THE CRAFT OF BILINGUAL WRITERS | REMEMBERING CLARIBEL ALEGRÍA | GOOD VS. EVIL IN CRIME FICTION

World LiteratureYour passportToday to great reading

Speculative5 Writers Who Dwell in PossibilityFiction PIERRETTE FLEUTIAUX | RODRIGO FRESÁN | ANGÉLICA GORODISCHER ALEKSEY LUKYANOV | ANNE RICHTER

CREATIVE NONFICTION Alberto Chimal’s periodic table of books

REVIEWS OF BOOKS BY Carmen Boullosa Mia Couto Dunya Mikhail & more Distributed by the University of Chicago Press New from HAUS PUBLISHING www.press.uchicago.edu

From Midnight to Glorious Morning? Life is Good Yiza India Since Independence Alex Capus Michael Köhlmeier Mihir Bose Translated by John Brownjohn Translated by Ruth Martin Mihir Bose traveled the length and breadth of India This new novel by Alex Capus is a hymn to trust, “Simultaneously bleak and hopeful, Yiza traverses to explore how a country that many doubted would friendship, and life’s small pleasures. Told with the expansive landscape of human suffering as seen survive its birth has been transformed into an eco- his trademark humor, Life is Good is about finding through the eyes of displaced migrant children.” nomic force to be reckoned with. This is a nuanced, contentment in rootedness as the world speeds up. —Foreword Reviews personal, and trenchant book. Paper $19.95 Paper $15.95 Paper $24.95 MAY – JUNE 2018 Contents cover feature 42 Speculative Fiction

43 The House by Pierrette Fleutiaux 15 35 45 Poetry by Nii Ayikwei Parkes on The Tenants Mahtem Shiferraw “The Power of Normal” by Anne Richter 51 Crime & Mystery Tribute A Perfect Wife by Angélica Gorodischer 12 40 Antagonists and Master Criminals In Memoriam Claribel Alegría: 54 by J. Madison Davis Amor sin fin Annus Mirabilis (Anus Horribilis) by George Evans & Daisy Zamora by Aleksey Lukyanov Poetry Q&A 58 15 Ancient History Six Poems 20 by Rodrigo Fresán by Mahtem Shiferraw A Conversation with Masatsugu Ono by Reid Bartholomew 18 Editors’ Picks: Three Poems Creative Nonfiction Summer Reads by Juan Bello Sánchez 24 9 Michelle Johnson 26 A Periodic Table of Books 19 Rob Vollmar A Dedication Poem by Alberto Chimal 37 Daniel Simon by Mohamed Metwalli Essays 28 Two Poems 30 about by Lamia Makaddem Inside the Bilingual Writer the cover by Erik Gleibermann Illustration by Gediminas 38 Pranckevičius, The Mandala 35 an illustrator by Claribel Alegría Exploring the Notion working and of Story Structure living in Vilnius, by Nii Ayikwei Parkes Lithuania

In Every Issue | 3 Editor’s Note | 5 Notebook | 62 World Literature in Review | 96 Outpost What’s on worldlit.org Visit our website for exclusive content including original audio recordings, photo galleries, blog posts, and more. digital enhancements online extras ON THE WLT BLOG

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So thrilled and proud Thanks to Michelle I have a new poem Join our community of readers of Oklahoma-based Johnson for the up @worldlittoday alba and writers on Twitter. Use the @worldlittoday for featuring fabulous interview Proud to share this : hashtag #IReadWLT and tell and nominating Zoë Urness’s questions about space with some us about your favorite features story/photo of #StandingRock. lillian boxfish amazing writers that photo from this issue. Timely. Poignant. Well- @StMartinsPress I greatly admire. deserved. @PulitzerPrize & flânerie for #filamlit #filipino @NativeOklahoma #zoeurness @worldlittoday #pilipnx editor’s note

ot only is World Literature Today sophisticated design aesthetic throughout one of the oldest continuously the current issue. Rob Vollmar, while con- published magazines devoted to tinuing to serve as our polymath book internationalN literature, but a remarkable review editor, has also assumed Jen’s former continuity has prevailed on our masthead online editing role. And we’re delighted to page in the past couple of decades. Dr. RC welcome Cassady Dixon as our new full- Davis-Undiano will soon celebrate twenty time colleague in marketing, public rela- years as WLT’s executive director in what tions, and social media. Behind the scenes I like to characterize as a third golden age but no less vital to our presence on campus, of Oklahoma must begin fostering contri- in the magazine’s history, following the Terri Stubblefield will consolidate her role butions to the scholarly and cultural activi- tenures of our founding editor (1927–49), as office manager in charge of programs, ties of the nation.” That utilitarian emphasis Roy Temple House, and our longtime edi- event planning, and development, and Kay remains at the core of our mission, even tor (1967–91) Ivar Ivask. Moreover, as of Blunck continues to keep the WLT ship as the university’s scholarly and cultural 2018, I’ll become the third longest-serving afloat by managing our subscriptions and activities have expanded beyond the state editor in chief (2008–18) in the publica- accounts. and region to become not only national but tion’s history, following House and Ivask. What remains unchanged is the unwav- international in scope. Standing on the shoulders of such giants, ering support of the University of Oklahoma As I wrote in a previous issue, “To the we feel fortunate to survey the horizons of in providing WLT with both an operational students in my magazine publishing class, the international literary scene from the base and an intellectual home. Speaking of I often cite Michael Robert Evans’s asser- Southern Plains of Oklahoma, a place that golden ages, we salute OU’s longtime presi- tion that ‘editing is primarily about people,’ has always been a crossroads of languages, dent, David L. Boren, upon his retirement not words. By extension, universities are cultures, and the imagination. this year and thank him for his generous less about buildings and the spaces—geo- Mindful of the continuity of our history support of the arts and humanities, and graphical or intellectual—they occupy than here, I’m also pleased to announce four new WLT in particular, during his tenure. We about the people who inhabit and enliven staffing changes for 2018: Michelle John- also thank Dr. Kyle Harper, OU’s senior them” (May 2015). While a JSTOR keyword son, who has served as WLT’s gifted man- vice president and provost, for his deep and search might provide a “big data” view of aging editor since 2008, is adding “culture passionate investment in fostering our con- world literature as cataloged in our pages editor” to her title—in the July issue, poet tinued excellence. In October 1926, when since 1927, most readers who pick up a John Kinsella and visual artist Helen John- Dr. House initially approached President book are looking for deep immersion in son will offer a lively Q&A from Australia, William Bennett Bizzell to request a startup the unique time and place of that writer’s and Michelle is already developing a music- budget of $150 for the first two issues of the world. Words always reflect back upon the themed cover feature for the September quarterly that eventually became WLT, his multiverse at large—we read such literature issue. Also of note, Jen Rickard Blair, previ- rationale was strikingly modest: “I know to be enlightened and inspired, even within ously our online editor and web developer, our little magazine will be useful in various the spatial and temporal circumscriptions took over as WLT’s art director as of the quarters. A good many of us, I think, are of our horizons. March issue—readers will appreciate her coming to feel strongly that the University Daniel Simon simon alba : photo  Have a comment, critique, or inspiration you’d like to share? Write to us on Facebook, reach out on Twitter @worldlittoday, or email the editor in chief ([email protected]).

WORLDLIT.ORG 3 World Literature Today May –June 2018 Volume 92, Number 3 Print/Digital Combo EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR & NEUSTADT PROFESSOR Robert Con Davis-Undiano

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR & EDITOR IN CHIEF Daniel Simon WORLD LITERATURE TODAY MANAGING & CULTURE EDITOR Michelle Johnson Wherever you are BOOK REVIEW & ONLINE EDITOR Rob Vollmar For the first time ever, combine a print ART & WEB DIRECTOR subscription with full digital access for the Jen Rickard Blair same price as print alone. PROGRAMS & DEVELOPMENT Digital Only: $18/year Terri D. Stubblefield PUBLICITY & MARKETING Print Only: $35/year Cassady Dixon Print + Digital: $35/year CIRCULATION & ACCOUNTS Kay Blunck Thank you for making World Literature Today your passport to great reading!

editorial board Roger Allen Manuel Durán César Ferreira George Gömöri Alamgir Hashmi Farzaneh Milani interns Tanure Ojaide Reid Bartholomew Nii Ayikwei Parkes Erin Donnelly Ilan Stavans James Farner Michelle Yeh Taylor Hickney Theodore Ziolkowski Tyler McElroy Claire Riggs contributing editors Grant Schatzman Jeanetta Calhoun Mish Linda Stack-Nelson Armando Celayo J. Madison Davis Bridey Heing World Literature Today is George Henson published bimonthly at the Emily Johnson University of Oklahoma, Norman. Marla Johnson Postmaster: Send address Marcelo Rioseco changes to WLT, 630 Parrington Karin Schutjer Oval, Suite 110, Norman OK David Shook 73019-4037. Periodicals Michael Winston postage paid at Hanover PA Ping Zhu 17331. Copyright © 2018 by World Literature Today and If you’re already a print subscriber, visit board of visitors the Board of Regents of the Molly Shi Boren University of Oklahoma. ISSN worldlit.org/print-digital to set up your S. Ross Clarke 0196-3570 (1945-8134 online). Cheryl Foote Groenendyke Subscription and advertising free digital access. Sarah C. Hogan rates are listed on our website Judy Zarrow Kishner (worldlit.org) or can be obtained

