Reviews

The Burden of History: A Review of Batool Abu Akleen’s 48kg

48kg . . . does not hide the Zionist intention behind abstractions, but rather confronts us with the stark realities of a genocidal war.

48kg by Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Batool Abu Akleen, Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher, Palestine, Tenement Press, June 2025

Batool Abu Akleen’s bilingual collection of poems, 48kg, is not solely a powerful literary work; rather, it is a testimony of the genocide that has been wrought upon Gaza for the past two years, written in a poetic verse and style. Her writing is urgent, heart-breaking, honest, and brutal; every line lingers long after reading.

A blend between personal witness and poetic verse, the collection was translated from the Arabic by Akleen herself along with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher. The close collaboration ensured that the urgency of her voice was not lost in translation. Indeed, her first-hand experience of the genocidal war on Gaza is not hidden in gentle language, and the bilingual nature of the text puts the original Arabic side-by-side with its English counterparts. In translation, Akleen endeavors to convey her experience of genocide to a broader, non-Arabic speaking audience.

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What’s New in Translation: September 2025

New publications from Palestine, Afghanistan, Italy, Senegal, France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia, Poland, and Kyrgyzstan!

Ten titles, ten countries! This month, we’re presenting reviews of a wide-ranging text of image philosophy in the age of virtual reality; a Russian master’s memoirs of his infamous literary friends; poetry anthologies featuring testimonies from the genocide in Gaza and the bold voices of Afghan women; a delicate and revelatory Serbian novel parsing lineage and dementia; and so much more. . .

1

From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, translated from the French by Dylan Temel, Other Press, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Power is domination—at least, that’s how it’s been overarchingly conceived. Though the concept abstracts out to a vast array of actualities, from the centralized to the diffused, the individual to the plural, the Foucauldian and the Weberian, the most immediate and base display of human power is that of one subject being undermined by another. Translation, then, as an intersectional arena between two bodies that are as similar as they are different, is an optimal stage by which to study the varying dynamics of power; but especially within the postcolonial context, it has commonly begun with the premise that translation is a dominating act, with one more powerful language exercising its patterns, definitions, and cultural values over another. In From Language to Language, the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne wants to build his theories on a different foundation.

It may seem that the closer one looks at translation, the less feasible an equilibrium seems—at least, from the outside. For bilingual or multilingual persons, however, the idea of equal values for different languages is simply fact; the hosts of multiple languages are likely to regard them as equally essential components, regardless of any diglossic differences in fluency, utility, or geographical relevance. As a speaker of Wolof, French, and English, Diagne is in this camp, and opens this English edition of From Language to Language with a personal anecdote on his family’s migration, which ends with the determination that his children should “live out their different identities and the languages that expressed them with self-assurance as pride.” His own multilingualism therefore places him at a position more primed to think of translation less as a sequence of conquests, and more as a rendezvous of common goals, whether that be the making of a fully-fledged individual, or of a more varied and generous world. There is, he says, a “gratitude and equality within a shared humanity, which is at the very heart of translation.”

By bringing the notion of hospitality into the translational exchange, Diagne coopts the innate generosity and charity of the act, but evades the pitfalls of gift-related debt by noting that both languages gain equally from the exchange, as “to translate is to create human community with the speaker of the language that one is translating.” Even when the resulting text is reductive, appropriative, or produced for colonial purposes, Diagne suggest that the undertaking of the translation—what takes the mediating individual from being a “vehicle” to being a translator—is a sense of hospitality, of taking in two languages into the mind and moving, shifting them against one another in the pursuit of knowledge and elucidation. It is not necessarily the human being—with all of our various motives, prejudices, and desires—who can accomplish what Derrida had called a pure gift, but the languages themselves are open to each other, that cultivates within the translator a “cross-pollination.” They lead us to curiosity, wonder, and finally the recognition of a common humanity as we realize what all language is meant to do: to make us real to one another.

Where Diagne does face the real failures of cross-cultural exchange, such as the regard of ‘primitive’ African art that gained so much traction in the Western world, he distinguishes these instances as projection, not translation. The simplification and repurposing of foreign expressions can only be categorized as an intellectual and imaginative failure, one that completely neglects the necessary reciprocity of translation. In this, From Language to Language is less a guide to the ethics of postcolonial interaction, and more an ode and an appraisement of translation’s generosity, compassion, and grace—which in fact forces us to first acknowledge, then see beyond our limits. When we dehumanize ourselves by devaluing or reducing one another, it is our most human invention—language—that urges us back towards coexistence, that opens the door of our little rooms and ushers us back into our common world.

2

Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev by Maxim Gorky, translated from the Russian by Bryan Karetnyk, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025

Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

The earliest complete edition of Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev first appeared in English in 1934; now, in Bryan Karetnyk’s sensitive new translation, Gorky’s sketches of his tumultuous friendships with these three titans of Russian literature have once again come alive with a scintillating play of memory and imagination, tenderness and criticism.

In these anecdotal portraits, born of meticulous observation and sympathetic reflection, Gorky defies the self-enclosed perspective that Leo Tolstoy saw in him, having groused: “This is why [your stories] have no characters.” On the contrary, these novelistic descriptions fortify real-life specifics into the aura of fictional characters, and Karetnyk’s translation renders Gorky’s keen attunement with graceful clarity; in Anton Chekhov’s “sad and gentle smile,” for instance, “. . . you could feel the subtle scepticism of a man who knew the value of words, the value of dreams.” Among their wide-ranging meanderings, the writers’ musings on aspects of the literary life—story ideas, interactions with fans, stylistic choices, words like “wishy-washy”—are particularly fascinating.

Not only do the three men themselves get under the skin of Gorky’s writing, so also does their work, causing shifts in perspective that inspire stylistic transpositions and modulations on all levels of his prose. In a montage of carefully numbered notes, he recalls Tolstoy as godlike and diminutive, lofty and earthy—as if the great author had personified one of his own larger-than-life, paradoxically intimate novels. Chekhov, in contrast, Gorky remembers with affectionate vignettes which, complete with rural schoolteachers and other Chekhovian characters, protest the “banal,” ubiquitous, socially accepted forms of violence that Chekhov lamented throughout his life. Turning to the morbidly flamboyant Leonid Andreev, Gorky’s concise formulations suddenly give way to a prolix digression on lying down between train tracks, reminiscent of Andreev’s gruesome sensationalism.

