Place: Italy

Our Spring 2020 Issue Has Landed!

April 16, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Feat. Anton Chekhov, Tsering Woeser, Phan Nhiên Hạo, Chus Pato and Alba Cid in our Galician Feature amid new work from 30 countries

Explore the grand scheme of things in Asymptote’s Spring 2020 edition “A Primal Design,” featuring poetry by Zuzanna Ginczanka and Phan Nhiên Hạo, drama from the great Anton Chekhov, Joshua Craze’s review of António Lobo Antunes’ latest fiction, and Fiona Bell’s essay on the “diva mode” of translation. Our Special Feature this season showcases Galician poetry, headlined by Chus Pato. The vivid colors of guest artist Ishibashi Chiharu set the tone for exciting new work from 30 countries and 24 languages, while Ain Bailey’s sonic art provides a fitting soundtrack!

The oracle reveals the obscure plan that drives history, and Galicia, as evoked by its poets, shimmers with oracular resonance. “Language endures / Bodies do not,” declares Gonzalo Hermo, and indeed, these verses seem meant for stone inscriptions. Lara Dopazo Ruibal’s work takes a more visceral approach: “the fig tree grows inside me while the scorpion hunts the ants coming out of my eyes.” But everywhere these poets deal in the essential, the “gold in its original depths,” as Alba Cid writes.

The primeval and the primordial abound in highlights like Matteo Meschiari’s dive into prehistory in his powerful fiction, “Red Ivory,” or Auschwitz survivor Edith Bruck’s lyrics, as immediate as they are minimal. Tareq Imam considers the sublime terror of blindness in a Borges-inspired tale, “Through Sightless Eyes”: truly we are as the blind before destiny. History, like that of Tsering Woeser’s immemorial Buddhist Tibet, provides an illusion of clarity in our confusion. Amidst all that disorientation, writes Seo Jung Hak, “Even if I scribble a poem, the absurdity like a fly who doesn’t bother to fly away somewhere is sitting on a chair like an old joke.”

As we sit quarantined in Plato’s cave pondering our collective conundrum, consider casting shadows of your own when you share news of the issue on Facebook or Twitter; as thanks, here’s a free flyer of the issue to print and share with friends!

If the work that we do touches you, consider signing up to our Book Club, or becoming a sustaining member from as little as $5 a month. We couldn’t do it without you!

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What’s New in Translation: April 2020

April 13, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Austyn Wohlers, Clémence Lucchini, Jacqueline Leung, and Sarah Moore

New literature from Algeria, Guadeloupe, Italy, and Japan!

In the newly ruptured world, the questions that arise all seem perplexingly novel. It is somewhat of a tonic, then, that one turns to literature to find that the queries that confound us now are more specific reiterations of questions that have plagued humanity for a long, long time. What is freedom? How do we persist through the turmoil of our nations? What does the past mean for the present? And, perhaps most pertinently, what survives? In this month’s selections in translated literature, four astounding works from around the world encounter and contend with these problems in their singular styles. Below, discover a passionate novel about a real-life Algerian bookseller, a Guadeloupe-set fiction that intermingles personal and national revolution, the latest English-language volume in Roberto Calasso’s grand series on human civilization, and a Japanese literary sensation which contends with feminine pain and perseverance.

our riches

Our Riches by Kaouther Adimi, translated from the French by Chris Andrews, New Directions, 2020

Review by Clémence Lucchini, Educational Arm Assistant

Though one cannot truly stress all the qualities of Our Riches, Kaouther Adimi’s first translated novel into English by Chris Andrews, within the limits of a book review, Adimi has certainly proved that she is able to convey Edmond Charlot’s life long passion for books in less than two hundred pages. In this historical fiction, recognized with two French literary awards, Adimi finds a new way to portray her native Algeria: through Edmond Charlot’s many literary endeavors.