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4 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 Notebook

city profile Sligo, Ireland

by Grant Schatzman

left Sligo’s River Garavogue. right Yeats’s grave in St. Columba’s churchyard.

hen I pulled into Sligo on the area where he spent much of his youth, and your dialogue take a turn toward poetry, morning bus with a dog-eared his footprints linger. With a car, a bicycle, you may discover one of Sligo’s greatest copy of W. B. Yeats’s Collected or a sturdy pair of walking boots, one can charms: here, literature never quite becomes PoemsW, I carried two wishes: first, that it retrace the journey of “The Stolen Child” history. would stop raining. And second, that I through the deciduous canopy of old Slish- Sligo is a place of poetry without pomp. might uncover some of the vital, inspiring wood to the rustling waterfall of Glen-Car, Verse is scrawled on the walls, written into force behind my favorite poet. where the fairies swing from fern fronds. folk songs, and etched into the memories of One gets over the rain. Bus and ferry can bring you to the famous those raised with rhymes on their tongues. Located on the coastal edge of County lake isle of Innisfree that hummed peace- Yeats’s legacy is borne proudly and revisited Sligo in the northwest of Ireland, Sligo rests fully in Yeats’s memory amid the bustle of frequently. One exemplar of this (and for on the neck of land between Sligo Bay and London, or to the Salley Gardens where me, one of the town’s great treasures) is the placid Lough Gill. Riverside restaurants, he would rendezvous with Maud Gonne, the Hamilton Gallery, which, in addition shops, and lively pubs line the town center, ever aloof. The more solemn-minded make to exhibiting artwork from a vast range of where the swinging doors of little cafés dis- their way to the cemetery where Yeats lies contemporary Irish artists, holds an annual close the smell of black currant scones or interred “Under bare Ben Bulben’s head / In invitational exhibition reflecting on some the flash of jam jars and bottles of cordial. Drumcliff churchyard” and ruminate on the aspect of Yeats’s work. Each of these special Visitors’ maps lead to abbeys, churches, lines cut into his simple headstone. shows is a culmination of the unique kind and other historical sites around town, but Despite the area’s many draws, travel- of presence with which Sligo is gifted—one somehow, people seem to gravitate toward ers from too far afield are regarded as that allows its inhabitants, and perhaps its pixabay / Wine Street, where the Yeats Memorial something of a pleasant surprise. Tours are pilgrims, to poignantly reenvision the life Building stands. more likely to be filled with visitors from and work of W. B. Yeats. dubreuil Lovers of Irish poetry have good reason another county than curious continentals or to venture to a less-trafficked town like pond-hopping Americans. Let slip a foreign Grant Schatzman is a WLT intern and a martin : Sligo. Yeats’s early work draws deeply from accent and you may find yourself caught writer, editor, and student at the University of photo KEITH EWING PHOTO: RIGHT GUNN. DAVE PHOTO: LEFT the natural features and fairy stories of the up in a chat with a lifelong resident. Should Oklahoma.

WORLDLIT.ORG 5 Notebook

translator’s note Unhomed

by Edward Gauvin

hen asked to contribute to a specula- The house in every incarnation from crumbling castle tive fiction folio, I noticed only afterward to suburban abode, whether with skeletons in the closet I’d picked two tales that revolve around or hearts beneath the floorboards, is a mainstay of the houses.W Freud would say I protest too much. (I am fantastic, locus of ghosts and seat of the self. The French merely grateful his list of impossible things—to govern, fantastique as a genre is bound up with the word étrange to teach, and to cure—does not include translation.) of whose supernatural suggestion our “strange” retains

6 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 left A house in Iceland with a turf roof. Photo: Jonathan Andreo/Unsplash

but an attenuated echo (“estrangement” preserves some at once spontaneous and concrete, combining interior- of the alienating force, though not its vector). And ity with materiality. Developing from Ann Radcliffe, so étrange in this context is generally rendered as Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Vernon Lee, it moved away “uncanny,” both of which are standard for the Ger- from explanation and mechanism toward instinct and man unheimlich—literally, “unhomely.” These words, transformation, ambiguity not merely ambient but each with their own origins and baggage, triangulate embodied. Richter avoids essentializing femininity; her a concept that derives its lasting power from its very approach is descriptive, not prescriptive, and above all impalpability, but it is to translation that we owe their inclusive; several authors she features have yet to make collusive proximity. it into English. Home: you can’t go back again, but when you do, Proponents of the social novel have accused fabu- they have to take you in . . . or not. In his history of lism of a reluctance or failure to engage the contempo- French fantastical literature, fantasist Marcel Schneider rary big picture in all its realist particulars, as if imagi- called Kafka a “delay-action bomb”: the impact of Alex- nation were a retreat and metaphor a surrender, but it is andre Vialatte’s translations extended far beyond their perhaps in paring specifics away, cleaving close instead first appearance in the 1930s. The titular structure of to some bone truth, that fables find their haunting Pierrette Fleutiaux’s tale (page 43), which updates the perennity. If, four decades after it initially lent its name age-old gingerbread cottage to modern “independent to her second collection, it is now possible to read “The senior living,” keeps its narrator daughter out as impla- Tenants” (page 45) as a parable of the refugee crisis, that cably as Kafka’s gate before the law. It is no diminish- is only a testament to its roominess. As Homi Bhabha ment to say the fable in Fleutiaux’s hands is “brought wrote, “the unhomely moment relates the traumatic home”: father swapped for mother, the urban for the ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider personal, chilly omneity moderated by wry rue. At the disjunctions of political existence.” Unhomed from end, no light blinds; life goes on. their native tongues, these stories now speak, across First hailed as the new female hope for the French borders, of abiding unsettlements. fantastique—in an admiring preface to her debut novel- la, Julio Cortázar likened her to Leonora Carrington Editorial note: Turn to page 43 to read Gauvin’s translation and Remedios Varo—Fleutiaux initially disavowed the of Fleutiaux’s “The House” and page 45 to read his label, branding her stories realist because she wrote of translation of Richter’s “The Tenants.” “ordinary things everyone knew about.” “The House” dates from her first collection in 1976; by the time of its Edward Gauvin’s work has won 2003 reprinting, Fleutiaux herself contributed a preface the John Dryden Translation claiming Calvino as a model and coming around to the prize and the Science Fiction and label fantastical for “lack of anything better.” Fantasy Translation Award and By 1995 Anne Richter had already included Fleu- been nominated for the French- tiaux in the second edition of her anthology Le Fan- American Foundation and Oxford tastique Féminin (the 1977 version only went as far Weidenfeld Translation prizes. as Patricia Highsmith). Richter’s introductory essay The translator of more than 250 graphic novels, he is a begins by quoting Lise Deharme, surrealism’s Lady of contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders the Glove and Queen of Spades, herself a noted ghost- and has written on the francophone fantastic at Weird story writer: “A chair can start putting forth buds in Fiction Review. any atmosphere that suits it.” The female fantastic was

WORLDLIT.ORG 7 Notebook

what to read now Unrequited Love

by Lori Feathers

hree brief, powerful novels in recent translation following day. But Vibeke is not your typical mother. Tenriched my reading during the last few months. Narcissistic and self-absorbed, she seems to have for- Stories of unrequited love, their protagonists suffer an gotten not only Jon’s birthday but his very existence. unsatisfied, persistent longing for affirmation in the face Instead, all her attention is focused on the possibility of seeming indifference. Each of these works illuminates of hooking up with a gruff, quiet stranger who is in a universal human frailty: the affection we most desire town as part of the traveling carnival. Love is a deep and rests in the hands of someone unwilling or incapable of vibrantly alive novel. The effect of Ørstavik’s narrative, giving it. alternating abruptly between Jon’s story and that of his mother, is beautifully devastating. The prose and pacing Hanne Ørstavik set a tone of foreboding tension and impending doom. Love This is not your typical love story but rather the sharp- Trans. Martin Aitken | Archipelago Books edged account of a boy whose need for attention from his heedless mother is heartfelt and full of yearning. Hanne Ørstavik places us inside the minds of her two protagonists: a self-conscious boy, Jon, and his single Antonio Monda mother, Vibeke, as they embark on separate adventures Unworthy one bitterly cold night in small-town Norway. While Jon Trans. John Cullen | Nan A. Talese wanders around the neighborhood alone, his thoughts never stray from his beloved mother, whom he fanta- Father Abram is a young Catholic priest who fulfills his sizes at home busying herself with baking a cake and priestly duties with true conviction yet repeatedly sur- wrapping gifts for his ninth birthday celebration the renders to his lust and desire to be in a loving relationship

8 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 editor’s pick: summer reads

