The more we educate ourselves about other cultures, the more we understand one another. We then don’t look at “the other” or “the foreigner” in fear. People usually fear what they don’t understand. And by understanding where we come from we all get to know ourselves.
Winner of an Albertine and FACE Foundation Grant
Recommended Review of The Abduction in The US Review of Books
Maram Al-Masri’s Le Rapt, as translated by Hélène Cardona, opens with the simple delights of a mother engaging with her young child, speaking to him as if he is a confidant. “He is occupied / making his ten fingers move / to convince me that love is the natural fruit / of the tree of life,” she writes, and what could be more wonderful than that? Bliss, however, is followed by unbearable grief, when her child is abducted and separated from her for years by her then husband.
The poems become the vessel for her dialogue with her missing child, and with her sorrow. Even when mother and child experience a complex reunion years later, each has learned to fear loving the other, and her son must face a second infancy, this time as an immigrant, much less blissful than the first. As a reader of poetry, I am compelled by the raw spareness of these poems, their keen honesty, and their refusal to provide us with a restoration arc. As a parent, I feel empathy, and awe at Al-Masri’s survival.
—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry
Each small stanza of The Abduction picks at the torn seam between parent and child. As the narrator peers “out a window/ I haven’t cleaned for a long time,” we also see what has been snatched away. Arabic poet Al-Masri writes of the changed shape of her future, a devastation eloquently translated by Hélène Cardona.
—Lauren Camp, 2022 to 2025 New Mexico Poet Laureate and author of Took House
Hélène Cardona’s masterful translation of The Abduction by French-Syrian poet Maram Al-Masri contains luminescent pages where readers will traverse tidal currents of raw emotion, passionate love, and the sting of separation. Unfurled through motifs of motherhood, nascent innocence, the ache of parting, and the fragility of memory, the verses offer a rare glimpse into the psyche of a mother torn from her offspring. This collection of poems is a sacred remembrance, reminding the reader of our deep connections between a parent and child and within the family. And the deep sorrows we face when those connections are sundered unexpectedly.
—Ron Starbuck, Saint Julian Press Book Reviews
Two poems from The Abduction in World Literature Today
A poem from The Abduction in One
Three poems from The Abduction in Plume Poetry
Two poems from The Abduction On the Seawall
“He has begun to speak to me” from The Abduction in AGNI
7 poems from The Abduction in Four Way Books’ The Translator Page
Poems from The Abduction in Exchanges Literary Journal
We arrived and the miracle happened.
It was the sea and the wind in the bells.
We came from far, from years
Thirsty as dust, from humble
fishermen’s nets on barren shore.
—José Manuel Cardona
There’s something about Spanish poetry, this particular poetry, where nothing appears lost in translation. Its bold, declarative tone, elevated content, mystical moments, contemplation, and fire show through in Spanish and now English. Especially memorable are the 20 poems to Circe.
—Grace Cavalieri, The Washington Independent Review of Books
Cardona’s collection harnesses the power of nostalgia in the Greek sense, a longing for home, to shine through the sadness of some of its poems to remind readers that “in the sunrises / memory comes back to” us, and we are richer for it.
Hélène Cardona’s translation of her father’s poetic anthology imbues the same reverence to the Old Masters of world literature, among them Homer, Góngora, and Shakespeare—from the last of whom the collection takes its title—into the fabric of its English lines as the originals show.
—Jordi Alonso, World Literature Today
In a world that needs more witches, this collection is a joy to read: the author gives the power to the reader to create the witch, our Circe, and carry her name and spells with us.
—Rachael Daum, Bookaccino
In years, I have not read a poetry more expansive, gripping, and beautiful for the true music of language. I have been enthusiastically revitalized by the recent encounter with the poetry of José Manual Cardona, masterfully translated by his daughter, poet Hélène Cardona. In her hands, Birnam Wood sings to us in a rendering that is lush and passionate.
—Rustin Larson, The Iowa Source
Circe, with her links to the traveller as well as the metamorphic and the Joycean sensuality of linguistic play, functions as both a lover and a celebration of language. Cardona’s pieces are indeed Orphic lyres.
—Elizabeth Ridout, Agenda Poetry
Cardona is a deeply engagé poet embodying human suffering in Spain as elsewhere. A spirited, inspired translation by José Manuel Cardona’s daughter, the polyglot American poet Hélène Cardona.
