I found, as I sat down to read this issue, that what I was hungry for was urgency, vitality, wit and I found pieces that gave me what I was looking for. “There’s No Cure for the Dead” by Nazli Karabiyikoglu (tr. Ralph Hubbell) weaves a breathtakingly complex tapestry, rife with competing rhythms and energies. Selim Özdoğan’s “Seven Difficulties and One Ever-Narrowing Path” (tr. Katy Derbyshire) brought exactly the acerbic, incisive voice I needed. The Alfred Döblin story “The Woman Who Walked In Her Sleep” (tr. Joachim Redner) was filled with great verbs, gestures, colors, sounds, taking the reader on a dizzying trajectory, a plummet, really, from the character swanning about Berlin, showing off his colorful fashion ensemble, to a murderous rag doll come to life. Menke Katz’s poems with their structural challenges around diminishing or growing numbers of syllables and the love of Yiddish had me re-reading them and admiring the translation. And Aco Šopov’s deep, painful poems (tr. Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer) after the devastation of the 1963 Skopje earthquake show how despair communicates across decades and has much to say to us about loss and survival now, sixty years later.
—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor
This issue I was particularly blown away by the quality of the interviews published. The César Aira interview conducted by Michal Zechariah is truthfully hilarious, and the line of questioning really allows his trademark wit and absurdism to shine through. I found Geetanjali Shree’s interview with Rose Bialer to be incredibly generous and thoughtful, fascinating and sharp. In both cases, I thought a really strong sense of their writing came through thanks to the interviewers. The visual section brought together two incredible artists—I’m researching the interplay of poetic text and space at the moment, so Lynn Xu’s thinking (teased out by Laura Copelin) really spoke to me, and I appreciated the climate focus of Bahia Shehab’s work, and her interview with Heather Green. Last but certainly not least, I loved Jared Joseph’s review of Johannes Göransson’s Summer. As a researcher, Göransson’s thinking on poetry translation has been incredibly insightful, and I enjoyed the same insights applied to his work, really engaging in depth with poetry as a genre and mode of being. As a bonus, I thought the criticism section was pleasantly varied in terms of geographies and genres!
—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach
All the fiction pieces in this issue are truly marvelous, as if they’re in conversation with one another! For example, Kim Cho Yeop’s “Laura” (tr. Sukyoung Sukie Kim) and Dalih Sembiring’s “Floccinaucinihilipilificatius” (tr. Avram Maurits) can be seen as companion pieces, as both stories deal with corporeal limitations and spiritual transcendence. Laura’s sci-fi context, on various conditions related to body dysmorphia, eloquently evokes the plight of non-binary and transgender groups, while Floccinaucinihilipilificatius represents a metaphorical lotus—its trajectory from pain and putrefaction toward the light of maternal love. There’s a sense of metaphysical wonder to both stories—even though one is inspired by science and the other by magical realism. Similarly, Rose Bialer’s interview with Geetanjali Shree can also be read as a celebration of the multi-bodied aspects of the Hindi language—a resplendent marriage between corps and spirit. Same with the imagistic beauty of Menke Katz’s poetry, where ideas and their physical manifestations are inextricably linked. On the other hand, Alfred Döblin’s “The Woman Who Walked In Her Sleep,” is a literally haunting, multi-genre cautionary tale showing how the denial of bodily desire, manifest through sadistic mind games, can lead to fatal results.
—Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora
Linda Maria Baros’s “No man has defended you” (tr. Emily Graham) is a heart-wrenching piece in which the tension between sensuality and violence, will and imposition, oppression and protection is palpable. I love how the poet’s imagination, memorably dark, transcends the map of desires and obscure impulses by working flesh into symbols (the sword, the heron, the levitation), and symbols into physical reality, always withering and decaying (the urinals, the worms, the genital mutilations). A dark fairy tale with a language that cuts and an otherworldly sense of the physical world.
The mind of the poet is caught in the middle of a long thinking process—in the short, vivid lines and the flow of the poem somewhere between seeing and thinking. Like someone whispering to themselves the directions to somewhere, and yet gets lost in the experience of traveling, Hélène Dorion’s work (tr. Susanna Lang) asks for the reader’s temporary surrender to the tidal rhythms of the poem.
Brief and bright, Juana Peñate Montejo’s poems (tr. Carol Rose Little and Charlotte Friedman) have the glimmer of the riddle and the clarity of the haiku. Nature is neither friend nor foe, but a compromised, complex reality that intertwines with the will of the poet without ever allowing the speaker either utter despair or absolute consolation. All are part of the unforgiving wheel of time, which remains the ultimate mystery.
I really loved Kim Cheom-seon’s hybrid work (tr. Matt Reeck and Jeonghyun Mun), in which poetry, prose, and painting comment on each other, each using a different pair of eyes to look at the same thing. The characters that inhabit this work are powerful and enigmatic—they seem to let you peer through them, but then deny you complete access. Their reticence is poetic: a refusal of total disclosure as a means to assert one’s own right to being complicated, to avoid oversimplification.