The winter break was one of long reads: Exit West, If Beale Street Could with a woman. Lisa, his latest lover, understands his commit- Talk, Manhattan Beach, Little Fires Everywhere. After a busy four ment to God and never asks him to choose between her and months of editing and teaching, with little time for reading novels, Man- the church. When Lisa is diagnosed with terminal cancer, aging and Culture Editor Michelle Johnson is looking forward to again Father Abram feels helpless to her suffering and struggles to immersing herself in other worlds. Here are three already on her list. understand why God allows it. At the same time, he ques- tions whether God truly forgives his repeated breach of his Therese Bohman vow of celibacy. He despairs God’s silence in response to Eventide both his sins and his efforts to atone for them. Father Abram Trans. Marlaine Delargy entangles himself in a tightening web of dishonesty as he tries Other Press to keep his relationship with Lisa concealed, and this causes him great shame. He comes to understand that his feelings Swedish author Therese Bohman, who is of shame are a symptom of God’s grace—evidence that his also an art-and-culture columnist, creates striving to be good can never be finished. Unworthy is an for her third novel an art history profes- immersive novel of one man’s fight to reconcile his flawed sor navigating the politics of the academic humanity with a godliness compelled by the sacred; his rec- world. The publisher’s catalog describes the ognition that even the most devout face silence in their need book as posing questions about the “dis- for divine solace. torted standards to which women are held in their relationships and careers.” The online reviews promise “crystalline reflections on art and Madame Nielsen culture” (Sylvia Brownrigg) and a protagonist who ultimately prevails. The Endless Summer Trans. Gaye Kynoch | Open Letter Rupert Thomson Never Anyone But You The Endless Summer feels like a fairy tale—lyrical, poignant, Other Press and dreamy; a story set in an otherworldly, timeless space. A group of young people converge upon a ramshackle To continue reading about strong women, manor where they pass day after summer day in a state of art, and culture, I’ve already set aside the hedonistic languor and ardent fascination with the beauti- advance copy of Rupert Thomson’s Never fully poised and reserved matron of the house, referred to Anyone But You. This novelization of the simply as “the mother.” This woman is indeed mother of lives of two revolutionary women, Claude three children: a teenage daughter, Stina, and two little boys. Cahun and Marcel Moore, traces their clan- But for Stina and the handful of young men who decamp at destine love affair in avant-garde 1930s Paris the manor that summer (among them both Stina’s gender- and Jersey. While smashing gender barriers, they played an influential ambiguous lover and her best friend from school), the role in the surrealist and dadaist movements and eventually risked mother is muse—enigmatic, beautiful, self-possessed—a their lives creating anti-Nazi propaganda. being whose love and attention they all long to receive. To their great surprise, the mother takes a lover, one of a newly Tayari Jones arrived pair of young men from Portugal hitchhiking across An American Marriage Europe. Months later the summer idyll abruptly ends when Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill one of the group dies. Madame Nielsen fittingly subtitles her novel “a requiem,” and indeed it beautifully evokes the With both Edwidge Danticat and Jacqueline death of carefree innocence and, with it, the recognition of Woodson recommending it, this story of a our time-bound existence. wrongful conviction’s impact upon a mar- riage is a timely must-read. Though not Lori Feathers (@lorifeathers) is a co-owner of Interabang a courtroom drama, the novel promises Books in Dallas, Texas, and the store’s book buyer. She enough connection to the law-and-literature writes freelance book reviews, sits on the board of the genre to satisfy readers who, like me, want to National Book Critics Circle, and is a fiction judge for the reflect on how the US legal system affects both those brought into it 2018 Best Translated Book Award. and their families.

WORLDLIT.ORG 9 himself catching upon Review Box postfor Hermione Reid is Bartholomew a writing andJapanese the staff ofThe Asterthe staff 10 Notebook his mile-long readinghis mile-long isn’t writing, hefinds Oklahoma. When he WLT above Hoby’s debut novel at the University of list orworking with WLT publication at OU. Neon inDaylight. intern studying , a student arts , astudent arts

A BookBento MAY –JUNE 2018 thoughts on book. the City, London, Cairo, and Mexico City along with their pictures of readers from subways the of New York hands. intheir be The page features black-and-white aside to get on take their whatever happens book to honored tradition of reading intransit, readers taking toSubway shine seeks light on Review time- the Book @SUBWAYBOOKREVIEW among avariety of carefully sideitems. placed recommendationwith abook as main the course arrangements. Bento builds Box on concept Book this that are often inelaborate, placed pleasing aesthetically tion of bentō, or single-portion home-packed meals Bento on is take aliterary Box aJapaneseBook - tradi @BOOKBENTO vacation and baby pictures on your feed. literature’s power moments insmall the inbetween put together alist of five Instagram pages that deliver more information than vital hectic inthe age. We’ve and inspiringpeace and reflection, has this never been Literature has always had aproud tradition of instilling constantly whirling information overwhelming. can be W connection to eachother, vast the amount of gives media us an unprecedented social hile 5 ing amoment midst inthe of still to day’s the be chaos. workthe for to speak itself. His for page- is perfect tak butthat experience, the deepen often he’ll simply leave Instagram page. He frequently captions adds poetic criticart Teju displays Cole and art photography on his Photography critic for New York the Times @_TEJUCOLE esting reading material. and finding new an inter while satisfy itch for poetry may have not otherwise connections. It’s agreat way to makeswhich for aunique that bridge books between into The titles fall books. eachother and form apoem, Spine-side from Out spines the creates of poetry @SPINESIDEOUT compile into Last Night’s abook, Reading (2015). there’s plenty to go through—enough for Gavino to and nuggets of wisdom is an inspiring and experience, event. Scrolling through numerous the illustrations authorthe next to Gavino’s favorite quote from the readings, during she which sits down and illustrates Gavino crowd. inthe Gavino to countless has been authors can only hope to have someone like Kate readings can bringBook kinds of inall people, but @LASTNIGHTSREADING lit by

Reid Bartholomew

lists Instas Favorite Literary , author, and -

PHOTO: COURTESY OF BOOK BENTO BOX PHOTO: COURTESY OF BOOK BENTO BOX Courtesy the artist/andreschulze.com of above Duo I,2013, oil oncanvasby Andre Schulze

Features From theSpeculativeFiction specialsection “It wasn’t toopleasantknowing prison camp inmates or testing prison campinmatesortesting they’d be inventing a portable they’d beinventingaportable course). Nextthingyouknow, punches (on mannequins, of punches (onmannequins,of —“Annus Mirabilis(AnusHorribilis),” you were makingstocksfor the KutuzovorHomereye- wall forexecutions.” byAlekseyLukyanov starting onpage42. WORLDLIT.ORG

11 12 mystery WLT crime & MAY –JUNE 2018 sheriff is certainly not is certainly sheriff “evil.” His choices, as aman not doing “good,” conventional inthe but sense, the as an sheriff the antagonist.to view The women are generally agree with decision their and have come him. By we time the reach story’s the conclusion, we that abused friend, their by her husband, murdered Susan Glaspell. Agroup of women conceal fact the Consider brilliant the classic “A Jury of Her Peers,” by audiencethe would interpret as proper the ones. Aristotle was not aChristian—but making choices inhis Poeticsdescribes protagonistthe is “good” that sense inthe Aristotle “antagonist”the opposing. the being In most stories, with “protagonist” the actor, primary the being and and “antagonist” from word their for “actor” (agon character. The Greeks us terms the left “protagonist” is no hero without counterpush the of an opposing W by Antagonists andMaster Criminals You Need One? Really Is a Bad Guy When Where J.MadisonDavis evil. Asevil. light by is defined darkness, there and good answer between is struggle the hat about? is fiction crime One glib , not saintly or morally pure— ), ), to have little or no for respect “inferior” people. He shoots holes inhis apartment’s and walls, he seems ofthink himas “good.” He’s he acocaine addict, and Crown, the but we wouldn’t usualsense inthe as ambiguous. Sherlock Holmes is on sideof the God some reticence, agree. choice to remain silent, and readers, with perhaps for many years. Her suffering justifies difficult the ness to emotional on the wife the cruelties inflicted and arepresentative of law, the show us his blind- of himas“good.” wouldn’t intheusualsensethink of GodandtheCrown, butwe Sherlock Holmesisontheside are notnearlyasambiguous. In mostcrimestories,thechoices In most stories, crime choices the are not nearly