For those who do not know Edmond Charlot (I was among that group before reading this book), he left a great gift to the publishing world by being Camus’ first publisher, by publishing under-represented authors, and last but not least, by pioneering the design of book covers as we know it today in Western Europe, referred to as “the talk of the publishing world” in Adimi’s work. READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

April 11, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Anna Aresi and Sarah Moore

To that grasp / of a palm in another's palm / to that simple act, forbidden to us now—

For the second week of our new Saturday column, In This Together, we present a recent poem from Italian writer Mariangela Gualtieri, newly translated by Anna Aresi and Sarah Moore. Below, Aresi explains the context of Gualtieri’s work and how the poem came to be such an instant success in Italy:

The first case of COVID-19 in Italy was diagnosed on February 21, just days before the Carnival parades and celebrations were scheduled to take place. Everything was immediately canceled and schools were closed, at first only in the most affected regions, until on March 9, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte issued the decree that would bring the entire country into total lockdown. The same day, Mariangela Gualtieri published her poem “Nove marzo duemilaventi” (“March ninth, twenty-twenty”). Within hours, the poem had been shared thousands of times on social media and in messaging apps, effectively becoming the text of the Italian quarantine.

Mariangela Gualtieri is a beloved Italian poet and cofounder of the Teatro Valdoca theater company in Cesena. The company has performed poems and works by major Italian authors, and Gualtieri herself is known for the masterful interpretations of her own works. She read this poem for a local TV channel exactly a month after its publication, on April 9; the recording can be found here (Italian only).

With more time on their hands and prompted by a sense of social responsibility, authors have been prolific during the lockdown, sharing reflections, diaries, and other kinds of writing, often to raise funds for hospitals and other organizations. Only in the months and years to come will we find out what pieces will stand the test of time, but even now we can be sure that this poem is here to stay. Though prompted by an unprecedented state of emergency, Gualtieri’s poem does not read rushed; on the contrary, it is a thought-out, compelling reflection on our (unsustainable) way of life in relation to the environment. Much like Dante’s Commedia, mutatis mutandis of course, the poem establishes a relation between the human microcosm and the universal macrocosm, inviting readers to reconsider our position as both individuals and as a species in relation to the universe.

As a final note on the translation, I should add that a first English translation, by Lucy Rand and Clarissa Botsford, appeared soon after the poem’s release. Rand and Botsford stated that they “deliberately chose to stick very closely to the Italian structure so that readers who do not know Italian can read the original in parallel and appreciate the language to the full.” With the poet’s permission, Sarah Moore and I took a different approach, seeking to provide Asymptote’s readers with an English rendering that also conveys the rhythm, bold syntactical choices, and flow of images of the original.

March ninth, twenty-twenty

by Mariangela Gualtieri

I want to tell you this
we needed to stop.
We knew. We all felt
how our actions
were too frantic. Staying inside of things.
Each outside of ourselves.
Squeezing each hour—making it count.

We needed to stop
and we couldn’t.
It had to be done together.
Slow down the pace.
But we couldn’t.
There was no human strain
that could hold us back. READ MORE…

Voices From Uber: An Interview with Maria Anna Mariani

March 23, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Maya Nguyen

I think that all confessions are driven by some common engine . . . but the time-space of Uber is particularly intimate and sealed.

Uber was once the most valued startup in the world and is used in over 700 cities. In Voci da Uber: Confessioni a motore (Voices From Uber: Motor Confessions), Mucchi Editore, 2019, Maria Anna Mariani performs the experiment of steering conversations with Uber drivers toward revealing intimate details of their lives—toward confession. These confessions are then written into a narrative. Her writing articulates the nuances of communication in the way that only the best of dramas can otherwise capture. This is perhaps the by-product of the oscillation between small talk and confession, where the positions of speaker and listener change so fast one only has time to recalibrate after the fact. I was drawn to the subtle tensions and evasions that contour the openings of contact, empathy, and understanding in such a dynamic terrain of communication. Here, Maria Anna Mariani talks about the process of writing the book and the unique space of Uber that allows for confession.

                                                                                                —Maya Nguen, March 2020

What is a repetition: JOHN 

Route: Streeterville-home
Time: 38 minutes
Traffic: tricky
Car: gray Hyundai Elantra
Average rating: 4.95

Select the material with an eye to variety and alternating themes, discard if there’s already a similar story and cut any nationality that appears twice. This is what I’d decided on when I began writing these pages. Structural constraint number one: avoid repetition. But now I have something to ask you: is a murdered brother a repetition? Which story about a murdered brother should I cut to avoid repeating myself? The one about Aisha or the one about John? Telling someone else’s story without permission, the story of a still breathing someone, is the supreme form of violence: we frequently debate the ethics of exploiting biography, and rightly so. But an even more treacherous problem, it seems to me now, is what to leave out: what I abandon to the unsaid as flawed—flawed because it retraces another life, in its ordinary but also extraordinary moments. What is a repetition?