—Margaret Saine, California Quarterly
Hélène Cardona has produced a very fine translation in ‘Birnam Wood’, a collection of her father’s poetry of travel and experience, the Ibiza poet, José Manuel Cardona, rich in language, metaphor and imagery. A lovely book and a must for students and poetry-lovers alike.
—Fred Johnston, Galway Western Writers’ Centre
Hélène Cardona is a seasoned translator. She has provided a service in sharing her father’s work with us in English, shedding additional light on that generation of Spanish poets who were forced into exile from their country. She lets us feel the pain of distance and separation as well as of life in new places.
—Don Cellini, The Ofi Press Magazine
Birnam Wood by Spanish poet José Manuel Cardona, and translated by his daughter, Hélène Cardona, is a collection of his absolute best work.
—Isabelle Kenyon, Fly on the Wall Poetry
Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art
TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics
Poem to Circe XIX, The London Magazine
Tom Smithson Dead in his Garret, World Literature Today
There is quite a deep sense of both belonging and not belonging, more of not belonging, and that is very clearly expressed in many of the lines in this collection; but José is not someone who is struggling to belong, through his poems. He has instead found a home in not belonging — the beauty of it.
—Jayant Kashyap, Only Humane
Beyond Elsewhere
by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac
Translated by Hélène Cardona
Beyond Elsewhere is a hauntingly beautiful narrative poem, a dance that at once touches on the universal and uniquely personal. With his debut collection, Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac establishes himself as one of French poetry’s most innovative new voices. His writing is lyrical, masterful, exquisite, an opening into the elusive, affirming the absolute necessity of listening to the world. Beyond Elsewhere is a symphonic poem with boundless language, where past and present meet.
Winner of a Hemingway Grant from the French Ministry of Culture, the Institut Français and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.
Selected by Grace Cavalieri in the Washington Independent Review of Books: May 2016 Exemplars: A roundup of the best poetry.
The Abduction received support for excellence in publication and translation from Albertine Translation, a program created by Villa Albertine
MAram Al-Masri
Translated by Hélène Cardona
The Abduction is a World Literature Today’s 2023 Notable Translation
Winner of the 2024 Independent Press Award
With a tender eloquence that equals the French original, Hélène Cardona brings into English a harrowing tale, The Abduction by Maram Al-Masri, of a new mother devastated by the abduction of her son, kidnapped by his father to be raised in Syria. Now, as the distraught mother powerfully notes, “war rages within me.” Cardona vividly conveys both palpable love and the wisdom learned from tragic loss: “To love, it is to prepare yourself / to be abandoned.” As The Abduction proves, Hélène Cardona is a translator who has the exquisite sensitivity and erudition that this brave, vulnerable work deserves.
—Cynthia Hogue, winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, author of In June the Labyrinth
Using artfully spare language and repetition, Maram Al-Masri takes us deep into the emotional complexities of losing her young child to a patriarchal society. Hélène Cardona’s deft translations capture both the stark immediacy and haunting music of these moving poems, almost letting us believe they were written in English.
—Martha Collins, author of Casualty Reports and Because What Else Could I Do, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award
In maternal bulletins, succinct, austere, and tender, the soul-ravaged speaker of The Abduction, like a Syrian Persephone, speaks from the wintry aftermath of her infant son’s kidnapping (“dusk no longer has your eyes”)—a shocking turn in a contentious divorce battle. The earliest poems in this remarkable sequence convey the female speaker’s first euphoric observations of her child and arc to the windfall of her poignant reunion with her son thirteen years later.
In the face of this domestic catastrophe, of patriarchal cruelty and callousness, Al-Masri takes a terse, almost elemental approach, employing silence and pareddown lyricism as able tools, reminding us of the poet’s champion task (“to write / is to be the boat that saves the drowning”) of seeking trusty, precise language for unbearable grief and waiting.
—Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Texas Poet Laureate and author of The World That the Shooter Left Us
Poetry from The Abduction and Translator’s Statement in MER
3 poems from The Abduction in Anomaly (fka Drunken Boat) 25
7 poems from Liberty Walks Naked in Anomaly (fka Drunken Boat) 25
Poems from Liberty Walks Naked and The Abduction in Agenda Poetry
5 poems from Liberty Walks Naked in Anastamos Journal
5 Poems from I Look at You in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Issue 59
4 poems from Liberty Walks Naked in NATIONAL TRANSLATION MONTH
3 poems from I Look at You in Plume 4
10 poems from The Abduction in The High Window, French supplement
Poems from Liberty Walks Naked and The Abduction in Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing: Tyranny Lessons (2020)
Poems from I Look at You in TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics
A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2018
Winner of the 2022 NYC Big Book Award, 2022 Independent Press Award, 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry, 2019 Readers’ Favorite Award Gold Medal in Poetry, Pinnacle Book Award for Best Bilingual Poetry Collection, Julie Suk Honor, Finalist for the 2019 Eric Hoffer Book Award and the 2019 International Poetry Book Award
Named Best Translation in the Washington Independent Review of Books
Birnam Wood /
El Bosque de Birnam
JOSÉ MANUEL CARDONA
Translated by Hélène Cardona
A bilingual collection in English & Spanish
Birnam Wood is one of the most impressive collections of poetry I’ve read in recent years. It is a work that can sit easily beside Seferis’s great poems of exile and return, or beside Elytis’s gigantic sequence of the Albanian campaign. This is Europe yearning: ‘Exalted were you in my dreams,/ Almost inaccessible like an island/ Sought and sought for years.’
—Thomas McCarthy, Poetry International
These are poems of solid classical diction, keenly aware of the rich traditions that precede it, where mythology, travel and personal memory represent starting points for erotic and metaphysical reflection. —Andrés Neuman, from the Preface
José Manuel Cardona’s Birnam Wood is a superb account of his travels around the world in the service of poetry.
—Christopher Merrill
Cardona is an essential twentieth-century Spanish poet. His poems journey toward an ever-receding home.
—Marsha de la O
The lush and mystical poetry of José Manuel Cardona’s Birnam Wood is firmly rooted in the world of classical mythology as a means of articulating what is human and timeless.
—Blas Falconer
Hélène Cardona’s translations are revelations of language and image, a voice dipped in clear water and wrung through her careful hands.
—Dorianne Laux
Like the great Spanish poets of his time, he takes from 16th and 17th century poets, from Saint John of the Cross to Luis de Góngora to Antonio Machado and Federico García Lorca.
—Willis Barnstone
Birnam Wood is a spell-binding, spell-bound book. José Manuel Cardona was one of many Spanish intellectuals exiled by the Franco government, and the poems reflect the anguish and longings of the exile, embodied most powerfully in the figure of Odysseus.
—Sidney Wade, The Los Angeles Review
“This book is a forest of love, the richness grown from the shared familiar roots in the fertile Spanish soil of poetry, then spread around the world.”
—Mark Eisner, North of Oxford
When you take down a book by a master poet like José Cardona you are, while reading his work, reliving, at least for a short spell, the magic of the great moderns and ancients. Hélène Cardona’s translation of her father’s work must be the crowning achievement so far in her own poetic career. For he reads in English as poetry, not as mere translation. I can’t offer better praise than this.
—Peter O’Neill, Levure Littéraire.
Cardona offers implacable, sublime juxtapositions of language which defy categorization. Birnam Wood is a paean to the importance of awe to human survival. With its roots firmly planted in classical mythology, Birnam Wood leaps into the air time and time again and absorbs itself thoroughly in the mystery of returning to earth. Birnam Wood is inexplicably suspended between mortality and immortality; groundedness and blind faith; past and future; courage and fear—it is a song for the ages, fascinating anew with every turn of an eclectic, sirenic page.
—Rich Follett, Readers’ Favorite
Beautiful. Themes of longing and belonging echo the sense that someone you love does not belong to you but longs to be with you.
—Emma Lee’s Blog
Probably the best poetry collection I’ve read all year! A passionate collection. Gorgeous!