In this edition, J.M. Coetzee provides a valuable introduction to Gorky’s life and work, describing how, as a student of Tolstoy, admirer of Chekhov, and mentor to Andreev, Gorky rocketed to worldwide fame with his novel Mother. He was imprisoned for anti-monarchist activity but, horrified by the violence of the October 1917 Revolution, was eventually sidelined by Lenin. So deep was Gorky’s faith in communist ideals, however, that he allowed himself to be taken in by Stalin’s flattery, ascending to the greatest heights of the Soviet nomenklatura and publicly endorsing the gulags to preserve his lucrative reputation. Yet, throughout his life, he used his considerable influence and resources to support writers who faced persecution and starvation under the repressive regime. Reminiscences reasserts the value of what Gorky is best known for today: his remarkable ability to relate to someone with generosity, vivacity, and precision.

3

Orlanda by Jacqueline Harpman, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, Seven Stories Press, 2025

Review by Regan Mies

“Do you remember the sound of my voice inside my head?” Aline asks the part of herself sitting across the table. “What does I mean when you say it?”

In Jacqueline Harpman’s Orlanda, the 35-year-old university lecturer has long been uninspired, worn down, forlorn for what seems like forever—or at least since she was twelve, when her mother began demanding the modesty and restraint of young womanhood. Then one day, everything changes in an instant: Aline is reading Woolf’s Orlando when she spots a young man at a train station café. Inexplicably, a part of herself, of her soul, zeroes in on him, departs from her body, and occupies his. As she invades, Aline senses only a tremor, a strange sorrow that matches her melancholy stasis, the “perpetual feeling of emptiness” she’s never been able to shake. The body-hopping part of her, which our narrator christens Orlanda, revels in her—his—new form. The consciousness of twenty-year-old music journalist Lucien Lèfrene has put up no resistance whatsoever.

What follow, in Ros Schwartz’s lively translation, are Orlanda’s ecstatic exploits with men; his gradual unearthing and worming out of the responsibilities of Lucien’s former life; and eventually, his trickster’s impulse to confront the repressed Aline and shock her with his intimate knowledge of her life and desires. He is, somehow, that buoyant, unrestrained, twelve-year-old part of her, become flesh.

Having first published Orlanda in 1996, Harpman is best known for the enormously successful I Who Have Never Known Men, a dystopic story of thirty-nine women and one girl who find themselves trapped in a bunker without explanation. Its main character is a singular girl in this makeshift society of women, facing a coming-of-age within the rigid confines of their prison, and through her, the author poses the question: What could it mean to transform from girl into woman in a world without freedom or possibility? In Orlanda, too, Harpman lingers in the territory of puberty and adolescence through Aline, who feels trapped by her mother’s expectation of charm and femininity and stifled by her mother’s insistence that energy, anger, and vigor has no place in a woman’s life. But where I Who Have Never Known Men never strays from its weighty solemnity, Orlanda shows Harpman at her wittiest and most delightful. The narrator—presumably a fourth wall-breaking stand-in for the author—frequently exclaims in surprise when her characters act unexpectedly, and on every page, the sheer pleasure Harpman seems to derive from exploration and imagination is clear, though the gravity of her characters’ very real dilemmas never seems to fall far out of reach.

After Aline and Orlanda first meet, a cosmic magnetism pulls them back to one another time and time again. Together, they’re relaxed and confident; they give each other strength. Orlanda brings out in Aline abilities she no longer realized she possessed, whether an unabashed attraction to her longtime partner or the ability to confront an obnoxious dinner party host. How would your ego and id interact were they distinct entities? Who might have the upper hand? Aline and Orlanda’s clashes and codependences help pave Harpman’s way toward an answer: What could we learn from ourselves, about ourselves, when confronted head-on by ourselves?

4

At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Reality by Andrea Pinotti, translated from the Italian by John Eaglesham, Zone Books, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

“Imagination has turned into hallucination,” the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser once warned, in response to our collective hypnosis after the advent of the image: “They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens. Instead of representing the world, they obscure it. . .” It’s a familiar line of thought within the study of image consciousness, for as long as there has been representation, there has been the struggle to track the real and the facsimile—where they separate, where they congregate, and to what extent they denigrate and draw from one another. Now that technological innovation is coming in a deluge to redefine magic, to create surfaces anew, to induce vision and sensation, and to readdress our bodies’ sensual functions, the same question of demarcations is growing alongside the innovations. It is into this dialogue that Andrea Pinotti arrives with his fascinating and rangy At the Threshold of the Image, which advocates for neither admission nor insulation against the invasion of image, but simply—as the title states—addresses our enduring romance with the boundary, and how it underscores our resistance to physical limits.

Narcissus falls in love with his reflection, Alice plunges into Wonderland, Galatea’s marble body begins to move, a viewer attempts to swat away a fly painted onto a canvas, the near-opaque figure of Tupac Shakur sways in front of an audience of thousands, Brecht knocks down the fourth wall, Wan Hu-Chen writes himself into a book in order to be with its protagonist, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome constructs the television screen as a passage . . . These are but a few of the samples, references, artworks, productions, and narratives that Pinotti draws on throughout his treatment of the threshold between representation and reality, forming the conceptualization of this in-between space as an “in/out dialectic” that incites both our desire to become a part of the image, and to have the image come to life. As he illustrates with encyclopaedic knowledge, images represent doorways of imaginary proportions, and we’ve never been able to resist tapping on a door.