Maya Nguen (MN): In John’s chapter, you write that you are “telling someone else’s story without permission,” even when that someone, John, wants to tell it. Yet, in Aisha’s chapter, she is reticent and you actively urge her on with your questions. Can you talk about your process in writing this book?

Maria Anna Mariani (MAM): Everything started during one of my rides. The driver and I were doing a bit of small talk, as you usually do when you get into an Uber. And then, all of a sudden, he revealed to me the most personal thing about himself. It was so personal and so haunting. For many days after the ride I found myself thinking about that interaction. What happens to communication when two strangers find themselves locked inside a moving capsule with no way out? How is it possible that the conversation can oscillate between its two antithetical poles: impersonal and stale small talk and the most intimate and daring confession? I wanted to find out. And so I decided to pay the utmost attention to the interactions during my subsequent rides and to retrace these conversations in my writing. But then something else happened. I started manipulating actual conversations in order to push them to their limits, already fashioning them into narratives. The writing got the upper hand. And it became a performance. READ MORE…

Wild Imaginings of Truth: A Review of Elena Ferrante’s Essays

January 15, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Angela Glindemann

We cannot contain the world, in its multitudes and messiness, within the constraints of our text, even when we are claiming to write nonfiction.

Incidental Interventions by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2019

Early in her new collection, Incidental Inventions, Elena Ferrante describes her fascination with a portrait of a nun, displayed in the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples. Its artist is unknown, but Ferrante forms a relationship to the person behind the painting all the same, through the work itself. Although the life and experiences of the artist remain out of reach, Ferrante feels that she could give a name to the creator who is knowable through studying the work: a female name, Ferrante surmises, which would then be “the only true name used to identify her imaginative powers.” 

As I began to reflect on this new collection of articles, I related to this desire to lend language to the snippets of truth that we grasp in life, and to search for meaning in others’ artistic expression. Back in 2018, reading Ferrante’s column for The Guardian as it was published week by week, I had formed an impression of these articles as a light yet thoughtful series of reflections on experiences from the ordinary to the dramatic. Reading about topics as diverse as feminism and the exclamation mark, I’d felt that I’d drifted along from colourful anecdotes in the author’s signature style, through to the often philosophical conclusions that felt natural, or even obvious, in light of the path I’d been encouraged to follow as a reader. In this process, I felt that I was getting to know the author, sharing in snapshots of her life, and feeling a sense of connection from the moments that felt relatable or right within my own world.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Antonia Pozzi

January 7, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Amy Newman

But I burned / with the desire to spring out, / in the encroaching sun

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Antonia Pozzi. Translator Amy Newman writes that “Pozzi’s poetry was posthumously altered by her father Roberto Pozzi to reshape her public image; he scrubbed any evidence of his daughter’s passionate love affairs and her doubts about religion.” These translations represent the restoration of a singular vision, showing that the work of translation can polish away the muck of misrepresentation meant to stifle the subjectivity of women. In these poems the brightness of the mind is painted next to the depths of angst. Here, Pozzi explores the poetry of her own body and what it means to contemplate an individual death in a time of the hierarchy and patriarchy of war.

Thoughtlessness

I remember a September afternoon
in Montello. I still a young girl,
with slender braids and itching
to race wildly with my knees.
My father, crouched inside a passage
dug out in a rise of the ground
pointed out to me through a fissure
the Piave and the hills; he spoke to me
of the war, of himself, of his soldiers.
In the shadow, the grass, cold and sharp
grazed my calves: underground,
the roots were perhaps still sucking
some drops of blood. But I burned
with the desire to spring out,
in the encroaching sun, to gather
a handful of blackberries from a hedge.

Milan 22 May 1929 READ MORE…

New Year, New Horizons!

January 1, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Rachel Allen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Reading resolutions for 2020—brought to you by the blog team.

Happy New Year, reader! To ring in the ’20s, we are getting personal and sharing our own reading resolutions. From literature engaged with the effects of climate change to classic theological texts, here are the reads we have on the radar for 2020. Maybe our titles overlap with some of yours? If you’re inspired, share your resolutions with us in the comments below.

Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor:

We are becoming ever more impelled by the worst-case scenarios, the ultimate consequences of our carelessness. Climate change is cemented at the pinnacle of every engaged mind, consuming the concerns of those on the forefront of human progress—the writers. December is a month of returns, and a trip across the Pacific on my part meant a reabsorption into the beloved stacks of books left behind by a past self who had endlessly imagined the present. I found in those volumes an incredible vitality—it takes considerably more courage to speculate on the future now, yet in our infinitely ideating language, we can’t help it, we imagine naturally, as we have always done.

Usually my reading directives are predictable, by which I mean they’re somewhat “in accordance” with my being a female Chinese poet—the tendency veers towards a healthy majority of women writers, plenty of Chinese literature, and as much poetry as possible. As we approach the new decade, however, I’ve turned my attention to literature more specifically in dialogue with our planet. In Amitav Ghosh’s beautifully urgent book-length essay, The Great Derangement, he convincingly argues for an overhaul of the fiction genre so that it may better address and reflect upon our contemporary precarity. Though the best of our stories are inevitably engaged with our environment, I found Ghosh’s take riveting in its insistence that we continue to build and invent language that is ever more precise, alert, and curious. READ MORE…

My 2019: Barbara Halla

December 20, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

Much is made of relatability in fiction, but it’s not something that I really think about.

As December winds to a close, we at Asymptote are once again reflecting and reminiscing on a year spent with books, those that have spoken to us, accompanied us, and in their own discreet way, carved their paths in the tracks of time alongside us. So today, in lieu of our weekly roundup, we return to our annual series with the following recap of Assistant Editor Barbara Halla’s literary year, filled with character-driven titles that range from the intimate to the epic. 

I had this strange impulse, as I sat down to write my “Year in Reading”, to scrap my outline and do something different: write not about the books that have stayed with me because of how good they were, but focus instead on the books I did not like. A “year in books that made me wish I didn’t know how to read” meditation, so to speak. And that would certainly be fun. Unsurprisingly, I seem to have a lot more to say about the books that made me miserable than the ones I loved, but I fought the impulse. What good would that do, just more misery (and free publicity) to spread in the world. So, back to my outline, and the more traditional rundown of some of the books that meant a lot to me this year.

I am going to start in reverse-chronological order. Much is made of relatability in fiction, but it’s not something that I really think about, unless someone tells me that a specific book is supposed to be particularly relatable to someone of my age/gender/nationality, in which case my brain takes this as a challenge to actively dislike it. While reviewers certainly mentioned its style (Joycean!) and its girth (a brick!), I don’t remember anyone specifically telling me that I should read Ducks, Newburyport because I would find myself in its pages. Lucy Ellmann’s opus, where an American housewife from Ohio spends her day making pies and thinking about everything from the challenges of motherhood to the climate crisis, is certainly a book of our time. But I didn’t expect that my overwhelming reaction to it would be a sense of “if someone could scan my brain this is exactly what I’d imagine it to look like!” As for relatable, this is the only book I have read in my life that shows some pity for tortoise-owners like me, and the fact that our care and attention are treated with complete indifference by the subject of our affection. There is a lesson in there somewhere about love and letting go. READ MORE…

A Blazoned Book of Language: Poems from the Edge of Extinction in Review

December 11, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Moore

The poets in this collection are intensely alert to their struggle, focusing on their work on the language's vulnerability and change.

I am beginning to write in our language,
but it is difficult.

Only the elders speak our words,
and they are forgetting.

So begins “C’etsesen” (“The Poet”), written in Ahtna, an indigenous language of Alaska, by John Elvis Smercer. In 1980, there were about one hundred and twenty speakers of Ahtna. At the time of this poem’s publication in 2011, there were about twenty. Today only about a dozen fluent speakers remain. Smercer’s lines reveal his urgent concern with the disappearance of his language and the weight of his task in preventing the language from slipping away. It is a race against time, between generations, for the young to learn the language before the old leave, taking the words with them.