—Bonnie Hearn Hill’s Great Day Book Club’s Book of the Month
Waxwing Magazine, José Manuel Cardona contributor bio
The American Journal of Poetry
Poemas, Periódico de poesía
La poesía de José Manuel Cardona, Periódico de poesía, an essay by Hélène Cardona
“One never loses one’s roots, even when living abroad. My real homeland has been Ibiza and I have always maintained bonds with it, like my friendship with the poet Marià Villangómez.” —José Manuel Cardona
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Praise
Beyond Elsewhere by French poet Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, and translated by Hélène Cardona is a wonderfully lyric, mesmerizing poetic meditation on desire, love, the soul, and spirituality. Beyond Elsewhere defies definition, hovering in that physical space somewhere above us, just beyond reach, but visible in a breathless lyrical cloud. As Arnou-Laujeac states: “I now know human passion is exclusive, symbiotic, psychotropic, but that the key is the spell eluding it, the time that tears it to pieces.” Arnou-Laujeac’s poems are psychotropic — a beautiful new voice in poetry. —Victoria Chang
“This is the absolute dawn,” Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac declares in the final pages of Beyond Elsewhere, a dazzling hymn to the currents of desire that shape each individual life. This is a testament to the ways in which love lights an invisible path to the morning when “Everything here is an Elsewhere.” Do not miss the chance to take this exhilarating journey. —Christopher Merrill
Beyond Elsewhere is a breathless testament to the transcendent power of love, ranging as it emerges from the poet’s pen, from the attraction between individuals to the diffuse but unmistakable connection between the soul and the universe from which it emerges and for which it serves as a kind of holy mirror. Cardona’s translation captures Arnou-Laujeac’s fervor in this series of prose poems that have captivated the attention of the French literati.
—World Literature Today, May 2017
Beyond Elsewhere by French poet Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, and translated by Hélène Cardona, creates a new mythopoetic language of transformation.
French author Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac’s poetic narrative is just exquisite – enough said. —Andrew Singer, Trafika Europe
This incandescent metonym of light is, writ small, a marriage of eastern and western wisdoms — a Bildungsroman describing the arc of a young man’s journey from innocence, through passion and despair, to the great clarity of spiritual understanding. Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac’s intensely visual account, clothed in lyrical image and visionary flame, in Hélène Cardona’s transcendent translation, easily carries us along in his brightly burning chariot in quest of the Divine. —Sidney Wade
Hélène Cardona’s new translation confirms again her exquisite powers and imagination in turning Arnou-Laujeac’s amazing work into an English classic. She X-rays the original, and comes out with an inner picture faithful to beauty and the author’s flowing dexterity. Her singing flare illumines the English version, which is now the original. Discover Hélène’s invitation to voyage. —Willis Barnstone
“I Wander in the Desert of the World:” Gabriel Arnou–Laujeac’s Prose-Poetry on Exile and the Search for Fulfillment
In Arnou-Laujeac’s Beyond Elsewhere – through Hélène Cardona’s interpretative efforts – we find a lyrical narrative that is soaked in a saddening sense of loss, of exile and set alight by a persistent, gloriously hopeful search for the ineffable, the absolute.
Stylistically spontaneous and thematically deep, Beyond Elsewhere is a challenging read. Arnou-Laujeac effortlessly distills whole schools of knowledge in short verses and phrases.
Ce que nous portons
by Dorianne Laux
Translated by Hélène Cardona
Les poèmes de Dorianne Laux sont sensuels, passionnés, ancrés dans la terre et la vie de tous les jours ; ce sont des prières, des témoignages de rites de passage. Ils parlent de la maternité, du travail, de fraternité et d’amour. Elle nous dévoile des histoires terribles, des douleurs et joies profondes, ainsi que des actes de bonté et de rédemption. Pour Dorianne, “grâce à la poésie, nous restons conscients de l’importance de nos vies individuelles.”
What We Carry (Boa Editions) was a Finalist of the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Dorianne Laux’s poetry is a poetry of risk; it goes to the very edge of extinction to find the hard facts that need to be sung. What We Carry includes poems of survival, poems of healing, poems of affirmation and poems of celebration.
That’s how it is sometimes —
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it. —from Dust
Il en est ainsi parfois —
Dieu vient à ta fenêtre,
tout de lumière éclatant, avec des ailes noires,
et tu es juste trop fatiguée pour l’ouvrir. —from Poussière
Interview with Dorianne Laux in Plume
Reviews
Ce que nous portons ? De la nostalgie, des regrets, des envies, des parfums de bonheur, des chagrins enfouis… « Quelque soit le chagrin, son poids/nous sommes obligés de le porter ». Il faut lire Dorianne Laux pour s’en convaincre — s’il en était besoin.