Still, now that this door is no longer an unopenable photograph, cinema, text, painting, or dream, and has morphed with digital largesse into something that can truly be considered “an osmotic membrane,” Pinotti is attempting to diffuse this semi-traumatic evolutionary jump by mapping out the aesthetic and phenomenological lineage of humans skipping back and forth across the threshold. It is a yearning that stems from the very first mirror-reflection, he surmises—from the very first acknowledgement that what one sees looking back is not only an image, but an extension of the self. As such, this is not a text that presumes any judgment or prescription for the increasingly morally complex presence of growingly convincing un-realities, but one that positions this pursuit of immersion within the history of human consciousness.

Because the instinct and fantasy of entering the image is a possessive one—and possession is so human. We are creatures covetous of experience, and the more we are aware of our own experiential limits, the more we seek to surpass them. It is our appetite for feeling, for navigating, for discovery, and for conquest that leads us not only to create works of unreality—which expand and multiply our reality—but also to long for the real potentials of those unrealities. History evinces that standing at a threshold never means turning back, it means forging on. Even if, as Pinotti so artfully and expertly illustrates, we have to invent somewhere to go.

5

Castigation by Sultan Raev, translated from the Kyrgyz by Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Syracuse University Press, 2025

Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

In Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s virtuosic translation, Sultan Raev’s novel Castigation displays an astounding variety of tones and forms. The translator’s note advises readers to “give up all attempts to fit this tale into any frame,” and indeed, within the text you’ll find poems, lists, digressive footnotes, vengeful snakes, Soviet punitive psychiatry, extensive quotations from Shakespeare and Şayloobek Düyşeev, and references to several of the world’s religions. Rich with polyphony and plethoric subtexts, Castigation rewards careful reading—and rereading.

From the beginning, Raev employs doppelgängers and recurring images to agitate the vortex of uncertainty in which his characters—seven psychiatric patients trudging through a desert to the Holy Land—find themselves. Is the desert a post-apocalyptic world? Or is it “The Seven” who are lost between death and reincarnation? Does the Holy Land even exist? The disorientation becomes thoroughly terrifying as the characters’ historical namesakes, including Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, invade their dreams and undermine their sense of self, and their relationships are complicated by mistaken identities and past traumas.

Denominated “a new Kyrgyz epic” on its cover, Raev’s novel has earned a place among the monumental thousand-year-old songs that inaugurated Kyrgyzstan’s indigenous literary traditions. Balladic rhythms and refrains suffuse the prose along with soothsayers and gods of epic poetry, but Raev’s story overturns the tradition of celebrating bloody military exploits; instead, he amplifies the voices of victims—women, the mentally ill, exploited animals, children . . .

The bitterness of the vulnerable betrayed by the powerful pervades the novel’s sense of history and The Seven’s coerced expulsion from their world. Kyrgyzstan was formed when the Soviet government took it upon itself to decide what being Kyrgyz meant and where to put people who seemed to fit the official description. In return for being basically exiled to a reservation, the indigenous nomads were promised advantages which Stalin later retracted, allowing poverty to overrun the Kyrgyz peoples.

Raev critically juxtaposes such imperialist violence with domestic abuse, political repression, and ecological destruction. The desert is partly a figure for an exhausted Earth suffering from deforestation and post-extractivist climate change, and in chastising humanity’s exceptionalist illusions, the curses that rain down upon Castigation’s conquerors are reminiscent of Kojojash, a traditional Kyrgyz epic in which a hunter is cursed by a mountain goat after driving her kin almost to extinction. “You’re not the pillar of the World!” an elderly woman screams at Alexander the Great. “All the living beings on Earth were not born to feed your belly!”

6

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025

Review by Christopher Alexander

For readers already familiar with Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s rich literary imagination, her patchwork novel House of Day, House of Night will seem like a homecoming of sorts. Set in the author’s adopted home of Krajanów, the stories return to her familiar themes: feminism, spirituality, astrology, the more-than-human world, and a mysticism rooted in the rich humus of the everyday.

Krajanów is part of the region of Silesia, annexed by the Prussians in the eighteenth century and slowly Germanized until it was returned to the Poles after the Second World War in a land swap. Tokarczuk addresses this porousness of borders and the trauma of relocation in House of Day, House of Night, which could not be more rooted in place and its shifting nature. In a scene loaded with tragic irony and sly humor, a relocated German returns to his village with his wife to see the town he grew up in, only to die on a hill, unwrapping a chocolate bar he would never eat, as his wife waits in the car below. What follows is an administrative tug of war as Czech and Polish guards discover the body and shove it repeatedly across the border to avoid claiming responsibility. The foxes, for their part, crisscross the frontier with impunity.

The cast of characters are the town’s residents—the intrigue of their foibles and follies, the adventures of their lives. The narrator is a writer who has recently moved in, and one of her closest friends is an older woman and wigmaker, Marta, who is both the guardian of the town’s memory and a reminder of human time’s fleeting nature. As they listen to Anna Karenina together on the radio, the narrator muses about her friend: “I sometimes wonder if she can understand these stories made up of dialogue read out by a single voice, and I think maybe she’s only listening to individual words, to the melody of the language.” In the next sentence, she hints that Marta may be becoming senile. The human tendency towards meaning becomes lost in music, and memory, and—like life—fades out and on.

But for those of us still able to distinguish words and make meaning out of sentences, House of Day, House of Night is a joyous read for the deep empathy and consideration Tokarczuk has for her characters. In this reissue of Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s luminous 2003 translation—which brought Tokarczuk’s work into English for the first time—readers will find deep insights into the origins of Tokarczuk’s fiction, which lie in the genius loci of Krajanów.

7

The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez, translated from the French by Alex Niemi, Dorothy Project, 2025

Review by Christopher Alexander

Laura Vazquez’s The Endless Week begins with a promise of sorts—a biblical epigraph hinting that the following pages contain knowledge of the face of God: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; / then we shall see face to face. / Now I know in part; / then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” But as much as the novel is a meditation on both the divine and the human, it is also a reflection on the omnipresence of images on social networks and the way they mirror and refract our reality.