Chris McCabe, editor of the anthology Poems From the Edge of Extinction, has equally set out on such a task: to collect, record, and preserve poems from multiple endangered languages. The anthology grew out of the Endangered Poetry Project, launched at the National Library, at London’s Southbank Centre, in 2017. The project seeks submissions from the public of any poem in an endangered language in order to build an archive and record of these poems for future generations. Of the world’s seven thousand spoken languages, over half are endangered. By the end of this century, experts estimate that these will have disappeared, with no living speakers remaining. Language activism has been growing since the early 2000s, and the United Nations declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL 2019) to raise global awareness of the consequences of the endangerment of indigenous languages. McCabe’s anthology, published to coincide with IYIL 2019, contains fifty poems, each in a different endangered language (as identified by UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger), presented in the original alongside an English translation; the result is an urgent and illuminating collection encompassing linguistics, sociology, politics, criticism, and philosophy that, in its totality, represents a manifesto of resistance.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Perspective” by Maria Borio

December 10, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Pelosi-Thorpe

that their borders invert onto one another as they age

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Italian poet Maria Borio. This translation of Borio’s work is deft, bringing out the implausibly smooth staccato of the original Italian. The mix of rhythm and flow in the poem is incapsulated by the symbol of the train that cuts and blows as it glides. Here, the movement of images works to push the boundaries of the movement of thoughts: brackets set off points of views that read almost like cinematic direction, suggesting that the pure movement of the verse—and thought—are always conditioned by some perspectival imposition. Come aboard Maria Borio’s powerful train of thought.

Perspective

The horizon line seemed the border of the world
halted midst your pole and the sea. The sea curving since

the earth is a globe, suspended between nose and horizon hands
fist fight, thrusting images of inconsistency against
[the horizon.

READ MORE…

Epic Reasons to Love Greek: An Interview with Andrea Marcolongo

December 2, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

The study of a language that challenges us the way that Greek does teaches us the trade of living . . .

Andrea Marcolongo’s motivation for writing The Ingenious Language is refreshingly straightforward: the Italian writer, translator, and classical scholar wants everyone to fall in love with ancient Greek. Casting aside the rigid pedagogical practices and elitism traditionally associated with classical studies, Marcolongo focuses on the personal, exploring the “extraordinary” challenges, ecstasies, and opportunities ancient Greek offers to all who engage with it. Written for “those who have never studied it and are curious, those who have studied Greek and forgotten it, those who have studied it and hated it, and those who are studying Greek literature in school today,” The Ingenious Language is a bestseller in Italy and, in translation, has been embraced by readers around the world. Masterfully translated from the Italian by Will Schutt and published by Europa Editions, Andrea Marcolongo’s love letter to ancient Greek is now finally available in North America. To celebrate, Asymptote spoke with Marcolongo about falling in love with an ancient language, the “strange” appeal of studying Greek, the myth of Greek color blindness, and the need for a common utopia.

—Sarah Timmer Harvey

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): In the introduction to The Ingenious Language, you mention “falling in love” with ancient Greek as a young girl. Can you tell me why Greek was so appealing to you, why you fell in love?

Andrea Marcolongo (AM): I always say that the love story with Greek is the longest of my life. However, it wasn’t love at first sight: I don’t believe in that. Instead, it was a path of knowledge. I remember myself as a young girl waiting for the yellow bus to go to high school with a big Greek dictionary in my hands. It was a challenge, first of all, to learn an alphabet that I didn’t know, and then a challenge to myself, my openness to the world.

Obviously, every language is “ingenious” in its own way because it expresses thinking of those who use it every day. The adjective “ingenious” which gives the title to my book derives from three different languages: the Greek, where it comes from the verb root “to create” and means, as in Aristophanes, “creative mind,” the Latin, in which it refers to the “genium” which, according to mythology, is a small being that accompanied man throughout the course of life to make him happy, and then the French, in which “génial” means fun, or beautiful. I played with these same words in three different languages as a way of explaining why I, Andrea, a thirty-year-old woman, love Greek. I love it because it is a free and human language. Free, because its quirks—maybe even those that drove us crazy at school—were not made obligatory by grammar, but left to the free choice of those who used Greek daily to speak and write. It is, therefore, a human language because it leaves people the responsibility of choosing not only what to say, but also how to say it. And in doing so, Greek also allows the speaker the freedom to express who they are. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2019

October 14, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andreea Scridon, Garrett Phelps, and Shelly Bhoil

October's new translations, selected by the Asymptote staff to shed light on the best recent offerings of world literature.

