Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2023

July 24, 2023 | in News | by Meghan Racklin and Xiao Yue Shan

Taking a closer look at pieces on landscape’s multiplicity, unrequited love, and memory amidst grief.

Launched four days ago, our blockbuster Summer 2023 issue gathers never-before-published writing from a remarkable thirty countries—including a spotlight on Indonesia. Don’t know where to begin with this thrilling mélange of established and emerging voices? To help you dip your toe into this brand-new edition brimming with literary gems, our blog editors take you through their favorite pieces. Read on!

Within the tensions of unrequited love, the transformative faculties of ardor conduct their most astounding magic. Time is stretched to its utmost limits, unbound feelings hit a multiplicity of extremes, and the physical proof of reality collapse under the extraordinary pressures of belief. There’s not a lot of happiness that can be found amongst the shifting phantasms and polarities of this condition, but there is plenty of beauty, of poetry, of hope and awe, all of it stemming from nothing but the imagination in overdrive, sparked brilliantly alive by the beckoning figure of desire.

There are many examples of such love to be found in life and art, but one that seems particularly difficult to understand is the love of a fan. The indulgent culture of fandom gives free reign to displays of love-as-devotion, ranging from pedestrian claims of destiny to reckless acts of sacrifice—and because it often inflicts the young and the hyperbolic, its passions are seen as lacking any certifying element of truth. A one-sided, disingenuous, superficial love. But just try telling that to a fan.

In an excerpt from her novel, Phantom Limb Pain, Heejoo Lee does much to redeem this expressive, unrestrained love. Tracing the contours of a fan’s deep—even vicious—adulation for an idol, Lee’s forthright prose, translated with a sensitive colloquiality by Yoojung Chun, reaches a tender, natural honesty, describing an emotion that gives a rhythm to the days and months, a thrill to the pedestrian events of waiting and wanting, and a vividity to the fantasies making life more beautiful. Manok, the young woman who paves the way for our nameless protagonist into fandom, is “downright shameless,” keenly following her idol’s every move, openly displaying her possessive jealousy, and attributing her love to an act of God. Being a fan in South Korea’s multibillion-dollar idol industry is nothing less than laborious; fans religiously attend promotional events, spare no expense in purchasing goods and merchandise, and “pour their hearts out” at every opportunity. From the outside, one is made to wonder what any individual gets out of this all-consuming lifestyle, and here, Lee explains it to us through Manok, with the eloquence of absolute sincerity:

Their presence stayed mysterious over repeated encounters, and it refused to be locked into language. Their real presence rendered everything in high relief, so that everything—even their shadows or things that might be their shadows—became amazing to me.

We Stand With Ukraine: “To Memorise a Crocus” by Sam Garvan

March 19, 2022 | in We Stand With Ukraine | by Sam Garvan

a half-opened door / like a wing-bone.

In this second installment of our new weekly column, we collect the works of writers around the world in response to the ongoing war in Ukraine—texts of compassion, of endurance, of commemoration, and of reaching outward. When there is the time of violence, there is the time of poetry, reminding us of the immense actions of language. This poem, an elegy in both images and the inverse of what can be seen, is written by Sam Garvan for Captain Sidorov, killed on February 19, 2022 by Russian artillery.

To Memorise a Crocus

Mariupol 10.3.22

And so the winter storm blew in, casting its cold eye
over the house I love.

Already on a clear night you can see a half-opened door
like a wing-bone.

To memorise a crocus, my father said, do so as hail
is falling round it.

Sam Garvan won the Troubadour Prize 2021, and joint runner-up Keats-Shelley Prize. His recent work is published / forthcoming in Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Alchemy Spoon, and the Keats-Shelley Review. He has a PhD from London University and works for a London beekeeper.

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Translation Tuesday: “What No Longer Exists” by Krishna Monteiro

August 1, 2017 | in Translations | by Adam Morris

“Where is everyone?” They’re not here, I reply. They no longer exist, I proclaim.

Today’s Translation Tuesday feature is from Brazil. Adam Morris’s skillful translation brings out the haunting quality of the piece, a stunning meditation on life and the afterlife.

“In the desert of Itabira
the shadow of my father
took me by the hand.”
—Carlos Drummond de Andrade

The first time I saw you since you died, you were in the living room, in front of my bookcase. The same immaculate beige overcoat as always, the firm press of your shoes crushing the surface of the carpet. You were reordering my books, removing volumes, violating pages, polluting my silence, my secrets. You were pulling from the shelves authors who had taken shelter there long ago, characters and dreams long since forgotten. Without realizing the distance between the two worlds that separated us, without considering that perhaps the cognac and cigarettes or the nightly fumes in which I indulged might be responsible for your return, I went down the stairs into the living room of the big house on Rua da Várzea where you and I and she (do you remember her?) had lived for so long. I ran down the stairs possessed, threw myself in front of you and addressed you with a courage that had never pulsed in me during the entire time you remained among the living. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Adam Morris

Language:

Brazilian Portuguese

Places:

Brazil
Rua da Várzea

Writer:

Krishna Monteiro

Tags:

Translation Tuesday: Two poems by Moon Taejun

March 14, 2017 | in Translations | by Hannah Pang

The things that she called upon spiralled in orderly circles and soared into the glistening winter sky.

