In poems and prose, dramatic elements abound: scenes and vignettes; scoring for voices; desires, plots and characters engaged in mortal conflict, sometimes within a single mind. Especially in the poems, much depends on cadence, breath, and beat. Ritual is interrogated even as it is performed; conventional wisdoms are discarded, mocked and mutilated; study is sacred, belief suspect — genuine lessons exist to be learned the hard way. The mundane and cosmic, the devotional and defiant, the lyric and political jostle, subvert, and re-create each other. From murderous history, Atlan wrested a body of work that is radiant with life.Description
“Liliane Atlan’s poems are as personal as dreams and as public as history. Wry, spare, flickering with wit, they are also resonant, authoritative, weighted with centuries of what Atlan calls ‘the wisdom that is not inscribed,’ that ‘makes written notes inexhaustible.’” Rachel Hadas, her most recent book, Poems for Camilla.
“Only a life lived on the edge such as Liliane Atlan’s could have given rise to these highly original poems, at once manic and tragic, electrifying and poignant.” Hoyt Rogers, writer and translator from the French, German, Italian, and Spanish
“Liliane Altlan writes both prose and poetry with the beauty and brilliance of lyric, the bite of epigram, the passion of an idealist fighting to survive in a brutal world. In the colloquies of great poets held in the next world, I imagine her seated with her peers — perhaps at a table with Kafka, Bob Dylan and Emily Dickinson. “ Alicia Ostriker, author of books of poetry and prose, most recently, The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems, 2002-2019.
Translator Marguerite Feitlowitz is the author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, a New York Times Notable Book and Finalist for the PEN-Winship Prize. In addition to translating Liliane Atlan’s major plays, Theatre Pieces: An Anthology, edited by Bettina Knapp, Feitlowitz has also translated, from the Spanish, the work of Griselda Gambaro, Luisa Valenzuela, Salvador Novo, and Ennio Moltedo. Her many awards include two Fulbrights to Argentina, a Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute Fellowship (now the Radcliffe Institute), and a 2020 NEA Literary Translation Fellowship. She teaches at Bennington College where she is the Founding Director of Bennington Translates, a multi-disciplinary initiative on literary and humanitarian translation in the context of forced displacement, exile, and collective crisis.
