DM SPITZER & SARA SHIVA STALLING SPITZER | Abyss of Departures

Creative translation:

texts by DM Spitzer

images by Sara Shiva Stalling Spitzer


Author of A Heaven Wrought of Iron: Poems from the Odyssey (Etruscan 2016), D. M. Spitzer works primarily on early Greek thinking and translation theory. His critical and creative writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Mosaic, Translation Review, Interim, North American Review, TRANSverse, Metonym, Numéro Cinq, and Cyphers. At present Dr. Spitzer is editing a volume on philosophy and translation, preparing a monograph on archaic Greek philosophy, and developing a number of translation and image|text projects.

SaraShiva Spitzer is an arts educator and visual artist specializing in photography and mixed media collage. Over the past twenty years she has worked with diverse populations in rural and urban settings throughout the American midwest and she currently teaches art to "at-risk" adolescents in Pennsylvania. Ms. Spitzer has curated exhibits of artwork by survivors of domestic violence, incarcerated women, and "at-risk" teens. and has been an activist-advocate for arts as a means of bringing attention to issues of social and economic injustice. Her current projects consider race and poverty in urban landscapes. Some of her work has appeared in TRANSverse Journal, Alluvian, Meat for tea, Montana Mouthful, and Azahares.

ТАРТАРИЯ - TATIANA SHCHERBINA / Tartary - Translated by J. Kates

Ленский расстрел – к ленинскому шалашу,

Тартар – к Тартарии, не в смысле ад к аду:

жизни всё больше в расколотом царстве теней,

жарко в истории и у могил мониторов,

мощи приехали – очередь как в мавзолей,

мемориалам – цветы, им, любимым без споров.

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The shooting of Lensky, directly to Lenin's hut,

Tartarus to Tartary , not meaning Hades to Hades:

lives lived evermore in the cracked kingdom of shadows,

hot in their history hunched over gravestone monitors,

powers standing in line at the mausoleum,

all strife memorialized among favorite flowers.

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