—Critique de Pierre Tanguy, Recours au Poème
Le vrai amour… la seule chose qui compte, qui reste, « que nous portons », plus que nos cœurs, nos corps, plus que nos idées, idéaux, combats, plus même que la vie et la mort, que nos proches ou nos perdus de vue, la trace de notre lien, de notre vérité intime, inconsciente, universelle, absolue – notre humanité.
Voici maintenant un livre qui porte, telles des nouvelles en puissance, les aventures quotidiennes d’une fée déguisée en personne-tout-le-monde : Dorianne Laux, traduite par Hélène Cardona… La fascination vient de l’immédiateté du réel, mais d’un réel qui se suspend. À force de l’avoir subi, vous êtes préparé à l’avènement. Car voilà, ce qui arrive dans ces poèmes, c’est que la narration s’arrête subitement… ou non, plutôt elle glisse… Et c’est cette suspension qui fait le vrai événement, cet étonnement, qui crée le miracle que nous raconte la poète, à savoir, l’inénarrable moment de prise de conscience de l’envers du décor…
— Review by Dana Shishmanian, Francopolis
Whitman’s Civil War
Whitman et La Guerre de Sécession
co-translated by Hélène Cardona and Yves Lambrecht
WhitmanWeb
International Writing Program, University of Iowa
The Civil War Writings retrace Walt Whitman’s writing and service as a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War
With commentaries by Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill, which explore how writing and image can be used to examine war, conflict, trauma, and reconciliation — in Whitman’s time and today.
ONE breath, O my silent soul,
A perfum’d thought—no more I ask, for the sake of all
dead soldiers.
—From “Hymn of Dead Soldiers”
UN souffle, Ô mon âme silencieuse,
Une pensée parfumée — je ne demande rien de plus,
pour le salut de tous les soldats morts.
—De « Hymne aux soldats morts »
Terreurs de Frontières (Les Publications du Centre Challenges, Port-au-Prince, Haïti, 2022), co- translation into French
Translations in Literary Journals
MARAM AL-MASRI
Two poems from The Abduction in World Literature Today
“He has begun to speak to me” from The Abduction in AGNI
Ten poems from The Abduction in The High Window, French supplement
Poems from Liberty Walks Naked and The Abduction in Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing: Tyranny Lessons (2020)
Poems from The Abduction in Exchanges Literary Journal
Poems from I Look at You in TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics
Poems from Liberty Walks Naked and The Abduction in Agenda Poetry
Three poems from The Abduction in Anomaly (fka Drunken Boat) 25
Seven poems from Liberty Walks Naked in Anomaly (fka Drunken Boat) 25
Five poems from Liberty Walks Naked in Anastamos Journal
Five Poems from I Look at You in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Issue 59
Four poems from Liberty Walks Naked in NATIONAL TRANSLATION MONTH
Three poems from I Look at You in Plume 4
CHRISTIANE SINGER
The Feminine, Land of Welcome in Asymptote
Translator’s Note in Asymptote
I also cannot get the words of Christiane Singer out of my head. In her essay, “The Feminine, Land of Welcome,” translated from the French by Hélène Cardona, she writes to women, “stand bewitched and ready to leap: the queen, the sister, the lover, the friend, the mother—all those who have the genius for relationship, for welcoming. The genius for inventing life.” She highlights the danger of defining women only by their commonalities, as well as the horrors that could have come to pass—and could still—in a world without women. Their absence would be powerfully felt, even in comparison to situations in which they are already roundly ignored or discredited. —Madeline Jones, Asymptote Blog Editor
ERIC SARNER
Poetry in The Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation
Translator’s Note in The Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation
NICOLAS GRENIER
Six Haikus from Rosetta in TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Vol 5, No 4
JEAN-CLAUDE RENARD
The Space of the Spoken Word in Washington Square Review, Summer/Fall 2012, Issue 30
ARTHUR RIMBAUD – CHARLES BAUDELAIRE – ALOYSIUS BERTRAND
Skin has its aroma, its murmur,
Its fiery color and mystery.
Thus love begins with the skin,
With dark hair, and penetrates
Like a bull horn, to the bones.
To the bones, Circe, you’ve penetrated,
Into my deep bones that proclaim
The vertebrate pain of the species.
I open my blood in love and offer it to you
—José Manuel Cardona
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