Blog Carnival #2: PAST MYTHS, PRESENT LEGENDS

Past Myths, Present Legends: new blog carnival at Aotearoa Affair Blog Fest. Guest edited by Rachel Fenton: “In Past Myths, Present Legends, writers and artists collude to bring you the visual word from a Northern shore to a Pacific shore, through time and place, all connected in tangential, elliptic, and surprising ways; a round table of ideas. Pull up a seat, feast your eyes and satiate your minds.”

Contributors: Helen Lowe, Chris Slane, Ant Sang, Scott Hamilton, Tim Jones, Andrea Quinlan, Adrian Kinnaird, Himiona Grace, Tommpa, Trish Nicholson, Martin Porter, David Tulloch, Gonzalo Navarro, Raewyn Alexander, Maureen Sudlow, Mike Crowl, Maurice Oliver, Vaughan Gunson, Rae Joyce, Dorothee Lang, and Michelle Elvy.

Link: Blog Carnival #2: PAST MYTHS, PRESENT LEGENDS

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Weekly Highlight: Tim Jones

The Translator

Shutting out the torment and the fear
deep into the night’s cold morning hours
I work on my translation.

Improbable, that in another tongue
such lines as these were born,
set down, are vivid on his page

and will not come across to mine.
Two ways to go: the forced rhyme
the flaccid filling phrase

or terse, unrhymed,
trying to capture the meaning
as if that could ever be known.

But something does translate —
a voice from bleak immensities
perfect for nights like these:

the wind’s forgotten murmur,
the war that beggars language
speaking the creole of slaughter.

“The Translator” was first published in New Zealand Books (December 2004), included in Best New Zealand Poems 2004, and then collected in Tim Jones’s second collection, All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens.

Tim Jones is a poet and author of both science fiction and literary fiction who was awarded the NZSA Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature in 2010. He lives in Wellington. His third poetry collection, Men Briefly Explained, was published in late 2011. Among his other recent books are fantasy novel Anarya’s Secret (RedBrick, 2007), short story collection Transported (Vintage, 2008), and poetry anthology Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (Interactive Press, 2009), co-edited with Mark Pirie. Voyagers won the “Best Collected Work” category in the 2010 Sir Julius Vogel Awards.  For more, see: Tim’s Amazon author page and his blog.