie Janusch manages the Center’s TWO LINES World Writing in Translation series, the latest volume of which, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, features extracts from Rex.