Magazine publications – summer 2011

The London Magazine

An essay by Will Stone, Van Gogh and his influence on German expressionism, was published in the June-July 2011 issue of The London Magazine.

http://thelondonmagazine.org/issues/june-july-2011/

About the London Magazine :

http://thelondonmagazine.org/online-only/the-june-july-issue-is-here/

To subscribe

http://thelondonmagazine.org/subscribe/

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The Black herald - 2

One of Will Stone’s poems will be published in the second issue of The Black Herald, partly bi-lingual literary magazine published by Black Herald Press.

Issue #2 September 2011 – septembre 2011
160×220 – 162 pages - 13.90 €

Poetry, short fiction, prose essays, translations.
Poésie, fiction courte, prose, essais, traductions.

More about the contributors

The Black Herald is edited by Paul Stubbs and Blandine Longre
Comité de Rédaction : Paul Stubbs et Blandine Longre

Soon available to pre-order / bientôt en pré-commande

Drawing in Ash – reviewed by Darran Anderson

Drawing in Ash

“Since the death of the mighty poet and translator Michael Hamburger there has been a vacuum here for advocates of visionary, vital, mysterious poetry that looks to Europe and the past for ways to push things forward. Stone is one worthy successor. The traditional blights of English verse are almost entirely absent, indeed are obliterated; gentility, domesticity, the patronising urge to dumb down or conversely to elude and exclude through highbrow language. Instead this is a full-spirited timely reminder that there is poetry to be found beyond the kitchen sink, the nursery and the countryside. There are whole worlds and entire histories out there to be explored.”

To read the full review on 3:AM magazine

http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844717965.htm

GUY DE MAUPASSANT ‘LETTER OF A MADMAN’

Translated and introduced by Will Stone

Introduction :

IN THE EARLY HOURS OF 2 JANUARY 1892, SENSING THE APPROACH OF INSANITY, THE RENOWNED FRENCH WRITER GUY DE MAUPASSANT ATTEMPTED SUICIDE. THERE THEN FOLLOWED FOR THE SICK MAN LONG MONTHS OF CONFINEMENT IN PASSY AT THE PRIVATE CLINIC OF THE RESPECTED DR BLANCHE, THE CONCLUSION OF WHICH WAS HIS DEATH ON 6 JULY 1893, OVERCOME BY HIS ILLNESS, A SYPHILITIC DISEASE OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM.

Numerous were the columnists following the course of the writer’s demise who sought to identify signs of madness in his works. Even before he had died the newspaper Le Figaro declared: ‘Maupassant has fallen victim to the intensity of his own sensations. He described and analysed the madness long before the dreadful sickness overcame him.’ Enthusiastically the salons fed the controversy. Some maintained that the frequent evocation of alienation in Maupassant’s writings resulted in the development of his ‘general paralysis’, whilst others continued to believe that the weakened author, suffering from writers block, nevertheless managed to preserve some inspiration from the scoria of his illness. In the ‘Letter of a Madman’ which was first published in Le Gil Blas in 1885, Maupassant, or ‘Maufrigneuse’ as he mysteriously signs himself (curiously recalling Hölderlin’s use of the name ‘Scardanelli’ during his own ‘madness’), left behind a text largely ignored until after his death, which is now regarded as one of the founding elements for the myth surrounding the famous short story ‘Le Horla’. The scene of the blurred reflection in the mirror is repeated in the story written two years later. Maupassant’s perceived ‘being’, which lived outside of his self, became an evil alter-ego as illness encroached upon his faculties and resulted in acute paranoid delusions and a virtual delirium of the senses.

His ‘letter’ can be seen as another fascinating fragment wrested from a journey of no return which unknowingly predestines studies into the suppressed nature of the unconscious by Freud in the following century. Furthermore one cannot help but recall in respect of Maupassant the earnest declaration of Poe; ‘And now – have I not told you that what you take for madness is but an over-acuteness of the senses?’

