Many Glove Compartments: Selected Poems (Dichten No. 5)
Oskar Pastior. Burning Deck, $10 (120pp) ISBN 978-1-886224-44-5
Berlin-based poet Oskar Pastior says translation is simply not possible ""the wrong word for a process that does not exist,"" as he puts it in the introduction to Many Glove Compartments: Selected Poems. Nonetheless, translators Harry Mathews, Christopher Middleton and Rosmarie Waldrop have gamely tried to recreate the mad, witty wordplay of Pastior's German poetry in this volume. Palindromes, anagrams, puns, ""sonnetburgers"" and exuberant nonsense ""abracadabra as was tartar as was kandahar- cardan (tack that man and gal flat as washrags!) as was cash"" prevail as Pastior, who is the only German member of Oulipo and who will be 75 this year, tinkers with the smallest units of language and the oldest of lyric forms. (Mar.)
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Reviewed on: 11/01/2001
Genre: Fiction