PHOTO: VICTROLA GRAMOPHONE BY JIMMY BAIKOVICIUS/FLICKR treats the steadfast Watson—a wounded veteran and The full character of the antagonist is usually a physician—like a King Charles spaniel there to concealed, but ideally, shouldn’t the antagonist amuse him. Yet Holmes and his readers face little be equal, a worthy opponent, a mirror anguish in his choices. Something bad is afoot and he will end it. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe reflection of the protagonist? often exhibits a rueful sympathy for petty criminals and other moral “small stuff,” but there is never any ney in the crawl space clipping wires under the dicta- question about the big stuff. Sam Spade, in The Mal- tor’s palace was all you needed to know about Barney. tese Falcon, faces an agonizing choice between love Novelist Dick Francis used to say that develop- or justice. Knowing how much Sam loves Brigid, the ing the hero’s character filled up his pages. However, reader becomes afraid that Sam isn’t strong enough in crime writing, I would say, the bad guy is usually to make the proper choice. It comes as a relief that underdeveloped, and frequently cartoonish. Why? he makes the painful, but right, choice. He’s not even Well, for the sake of mystery, the full character of the able to articulate well why he does this, but we like antagonist is usually concealed, but ideally, shouldn’t him, even admire him, for choosing what we hope the antagonist be equal, a worthy opponent, a mirror we would have the strength to choose in similar cir- reflection of the protagonist? Writers create plots, cumstances. however, in which the conflict must be resolved, so The antagonist, in fact, does not need to make naturally, a tie (to paraphrase Vince Lombardi) would choices that the audience finds “not good.” He or she be like kissing your own sister. The deck is going to merely needs to hinder the “good” choices of the pro- be stacked for the “good guy.” Continental writers tagonist. By opposing the protagonist, for any motive, often push their resolutions toward ambiguity to an antagonist fulfills the dramatic function. Aristotle both make them more “realistic,” like “literature,” and controversially wrote that character is in service of less obviously British and American knockoffs, but the plot. You might have a play without character, the collision of definite good and evil is much more he says, but never one without plot. It is one of the popular, both in derivative writings and in imported most attacked things he wrote, and yet think of all best-sellers. the entertainments you have enjoyed that are largely I would further argue that few people are capable “characterless.” A good guy, a bad guy, and a series of identifying with true evil. Even the most hardened of events leading to a conclusion—it’s certainly the criminals rationalize their behavior. The girl didn’t essence of most murder mysteries. rob the store in order to show off her evil—she want- This is not to say that the highest quality of lit- ed a new frock. Raskolnikoff murdered his landlady erature gives us characters without complexity or to become Napoleon. We may be decadently amused complication (“depth” if you prefer), but white hat/ by Hannibal Lecter, but can we identify with him? He black hat conflicts are the rule in books, movies, and lost me with the fava beans, never mind the liver. It’s sometimes even quality television. Hired to write worth noting here that no matter how entertaining an original Law and Order novel, I was told that the Lecter is in his first two appearances, he is not really novelist’s challenge was that the show was character- the primary antagonist in either. In Red Dragon, less; that is to say, unlike many other television series agent Will Graham pursues “The Tooth Fairy.” In (like the spin-off Law and Order: Special Victims The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling pursues Unit), the internal struggles of the characters were “Buffalo Bill.” Both antagonist killers are not sym- of little or no consequence. Almost no one thinks of patico. Despite Lecter’s appeal, he’s structurally only Law and Order as “junk” television, however. It runs a secondary character, a murdering Mr. Micawber. almost every night on cable television, still delivering The agents need information from him, and that’s all. its thoughtful episodes to its audience. The old series Most famous villains are memorably cartoonish.

PHOTO: VICTROLA GRAMOPHONE BY JIMMY BAIKOVICIUS/FLICKR JIMMY GRAMOPHONE BY VICTROLA PHOTO: Mission Impossible was similarly characterless. Bar- Take Professor Moriarty in the Holmes stories. He is

WORLDLIT.ORG 13 and mystery columnin including also publishedseven 14 crime and dozens ofshort and stories and articles, stories andarticles, J. MadisonDavisJ. is including hiscrime the author ofeight Dead Line Dead . Hehas WLT of Frau , an Schütz WLT nonfiction books books nonfiction Edgar nominee, Law andOrder: mystery novels, since 2004. since 2004.

MAY –JUNE The Murder &

mystery 2018 Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). in movies like The Magnificent (1960)and Seven The discourse, drawing on of echoes the characterization have recently of become part our national political lingers, and images of Hispanic leering lords drug Nonetheless, fear of “Yellow the Peril” unfortunately would currently resurrected never be for or books film. staunchthe Inspector Whatsizname chasing himbut to 1959was amuch more interesting character than Manchu inSaxRohmer’s string of novels from 1911 faded. Stereotypes linger, of course. Dr. The evil Fu- weren’t quite palatable, of and types westerns those thereally that was cathode-ray asense those images that almost matched genocide. actual the Gradu- Americans were massacred on television in numbers ous boys with low IQs. When Iwas achild, Native ning Mexican bandits; and huge, lascivious, murder old movies; at conniving Jews; Arabs;- deceitful grin of aNation; at bucktoothed and Japanese sneaky in trayal of drooling American African rapists inBirth perceptions ofvillains. We fictional wince at por the gious, prejudices, and sexual and has this altered our played only infiction on Victrolas the of Nazis. by guy listens who agood being to Wagner, usually Dexter’sColin Inspector Morse convention all defies plicably, masterminds evil donot appreciate Mozart. and he is playing killer. himthe call Beethoven, Inex- music. If detective the enters acharacter’s chambers antagonists as cats liking (Dr. No!) and classical villain’stheir abnormality, writers may portray their are with inconvenient emotions. As ifto emphasize can with identify a psychopath, tormented as we devoid of emotion. It is unlikely average the reader antagonists, chameleon-like, intelligent, and utterly Psychopaths,fiction. as portrayed, are convenient forerunnerthe of along line of psychopaths incrime limited description of his character himup sets to be evidentlycrime it’s because in his nature, and the well educated, of arefined background. He turns to prototypethe of many amaster big criminal: brained, If thedetectiveentersacharacter’s

antagonists We are much more sensitive today to reli racial, - Beethoven, callhimthekiller. chambers and he is playing chambers andheisplaying

and

master

criminals - - exactly howexactly ventures far fiction from truth. the marchersRockwell, tiki the in Charlottesville) to see real-world Nazis (Himmler, Hess, George Lincoln “supermen” with dweebish, the idiotic, and deranged doctor from only Omaha. One need compare these cannot tothey cure accents their seem or defeat a to wipeoutthrillers, any detail. Despite security this, crack shots, and able, as Nazi the in many does killer geniuses inscience, physical specimens of health, attributed to themselves. master These are criminals Übermensch the them status that ludicrously they and yet, ironically, popular literature often grants hate. Worse perpetrators are of evil hard to imagine, bookshelvesthe as antagonists the loves everyone to ter how aged, have and continue been to march down Munich Indriðason’s Folsom’sAllan The Day after Tomorrow, to Arnaldur The Odessa File, to Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil to , Nazis are always available. From Frederick Forsyth’s for characterization the of skills many of the them, wants to get inidentifying with that pathology. ing conclusion of Fritz Lang’s Mis as as close anyone aware of problem, the and eventhoughdisturb the - perhapsevil, public the because has become acutely to showbegun up inrecent novels representing pure fortimes amusement—or lunch. Pedophiles have also rationalizations of someone murders who multiple eighties. It is hard to with conscienceless identify the and since atlar purpose Red least when Dragon (1981) asimi- have killers (yawn!). In served serial books, can rampage freely until heroes the blow up them nation for us to feel uncomfortable with, and they so Transformers and Klingons- have discrimi no social bad-guy robots or aliens or comic-book mutants. it might also explain why many so of our movies have fashioned masterminds, criminal but is which good, racism inhibits creation the of many of old- these Fortunately writers, for but thriller unfortunately Fear of storms viral the released as areaction to The Silence of the Lambs the (1988) bookended and numberless Nazis, other books, no mat- Operation Napoleon , to Robert Harris’s, to Robert Palmyra, Virginia Palmyra,

PHOTO: MERIÇ DAĞLI /UNSPLASH PHOTO: MERIÇ DAĞLI /UNSPLASH Six PoemsSix by nowhere; reminding us of everywhere, monosyllabic, things odd pasty on our foreign tongues and new we milky, carve those with weight the of firmament; the drooping finally our bodies from inside the out having something rotten years later, many lands apart, within we carry those towe forget; seem usaligning with ahistory birthmarks, like numbers marked on our abdomens more, or of curse the ageneration, markedthose on our foreheads or joy –or both; brink ofin the sorrow, we which Those are given Nomenclatures II MahtemShiferraw poetry filled with grim love. with grim filled us ofcalling something ourall names and naming, containing throughout, containing us – and into us lands, new carrying centuries, across black the seas and foremothers, beaming through and strife names –the of our fathers with grief and filled those foreign-nessthe of our mouths; color the ofbodies, our skin, from our hair, shape the of our and not dissent to, shaping themselves we receive,those or hear this , all of, all it, a new death.a new beginning, anew this, here, there, here, splintering my sides black mud or dust constructed to fracture into multitudes, Instead, is bone, body this with her last breath. namewhispered the of her city even Lot’s wife with white the salt of Assab’s dunes – I dream of covering my body like something burned and tossed. foreignnessthis smell they and refusing all – this reachingall at same the time ghoststhe of my past selves by othercalled names; but init Istand This is not my story; slide on my face. dust earth, the and bones Stranded at bubble sea, from andDust Bones WORLDLIT.ORG

