Thursday, May 17, 2007

Edip Cansever

I'm reading Robyn Sarah's Little Eurekas: A Decade's Thoughts on Poetry right now. I've long been an admirer of Robyn's critical prose and it's wonderful to see it collected and bound. One of the sections of the book is a series of "Appreciations," short essays on single poems. One of those poems is one with which I was previously unacquainted, but I've become enamoured of it: "Table" by a Turkish poet named Edip Cansever, translated by Richard Tillinghast.

AUDIO of me reading "Table."

[Apparently, I don't know what month it is; contrary to what it says on the recording, I recorded the poem in May, not March...]

2 comments:

Brenda Schmidt said...

Great poem!

I ordered Little Eurekas. Looking forward to it.

Anonymous said...

Zach, that's a great reading. You have a gift for this. Now, probably you should have asked permission of Richard Tillinghast to post this recording (I did, to quote his translation--and he told me it was not necessary to get permission from Cansever's estate-- something about the U.S. & Turkish copyright laws)--I'm sure he'll be fine with it, but just on gp's. Email me if you want to get in touch with him, and I'll dig up his coordinates. He was most gracious about my using the poem. (You've just reminded me that I should probably send him a copy of the book.) By the way--according to Eric Ormsby, "Cansever" is pronounced "Jansever." Thanks for your good words on Little Eurekas.
Robyn