Maia Evrona is a poet, prose writer and translator. She has been called a representative of a “new generation of Yiddish poet-translators."
Originally from Massachusetts, she grew up with a serious illness. After having been too ill to attend high school and college, she was accepted into the Bennington Writing Seminars at the age of twenty, without a bachelor’s degree. Since then, her poetry has been supported with two joint Fulbright Scholar Awards to Spain and Greece, along with other honors.
Over a hundred of her translations have appeared in journals, along with her own self-translations, from English to Yiddish, of her own poetry. Her renderings of Avrom Sutzkever have garnered a significant following, and were awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her translations of Ukraine-born poet Yosef Kerler are forthcoming from White Goat Press. She has also translated Atahualpa Yupanqui from Spanish into English.
Like many writers, she wishes she were really a singer. She manages that longing by treating her poetry readings like borderline musical performances, and by engaging with music through her other talent: She has been dancing Argentine tango for ten years.
She happened to be on the island of Hydra the week Leonard Cohen passed away, the subject of this sample poem:
One Way to Say Goodbye
He passes away while democracy falters
on its way to the USA, just before the holiday
for Hydra’s patron saint. The same
bells ring, the same processions are made,
the same these priests have been making for centuries.
The poets and writers and drifters of the sixties
are gone. No one plays a guitar under the pine tree
at Dousko’s now that the tourists, too, are gone for the winter.
The electricity he lamented and running water
have stayed so the few restaurants play
recordings of Bird on a Wire and Hey, That’s No Way
for me and the priests. Tea and oranges, flowers
and pomegranates multiply at his door. Who am I here,
a poet after the poets and writers and drifters
have disappeared? This is the way
I have always listened to Leonard Cohen anyway,
on my own processions through streets,
sitting in doorways under the moon,
alone in a room. Here are the rooms
where he wrote songs I traveled through
when I was sick for a decade, over the wall
is the terrace from the photograph I studied:
Leonard Cohen playing guitar in the eighties
after the other poets and writers, the drifters were gone,
Leonard Cohen singing to the rooftops, to the mountain.
Learn More: http://www.maiaevrona.com