Salim, the young hero of the The Endless Week, is a poet who posts his work online and lives at a remove from the world. He has stopped attending school after a classmate had his eye gouged out, disturbed by the collective non-response of the administration; instead, he learns about life outside his doors through the internet, speaking to his followers and messaging his friend Jonathan, whom he eventually meets in “real life.” Sharing this isolated existence is his sister Sarah, their father, and their dying grandmother. Vazquez threads all these various elements to form a plot that involves Salim and Sarah’s search for their lost mother, who is a potential blood donor for their grandmother. This leads to a departure from their insulated life to confront the flesh-and-blood incarnations of existence, which show up in a motley cohort of the homeless, drunk, and disenfranchised. Yet, despite The Endless Week’s novelistic appearances, it is at its core an exceptional work of poetry.

Vazquez aligns herself with a mystic tradition that observes the world with a detached, almost clinical view of events as they occur. Operating on the level of koan, a concise paradoxical wisdom similar to that of verse, Vazquez extends both aesthetics to deploy them in prose. The result is a mediatization of images that reflect and refract on the fragile, slippery nature of existence and its essential nature. In one scene, Salim becomes conscious that he is a collection of images (thoughts) while engrossed in his phone:

He wondered how many images were engraved in his mind like that, how many ads, how many words, shapes, songs, smells, scenes, faces, how many thousands of clips lived like that in his mind, and how many more would get in without him realizing. He wondered if the scenes in his mind belonged to his mind or if they belonged to the world. Was he made of this combination of images and memories, some abstract, some clearer, in his mind? Did his memories make him, or did he make his memories? He locked his phone, he shuddered once.

For Vazquez, the world itself begins in words that come from a distant voice, whispering us into being. In a world of deepfakes, The Endless Week reminds us that reality is pure fiction and that we co-author our existence with a cohort of other agencies, suggesting that each one of these others is a face and facet of God.

8

The Investigator by Dragan Velikić, translated from the Serbian by Christina Pribichevich-Zorić, Istros Books, 2025

Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

How does the past manifest in us to shape our sense of possible futures? Celebrated Serbian writer Dragan Velikić confronts this question with quiet torment in The Investigator, his second novel to be translated into English.

Dragan Velikić, a fictional narrator who shares his author’s name, suffers a paralytic tremor of the soul when his mother dies in Belgrade, upon which his recollections of her become entangled in his terror of losing his memory to Alzheimer’s. He recalls her domineering passion for order and detail; over and over she had poured over old photographs, “obsessed with wanting to have the full wealth of her experience at her disposal at every moment. That was why she had to keep remembering the life she had lived and vigilantly reign over its vast territory.” Here is a suggestion that time can be ruled—and that the ruler may select their life experiences from the offerings available within the territory’s borders. “The world was like a catalogue,” says Velikić of his strictly organized childhood. In his mother’s eyes, anything in the catalogue, any past or present detail, could be read as a “warning sign” for the future. This is the logic of genetics as well as superstition: using past circumstances to explain the present and anticipate the future. But even as he notices his mother’s inclinations surfacing in himself, Velikić finds them stifling.

Is it madness to seek order in a life consisting of unfinished stories—especially considering how easily events may be forgotten, families lost, borders redrawn? Velikić’s grappling with bereavements, memory lapses, and aborted projects is part of his struggle to exist in a place that should be home but offers none of home’s comforts or stability; in violent ethnic conflicts, his native Pula becomes Italy one minute, Yugoslavia the next, and ultimately Croatia. When Yugoslavia’s disintegration renders Pula unsafe for Serbs, dispossession and relocation to Belgrade catalyze the fatal decline of Velikić’s parents.

Christina Pribichevich-Zorić’s beautiful translation of Velikić’s muted conflicts insists on a slow read; his ruminative plot appears to leave no loose ends while in fact creating sheaves of them. As the novel progresses, it becomes difficult to distinguish actual events from what the narrator merely imagines, and the reader may find herself unable to trust her memory of what she has read—or sometimes not wanting to trust it, when Velikić re-envisions a previously remembered episode in a richer imaginary. With uncertainty pathing the text, The Investigator’s greatest revelation may indeed be the creative promise latent in the truth’s vulnerability.

9

Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets, translated from the Persian-Dari, Two Lines Press, 2025

Review by Liliana Torpey

Ideally, anthologies would act contrary to our expectations, shining brightest when they complicate what might be simplified, and introducing plurality over a flattening unity. This is certainly the case in Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets, the broad parameters of which shelter other, more specific descriptors: clandestine, diasporic, exilic, activist, academic, feminist, feminine. In her introduction, Aria Aber states that Afghan poetry is one “of fragmentation, multiethnic positionalities and languages, and geographic variation.” The five poets featured here, writing in Persian and brought into English by eight translators, deliver a variation in poetics that will surely offer any reader of poetry a place to land.

I was particularly taken by Maral Taheri’s poems, which writhe and dance like a ball of worms (figures that feature prominently in her verses). “I need to spit to one side / and send kisses to the other / then come back and fill out my crosswords / I would never admit that the world has no meaning,” writes Taheri in Hajar Hussaini’s muscular translation. Here, love and irreverence wrestle and embrace amidst existentialist chaos and material violence.

Mahbouba Ibrahimi’s poems, on the other hand, elicit feelings of longing, a troubled introspection: “Mournful, enraged, / these days / poetry / can’t work its poetry.” Meanwhile, Mariam Meetra’s work throws a gut punch of tenderness and despair: “and plant a tree in the middle of the room / so the explosions can’t shake it / the blood stench can’t smother it.”

Some poems are unyielding in their act of witnessing war, terror, and stolen childhoods, as in Karima Shabrang’s lines: “Of all things silent I am afraid, / of a silent God / who dwells where the hands of orphans can’t reach.” Others grasp with determination toward freedom: “If you have no legs, leap into the dark . . . By any path that can lead away from this prison / you have to escape,” writes Nadia Anjuman.

In focusing only on five poets, Hair on Fire brings their stature into focus, recognizing these writers’ place in a global, feminist canon. You could never make me believe that poetry has no meaningful effect—not when collections like this exist.