Letter of a Madman

My dear Doctor, I place myself entirely in your hands. Do with me as you wish. I shall tell you frankly about my strange state of mind and you can determine whether it might not be better for you to take care of me for a while in a nursing home, rather than leave me prey to the hallucinations and sufferings which plague me. Here is my story, in full and in detail, charting the incredible desolation of my soul.

To read the full text of Letter of a Madman on the website of THE WHITE REVIEW (july 2011)

The French text.

Will Stone’s poem in French translation

Will Stone’s poem ‘Verhaeren in Rouen‘ from his award winning collection ‘Glaciation‘ (Salt 2007) was selected for publication and translated by Jacques de Decker in issue 278 of the Belgian literary review ‘Marginales‘.

‘Marginales’ is published in Brussels by Jacques de Decker, President of the Royal Academy of Language and French Literature, and is edited by the writer and broadcaster Jean Jauniaux.

A recording of poet and translator reading the poem was made to be broadcast on the accompanying radio programme. This recording can be accessed at the link below:

http://www.demandezleprogramme.be/Ecoutez-Will-Stone-lire-le-poeme?rtr=y

Drawing in Ash, new collection

 

Drawing in Ash

Drawing in Ash

by Will Stone

(April 2011 - Salt Publishing, Salt Modern Poets)

Will Stone’s powerful second collection Drawing in Ash extends the remarkable imagery and visionary capacity he displayed in his first collection from Salt Publishing, Glaciation, which went on to win the prestigious international Glen Dimplex prize in 2008.

To order the book

http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844717965.htm

“Whilst shifting the lens slightly from the devastating surveillance of his first collection of poems, Glaciation, Will Stone’s vision remains constant, evolving a cerebral inclination for the sublime image. Drawing in Ash is a remarkable piece of time travel, roaming through the churchyards and back alleys of Europe where Stone frequently memorialises previously untapped biographical moments within extraordinary lives … The Poet adopts the guise of medium and historian in a powerful book of poems that never relents, never misses its targets.” — James Byrne

Excerpt from book:

The Extinction Plan

Moments of pain, progress driven,
the unwelcome clarity of time’s incision
enhanced by the new drug day,
where late crimes roll and bask
and suddenly woken eyes, lepers
peer in on hastening apocalypse.

The drone of no return, the settling
of old scores, of charcoal petals,
the cinder path of all that is predicted.
She who never arrived one step ahead
and all around you the embalmed
the catacombed, erect in their niches.

The extinction plan in motion,
as cut price flights steeply climb,
over Ensor’s cornered skeleton.

In order to go on, Schubert pens,
Munch paints Death and the Maiden.
Strindberg runs through the Latin Quarter
brandishing his hands, black and burned
from experiments with sulphur.

Each repeats what has gone before.
The earth can take another sack of fear,
a single life’s strict toiling,
embittered aging, the dead weight of loss,
a case of cherished photographs
and a few last sprigs of joy.

No one wants to be dust.
No one wants their love left out,
but nearly every wheel finds the rail
and follows the tramline to lust.

In one dive billions of krill find God.
Ghostly, like a low gas flame
they go on a while unseen, they exist
to explain the blue whale’s darkness.

© Will Stone.

Magazine publications

The Black Herald, issue 1.

Some of Will Stone’s translations (Georg Trakl, Émile Verhaeren, Georges Rodenbach) can be read in the first issue of The Black Herald, literary magazine published by Black Herald Press.

Issue #1 January 2011 – Janvier 2011
160×220 – 148 pages - 13.90 €
ISBN 978-2-919582-02-0

Poetry, short fiction, essays, translations.
Poésie, fiction courte, essais, traductions.

to order the magazine

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The Wolf, issue 24

Some of Will Stone’s poems (The Survivors and Picpus Cemetery) and an essay (on ’Holocaust‘ by Charles Reznikoff) are published  in issue 24 of The Wolf, March 2011.

http://www.wolfmagazine.co.uk/index.php

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A series of Will Stone’s photographs, entitled Fragmented remembrance, images from Belgian cemeteries, was published in issue 3 of Artesian (January 2011, Go Together Press).