15 16 constant self of being. thing –notethis here: not an object, but a and shaping away to forgetfulness –to survive Knowing gendered the histories of too, our bodies unbelonging, that of death, anew imminent threat. our fears that too; of assimilation, that of as an –again, alien athing, an object. Having to count humanness me in ash.like thin Having –see tome, beg see this here – lost. The constant loss, coating our skin inclined wretched, to think: once there, now immigrant, the between and refugee. the Iam amidst tears, or difference the bewilderment, or say to Having grief-stricken. the to explain, brokenness. Not knowing what to do home within invisibility, or worry, or War, constant this: Ifind,is also hiding, a thirst, acry, for nostalgia simpler days. bleeding meat on inside, the quenching thorns afruit: on is thing, also this outside, the to acknowledge, that we which ignore; our own, or not; knowing the we choose language: that we which to use define notice,This Ialso thing, comes within made of war, things infested or: by war. to me, or, my body, asathing; an object are – as if to say things foreign all –note: referring it up mouths rise seen the of strangers, byI have it, described often been War poetry WLT MAY –JUNE

six

poems . The knowing of our selves: new 2018

by

mahtem

shiferraw cannot get of. rid a toothache I itI find hiddeneverywhere: or It mad. Both. not does leave, and somehow isthis absence, smell the of something missing, old horror, coming back home. And one this – I know it of is also ableeding shade. Its mist, an shape of my shadow, and though fuchsia, or burgundy, onethis drags itself me, behind exact its the body or out. One is acloud that refuses to rain – I donot ask where –inside Ifit within cloak the sounds like music too, but donot letit fool you. our ears, our movements. Oncloudy days, it sound we hear is not new, but slowly whorls or it and does, Idonot know. The hissing is turned backward. It not me, does see is an empty but cloak, its one, red eye years to muster, and never leaves. One learning. The learning we dotakes of words we donot recall. We this call and alone, our bloated belly with thousands shed our skin,we stand, suddenly naked and Iletit breathe black When blood. we and with blue venom, it enters my veins, I don’t know one. which Toothless in my dreams. but One is aserpent, The languages come Ispeak to me ISpeak The Languages

PHOTO: MERIÇ DAĞLI/UNSPLASH PHOTO: MERIÇ DAĞLI/UNSPLASH upon her body. emeralds are imprinted on my mother –sawdust himself is tobut be gray, athin and his hues to adhere to dark –the blue he has known through. Perhaps not he does know which it purple, is deep aslash of oxblood rippling I donot know –but it when comes to me How many has times lived, soul this refusing to die, now or ever. a strange thing Icannot recognize, what to say. Here too, he becomes really here alone? To Idonot this, know universe,the constantly asking –are we himswimming strange the find waters of I have written about that somewhere, Istill My father too, afish to seems be and though same the both age, and we hum quietly. without amaster. In story, this we are believe. He or athief, was also astudent a cattle farmer, or he would so have me Before Iwas my born, father was The Cattle Farmer and something sweet – weEverywhere go, we smell of death of fire that embrace us are blue with fear. intothem our branch arms. The rings childrenbear and sizeof the fold seeds its roots and rest our We little bodies. bleeding We be. wombs carve throughout ghosts of Gojiam. It us bleeding, sees mybetween father and I,and the standing green, translucent thing its aroma, like autumn, like rain, what comes after acry, or bleeding – Its leaves for abalm blistering skin; child, but Idonot hear. honey and winds. It wild me calls but not does It flinch. feeds me above mountains. the It me sees home. It and stands muscular tall I long for it on quiet nights andit call The Eucalyptus Tree after Susan Hahn black lioness press. press. black lioness executive editor of Collective, and Artist of the Ethiopian of color, co-founder of writers andartists to advance the works organization working anonprofit Arts, of Anaphora Literary She isthe founder Nebraska Press. the University of was publishedby collection Poets.African Her Sillerman Prize for won the 2016 Mahtem Shiferraw WORLDLIT.ORG Fuchsia

17

18 WLT poetry MAY –JUNE by JuanBelloSánchez Three Poems is not always opposite the of staying and that leaving that life the of aman is measured by sizeof the his shadow to dieto say leave my sight stay night the but to learned we go also it alone and coldness the of one the aiming arevolver we calmness of the learned cigarette the smoker to await chance with aroll of dice the to undress backseats inthe of cars we to learned pronounce brooklyn movies inthe intheMoviesBrooklyn We to Pronounce Learned 2018 a springtime inminiature. doorgoes to door, offering travelingthe salesman womanthe pushing astroller – fatiguedthe cars, sun– the that through falls trees, the thingsAnd of these all fights to overcome its transparency. mundaneThe that you don’t pay it much attention. common is so or where everything where nothing extraordinary on, goes Take at alook street the Nothing Extraordinary

PHOTO: PALON YOUTH/UNSPLASH PHOTO: PALON YOUTH/UNSPLASH tinting windows the with its garish light. rose eyesof inthe stuttering the rooster, beforeof All trumpets. the sun the and dancers the stitched rain the to golden the hips The sailors spoke with words of sand with them to crescent refill moons and shimmering fish. soldier. There, emptied poet the wine bottles her facemarked by dark the circles of an exiled tiger’s barthe with aBengal pelt, on keys of the old the piano. The waitress cleaned in coffee cups, and painted who actresses lips their There were that bells could only heard be starin the tamer’s tuxedo pocket. At night, woman the red inthe dress drank champagne playingyou sea the can accordion. the see Someone told me that ifyou open door the of atree The Green Café Premio dePoesía Joven RNE. Baena,” the XVI Premio dePoesía EmilioPrado, andthe VI Spanish poets. the works ofyounger peninsular poetry. She iscurrently focusing on Spanish andLatin American isatranslator Socha Emily of de Poesía Joven “Pablo García and has beenawarded the IV Premio three collections, chapbooks, poetry Compostela. Hehas publishedsix poet andteacher from Santiago de Juan Bello Sánchez isaSpanish Translations from the Spanish By Emily Socha educate. raucous storytelling instinct, he’s guaranteed to entertain as well as and armed with his meticulous eyefor scholarship and an always- holy Who grail: invented comics? Campbell he has answer, the thinks Alec presented by translator Carol Apollonio. a refinement of Ganieva’s already impressive as awriter, gifts artfully Muslim-majoritystood subject nation of Russian the Federation but books for the summer. sible in his slowly expanding home garden but has his eyeon these three EditorBook Review Rob Vollmar hopes to spend asmuch time aspos- ) delivers his first major work of comics inaquest history for the checks my off all boxes. literary andEast West emerging from Dark the Ages mysteries,occult and intermingling the of involving a missing aristocrat’s daughter, and place, better. the This dramatic story andtorical fiction, more the exotic time the I am an absolute mark for imaginative his- Europa Editions Trans. Katherine Gregor The Apothecary’s Shop: Venice 1118A.D. TiraboschiRoberto only another glimpse into poorly this under second novel intranslation promises not cies of Dagestani culture and society. Her duced anglophone readers to intrica the - Walland the Ganieva’sAlisa debut novel, The Mountain VellumDeep Trans. Carol Apollonio Bride and Groom Ganieva Alisa editor ’ s (Deep Vellum, (Deep 2015),intro-

pick Campbell ( Scottish cartoonist Eddie IDW Comics Cartoonists Reinvented a Bunch of Raucous the Century, and How Johnson, the Fight of The Goat Jack Getters: CampbellEddie : summer WORLDLIT.ORG From Hell,

reads

19 - 20 WLT Q&A MAY –JUNE 2018 “The Big Thing” “The Mishima Yukio In Prize. 2015he Masatsugu aJapanese Ono is writer wan ni seowareta fune years ago). In addition, an Ono is 9 Nen Mae no Inori

the French. translated several works from to his work, such asthe prominence for New Writers, and Nigiyakana grave), which won the Asahi Award umoreru (The haka water-covered discusses some of the themes central accomplished translator who has a choppy bay), which won the and some of the major influences on received the Akutagawa Japan’s Prize, highest literary honor, for his work based in Tokyo and the author of his writing. writing. his of his work by Angus Turvill, was of place and the power of compassion, published in April 2018.Here, he numerous novels, including Mizu ni including novels, numerous A Conversation with Masatsugu Ono by Lion Cross Point, atranslation ReidBartholomew (A prayer nine (Boat on

PHOTO: KODANSYA (KIYOSHI MORI) Reid Bartholomew: Jeffrey Angles, 2017 Yomiuri Prize Therefore, writing this novel was for me an recipient, has called you “one of the most important attempt to get as close as possible to Takeru’s Japanese novelists of the post-Murakami generation.” What does it mean to you to be considered a part of this mind so that I could feel his suffering. “post-Murakami generation”?

Masatsugu Ono: Jeffrey Angles is right to use the term was very strong. The works of intellectuals such as Fou- “post-Murakami generation.” I think Murakami has cault, Deleuze, Derrida, Barthes, and others were widely changed the regime of literary Japanese language. When read by students in the humanities. I was also interested he first started publishing fiction at the end of the 1970s, in the work of French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss. No his style—in which some critics saw the influence of doubt influenced by this air du temps, I was very keen Kurt Vonnegut Jr.—was both new and unique in its to learn French so that I could read these intellectuals in lightness and gentle humor. At the time his style was their original language. considered rather nonliterary, especially when com- pared to the seriousness of modern Japan’s literary tra- Bartholomew: What aspects of that background with dition. Looking back on the history of postwar Japanese French philosophy and literature have worked their way literature, we can see that Murakami made a clear mark into your writing? in it: there is the pre-Murakami period and the post- Murakami period. Born in 1970 and having first started Ono: I worked on Edward W. Said’s Orientalism for my to publish at the very beginning of this century, I can say BA thesis, without knowing that Ōe was a great reader that I’m writing in the post-Murakami period, in other of Said. They are friends: as you know, the title of Ōe’s words, in the Japanese literary scene (or “literary field” last and probably final novel is a kind of homage to in the Bourdieusian sense of the term) strongly marked Said’s book On Late Style. For my MA, I worked on by the work of Murakami. Michel Foucault, in particular on the role of literature in his work. For early Foucault, literary texts were his Bartholomew: Two Lines Press describes Lion Cross preferred materials for analysis. However, from the Point as “reminiscent of Kenzaburō Ōe’s best work.” mid-1960s, he turned his back on literature. In my MA What parallels do you see between your own writing project, I tried, in vain, to explain the reason for his and his? abandonment of literature. There were days when I couldn’t write even a single page, so I started to write Ono: I myself was surprised by this comparison. Most a short story about my hometown. So perhaps it can of Ōe’s stories take place in two places: Tokyo, where the be said that I started to write thanks to my study of narrator lives with his family, and a small village situ- French philosophy. ated in a valley on Shikoku Island. Ōe says there are two important subjects for him: the writer’s family life with Bartholomew: I read that you have translated works of his handicapped son, and literary investigations into literature by Édouard Glissant and Marie NDiaye. Has the local popular culture of his pays natal (homeland), having that experience with translation impacted your which he calls a “small peripheral place.” I have been writing in any significant way? very interested in the latter subject. Most of my stories take place in a small fishing village modeled on where Ono: Translation is good practice for reading a text I grew up. precisely. The experience of having done translation often made me consider if I translated this or that Bartholomew: I understand you’ve spent a lot of phrase of my own writing into French, would the effect time studying French philosophy and literature. What on the reader remain the same, or would it somehow piqued this interest? be diminished? Editorial note: Turn to page 69 to read

PHOTO: KODANSYA (KIYOSHI MORI) (KIYOSHI KODANSYA PHOTO: Ono: In the eighties and early nineties, in the literary Bartholomew: Do you read any of the translations of a review of Lion milieu, the presence of so-called French high theory your own works? Cross Point.

WORLDLIT.ORG 21 q & a masatsugu ono

It may well Ono: I don’t read the whole translated book. But in the be that, as case of my English translations, I do take a look at the places in the text that I imagine would be particularly adults, we difficult to translate. are just not aware of the Bartholomew: In Lion Cross Point, you decided to write elements inside the mind of a fourth-grade child named Takeru. What aspects of that perspective were you most con- that surround cerned with emulating? us, which are very real but Ono: When I started to write this novel, I got the feeling that this story had to be told from his point of view. I simply not could have written from a first-person perspective, but visible to I didn’t do that because I have never experienced the our eyes. same hardships as Takeru. Therefore, writing this novel was for me an attempt to get as close as possible to his mind so that I could feel his suffering. I wanted to write in such a way that the reader would understand that there were a lot of things about Takeru that not even the author could grasp. I didn’t feel like I was “creating” a character. To me, Takeru is there just like a real person.

Bartholomew: In Lion Cross Point, you focus a lot on the importance of place and the way that it influences characters. In fact, it isn’t just the physical attributes of the place that have an impact, but the history of the place seems to actively engage the characters. Tell me a bit about your decision to make place such a prominent factor in this story. can see. What made you include this dimension in an otherwise very real story? Ono: As I said above, most of my stories take place in a small seaside village modeled on my childhood village Ono: I think these “fantastical” elements are very real on the east coast of Kyushu Island. The village where for Takeru. As I was writing, I felt that the boy really I grew up is known for its deeply indented coastlines, saw them. So it was quite natural for me to include this and I have always been interested in writing about small dimension. When we were children, we saw and heard places in the countryside rather than about cities. I have things differently from the way we do now: our percep- been very influenced by my own childhood experi- tion of the world was very different. It may well be that, ences, though I left the village when I was eighteen. It as adults, we are just not aware of the elements that is very common to say that the place where we grew up surround us, which are very real but simply not visible continues to have an influence on us, on the way we to our eyes. are. A place is not only a geographical site. It is woven from the people who live there, each with his or her own Bartholomew: At the 2012 PEN World Voices Festival complex history, as well as from the history and culture during a conversation you had with Stuart Dybek, you of the place itself. As you suggest, the place in which this spoke about how the ocean of your hometown was story is set is also one of the main characters in the story. almost confining to you, something you always wanted to go beyond. From what I’ve seen, however, it’s a con- Bartholomew: The story incorporates some fantastical stant presence in your writing. Why do you choose to elements on top of reality, such as things that only Takeru return there in your writing?

22 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 Even though the closeness of we refer to this as having a cat’s back). But your interpre- human relationships in a small tation is very interesting. town could be suffocating at Bartholomew: There is a great deal of focus on physi- times, I liked talking with the older cality in general when describing people. The only char- inhabitants and listening to them acter that we get much of a look into the internal world talk to one another. of is our Takeru, and he is often as confused about the inner worlds of others as we are. Ono: Well, my small hamlet is situated on one of many coastal inlets that form the coastlines of my hometown. Ono: I agree with you. For Takeru, the boundary The sea itself seems enclosed by the surrounding hills. between real and unreal, inner world and outer world, This landscape gave me a sense of confinement when I remains ambiguous. He seems to be haunted by an was a child. Even though the closeness of human rela- unconscious desire to eliminate the distance between tionships in a small town could be suffocating at times, him and his elder brother. I liked talking with the older inhabitants and listening to them talk to one another. But this natural confinement Bartholomew: Takeru always seems to be at the mercy Compassion, made me dream of ailleurs, another place. I always felt of someone else, and, thankfully, there is always some- a tender myself torn between the attachment I felt to my home- body compassionate enough to stretch out a hand in attention to land and the desire to go farther afield. the darkest of times. That said, every one of those characters ends up having to leave. Is compassion just others, is a Bartholomew: Does this sense of confinement hold a brief respite from the pain of life, or is it something sort of prayer true for Takeru, who has come from a very literally more to you? for others. confining place in the city to this small fishing village? Ono: Well, I hope those hands form a chain even if each Ono: It is Wakako, Takeru’s mother, who feels deeply of them is being given only momentarily to those who this sense of confinement. I suppose Takeru felt himself suffer. Don’t you think the fact that someone thinks confined when he was in a big city with his mother and of you even for a brief moment is in itself something his elder brother, but it’s no longer the case once he encouraging and delightful? Compassion, a tender moves to the fishing village. attention to others, is a sort of prayer for others.

Bartholomew: Tell me a little bit about your fascination Bartholomew: Throughout the novel, there are a lot of with water—it’s a motif that has appeared throughout references to what Takeru calls “the big thing,” which many of your works. seems to link everyone together. In some cases, it appears to be a religious element, but at other times it Ono: I don’t know why. I’m not a good swimmer. I seems like something more natural and innate within remember almost drowning in the sea when I was people. Could you elaborate a little more on the signifi- around ten years old. My friend and I thought that an cance of this “big thing”? Reid Bartholomew is approaching typhoon was still quite far off. The sky was a WLT intern studying clear. The see appeared calm. But . . . Ono: I think it is a sort of wholeness that envelops all writing and Japanese of us along with all other forms of existence in this uni- at the University of Bartholomew: I’ve noticed that many of the adults are verse. It can certainly include a religious dimension. I’m Oklahoma. When he described as stooped over or having hunched backs. wondering if it may be like a wholeness we feel when we isn’t writing, he finds Was that simply a physical description that accompanies listen to the music of Bach: this music is of course reli- himself catching up on living out in the country, or were you deliberately trying gious, but what we are given always goes beyond. Takeru his mile-long reading list to hint at a burden these characters were carrying? doesn’t have enough words to describe what he feels or or working with the staff what he is exposed to. For him, it is nothing more than of The Aster Review, a Ono: I hadn’t noticed that myself, but perhaps it’s “the big thing.” student arts publication because I have a tendency to stoop myself (in Japanese January 2018 at OU.

WORLDLIT.ORG 23 creative nonfiction

A Periodic Table of Books

by Alberto Chimal

{CR} {ZN} {P} Chromium books that are all Zinc books: humble, useful, with a Phosphorus books: luminous, leaving shiny surface. moderate gloss. traces in the deepest parts of the body.

{FE} {NA} {S} Iron books, extremely heavy, which resist Sodium books, which are everywhere but Sulfur books, which cause everyone to being read and are left to rust, little often ignored and react violently to turn up their nose but at the same time by little. humid glances. are indispensable.

{H} {CS} {SB} Hydrogen books that explode just by Cesium books, with a precise pulse, Antimony books: always in the company opening them. reliable, whose titles are of others, always neglected and misplaced, seldom remembered. rarely opened.

24 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 left Iron, Uranium, Calcium, Gold, Praseodymium, Rubidium, Stontium, and Lead books. Illustration by Shayna Pond

{O} {PR} {AU} Oxygen books: indispensable but never to Praseodymium books, which think they Gold books: beautiful, brilliant, but pass be read in full, in their pure state, because are merely useful and practical but conceal through us without causing harm or ben- they go to your head. a double: a green or metallic mystery. efit.

{U} {RB} {NOBLE GASES} Uranium books, which remain forever in Rubidium books: almost always thought Argon, xenon, radon books: inert. your flesh and burn slowly. useless yet inspire vivid dreams of brilliant red. {HG} {PB} Mercury books, beautiful in appearance Lead books, extremely heavy, which claim {AS} but slippery; they slide away, disappear. to protect but kill instead. Arsenic books, like the one Napoleon read for years, they say, with such fervor that it {C} {SR} became part of him. Carbon books: those who feel as if they Strontium books, which look yellow but were part of their life since glow burning red. {PT} before: forever. Platinum books, which can serve as mere {CA} decoration, or can be nutritious, or Translation from the Spanish Calcium books, which form deposits and even explosive. By George Henson settle in inaccessible folds. {CD} Mexican writer Alberto {K} Cadmium books, which drive readers Chimal (b. 1970) Potassium books: soft, so they say, but be hopelessly mad, and without the possibility is the author of the careful when touching them. of appeal. short-story collections Los atacantes, Grey, {I} {AG} and Manda fuego Iodine books: scarce and essential; those Silver books, which fix images, cure warts, (Colima Prize 2014) who don’t read them are a bit dumber, bring rain, open the skin, and threaten and the novel La torre y el jardín, which was a even if they don’t realize it. to disappear. finalist for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 2013. His most recent book is the children’s story {RARE EARTH} {SI} El juego más antiguo (2017). He blogs at Books made of ytterbium, erbium, ter- Silicon books: abundant, simple, capable lashistorias.com.mx. bium, yttrium books: their readers always of fixing the memory of both words feel like someone who arrives to an and light. George Henson’s unknown city. translations have {TI} appeared variously {RU} Titanium books, which everyone competes in Words Without Ruthenium books, which harden us, are for and for petty reasons. Borders, Kenyon difficult to find, and rarely discussed. Review, Asymptote, {GE} and World Literature {BA} Germanium books, which are very Today, where he is a contributing editor. Most Barium books, which we always find with expensive and always expect to be recently, Deep Vellum released his translation someone else, who treats them almost replaced by others. of Sergio Pitol’s The Magician of Vienna. like diamonds.

WORLDLIT.ORG 25 poetry

A Dedication Poem

by Mohamed Metwalli

To an ordinary man To a previous relationship Mohamed Metwalli Who couldn’t care less That doesn’t cause a current headache, won the Yussef El-Khal About disasters befalling him, To a bruise in my ribs Prize in Lebanon for his To some modest happiness That I sheltered as if it were a dead embryo, poetry collection Once That this man finds in a bar in wintertime To my past life, upon a Time in 1992. Without a fight, Which would not, probably, cause harm to He was poet-in-residence To a tax-free beer bottle, anyone now, at the University of To a woman who does not intend to ditch me To a woman who snatched me out of depression Chicago in 1998. Other in the next five minutes, without anything in return, collections include The To a joke strong enough to lift our dusty coats To an old train line Story the People Tell To the inside of a tavern, That everyone has forgotten on purpose, in the Harbour (1998), To a dream, free of guilt To a wooden stool The Lost Promenades As if it were a tax collector, Falling on the head of an ordinary man (2010), and A Song To a glistening poem – Who was talking to me five minutes ago – by the Aegean Sea Like the surface of a lake And killed him, (2015). He compiled and That won’t be scratched by a pebble To opera singers co-edited an anthology of Thrown by a playful child, With fat bottoms and narrow horizons, offbeat Egyptian poetry, To a moment of silence and exchanged looks, To feminists who will blame me Angry Voices, published To a fragile soul like glass For not mentioning a woman by the University of cracking in this silence As an active element in the poem, Arkansas Press in 2002. Because of a reproachful look, To a blank sheet and a pencil

26 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 above Piburger Lake, Austria. Paul Gilmore/Unsplash

And the freedom of a child to narrate the scene, To his spices that changed thoughts and beliefs, To a dream of an ordinary man of fishing To the sand and its other buried letters, Under a clear sky To leaning against her arm In a lake whose surface will never be scratched by When I had a bruised rib a pebble, Refusing to acknowledge weakness, To coastal cities that forgot baby sharks, To her nobility, not showing power Octopuses, and fishing poets, One sunny morning on our way to the sea, To the cats of the rocks, punctured straw baskets, To those who died in another dark sea Gretchen McCullough And historic fortresses Before uttering their last words, is a senior instructor When they merge with seaweeds, To their dreams that drowned at the outset of the at the American To a fisherman who broke free from having last century – University in Cairo. Her a sweetheart Of not missing a single moment of pleasure in life, bilingual book of short And hence became ordinary To their souls that will keep haunting their stranglers, stories in English and Making it possible now for a stool in the tavern to To the Titanic, when splitting, Arabic, Three Stories smash his head, To whoever likes this poem! from Cairo, translated To a coastal cook who found a love letter with Mohamed On a disintegrating yellow paper Translation from the Arabic Metwalli, was Dated 1912, By Gretchen McCullough & Mohamed Metwalli published in 2011. Cooked its ingredients in oyster broth A story collection, And fed it to his customers who came Shahrazad’s Tooth, From faraway towns, appeared in 2013.

WORLDLIT.ORG 27 poetry

Two Poems

by Lamia Makaddem

Poetry was created to solve family problems

Let me just say: this is why poetry was created to solve family problems when needed and sometimes to wash the dishes and polish the glasses . . . I’m tired, That’s all. “Whores” have the right to get tired to close their legs for a while, to assess the damage and measure the distance between their ass cheeks and life and the customer just has to wait until the hole has mended and the edges have dried out.

Do you know what hurts the most? My ears. They were completely ruined by the screaming the screaming of rain outside and the wind in the locks, whenever my door is slammed by one of them like you, who didn’t pay a single penny so in return I asked you to recite a poem while entering me. “The poet whore!” is that what you told yourself? Yes, this is me at my weakest but can you deny that you were on the verge of tears when you finished? Lamia Makaddem is You put your head between your hands and cried like children do. a Tunisian poet and I also remember what you said before you left: I love you. translator living in All this happened in less than an hour the Netherlands. The while the wind was howling outside like a pack of dogs author of two books of and wolves far away echoed the howls. poetry, her verse has been translated into English, French, Dutch, ✴ and Kurdish. In 2000 she was awarded the El Hizjra prize for literature. She translated Let me just say the award-winning Dutch novel Jij zegt het for this – and this alone – was poetry created: (You said it), by Connie Palmen, and is to wipe fingerprints from our bodies,

currently working on the Arabic translation to straighten the sheets and pillows TRBOVICH/FLICKR JASON PHOTO: TOP of Malva, by Hagar Peeters. and to open the door at the end and say . . . goodbye.

28 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 Love makes woman a man and man a woman

It is not enough for you to touch me with your hand love is touching me with everything, with woman and distance and a bunch of grapes. It is not enough that you take me under you and on top of you you have to drag me by feet and into nightmares as well. Love is not a relationship between two individuals like they told us but rather two universes melting, a mixture of water with water. It is to love women as if I were you, to lust after their breasts to be riven seeing their naked flesh Karen McNeil’s literary to gasp when a woman lifts her hair with her hand to put it behind her translations have and just as your heart weakens when you see a hanging fruit appeared in Banipal, my heart weakens for the same reason. World Literature Today, Without air between us we are breathless and al-Jadid. She was without the sun rising above me and above you we are eyeless. revising editor of the The idea: love makes woman a man and man a woman Oxford Arabic Dictionary (2014) and has and makes water into love a master’s degree in Arabic literature and and love into life. linguistics from Georgetown University. She I incarnate in you like I incarnate in light and soil lives in Providence, Rhode Island. and you incarnate in me like life and death. I assembled you only because I collected you from here and there: Miled Faiza is a Tunisian some of your heart I brought from a train station American poet and some of your eyes from glasses in bars translator. He is the some of your skin from a cemetery author of Remains of a meanwhile you are here House We Once Entered and not here. (2004) and translator of the Booker Prize–shortlisted novel Autumn,

TOP PHOTO: TRBOVICH/FLICKR JASON PHOTO: TOP Translations from the Arabic by Ali Smith (al-Kharif, 2017). He teaches By Miled Faiza & Karen McNeil Arabic at Brown University.

WORLDLIT.ORG 29 essays

Inside the Bilingual Writer

by Erik Gleibermann

Through a series of interviews, Erik Gleibermann explores how eight prominent bilingual US writers approach their dual-language craft as they navigate identity between a childhood lived in one tongue and adulthood lived in another.