A new month brings an abundance of fresh translations, and our writers have chosen three of the most engaging, important works: a Japanese novella recounting the monotony of modern working life as the three narrators begin employment in a factory, the memoir of a Russian political prisoner and filmmaker, as well as the first comprehensive English translation of Giorgio de Chirico’s Italian poems. Read on to find out more!

the factory cover

The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada, translated from the Japanese by David Boyd, New Directions, 2019

Review by Andreea Scridon, Assistant Editor

Drawn from the author’s own experience as a temporary worker in Japan, The Factory strikes one as being a laconic metaphor for the psychologically brutalizing nature of the modern workplace. There is more than meets the eye in this seemingly mundane narrative of three characters who find work at a huge factory (reticent Yoshiko as a shredder, dissatisfied Ushiyama as a proofreader, and disoriented Furufue as a researcher), as they become increasingly absorbed and eventually almost consumed by its all-encompassing and panoptic nature. Coincidentally wandering into a job for the city’s biggest industry, or finding themselves driven there—against their instincts—by necessity, the three alternating narrators chronicle the various aspects of their working experience and the deeply bizarre undertones that lie beneath the banal surface. READ MORE…

Traversing the Forbidden: A Journey Through Prohibited Literatures

October 7, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Anna Wang

Banned literature offers us the opportunity to gain valuable insight, no matter how controversial.

For literature lovers, it is no secret that a great deal of our favorite titles have been—or still are—banned from the public. In this following essay by Anna Wang, Graphic Designer at Asymptote, she takes us around the multifarious and wide-ranging cartography of vital, yet blacklisted, titles from around the globe, from a novella that metaphorically depicts the persecuted Uyghurs of China, to an infamous work of revolutionary author Boris Pasternak. In realizing the context and culture in which these pertinent titles arose, we may in turn acknowledge both the price, and the power, of the truth.

In a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson entitled “The American Scholar,” Emerson gave both praise and warning to the power of literature, stating: “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.” Emerson was right. Books have the ability to persuade, influence, and inspire—an ability which many have found threatening. Time and time again, figures of authority have attempted to reign in or block out literature that challenges their agenda. In celebration of banned literature in the history of world literature, let’s take a look at some of the most impactful banned texts throughout time, why they were banned, and what we can learn from them. 

Wild Pigeon, by Nurmuhemmet Yasin 

Wild Pigeon is a novella originally published in Uyghur between the pages of the 2004 Kashgar Literature Magazine. Written by a young freelance writer, Nurmuhemmet Yasin, it quickly gained widespread acclaim among the Uyghur people in China. The work, written in Uyghur, is a political allegory that tells the story of a young pigeon who is the son of a dead king. While he is looking for a new home, he is trapped by a group of humans. His struggle for freedom and his eventual shocking decision has been interpreted by many as a criticism of the Chinese government for its treatment of its Uyghur population. 

READ MORE…

The Singing Knots of Jorge Eduardo Eielson: Room in Rome in Review

October 2, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarug Sarano

The white pages are treated like canvas, and the lines as singing knots.

room-in-rome-jorge-eduardo-eielson-rgb

Room in Rome, by Jorge Eduardo Eielson, translated from the Spanish by David Shook, Cardboard House Press, 2019

Knots
That are not knots
And knots that are only
Knots

  1. Peruvian poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson once said of César Vallejo: “There is no superfluousness in Vallejo’s poetry, just as there isn’t any in Christian mysticism, although for opposite reasons”. This reason, according to Eielson, is that Vallejo’s poetry, as opposed to Christian mysticism that supposes a martyrdom of the body, is “a descent of the body—fleshly and social—into hell, that supposes another martyrdom, that of the soul.”
  1. Eielson writes the fleshly and social descent of the body into the Eternal City. Just looking at the title of the opening poem confirms Eielson’s commitment to the body: “Blasphemous Elegy for Those Who Live in the Neighborhood of San Pedro and Have Nothing to Eat.” Room in Rome was written in 1952, shortly after he had left Peru for Italy, where he would settle until his death in 2006. Vallejo, his hero, would also leave Peru for France. Despite this, Eielson’s book was widely available until 1977. During this period, he produced the novel El cuerpo de Gulia-no (The Body of Gulia-no). Again, its title suggests a rigorous investigation of the body and its descent into the worldly. Eielson would write, in 1955, Noche oscura del cuerpo (The Dark Night of the Body)—a shout-out to the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross.)
  1. “i have turned / my patience / into water / my solitude / into bread”
    “here i am headless and shoeless”
    “our father who art in the water”
    “love will be reborn/ between my parched lips”

READ MORE…