Meanwhile take my hand

Meanwhile Take My Hand

Graywolf Press, 2007

Translation: Elizabeth Macklin

Kirmen Uribe has become one of the best-known Basque-language writers—an important contemporary voice from a vital but largely unknown language. Meanwhile Take My Hand presents Uribe’s poetry to English readers in both the original and in the poet Elizabeth Macklin’s skillful and award-winning translations. In these poems are the drug addicts of Spanish coastal fishing towns, the paved-over rivers of urbanized medieval cities, the remains of loving relationships, whether entirely uprooted or making do with companionable silence. The Basque phrase—Bitartean heldu eskutik—that became the book’s title—Meanwhile Take My Hand—Uribe has said is “what you say when there’s nothing at all you can say.”

“The poems are a beacon of light and memory, surrounded by conflict, explosion and interruption.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Unusually wise for a young man.”—Booklist

“[Uribe’s] lyricist’s sensibility teaches him to write poems as lucid and lilting as songs.” —The Harvard Book Review

“These poems are lyrical and spoken, speaking of love and family, of legend and of war, of dangerous friends and the dangerous world. They weep out of the particular with wisdom and feeling.” —American Poet

“Elizabeth Macklin’s translation is crisp and pure.”—New York Newsday

“Elizabeth Macklin is the first American poet to venture deep into Euskara, that unexplored territory, and she’s found there a contemporary ancient lyricist. Fishermen and modernists, history and eroticism, cuckoos and e-mails, fairy tales and newspaper clippings: Uribe’s olive tree ‘lives two thousand years but tends to remember nothing.’ His poems remind us that poetry tends to remember everything.”—Eliot Weinberger

“Thank you Elizabeth Macklin for bringing to English readers the poetry of Kirmen Uribe written in the oldest European language. Macklin’s English, like Uribe’s Euskara, is lyrical with a hard edge, sad and funny, rich in paradoxes. Uribe is a poet of consequence and Macklin has accomplished no small feat.” —Mark Kurlansky, author of The Basque History of the World

“Sharply alive, prolific of freshness, in Meanwhile Take My Hand no poem lacks its flash of discovery and verbal surprise. Here is new pleasure, access freely given to a deep culture unknown to most of us. A vivid inheritance, written and oral, comes over to us richly in these savvy, wry, and hope-filled lyrics. Uribe welcomes us with incursive thought and a ready diction, quick to strike home. Because the English text is such a joy to read, the translations must be excellent. Quotable examples are on every page. Read it and see.”—Marie Ponsot

“Elizabeth Macklin’s translations of Kirmen Uribe’s poems throw a door wide open on a landscape both foreign and familiar, whose otherness is explicated by the clarity of the light in which it’s bathed. Uribe is a poet whose concerns embrace all that’s human (lovemaking, fable-making, growth, and death): like Darwish, Ritsos, or Zagajewski, he’s a poet of worldwide scope.”—Marilyn Hacker