As the editor of a world literature journal who’s read submissions across all genres for more than six years now, I’m always on the look-out for a certain cosmic echo when one piece of writing rhymes with another from a different continent, as if confirming our shared humanity. Last week’s poem by Portuguese poet Ana Luísa Amaral, addressed from mother to daughter, is perfectly answered by these elegiac verses by Korean counterpart Moon Taejun mourning a departed mother, and capturing a magnificent stillness.

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

My Mother’s Prayer Beads

One day my mother sat blankly as she fingered her cold prayer beads.

My mother lowered her head as though mending some frayed clothes. She mustered the flowers, thunders, grasshoppers, and snowstorms; she also called upon my dead granny, me who was ailing, and my maternal uncle who lived afar. Silently, she bound up small scraps of cloth. Then she called upon the terrifying darkness, the valley fog, the roaring fire, and the stars on high. A faint, lengthy song arose from my mother’s bosom like it did when she used to sing me to sleep. She hummed the simplest song that all – the stag beetle, the puny bird, the eight-year-old child, the ninety-year-old granny, the parched verdure, the flock of sheep and its meadow, and creatures with menacing teeth – would know. The song my mother sang was fettered by her cold prayer beads while the things that she called upon spiralled in orderly circles and soared into the glistening winter sky.

A Faraway Place

Today the air teems with words of goodbye.
A handful, a handful at a time, I breathe the words of goodbye.
A faraway place comes forth.
As it pushes me little by little, a faraway place comes forth.
I would bring with me the first newly sprouted leaf, her lips, her crimson
cheeks, and her beaming eyes that make me shy.
The air raises my heart, like a fragile piece of ice, and passes me by.
The barren tree sheds and sheds its leaves and the rock governs the dim
light of the stone’s shadow.
The bench sits at the same spot all day long with a frame on which nobody
is seated even now.
Hands quivered, eyes damped, and at a loss for words.
When everybody speaks of farewells,
a faraway place comes forth,
somewhere we can hardly fathom.

Translation Tuesday: An excerpt from Prosopopoeia by Farid Tali

December 13, 2016 | in Translations | by Aditi Machado

That autumn I believed in God for three months while the metro trains screeched along, especially where there were bends.

Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia is a hybrid novella—a work of postmodern elegy that narrates the death of a young man from AIDS. We are told this story by the deceased man’s brother, who is at times tormented and mournful, at times disengaged from his French-Moroccan family’s forms of grieving. With “cold curiosity” he even describes the decomposition of his brother’s corpse in dense, poetic language. In the excerpt included here, the narrator reveals his conflicted feelings about religion even as the power and beauty of the Quranic verses sustain him, give him—in the midst of this death song—life.

Forty days would have passed between the first ceremony and the last: there was a time, a dead time that followed the death of the body, which was calm, having been abandoned by pain and now engulfed by two long songs which got mixed up. It was neither a period nor a duration, just a time, sensed too early and known too late. It’s to keep company with the deceased, someone said, so that he knows where he’s going, that he won’t be alone there. His room had been emptied of all furniture; it was also the room in which I slept. I was crouched in a corner: old, Arab men with receptive palms were sitting in an almost perfect circle in which each one in his place rhymed with another. And those soft, rhyming words, whose meaning I could not understand, seemed to be coming out of their palms. I knew they were from the Quran, that it was music, I recognized its rhythm. I breathed in the syllables, they cure tuberculosis. I hung on to each successive rhyme, each time it was the same. I puffed out my chest at the beginning of every verse, it was like nectar for my lungs. The words came loose as though liquid and, flowing in a single gush, came to rest on my lips as at the source of a garden as old as several years of drought. The words came but in written form only, dressed in strength and glory, borne in those sacred characters that symbolized for me the essence of the divine. They had neither body nor flesh but were men. They came from the bottom of the throat—from the base of the larynx, to be more precise. From the voices of those one seldom hears, beyond the commonness of the everyday, composed of a balance between breath and sculpted air. They possessed nothing more than the appeal of written things and they were no less beautiful for it. I thought this as I listened, and I listened. It might have been God or madness or love, but so what. Certainly I was wrong to think that to love this singing as I did meant I believed in God, that there could be no beauty in a moment such as this without it having been dictated by him. I didn’t think I could be this deluded, that I could be so unhappy as to confuse pleasure with faith. I saw truth where there was none, as is the case often.

That autumn I believed in God for three months while the metro trains screeched along, especially where there were bends. I believed because I was reading the Quran (and I was haunted by the idea that my hands were too dirty to touch it, that for every page I turned I needed water—or sand, as I’d heard it said of those primitives, Muslims of the desert, who in the absence of water were permitted, by way of ablution, to rub their bodies and hands with a stone or with sand) and because it made me fear God.