10

You Must Live, New Poetry From Palestine, edited and translated from the Arabic by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, Copper Canyon Press, 2025

Review by Christopher Alexander 

You Must Live, New Poetry From Palestine is both a prayer and an order: that the rich polyphony of voices continue to live in face of ongoing genocide. Bringing together works from contemporary poets currently living in Palestine (with the exception of Yahya Ashour, who was stranded in Michigan when the war began), the poems in this collection vibrate with present urgency, acting as a testimony not only to the brutality of the Israeli invasion, but the vibrancy of the fractured literary community in Gaza. In one of the early poems of the collection, Waleed al-Aqqad addresses this mutilated body politic and the collective mourning of its citizens in “I have never seen a corpse intact”:

I have never seen a corpse intact
but I recognize each of them
every one of them, each victim.
Even those fingers, I know whose they are.

For the most part, the collected works are written in an experimental vein of modernist Arabic poetry inaugurated by Mahmoud Darwish, which—while resolutely contemporary—is rooted in classical traditions. In their introduction, editors and translators Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Boor address some of the difficulties of bringing this form of verse into contemporary English, particularly given the prevalence of poetic devices in everyday speech and the common motif of personification that speaks to a pre-Islamic, animist view of the universe.

One example of this intersection between past and present aesthetics can be found in the queer politics of Nema’a Hassan’s “How to build a pub in a country prohibited from love.” Arabic verse has a long tradition of odes to young boys and a running theme of liberation through excess and drinking, both of which existed alongside strict conservative mores. In referencing not only the repressive force of the Israeli army but also the theocratic rule of Hamas, Hassan demonstrates the possible subversions:

To my neighbor whose window I peep through each night,
urged by the tight dress I love to wear,
I smile and feed
naughty children syruped pies.

For the poets included in this volume, simply submitting their work was an act of courage, as each message sent to the outside world initiated them as potential targets—and still does. The process of translation and editing also put them at risk, shining a beacon each time they connected to a cell tower or satellite; to hone their language, they put their lives on the line. Still, as the authors of this volume remind us again and again, simply living in Palestine is deadly, and the depths of the tragedy must be heard and understood for it to stop. To imagine such a future, certain poems in this volume also conjure up an end to the war, such as in Khaled Juma’s “When the Soldiers Leave this Place”:

When the soldiers leave this place,
I’m going out to buy a few millimeters of air
and try, if I can, to sing you
to sleep.

. . .

When the soldiers leave this place
don’t mess with what remains of the story.
They know—they only know
what is only known to them.

The story is not over, and this collection grants its readers access to the knowledge and experiences of those living on the ground: the bonds of family and kinship, the intimate awareness of death, the devastating impacts of genocide, and the will to go on living.


 

Christopher Alexander is a poet, performer and multidisciplinary artist. S he is currently engaged in a long-term investigation on interspecies communication and the performance of nature in the Mediterranean. Together with the visual artist and researcher Alexia Antuoferomo, they co-founded the collective of artists and researchers, Tramages. Heir texts and translations have been published in Asymptote, Belleville Park Pages, Pamenar Press Online Magazine, parentheses, Point de chute, FORTH Magazine, Fragile Revue de Créationsremue.net, and Transat’, among other publications. Heir work has been exhibited at 59 Rivoli, La Générale Nord-Est, Mémoire de l’avenir, and the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Heir first poetry collection, play-boy, explores the seepage of toxic masculinity into contemporary gender norms and is forthcoming in a bilingual edition with Le Nouvel Attila in 2026.

Regan Mies is a writer and translator in New York. Her work has appeared in the LA Review of BooksCleveland Review of BooksNecessary Fiction, and elsewhere. 

Xiao Yue Shan is a poet, writer, editor, and translator.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong writes experimental fiction, essays, and poetry. Her books include The Box and Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl, both published by Graywolf Press.

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

Grief and Knowledge in a Dying World: A Review of Inn of the Survivors by Maico Morellini

Stability and instability. Throughout Inn of the Survivors, the theme of balance comes up time and again—literally and metaphorically.

Inn of the Survivors by Maico Morellini, translated from the Italian by Rose Facchini, Snuggly Books, 2025

Inn of the Survivors is Italian writer Maico Morellini’s debut in the English language, a haunting and eerily familiar work from a sophisticated voice in speculative fiction, arriving in Rose Facchini’s translation. Set in a dystopian future after an unspecified climate disaster, the novella tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl’s arrival at the titular Inn of the Survivors, a haven on the Adriatic coast. Having taken off from her remote home in the mountains overlooking the Po River Valley, and following a three-year trek through Bologna, Forlì, and Cesena, she finally reaches the Inn and encounters others like her: people who have been on the run, trying to survive, living with trauma, grief, or shame. The price of staying? You must tell your story.

Lest you think my use of the second person is casual, it should be said that except for the backstory—which appears in the latter half—the novella is written entirely in the second person. While this narrative device appears often enough in English, it is far less common in Italian, with only two novels coming easily to mind: Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore by Italo Calvino, and the most recent Strega Prize winner Come d’aria by Ada d’Adamo. This is likely due to the Italian third person impersonal (si + verb), which can mean anything from “you,” to the more formal-sounding “one,” to the most passive of voices. As such, choosing to write this tale in the second person was a bold and effective choice on the part of the author, with the new text sounding entirely natural (the ideal result for a work of cli-fi). Yet, thanks to specific geographic locations that are an integral part of the story and the protagonist’s desire to understand her country, it still retains a quality we can call “Italian.” READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Safe Corridor by Jan Dost

Amidst Safe Corridor’s war, the child has become the historian, recording what adults try to forget.

“Children,” Jan Dost tells us, “grow up quickly in wars.” In his bold and unflinching Safe Corridor, the author demonstrates this brutal reality through the eyes of a young narrator caught within Syria’s civil conflict, resulting in a phantasmagorical, gripping account that not only captures the violent facts, but also the mind’s attempts to accept them. As Dost moves seamlessly between the surreal, the absurd, the tragic, and the enraging, the novel engages with the true consequences and aftermaths of loss: who—or what—one becomes after surviving the unthinkable.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Safe Corridor by Jan Dost, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, DarArab, 2025

“On the evening when young Kamiran began to realise that he was turning into a lump of chalk, rain was bucketing down.” With this devastatingly surreal image, Jan Dost’s Safe Corridor—gracefully translated by Marilyn Booth—immerses its readers in a scene that brings to mind Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. A Syrian-Kurdish writer-translator based in Germany, Dost is one of Syria’s most important living authors with sixteen novels to his name, most of which center the realities and consequences of his home nation’s civil war. Safe Corridor, originally published in Arabic in 2019 as Mamar Āmin, entrusts this testimony of a devastated country to a voice least equipped—and yet most fated—to bear it. Told through a fragile, furious, and often surreal narration, the novel captures how war is not only fought on battlefields but also inscribed upon the bodies and imaginations of children. As the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish puts it in his poem “The War Will End”:

I don’t know who sold our homeland
But I saw who paid the price.

Roland Gary, in his introduction to Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays, states that the Czech writer’s work “belongs unmistakably to the twentieth century . . . because his sense of man’s fate is deeply bound up with the atrocities and nightmares of the age.” Similar atrocities have persisted into our own century, ensuring that Kafka’s worlds remain an enduring source of inspiration for many writers worldwide—especially Arab novelists. They are the worlds of the absurd, marked by estrangement and fear, wherein one is perpetually hounded by unseen forces they cannot name, condemned to live within utter futility. READ MORE…

Nostalgia and Aesthetic Inertia: A Review of The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko

The Last Soviet Artist compels readers to take note, to research, and to reflect. . .

The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko, translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich, n+1 Books, 2025

The title of this review is part borrowed from, and part inspired by a subsection of Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia. A meditation that concerns itself with the capacious titular affect, Boym studies nostalgia through the revolutionary era of perestroika, the fall of the Soviet Union, and well into the present. While she categorizes two types of nostalgia, restorative and reflective—the former more active, seeking to reconstruct the past, and the latter passive, dwelling in yearning—she caveats that these are only “tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing.” While reading Victoria Lomasko’s The Last Soviet Artist, a third degree of nostalgia emerges: the residual. Nostalgia’s escape from the decay of romanticization towards a productive politic of collective and self-exploration feeds the heart of the text. 

Translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich, Lomasko’s latest—a graphic reportage that blends elements of memoir—was initially planned as a sequel to her Other Russias, which she mentions in her introduction. I hold a particular reverence for introductions; these precise portals often reveal more of the author’s motivations than is written on the surface, and Lomasko’s is particularly transparent. There is an urgency—we learn that Lomasko has self-exiled in response to Russia’s iron grip of heavy censorship and repression. In her home country, there is no room for imagination, no space for artists, and social activism has been systematically stifled. This realization dispels the awe Lomasko had held for “those fairytale pictures and stories” that she grew up reading about an everlasting friendship among the fifteen Soviet republics. Any remaining traces of nostalgia for “that period” soon erode away when Lomasko, seeking photocopies of her work clandestinely at a museum in Belarus, realizes that her body remembered what it “had really meant to be a Soviet person.” 

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Possibilities in Transformation: A Review of Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová

[Ceilings] and its setting dwell in a place where play and terror occur simultaneously. . .

Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová, translated from the Czech by Tereza Novická, Twisted Spoon Press, 2025

In “The Aleph,” Jorge Luis Borges’s eponymous narrator attempts to describe the titular object—a point in space that contains all other points—but finally articulates that he cannot truly do so: “Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south . . . Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction.” Borges is far from the only writer to fear that fiction might distort truth or one’s simple lived experience. In the way of Barthes, who wrote that “incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order,” Borges’s attempt to translate the aleph functions as a useful thought experiment: How does one coherently translate an experience or text that is fundamentally incoherent? Should one even try?

Ceilings, Zuzana Brabcová’s second novel to be posthumously translated into English, represents an aleph of sorts. It is about a woman named Emička (or Ema) who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital, but it is also about Emička’s imaginary brother, Ash, who is committed to the same hospital—because he both is and is not Ema herself. As for the hospital, it’s certainly a hospital, but it also shapeshifts to become an aquarium, Ema’s childhood home, and an IKEA. Plenty of readers will take the easy route and try to interpret these inconsistencies as reflections of Ema’s unstable mental state, but Brabcová disrupts this reading by refusing to settle on a clear narrator. She shifts between the third person and Ema’s/Ash’s perspective, sometimes all within a single paragraph. Thus, while perhaps not as untranslatable as the aleph, Ceilings provides no shortage of challenges: its circuitous syntax, its treatment of time, its slippery subject matter. READ MORE…

To Keep the Shimmer Alive: A Review of The Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern

To read The Gallows Songs now is to reclaim vision from algorithmic sameness, to practice freedom . . . as an event within language.

The Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern, translated from the German by Max Knight, introduction by Samuel Titan, New York Review Books, 2025

Christian Morgenstern’s name itself opens a door. The significance of his first name is clear enough, but it is his last—German for “morning star”—that bears the promise of light before knowledge, of awareness before the world hardens into habit. In The Gallows Songs, newly reissued by NYRB Poets in Max Knight’s classic 1963 translation, Morgenstern uses that dawn brightness to keep language—and thus perception—from calcifying, with a celebrated nonsense that is less escapist whimsy than a disciplined refusal of routine. At the heart of The Gallows Songs lies a paradox: it is the crimson thread holding the hanged man to the gallows pole, at once constraining and liberating, that gave Morgenstern permission to see the world as a new thing, with the freshness of something that will not be seen again. Laughing on the edge of death, Morgenstern turns the gallows itself into a perch to witness the world anew. READ MORE…

Transgressive, Phantasmagorical Banquet: A Review of The Minotaur’s Daughter by Eva Luka

. . . Luka's rendering moves beyond the Rilkean dream realm into a world of flesh and blood . . .