If there is such a thing as a “soul,” surely language would have something to do with it. As a bilingual poet, I often have to wonder what it means for me to have “given myself” to a language that is not my mother tongue, and where my native Italian resides in life and career mostly carried out in English. I felt very close to Nina Kossman’s self-translated essay, which tries to break down (and piece back together) a Russian-American identity and looks for the seams in the soul of language.
—Marina Dora Martino, Assistant Managing Editor (Poetry)
I love Yente Serdatsky’s gutsy style in her defence of the Yiddish language (tr. Dalia Wolfson) as a language worth holding on to and writing literature in. Linda Maria Baros’s poem (tr. Emily Graham), with its accusatory refrain “No man has defended you,” expresses for me a general malaise and dissatisfaction in relations between women and men, of women towards men, in sexual relations, above all. The refrain gives the poem structure and an insistent power, and the language is either directly, or through arresting images, boldly sexual. Max Czollek’s powerful article (tr. Jon Cho-Polizzi) addresses two important issues, within the context of German politics, but relevant beyond that country: the rise of the far right; and the difficulty in having full and open discussion of the various issues our societies are grappling with or undermined by. The specific concern in Czollek’s piece is the failure to address adequately the threat posed by Alternative für Deutschland. In other democracies, we also need to be more probing, outspoken and active in protecting the rights and protections we have and fighting attempts to limit them.
—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor (Issue Production)
Abby Walthausen’s review of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Kibogo is one of the best reviews I’ve read in a long time with its nuanced engagement with the translation and equally nuanced approach to the excellent book. In the Mohammed Khair-Eddine piece (tr. Conor Bracken), I especially enjoyed the metacommentary on writing in French, and the politics of language choice. In the issue’s Visual section, we featured an intimate and scintillating conversation between Laura Copelin and Lynn Xu in which the two discuss the co-creation of an immersive installation, based on Xu’s 2022 poetry collection, And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson. Xu asks, “If the axis of the book is time, what do you do when the dominant axis of the museum is space?” Both Xu and Copelin investigate (as does the book) profound and surprising questions about the relation of time to the (often simultaneous) acts and states of reading, collaborating, and mothering. In the second visual piece, I interviewed multidisciplinary artist and activist Bahia Shehab, one of the founders of the design program at the American University in Cairo and the co-author of A History of Arab Graphic Design, about her vibrant, overlapping practices as street artist, historian of art and design, muralist, and creator of opensource installation art, which she invites others to recreate elsewhere.
—Heather Green, Visual Editor
Each piece in the Nonfiction Section of this issue comes from writers of diverse backgrounds writing about and in European languages. Selim Özdoğan, translated by Katy Derbyshire, challenges ideas of a universal literary standard in German. Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, translated by Conor Bracken, tells us that, “The true writer is always a stranger in the language he expresses himself in,” and, “It’s the language that possesses him.” Nina Kossman, translating herself, reminds us that concepts about a writer’s background defining a writer can be very tricky, can make, “you lose your way in your own words, lest you do not see the forest (душа) for the trees (words).” And Max Czollek, translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi, explains that “the staging of culture and diversity for German mainstream society is a very different animal than the actual recognition of diversity” in his call to De-Integrate!
—Ian Ross Singleton, Nonfiction Editor
In this issue’s Drama section, we encounter the fraught interpersonal relationships of people caught in thorny sociopolitical circumstances, often out of their control. In Latvian playwright Justine Klava’s Ladies translated by leva Lakute, a grandmother, daughter and granddaughter struggle to find common ground as the spectre of violence erupts in their home accidentally. The women push and pull against the tides of a changing world and the perennial metaphorical wolf at the door that haunts them. in the late Viennese playwright Anna Gmeyner’s play Automat translated by Neil Blackadder, a man and a woman meet under mysterious, furtive circumstances. On the cusp of a world turning ever more brutal, there is the faint flicker of connection between them, which begins as transactional but perhaps may become something deeper and more profound. Two poignant pieces that hold the veritable mirror up to nature.
—Caridad Svich, Drama Editor
What does it mean to read literature in translation? And what does it mean to be a translator given the politics of world literature and the hegemony of English? These questions are front and center of Jake Goldwasser’s review of Except for This Unseen Thread by Ra’ad Abdulqadir. It is a challenge posed by the translator of the text, Mona Kareem, and one that Goldwasser tackles head on, including the implications of being an English-language reader of a non-Western language book. The creation of a national literature as means of resistance against the destructive power of (cultural) colonialism is explored beautifully in Abby Walthausen’s review of Kibogo by French-Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga, a novel about the importance of myth and narrative.
—Barbara Halla, Criticism Editor
*****
Read more from the blog: