Translations

Translation Tuesday: “I’m Scared of Those Dots” by Mirka Szychowiak

Somebody said that the healthiest ones die most easily.

Today’s Translation Tuesday comes from the Polish writer Mirka Szychowiak. “I’m Scared of Those Dots” is a haunting ellipsis of a story, concealing just as much as it reveals.

I came earlier today, let’s spend as much time together as we can, let’s enjoy each other’s company, stock up on it. As usual, we won’t be able to answer the same questions, but they will be asked nonetheless.

Zbyszek, who pushed you out of that dirty train? Your bloody blonde mop on the tracks, it still hurts. Who did it to us? How are you, Basia, do tell. What’s up? You were the fastest among us, made us so proud. Somebody said that the healthiest ones die most easily. You didn’t want to be an exception, did you? You passed away at a faster pace than when you broke the 100-metre record. Rysiu, your last letter made us angry. You better all come, you wrote. Your life with us was filled with laughter, but you were alone when you shot yourself for some strange girl. We were furious, but almost all of us did come. Almost, because Bolek had left by then, as was his custom, quietly. He fell over and that was it. Two hours after his death, he became a father. Both prematurely. Youth gave us no guarantees, we understood it early on and only Adam didn’t get it in time—it was the youth, which tore his heart apart, like a bullet. It was so literal it stripped him of all romanticism. It poured out of him, ripped him inside and that was it. Later it was Bożenka and Janusz. The two of them and the carbon monoxide from the stove. A potted fern—a nameday present—withered and then somebody called to say that there were less of us yet again.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Future Perfect” by Paolo Zardi

You are sitting up straight, and don’t know that in less than a minute you are going to die.

The narrator of “The Future Perfect” is riding the bus, listening to the Beatles on an iPod, when a tragic accident occurs on the street outside. Paolo Zardi doesn’t tell us which album it is, but perhaps we can speculate that it is Sgt. Pepper. As a shattering portrait of parental loss and a terrifying vision of the randomness and finality of death, Zardi’s story recalls the songs “She’s Leaving Home” and “A Day in the Life,” respectively. Like those songs, the reverberations of “The Future Perfect” stay with us long after the final line.

I’m sitting on a plastic chair on the number 7 bus, on Corso Stati Uniti, heading towards the station, laptop case in hand, and a sense of satisfaction for the great deal I just closed. You are riding a scooter, an Aprilia SR, with a black leg cover over your legs, a bunny-eared helmet on your head, and a windshield to protect you from the rain. You are sitting up straight, a common female stance, and don’t know that in less than a minute you are going to die. Opposite me, there is a woman who is the carbon copy of a girl who was in elementary school with me, but ten years older; you, in the meantime, drive up alongside the huge window where I’m watching Padua’s drenched industrial area flash by—I can also see a Seat León waiting to exit a side road, five hundred meters ahead of us—and I smile when I see the huge bright “Serramenti Cacco” sign; then, I look down at you, but the visor of your helmet is dark, and I can’t see the lines of your face. You continue driving in your lane, next to us, under a trickle of rain, while on the bus a black kid offers his seat to a man who had no idea he was that old. We will pass you soon, and you, trailing behind us, will crash into the front of a car that will not have yielded the right-of-way; we will only hear the muffled sound of sheet metal buckling, and we will ask ourselves what the noise was; someone will say it was two cars crashing; someone else will add, in the dialect of Padua, “That was some crash!” and then we will all go back to reading our books, to listening to the Beatles on our iPods, to asking ourselves why we hadn’t noticed we had aged. While your mother is preparing the pasta for dinner, a doctor will be trying to reanimate you, pressing his hands down on your chest 103 times a minute, the time it takes to cook the Barilla farfalle noodles; they will be throwing in the towel just as your mother is draining the pasta and is starting to ask herself why you are so late. At eight thirty, sweaty-palmed, she will call you on your cell phone, and on the other end a man will sit down and wait for it to ring just once more, just one more time before working up the courage to answer and explain to the person who brought you into this world what has happened to you; and on this side of the world your mother will slip to the ground and will scream, without understanding, “Oh God, oh my God!” Your father will get up off his armchair, where he had started watching the news of Obama’s victory on channel 2 and, heavy-hearted, he will go to the kitchen; and when he sees his wife sitting on the floor, he will understand everything, immediately; then he will kneel next to the woman he has always loved, and he will hold her as if she were made of fine glass, and, incredulous, they will cry, together; your mother will remember the day she gave birth to you and your father the first time you told him you loved him. Then, in time, your room will become a shrine and your things small relics; your mother will spend her next years listening to your CDs, stuck forever in 2009, hugging the first teddy bear she ever bought for you; your father will slip into a silence that is more and more dismal. But in the meantime, we, the passengers on the bus, will have already arrived home: when your mother was dialing the phone, I had already eaten dinner; when she slipped to the floor, I had finished brushing my teeth; when your parents were driving to the hospital, accompanied only by the sound of their sobs, I was finishing the book on my night stand. And while they were identifying your face, disfigured by death, I had just closed my eyes, thanking the Lord for such a beautiful day.

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Translation Tuesday: Two poems by Maung Day

Khine Khine Monkfish doesn't like the deaf physicians.

We are back with our first Translation Tuesday of 2018! Today, we showcase two short poems by Burmese writer Maung Day wherein he imagines worlds without mysteries or poets. Enjoy!

Fire Alarms Are Real

All the poets in the world

Will be gone in a day or two

After singing of roses and naked monks.

Then we can start our celebration

With giraffes sitting on top of poles

And people eating curries with green rice

While their souls defecate on their heads.

 

Since when did our gardens become markets

Teeming with walking wardrobes and skeletal birds

Buying music cds from deaf physicians?

Maybe nothing’s too surprising anymore

Now that our place has become a willow tree,

Our houses the innards of a violent vegan,

And our genitals electronic cigarettes.

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Translation Tuesday: “Reading on the Tram” by Aibhe Ní Ghearbhuigh

The staccato poetry / of noticeboards

Today we are thrilled to present a frosty poem that brings us to the trains of Ireland. Irish poet Aibhe Ní Ghearbhuigh beautifully weaves together locomotive travel with the more abstract movement of reading. 

Reading on the Tram

The morning tram

I go unseen

in the concertina of life,

in the articulation

between two cars

 

(out with your book)

 

I can feel

every soft turning

every

rounding of the bend

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Translation Tuesday: BALLERINA by Kinga Tóth

in the hole is the wire / the wire coiled / around the girl / like a lace collar

“BALLERINA” is a poem from Hungarian writer Kinga Tóth’s book, ALL MACHINE. Tóth is not only a poet, but a visual and multimedia artist, some of whose visual work was featured in the Summer 2016 issue of Asymptote. The sound poetry Tóth produced for ALL MACHINE can serve as a fitting prelude (or accompaniment) to reading “BALLERINA.” We hear a whirring, disjointed medley of voices surrounded by the squeaking of an unoiled machine, much like the rotating figure in the music box of the poem. 

Also included here are some illustrations from ALL MACHINE and photos from Tóth’s live work. Of them, Eva Heisler has written, “While the typed phrases in Tóth’s visual poems are a mix of English, German, and Hungarian, the poet insists that translation is not necessary, that legibility is not the point; words in her poem-drawings shake their signifying function and border on visual stammers, the line spacing often squeezed, the lines tightly stacked, and the pages factory-tuned.”

Kinga Toth, cover, 1._balerina (1)

1

the object’s shape material
regular 10×10 wood
top and bottom parts
joined with metal hinges
rotating a cylinder
in the centre a hole where
sharp fixings
are screwed
its internal design
delicately lineated
including curves
in the centre of the cylinder
(and opposite too)
is wire knotted
to hooks inside the object
the other end
positioned on a platform
onto a turning rod
wound to 2/3
with the opening and
closing of the lid the taut
rod scrapes against
the object’s inner wall/border
upon lowering against
the opposite the aim
of the first phase is to scour
the girl out from within

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What’s New in Translation: December 2017

Looking for new books? Look no further!

2017 was a fantastic year for books, but there’s still so much more we want to share before we enter the New Year! This month, our team of editors review two new books from China and Japan—each of them special in their own way. Dive in! 

lianke

The Years, Months, Days by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas, Vintage (UK)

Reviewed by Dylan Suher, Contributing Editor

Released years after the publication of the original, translations benefit from historical hindsight. Although the two novellas contained within The Years, Months, Days (Grove Atlantic, December 2017) are the latest of Yan Lianke’s works to be translated into English, they were originally published in 1997 (The Years, Months, Days) and 2001 (Marrow, originally titled Balou Mountain Songs 耙耧天歌), just before the string of novels upon which Yan’s reputation now rests: Hard Like Water (2001), Lenin’s Kisses (2004), Dream of Ding Village (2005) and Four Books (2011). Read in retrospect, these novellas represent a critical point in the evolution of Yan’s aesthetic. In both, we can see Yan learning how to best use his preferred technique of primordial allegory, painted with a broad Fauvist brush. Carlos Rojas tends to smooth out and harmonize Yan’s expressive phrasing, but the credit (or blame) for the rough symbolist feel of a metaphor like time that “rushes past their interlocked gazes like a herd of horses” should all go to Yan.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Train” by Martín Tonalmeyotl

Each step is a return: towards death, towards life

From the humorous to the profane and the sacred, Náhuatl poet Martín Tonalmeyotl’s poetic work is firmly rooted in the mountains of his native Guerrero (Mexico) and reflects his commitment to his culture and his language. Far from idealizing his home state, however, Tonalmeyotl’s work frequently takes an unflinching look at a sociopolitical situation where, in addition to the 2014 kidnapping and murder of forty-three students from Ayotzinapa amidst increasing violence from drug trafficking, Guerrero’s citizens have gone so far as to organize independent civil defense groups for protection. In “The Train,” the poet takes up another aspect of life in contemporary Mexico, human migration, in the series of freight trains otherwise known as La bestia (the Beast) or El tren de la muerte (the Death Train) that transport migrants from Central America to the US border.

—Paul Worley

The Train 

Each step is a return: towards death, towards life
Each train is a nightmare: of blood, of hunger, of cobwebs
Each child is a piece of fruit: rotten, sweet, bitter, what does it matter
At any rate life is sold to the scavengers
To the rancid wolves who’d like to eat us whole
Because if they don’t devour our stick-thin bones
Their potbellies will become hollow
And they won’t have any shit to feed their own parasites
We should get drunk, I tell you,
So we forget that on this earth
Day by day we are hunted down like rabid dogs

Translated from the Náhuatl into Spanish by Martín Tonalmeyotl
Translated from the Spanish into English  by Paul Worley

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Translation Tuesday: The Strawberry Pickers by Felix Nicolau

freedom is expensive, paid up front!

This Tuesday, we’re excited to share a new poem by the Romanian poet, Felix Nicolau, whose work is a cutting and humorous comment on life for those crossing borders and coming into contact with other cultures, yet who are still at the very bottom of the social ladder. 


The Strawberry Pickers

is President Iliescu around—the sun will come out!
on Christmas we took our measure of freedom
seriously, didn’t the Star Poet of Pit Coal and his miner comrades from Jiu Valley invade
the capital?
didn’t they march through the springtime quarter or through the slums?
Hooray President Goatee!  Did he eat salami with soy like all of us?  Boo, Goatee!
we won’t sell our country out!
back then we had the means but no beans
now there’s lots of beans but no financial means
we’ve been hit by a nuclear bomb of whiskey and cigarettes
is President Iliescu around—the sun will come out!
the retirees applaud the miners the students heckle their grandparents
the scenery’s cleared of railroad locomotive plants
the sea is cleared of our fleet
freedom is expensive, paid up front!  Give us money to stay up front!
finally we can buy and sell the best football players
more powerful than the Chinese—we take all the strawberry picking jobs in Europe
we pick the strawberries on the bottom of the Atlantic
we emerge on the east coast and keep picking
watch out Alaska—WE’RE COMING!

Translated from the Romanian by MARGENTO and Martin Woodside


Felix Nicolau
is Professor in the Faculty of Theology and Literature, Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of eight books of literary and communication theory,
 five volumes of poetry
(Kamceatka—Time IS honey, 2014) and two novels. He is member on the editorial boards of The Muse—an International Journal of Poetry and Metaliteratura magazines. His areas of interest are translation studies, the theory of communication, comparative literature, cultural studies, translation studies, British and American studies, and Romanian studies. He is also swims, rollerblades, and rides a scooter. Sometimes he even reads more than writes.

MARGENTO (Chris Tănăsescu) is a poet, performer, academic, and translator who has lectured, launched books, and performed in the US, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Europe. His pen name is also the name of his multimedia cross-artform band that won a number of major international awards. He is co-author of poetryartexchange, his co-translations with Martin Woodside from Gellu Naum’s poetry (Athanor and Other Pohems) were nominated by World Literature Today as Most Notable Translation in 2013, and he has written the libretto for a rock opera composed by Bogdan Bradu. He deploys networks-of-networks and natural-language-processing algorithms in his collaborative poetry, and continues his work on the graph poem project together with Diana Inkpen and their students at the University of Ottawa. MARGENTO is Romania & Moldova editor-at-large for Asymptote.

Martin Woodside is a writer, teacher, scholar, and founding member of Calypso Editions. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who earned his MFA and a certificate of specialization in Children’s Literature from San Diego State University and his Ph.D. in Childhood Studies from Rutgers-Camden in 2015. He ​has written five books for children, a chapbook of poetry (Stationary LandscapesPudding House), and a full-length collection of poetry (This River Goes Both Ways, Wordtech). His translations of Romanian poetry have appeared in several books and journals, including The Kenyon Review Online, Asymptote, and the Brookyn Rail’s inTranslationHe’s published two collections of Romanian poetry in translation: Of Gentle Wolves, an anthology of contemporary Romanian poetry, and—along with MARGENTO—Athanor & Other Pohems, collecting the work of the brilliant surrealist Gellu Naum.


*****

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Translation Tuesday: Poems by Roberto Piva

I am the acid trip / in nighttime boats

Today we present the Brazilian poet, Roberto Piva, translated by Asymptote Editor at Large for Brazil, Maíra Mendes Galvão. At once spiritual and carnal, Piva’s poems are rooted in the chaos of the metropolis, the dirt and grime of the urban underworld, all with a Surrealist and sometimes Romantic tinge, at the heels of André Breton, Murilo Mendes, Lautréamont, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. His utter divergence from the formal constraints of constructivism and the then-flourishing Brazilian concrete movement, as well as his reliance on the sensorial, rendered him one of the “poetas malditos”—maligned poets—an outcast even from the infamous yet famous Brazilian “marginal generation.” “Piazza I” first appeared in Piazzas (1964), while “Poema Vertigem” (Poem Vertigo) was published in Ciclones (1997).

Piazza I

One afternoon
is enough to go mad
Or to hit the Museum to see Bosch
a winter’s afternoon
on a grave patio
where garòfani milk-shake & Claude
obssessed with angels
or vast engines that spin with
seraphic grace
playing the banjo of Remembrance
without the love found tasted dreamed of
& long municipal vivaria
without seeking to understand
imagine
the eyeless marrow
or virgin birds
it just so happened that I saw again
the simple mortal tower of Dream
not with real & cylindrical fingers
Du Barry Byron the Marquess of Santos
Swift Jarry with the noise
of bells in my barbarian nights
the chariots of fire
the trapezes of mercury
are hands writing & fishing
eschatological nymphs
small cannons of blood & the large open eyes
for some miracle of Luck
I am the jet set of damned love
INSIDE THE NIGHT & ITS ILLUMINATED CRAMPS
the parrots of death with Aristotle at the stern of thunder
THE WILL TO DRIFT AROUND LOVE’S DATA
spinach in the morning & cream cheese
sporty-souls with flowers between their teeth
my orange opening up like a door
YOUR VOICE IS ETERNAL I see the ashen hand tearing
the wall of the world
WE ARE IN LIFE DEFINITELY

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Translation Tuesday: “Love Crisson” by Milli Graffi

Talklossenette wavening / the palpid culdicurve / ambashes.

I fell in love with the poetry of Milli Graffi in 2008, when I was seeking authors to include in a dossier for Aufgabe on “poesia ultima e della ricerca,” or the latest Italian poetry of research. It was immediately clear to me that we had heroes in common—Lewis Carroll and James Joyce in particular.

There’s a section in Finnegans Wake on Anna Liva Plurabelle in which Joyce speaks of “loosening your talktapes.” When he translated this passage into Italian, Joyce himself rendered this phrase as “scioglilinguagnolo,” a translation that likely reveals the matrix of the original notion he had in mind: in English, we speak of tongue twisters, or what we might render in Italian as attorcilingua, while in Italian one uses the term “scioglilingua,” or tongue-dissolvers, tongue-thawers, tongue untiers. The Italian idiomatic expression might very well have been the origin of the “loosening” that ended up in Finnegans Wake, a book in which all languages converge in tangles of phonemes and roots.

I discovered this point of correspondence in a book of English exercises that Milli Graffi edited for Paravia publishers, aimed at high school students—because Graffi, unstoppable champion of the avant-garde that she is, chose this mind-twistingly complex passage for the teaching volume. When we got together this summer in Milan to prepare for a public chat on translation, on a sultry heat-thickened afternoon further stultified by a city-wide transit strike, Milli told me that she had used the word in a poem, and I knew that I had to try translating it.

The work was published in Mille graffi e venti poesie, 1977-78 (Geiger, 1979), and I soon found that Graffi had rendered Joyce’s phrase even more Byzantine, because she transformed scioglilinguagnolo into sperdilinquagnolo, turning the action of loosening embedded in the original Italian phrase into loss (sperdersi refers to losing oneself; sperdere means dispersal, scattering), and lingua (“tongue; language”) into linqua, some sort of calque tending toward the English “linkage” while containing the heavily deictic “qua” (Italian “here”; Latin “what; as; in the capacity of”). I took other necessary liberties while working with this poem: my translation of ambiscia is a calque of ambassador and ambush, and so on. A proper gloss would proceed word by word, but I’ll leave it up to readers to discover some tripwires of their own.

—Jennifer Scappettone

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Translation Tuesday: “The Despair of Roses” by Frédérique Martin

I sold my mother the other day.

If Camus’ Meursault once shocked us with his emotional alienation, opening his novel with “Today, mother died,” Frédérique Martin’s unsentimental narrator takes it one step further in “The Despair of the Roses”: “I sold my mother the other day.”  This Translation Tuesday, we present the brilliant fiction leading off our New Voices in French Literature Special Feature showcase in our latest issue. If you are a French reader, hop over to this article page for the French original and translator Hilary McGrath’s note, and consider following us at our newly launched French Facebook page!

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

I sold my mother the other day. At the market in Saints-Sauveurs, the one that’s open to the public twice a year like in many large towns. I wanted to take care of the sale myself rather than handing her over to one of the merchants. They may know all the right things to say but they don’t always keep their word. Don’t think that I don’t love my mother. I said to her—I love you, Mum. Don’t ever forget that—but the day comes when you have to move on from your parents and let go of the apron strings. My father has been dead for some time so this question never arose with regard to him.

She was gone by around three in the afternoon. You could hardly say they had to tear us apart. She’s not even that old and is still in excellent health. She wasn’t a burden on me either. It was more a question of weighing things up and finding a balance; when one stage in life comes to an end you need to move on. To leave your childhood behind you, selling your mother becomes a necessary step. I’m not the only one who believes this to be true but I know what some people think about it; they consider it a little too . . . radical. For the most part, they are hypocrites who end up putting their elderly relatives into retirement homes where death awaits them. Some keep them at home but reduce their living space little by little and send them to bed earlier and earlier, knowing that the deadly boredom of the interminable days will grind them down. Some people probably still love them enough to relinquish a space for them, some corner, over there. And wait it out.

I don’t want all that palaver in my house. My mother is affectionate and very active. That’s the memory I’ll always have of her. However, she did weave an invisible, sticky web around me that prevented me from growing up, my heartbeat stuck in a groove that wasn’t my own.
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Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from “The Garden of Seven Twilights” by Miquel de Palol

I grew aware of the immense distances spread out in front of me, breathing for me.

“When I read Miquel de Palol,” says Mireira Vidal-Conte, “I see reflections of such authors as Claudio Magris, Robert Walser, Cortázar, Ray Bradbury, Clarice Lispector, Stendhal, Szymborska, Casares, Karel Čapek, Pessoa, Proust, Flaubert, or Novalis; but also of painters like Brueghel the Elder (the first of many predecessors of the surrealism of the detail) or the cinema of David Lynch, Fellini, or Wong Kar-wai. This is true irrespective of the genre, for the poet under discussion works not in a specific genre (save for that of language), but in the broader category of art. As a literary artist, he employs genre in the manner of a simple tool, employing the one that works or those occasions when it works. He is a poet when poetry is what is called for.” For this Translation Tuesday, we present an excerpt from The Garden of Seven Twilights, in which the great Miquel de Palol touches the real in all its vertiginous vastness in childhood moments spent face to face with the cosmos. This piece was first published last Thursday along with new work from thirty-one countries in our Fall 2017 issue.

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

The Story of the Swing and the Stars

My American childhood, super-protected, closed in on itself, took place between Long Island and New England: Providence, Boston, Salem . . . Now they seem to me like places from a dream. My godfather Kaspar had a house on the outskirts of Boston, and I stayed there for long stretches in the summer, until my mother died.

There was a swing between two apple trees in the garden behind the house, but from a very young age, I preferred to kill time staring at the cockroaches and butterflies.

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Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from Mediterranean Suite by Florin Caragiu

Not far away, the frescoes catch in their fishing nets The memory and the wind. Closely following behind us, the dolphins.

Today’s Translation Tuesday is brought to you by MARGENTO, Asymptote Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, and poet and translator Marius Surleac. As you immerse yourself in these lines, it is worth keeping in mind Florin’s unique profile and approach to creation as he combines poetry, mathematics, and Eastern Orthodox theology. There is a specific emphasis on mystical practice, particularly the kind that involves “iconic Hesychasm.” These excerpts from Florin Caragiu’s work, Mediterranean Suiteexplore a sense of nostalgia, loss, and change.

Excerpts from Mediterranean Suite

It was only after long that we found the poet’s grave

In the graveyard by the sea. We barely made out

His name on the burial stone. We had passed

The spot several times

Without noticing it. Just as day after day people keep reaching

Your sight and you have no idea what they’re holding back.

Just as the blotchy calligraphic lettering

Overshadows a voice and its sharp beams

Coming out of a cloud of sea gulls, out of the lighted beacon

Piercing the sea’s costa and its coastal heart,

The wave amphitheater, and the city’s watery arteries.

 

Not far away, the frescoes catch in their fishing nets

The memory and the wind. Closely following behind us, the dolphins.

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Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from Formaldehyde by Carla Faesler

​"There is a human heart the size of a fist inside of a jar."

This glimpse into a new work by Carla Faesler offers an intriguing portrait of a married couple’s life and the spectre of their daughter, memories of a deceased mother, and a heart preserved in a jar. This excerpt seems to almost represent a cross-section of the story, focusing on one particular, seemingly normal day, yet with flickers of the past as well as into the future. The ending leaves us unsettled, but wanting more—we’ve become witness to a family’s mysterious secret, and we won’t be let go just yet. 

Excerpt from Formaldehyde

“The heart, if it could think, would stop.”

—Fernando Pessoa, Book of Disquiet

Febe, Larca’s mother, swallows her pills in the morning. Her circulatory system pumps the pharmaceuticals in minutes. Only then can she cook breakfast. When the effect peaks, she’s finishing her second cup of coffee. Larca walks to school hand in hand with Celso, her father, while Febe, engrossed like a hen, perches in her armchair, purveying a section of foliage out the window, a bit of sky, the fraction of a lamp post, to wonder how her husband, after dropping off their daughter, can walk to the hardware store and hoist the storefront’s heavy curtain under the constant watch of the guards. The physical force flushes red Celso’s face, supplied with blood by a network of fine veins. Then Febe, pallid, stands to fix her hair and slip something on in time for her husband to come home. Once he’s climbed the stairs, they greet one another with the warmth of a hand resting on a shoulder or the idle motion of clothes settling. Immediately then, two mannequins long out of fashion go down the white wood stairs. They drive to the market to buy food, and they check up on grandma’s house, which is really the house of Cristina, Celso’s dead mother, where everything remains unchanged thanks to Aurora who, despite her ponderous age, has held to her thrifty ways. They leave behind some groceries and the daily request that she resist the cloisters that have her walled in, consumed. It’s not that there are ghosts, with the family legend there would be enough dead to populate a country, it’s Aurora who frightens herself, the terrible appearance of her varicose veins, her wearied insides burdening her with the notion that she won’t ever disappear.

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