Our Spring 2023 issue is alive. Animated with the wide plethora of voices, lifeforms, and phenomenon from thirty different countries, this selection of world literature is moving, feeling, singing, and changing—wonderfully emblematic of writing’s capacities to transcend the page or the screen. To aid you in your explorations of this multivalent “Vivarium,” our blog editors present their favourites from the issue, including our first ever feature of Bolivian literature, and work from Portugal’s famed modernist, Fernando Pessoa.
“Love does not fulfill itself,” the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy once wrote, “it always arrives in the promise and as the promise.” Though it seems almost flippant, in this line is the (not so well-kept) secret that has always led me to look for love in poems, that moves me to believe there is still no better medium than poetry to offer us love’s canyons and shadows, and that it is the poem’s purposeful language which allows us to seek love out—not in the validating or reciprocating constructs of daily life, but in truer forms: those sublime visions, conquerings of time, and suspensions of reality. Nancy knew that love is unfulfillable because its absolution is impossible, but it still comes to us as inextricable from eternity: the promise of love is love’s own perpetuity, the promise that love’s law is the one that overcomes all others. And though there are great, sweeping narratives of love in novels, there are wondrous portrayals of love in theatre and in cinema, there are photographs and paintings that capture love’s possibilities and devastations, but the reason I return to the poem is that it, too, is a form that recognises its own innate impossibility (because how can a word capture any of this), and then goes on to form its own laws, which enact the impossible.
Mariana Berenice Bredow Vargas’s alluring, propulsive work, “Let it Go,” is one of the most magical love poems I have come across in some time. Translated with the expert, time-keeping ear of Forrest Gander (whose prowess is especially evident in his rendering of the last lines), the piece begins with an invitation and does not wait a beat before seemingly taking us by the hand to sweep over the landscape, magic carpet-ing over the exhaustive obligations of everyday patterns and collected burdens, up and towards the vast and imagined horizon that separates the awake and the dreamed, into the kaleidoscoped marvels and cacophonic frequencies of everything the world has to offer. The poem is an exalted plea for the lover to recognise the availability of immense beauty and profound joy, but also a tender admittance that one can only get there travelling alongside another: “. . . there’s life // dreaming you past the pain, let’s go, I want / to dream it too . . .” Balancing the imploring voice of a hopeful romantic with the resonant fact that fantasy is essential to anyone wanting to live, within Vargas’s impatient call is the promise of love—a promise so beautiful, it almost doesn’t need to be kept.
The poems of Franca Mancinelli included in this issue are not love poems, per se, but they hold the same enchantment and sensitivity that comes from looking long at an object of one’s devotion. The seven brief works, translated with delicate, purposeful precision by John Taylor, have the quiet certainty of being rooted within the body while it is examining connections that pull the mind outward. Pinpointing those shifting spaces in which something of one’s own is turned into something else by the world, Mancinelli deftly stamps her brief lines with a sense of unfurling, of metamorphosis, of awakening. The gaze is pulled out of the eye; a woman bears fruit; a daughter comes as a translation. In these sensitive awakenings of boundaries and shifts, the poems divagate and seek new definitions, moving curiously onward to find out what happens in the middle of becoming, and what is awaiting at the end.
Accompanying these lucid miniatures is an exquisite interview with the poet, conducted by Adele Bardazzi and Roberto Binetti. In an expansive, meditative, and incredibly lyrical conversation, Bardazzi and Binetti query Mancinelli on her use of rhythm, her application of measure, her defiance of genre, and change as her subject and occupation. What results is an elucidation of how the body can physically play—as if it were an instrument—the string of a poetic line, of the sacred objects that allow one to tap into unseen currents, poetry as a “mother tongue,” the presence of silence, and the power of uniting the beginning with the end. Mancinelli is a generous, ethereal, and illuminating thinker, anchoring her spare poems into a deep metaphysics of transformation and cosmic harmony; Bardazzi and Binetti are insightful and brilliant interviewers, conducting their authority of questions with tremendous intelligence and respect for Mancinelli’s work. To read this elucidating dialogue after spending time with her poems makes for such an impactful sequence of thinking; one sees exactly as the poet had, when she tells us: “I recognized a language that was coming to save me.”
To be saved . . . from tedium, from mediocrity, from misery. Love cannot promise to deliver us from all of that, but even in a few (exceptional) poems, writing shows that it can—and has.
—Xiao Yue Shan
“Look: everything is literature,” says Álvaro de Campos, one of Fernando Pessoa’s many literary alter egos, in translation by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. For de Campos, life is lived through the repetition of others’ stories, of patterns that have already been set. “Everything,” he says, “comes to us from outside, like the rain . . . Do you know why you are so sad? It’s because of Plato . . . And humanity loves because it has heard others speak of love.” Jull Costa and Ferrari’s conversational, rhythmic translation of de Campos’s late style is full of despair and humor, and the poem offers a clever commentary on Pessoa’s literary project. “Most of us,” de Campos—a fully-realized creature of Pessoa’s imagination—says, “are pages that read like something out of a novel.”
If that is, for de Campos, a bitter truth, for the clients in Maria Galinas‘s Mole Crickets, translated by Lisa C. Hayden, it is a desperate wish. Galinas’s narrator calls himself an editor, and he offers a strange service: he writes his clients’ lives as classic literature. In Hayden’s translation, the editor is not-quite removed, reclusive, and funny: he observes, about his clients’ dream careers, “Guys like this usually say sailor or cosmonaut. . . . If it’s sailor, he’s a romantic. If it’s cosmonaut, he’s a romantic and a fool.” The sessions the editor has with his clients resemble therapy, dredging up childhood traumas and petty slights. The editor remarks that “I remember how scared I was when I was just starting out, when one of my clients suddenly burst into tears.” Here, everyone is looking for stories that will let them make sense of their lives.
The line—or lack thereof—between fiction and reality is also the theme Alex Lanz takes up in his review of Mircea Cărtărescu’s surreal and syncretic Solenoid. Lans writes that “Solenoid is ‘not a novel’ according to the narrator of this document, who describes it instead as a long diary made up of several notebooks, which record the anomalies he has experienced for most of his conscious and unconscious life.” The narrator of Solenoid offers a rejoinder to de Campos and a critique of Galinas’s editor: “Why would I, a three-dimensional creature, take as a guide the two dimensions of an ordinary text?” Lanz writes that the novel—itself a densely metatextual, self-referential and self-abnegating demonstration of literature’s dizzying possibilities—is a chronicle of the narrator’s “lifelong quest to escape himself,” and it is also a complex treatment of literature’s relationship to reality and escape (“fiction,” Lanz writes, “fastens its readers to the world.”). Cărtărescu’s novel, Lanz writes, “sustains both the quotidian and absurdist tenors” of literature, of life.
—Meghan Racklin
*****
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