The Minotaur’s Daughter by Eva Luka, translated from the Slovakian by James Sutherland-Smith, Seagull Books, 2025

The Minotaur’s Daughter, the English-language debut of Slovakian poet Eva Luka, unfurls a tapestry of phantasmagoria, animism, resistance, and transgression. Born in 1965 in the town of Trnava, Eva Lukáčová’s career in verse began with the collection Divosestra (Wildsister), published in 1999, which was followed by Diabloň (Deviltree) in 2005 (upon which she began using the shortened version of her name), Havranjel (Ravenangel) in 2011, and Jazver (I-Beast) in 2019. The Minotaur’s Daughter contains work from the first three publications, compiling them in a immersive, wildly populated series that plunges their readers into a universe of vivid imagery and sensation.

From Divosestra, the title of a particular poem, ‘Diabloň’, became the title of Luka’s second collection; samely, ‘Havranje’ from Diabloň became the title poem of her third collection, from which the poem ‘Jazver’ (I-Beast) became the title of her fourth collection. This interconnectedness between the poet’s body of work reflects her continuity of themes and imagery—an ever-deepening quest to go into more complex levels of introspection. Prominently featuring various creatures and their biological transformations, Luka preserves throughout a distinct focus on water and the moist elements of body and nature. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2025

The latest from Palestine, France, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Bulgaria, Japan, Canada, Cuba, Argentina, Slovakia, and China!

This month’s round-up of newly released titles spans twelve titles across twelve countries. We’ve got a profound and lucid collection compiled of diaries from the genocide in Gaza; a readdressing of womanly sacrifice in the domestic realm; an Argentinian novel reinventing the history of Italy’s famed “Park of the Monsters”; the long-awaited esoteric and experimental tome from German writer Michael Lentz; essays and textual riches from the father of surrealism; and much, much more. . .

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Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Nahil Mohana, Sondos Sabra, Ala’a Obaid, and Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Basma Ghalayini and Ayah Najadat, Comma Press, 2025

Review by Justin Goodman

Similar to the intimate testimonies of Atef Abu Said’s Don’t Look Left and Plestia Alaqad’s The Eyes of Gaza, Voices of Resistance compiles the diaries of four Gazan women, tracing their thoughts as they mourn their martyred, fear their decimation, celebrate the Palestinian people, and sacrifice meals for the sake of birthday pastries. Together, Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid highlight what Gillian Slovo describes in her introduction as both a beauty “in [their] honesty and spirit” and a horror as they gain “a whole new vocabulary for describing the sounds of different bombs.” This latter is compiled by Mohana in a list running half a page long, as she distinguishes the subtleties between “Bouf” (aerial bombing) and “Dddof” (artillery shelling). Most importantly, however, she adds: “. . . we have begun to lose our hearing.”

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Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: A Father is Born by Andrés Neuman

[Neuman] exposes this version of love for what it is, an ecstatic and embarrassing dissolution of the self.

In his latest and perhaps most personal work, Argentine writer Andrés Neuman probes his newfound role as a father, reckoning with the masculine and the paternal with trepidation, honesty, and most of all, wonder. The arrival of a child is here fortified with the poetry of discoveries—developing ultrasounds, the first tentative words—and the sublime language of an expanded self, as both father and son come to find their new places in the world. At once a universal and a deeply private story, A Father is Born is a testament to where the mind goes when it is led by love.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

A Father is Born by Andrés Neuman, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, Open Letter, 2025

Andrés Neuman’s bios often begin by describing him as a son—specifically, that of Argentinian musicians who emigrated to Spain in the early 1990s. This intimate history has previously been explored in his writing, including in a collection of poetry about his dying mother, as well as a novel based on the dictatorship suffered by his family in Argentina. Now, continuing this occupation with lineage is a book that sees him wrested into a different position within the family: as a father to his newborn baby. A Father is Born was originally two separate texts, but arrives in English as a happy side effect of their translation by Robin Myers. The first, Umbilical, is a patient and forensic study of his and, to a lesser extent, his partner’s experience of expecting and then raising their child, Telmo, while the second, Small Speaker, explores the boy’s first forays into language and the mysterious assembly of a lexicon.

‘Little by little, I’m birthed as I speak to you.’ Each page of A Father is Born is akin to a poetic diary entry, ranging from the descriptive to the self-reflective. In the first section of Umbilical, titled ‘The Imagination’, Neuman explores the psychic nature of the fatherly bond pre-partum, detailing the subconscious effort of conjuring a loving connection to his future child. These opening chapters hum with the low frequency worries of a figure who knows about the precarity of life and miraculous ‘overlapping fates’ of ancestry: ‘. . . hands over hands over hands.’ In his wanderings around an expectant house, he realises how such fragility applies to the story he is building,

“More than their creator, I feel like their host,” your mother confesses.
Now I imagine us in concentric circles: you travel within a reality within our reality, which exists within ceaseless curves. What am I, then, in this home where your mother’s womb rocks and sways? Who do I inhabit?

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Performances of Masculinity: A Review of Rock, Paper, Grenade by Artem Chekh

Rock, Paper, Grenade is . . . a novel about how masculine social dynamics can transform and change its characters’ emotional lives.

Rock, Paper, Grenade by Artem Chekh, translated from the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings and Oksana Rosenblum, Seven Stories Press, 2025

When men talk about other men in the world of Artem Chekh’s Rock, Paper, Grenade, there is an external sense of kinship coupled with a subtle hostility—a language of insults and mockery that permeates every interaction. And within this, nothing is more feared and ever-present than the specter of queerness. Felix, the stepfather of protagonist Tymofiy and a prominent character throughout the novel, had experienced a “fulfilling and, by and large, carefree childhood,” yet still casually criticizes his brother for a perceived femininity. From comments about his choir involvement and “sailor suit” to the accusation of being a “faggot and wimp,” his familiar descriptions of his brother are laced with casual homophobia.

Throughout the novel, the F-slur is routinely thrown about when a male character behaves with vulnerability, and any feminine quality in men is roundly scorned; as such, Rock, Paper, Grenade is, at its core, a novel about how masculine social dynamics can transform and change its characters’ emotional lives. Felix’s presence is emotionally fraught for Tymofiy; when the two meet, Felix provides a role of care, yet he also uses hegemonic, power-driven masculinity—and its undercurrent of homophobia—to cause profound harm. In Chekh’s world, this duality of male vulnerability and aggression is of utmost importance, creating dramatic tension between the characters while underscoring the broader point that patriarchal behaviour profoundly traumatizes the emotional lives of men and boys.

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Singing, Electric, Body: A Review of bruno darío’s Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation

The glee and daring of darío’s style, his technicolor whiz-kid pyrotechnics, induce an especially poignant and headlong involvement. . .

Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation by bruno darío, translated from the Spanish by Kit Schluter, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025

Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation is bruno darío’s mesmerizing monument to literature. Published as a tripartite collection by the Brooklyn-based Ugly Duckling Presse, it is both a posthumous triumph and an instance of translation as friendship, as a kind of company-keeping in one’s journey across states. When the Mexico City-based darío wrote these beguiling poem sequences during his twenties, he was suffering, then living, then dying of brain cancer, which ultimately killed him at the age of twenty-nine in 2022. The accomplished translator Kit Schluter recounts in his introduction that he was a good friend of darío’s (who insisted on presenting his name in lowercase since the laws of publishing would not allow him to publish wholly anonymously); the two of them, Schluter writes, “had become friends the way poets working in different languages so often do: by translating each other’s work.”

The Lantana trilogy, 153 English pages in all, recounts the doomed, fatal, gorgeous love story between one speaker, “the Inconsolable,” and his beloved, the terrific and terrifying Anfitriona, who kills herself in the first part of the sequence, “feast, fright,” then stays silent in the second, “airsickness,” as the Inconsolable writes letters about her, his life, and his work. Finally, in the third section, “raze,” she is able to speak a bit before the voice of Gravity—the gravity that pulls her deeper into the earth, into her final destination as earth—takes the final word.

There are several paths into darío’s work; I’ll start with Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass is referred to frequently throughout the book, the magnum opus of the poet of the body facing the cryptic missives of a young poet approaching death. “I sing the body electric,” darío quotes in English in one of his poems, and he does—he sings the body electric, but he sings the body as it disappears from the realm of bodies past, the body as it crumbles or effloresces into the realm of the intellect and the image. These, more than the flesh, are the guarantors of eternity, and darío takes us on a tour of the seam between them and the real.  READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2025

Newly released titles from Morocco, India, Norway, Haiti, Spain, Austria, Argentina, Egypt, Brazil, Germany, and Chile!

This month, we’re delighted to present eleven titles from eleven countries, including a lyrical litany of dreams from a Nobel laureate, a psychologically thrilling fiction-study of domestic violence and complicity, a rollicking novel on poverty and police repression in a Brazilian favela, a sharp and surrealistic collection that deeply probes the connection between death and poetry, and much, much more. . .  

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Writings on Translation by Abdessalam Benabdelali, translated from the Arabic by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jordan Silversmith

“What is at stake in translation,” Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali writes, “is the strangeness of the other.” In Writings on Translation, a slim but resonant volume translated with clarity and philosophical sensitivity by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Benabdelali argues not only that translation is foundational to the development of Arabic and European thought, but that it constitutes a mode of ethical relation—a hosting of the stranger.

Composed of essays selected from two earlier Arabic-language works, this collection positions translation not as the failed transfer of meaning between stable tongues, but as a generative rupture in the myth of linguistic purity. Echoing Derrida and drawing on classical Arabic poetics, Benabdelali deftly critiques the nationalist drive to see language as a closed identity. “The instrument of translation is a living language,” he writes, “and its mirror is condemned to be broken.” It is in this shattering that thought is permitted to migrate.

What emerges then is a meditation on translation as both inheritance and resistance. Benabdelali revisits the Abbasid-era Bayt al-Hikma, critiques 18th-century French Orientalism, and confronts the ambivalence of Arabic literary modernity, where some authors write in expectation of translation while others fear its erasure. His essays resist binary framings of colonizer and colonized, instead advocating for a polyglossic hospitality in which meaning is always provisional and always in motion. READ MORE…

“I will never die. I will dance. . .”: On Apotheosis of Music by Witold Wirpsza

Wirpsza’s work may provide some guidance as to what the artist’s role could be in the face of humanity’s darker moments. . .

Apotheosis of Music by Witold Wirpsza, translated from the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda, World Poetry, 2025

In the fourteenth century, writing from a state of political exile from Florence, Dante gave us an allegorical tour of the afterlife with an imaginary Virgil as his guide, presenting a cast of historical and mythic figures re-imagined. It isn’t hard to make the connection between him and the twentieth-century Polish poet Witold Wirpsza, who, as he contended with World War II and its subsequent outfalls, wrote from a state of exile in West Berlin and introduced his own cast of mythic figures: Dante, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Stalin. Now, from Frank L. Vigoda—the nom de plume of translator husband-wife duo Gwido Zlatkes and Ann Frenkel—comes Apotheosis of Music, a selection of Wirpsza’s cerebral and exuberant oeuvre in an indulgent, cheeky, rhythmic English, at times originating its own pleasant musicality. Where Zlatkes lends his native Polish perspective, Frenkel’s background in musicology allows for an execution of the musical structures and themes prevalent throughout Wirpsza’s work.

Born in Gdańsk, Poland in 1918 and educated in music and law, Wirpsza was drafted into WWII, held as a prisoner of war in a German camp, and, after initially being a supporter of communism following the war, eventually defected from the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR) in objection to its policies. After publishing an essay critiquing nationalist identities called “Polaku, kim jesteś” (Pole, who are you), he was banned from publication in his native Poland—a sentence that lasted until 1989, four years after his death. He then settled in West Berlin, where he lived for the remainder of his life; there, he brought works of Polish literature to a German audience and vice versa, translating works like a biography of Bach and a novel about Mozart from German into Polish.  READ MORE…