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Two poems, Nietzsche at the end and Advance of a rainstorm will be published in The Shop in March 2011.

http://www.theshop-poetry-magazine.ie/

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A poem, Guided tour of the ruins, will be published in Poetry Wales (spring 2011 issue)

http://poetrywales.co.uk/currentissue/

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3:AM

An essay by Will Stone was published on 3:AM magazine in October 2010:

Trakl, A visionary infection.

“My aim here is to attempt to illuminate a little of what, for want of a better phrase, one might call ‘the anatomy of movement’ in Georg Trakl’s vision, to try to identify perhaps the most crucial strand leading to the infection of images that lends his work an unrivalled visionary intensity and singularity in modern European poetry.” Read more

Journeys by Stefan Zweig, translated by Will Stone

Hesperus Press Ltd (October 2010)
ISBN 978-1843914587

Buy the book

‘When I am on a journey, all ties suddenly fall away. I feel myself quite unburdened, disconnected, free – There is something in it marvellously uplifting and invigorating. Whole past epochs suddenly return: nothing is lost, everything still full of inception, enticement.’ Hesperus Press is delighted to present the first English translation of Zweig’s writings on his travels in Europe. Representing a lifetime’s observations, this collection can be dipped into or savoured at length, and paints a rich and sensitive picture of Europe before the Second World War. For the insatiably curious Zweig, travel was both a necessary cultural education and a personal balm for the depression he experienced when rooted in one place for too long. He spent much of his life weaving between the countries of Central Europe, visiting authors and friends, exploring the continent in the heyday of international rail travel.

Reviews

Stefan Zweig JOURNEYS Translated by Will Stone 128pp. Hesperus. Paperback, £8.99.

During the first decades of the last century, Stefan Zweig recorded his observations as he weaved through Europe by train. This anthology represents the first collection of those observations in English, selected and translated by Will Stone, whose versions match Zweig’s writings in the luminosity of their prose.

Every phrase in these essays radiates a joy in the written word and in its capacity to conjure up a sense of place. Whether his subject is London’s Hyde Park or the cathedral at Chartres, Zweig’s concern is not with the characters that he encounters, but with the personality of the places. Where other travellers are mentioned, it is either in his tirade against mass tourism (the state of “being travelled” rather than “travelling”) or in his requiem for the Hotel Schwert in Zurich, once a staging post for the towering figures of European culture but set to become a tax office. In this essay, Goethe rubs shoulders with Casanova and Madame de Staël, and at once we have a sense of what Stone suggests is Zweig’s aim in writing – “as if endeavouring somehow to stitch the uncooperative continent together”.

This essay on Zurich acts as a fulcrum for the collection not only in its evocation of a pan-European culture, but also in the symbolism of this site of cultural wealth being transformed – rebranded – as a tax office. Such unease at change becomes the tenor of the anthology, as it takes in the rise of nationalism and capitalism and the attendant degradation of culture, and builds towards the double crescendos of the two world wars. The essay on Italy from 1921, for example, is as much a celebration of the cultural wealth of that country as it is a lament at the cheapened culture of Zweig’s native Austria. The year 1937 then marks a final gear shift, with an account of a Jewish refugee shelter in London that gives a stark outline to the misgivings latent throughout the collection.

Despite these necessarily dark endings, Journeys is an enriching tour through cultural diversity and linguistic vibrancy, brilliantly evoking the intensity and individuality of these places. The translation demands a poetic sensibility, and Stone has that in abundance, producing a version that has a music and a grandeur of its own.

Charlotte Ryland (Times Literary Supplement, December 17, 2010)