“When I live in both languages at the same time, it’s like breathing.” – Esmeralda Santiago

hen Edwidge Danticat was composing “A for New York at age twelve. English had become her Wall of Fire Rising” in her 1995 short- dominant language and the medium of her writer self, story collection Krik? Krak!, internally while Creole preserved life’s underlying roots. sheW heard her characters speaking Haitian Creole, In a recent interview Danticat told me how years Danticat’s childhood language. A distressed married after writing “A Wall of Fire Rising” she returned to couple talks about whether to consign their young son those roots, adapting the story into Creole for a Haitian to work at a sugar mill where for months, the husband radio broadcast. “I felt closer to how I felt the story as has been turned away. In his pain, he dreams of escap- a child,” she said. She was elaborating on a reflection ing Haiti in a hot-air balloon lying idle beside the mill. about the story in her essay collection Create Danger- His wife tells him that “if God wanted people to fly, he ously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2011), in which would have given us wings on our backs.” He replies, she says, “It was as if the voice in which I write, the “You’re right, Lili, you’re right. But look what he gave voice in which people speak Creole that comes out us instead. He gave us reasons to want to fly. He gave English on paper, had been released, and finally I was us the air, the birds, our son.” writing for people like my Tante Ilyana . . .” Danticat wrote these lines and the rest of Krik? Danticat’s dance between languages, and between Krak! in English over ten years after leaving Haiti selves, illustrates the creative artistic and identity flow

30 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 left Daniel Alarcón, Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Ha Jin, Esmeralda Santiago, and Gary Shteyngart Illustration by Jen Rickard Blair many bilingual writers experience. I spoke with Dan- history, such as Khaled Hosseini (Farsi), Laila Lalami ticat and seven other bilingual writers now living in (Arabic), Andrew Lam (Vietnamese), Kao Kalia Lang the United States to discover how each crafts between (Hmong), and Elif Shafak (Turkish). Still others, such languages. The others included Sandra Cisneros, Junot as Viet Thanh Nguyen (Vietnamese), Chang-rae Lee Díaz, Daniel Alarcón, Julia Alvarez, and Esmeralda (Korean), and Jhumpa Lahiri (Bengali) have had more Santiago (Spanish), Ha Jin (Chinese), and Gary Shteyn- indirect connection to the second language, not speak- gart (Russian). Each engages in a distinctive artistic ing it regularly as children. process. Santiago, for example, composes simultane- For those who work directly between languages, the ously in Spanish and English. Shteyngart sprinkles in process sometimes begins unconsciously, without even Russian when drawing from childhood memories. Jin transferring visibly to the page. Cisneros told me that Many of these inflects English with a slightly alien tone to remind while she wrote her lyrical coming-of-age novella The readers his characters are actually speaking Chinese. House on Mango Street, she was not aware of the sub- writers have But while the crafting processes differ, the search for surface presence of Spanish. “I was thinking in Spanish found their personal identity is often quite similar. Like Danticat, and writing in English,” she said. “It was there under- work to be many of these writers have found their work to be a neath like an archaeology.” Over the years she brought a powerful powerful means for navigating identities along the inti- Spanish more consciously into her process, telling me mate boundary between a childhood of one tongue and that now “I always feel like I’m on a borderland.” means for an adulthood of another. Traveling back and forth can For Shytengart, Díaz, and Santiago, the play of navigating be a journey of both reconciliation and conflict. languages in sleep emerges to inform how characters identities In living this duality, these writers voice the daily speak in story. “If the people in my dream are Spanish- experience of many bilingual immigrants around the speakers,” Díaz said, “they speak to me in Spanish. As along the world who are cooking breakfast, attending staff meet- with my dreams, my writing. English and Spanish exist intimate ings, posing questions in class, and buying the week’s in me side-by-side, twin rivers of different size, mostly boundary groceries. Collectively, bilingual writers play a forma- separate but sometimes confluent.” Díaz comfortably tive cultural role in the United States, reflecting the lives transfers his immigrant childhood experience lived in between a of a growing community. In 2015, 37 million people or Spanish into English. “I didn’t know English when I childhood of 12 percent of the population spoke two languages, an first moved to New Jersey,” he said, “but that didn’t stop one tongue increase of 11 million since 2000. The greatest number me from bearing witness to those terrible first years, and an by far speak Spanish, followed by Chinese and Tagalog which I now recount in a language that at the time I (census.gov). did not possess.” adulthood of These writers’ voices are especially vital now because To get an angle on Díaz, I trained a lens on his another. they counter the current anti-immigrant backlash. expletives because they are such a potent element of his While the Trump administration does not explicitly dialogue. What does it mean if a character says mierda negate non-English languages, it targets them implicitly rather than shit, cabrón instead of asshole? Because his through the proposed Mexican border wall, revocation texts are almost entirely in English, when a Spanish of DACA, and travel restrictions against eight coun- word or phrase appears, it can highlight and intensify tries with non-English primary languages. It has even a moment, often with playful sexuality. In the short- removed the White House Spanish website. story collection This Is How You Lose Her, the narrator Many of these writers are immigrants who arrived Yunior’s brother tries to justify having an affair, saying as children young enough to make English their to their mother, “Se metió por mis ojos” (She took me dominant language, except for Jin, who left China for through my eyes). The mother responds wryly, “Por Boston at twenty-nine, and Cisneros, who grew up mis ojos my ass. Tu te metiste por su culo” (Through my bilingual in Chicago. Alarcón came from Peru at three, eyes, my ass. You took her through her ass). This sala- Díaz from the Dominican Republic at six, Shteyngart cious bilingual wordplay creates a loose intimacy that from Russia at seven, Alvarez from the Dominican accents the conflicted family bond. Similarly, in anoth- Republic at ten, and Santiago from Puerto Rico at er family moment, Yunior’s brother, feeling judged thirteen. Other bilingual writers have had a similar for his womanizing, tells Yunior, “Cállate la fucking

WORLDLIT.ORG 31 essay inside the bilingual writer

For those who boca” (Shut your fucking mouth). Here, the Spanglish to splice Spanish into his English texts. He contrasted work directly could be read as either casualizing fraternal repartee or himself with Díaz. “It didn’t make sense for me to between accentuating the angry edge. approach Spanish in the way he did. He’s writing about While Díaz displays Spanish and English interweav- a lived bilingual experience.” languages, ing, Jin explained how English and Chinese for him Alarcón, however, incorporates translated Peruvian the process operate almost through separate channels. “I think in vernacular. “If I’m writing a conversation between a sometimes English, but I hear in Chinese,” he said. Though twenty- father and a son about love, sex, travel, money, or what- nine when he immigrated, Jin chose to write his novels ever, I’m translating from Peruvian Spanish. How you begins and stories in English and attended the Boston Univer- translate is so situational. In English, you’re not going unconsciously, sity MFA program, which he now directs. While he has to translate something into deep Brooklynese.” He had without even a well-attuned ear for English idiom, he told me that two translations done of his novel City of Clowns, one transferring in his novels and short stories he wants his Chinese- in Peruvian Spanish for a Peruvian audience, and the speaking characters to sound slightly dissonant so the second in a neuter Spanish for a US audience. He said visibly to the reader senses they’re not speaking English. Sometimes the latter is bland and unrooted to any particular com- page. he does this by translating Chinese figurative language munity but necessary for the multinational Spanish literally. He gave an example from his 2016 novel The population in the US. Boat Rocker, where a character uses the common When the writers dip into the well of their child- Chinese expression “A lie the size of heaven.” On the hood languages, the vocabulary in context feels any- other hand, working with the complex connotations of thing but neuter. It is deeply immersed in the personal poetry, Jin said he usually prefers to write in his native phrasings of family intimacy, whether harmonious or Chinese. “I need to feel the full weight of the language,” conflicted. Like Díaz, Danticat builds tension around he said. “With Chinese, I still can have this feeling, family interaction using slivers of the second lan- which has gradually been shifting to English.” guage. In her 2017 short story “Sunrise, Sunset,” for While Jin is the only one of the writers who regu- example, she sparingly employs three Creole words larly composes in two languages, Santiago is the only to intensify two mother-daughter moments. In the one who actually writes bilingually in the moment. first, an Alzheimer’s-stricken grandmother dangles “It’s spontaneous,” she explained. “Early drafts of all her granddaughter over a balcony, while the mother, my books are a mélange of English and Spanish, with Jeanne, beseeches her to pull the baby back. Jeanne whole pages in Spanish then translated to English pleads with two separate words for please: souple and toward the final drafts. I go from English to Spanish in then tanpri. At the end, they have a second strained midsentence when drafting. It feels as if that mixture is moment when Jeanne tells her mother, now being my real language.” carted away on a gurney, “Mesi” (thank you), less in Alarcón, in contrast, is the only writer working out gratitude than in farewell. loud in one language and compositionally in the other. Danticat depicts another poignant mother-daughter A journalist as well as fiction writer, he researches and moment in her children’s picture book Mama’s Nightin- interviews in Spanish, primarily in his native Peru. He gale. The young narrator, Saya, misses her mother who wrote an investigative essay for Harper’s on life in Peru’s has been jailed as an undocumented immigrant. Late largest prison, which also served as the basis for his at night when everyone is asleep, Saya listens to her fictional prison settings. mother’s outgoing voicemail message. “Tangri kite bon Because he immigrated to the US at age three, Alar- ti nouvél pou nou!” the voice says in Creole. “Please, cón spoke limited Spanish growing up. Along with Jin, leave us good news!” The reader can feel Saya’s spirits he has had to train himself to employ his nondominant momentarily lift. language and marks his rite of passage into literary The way that bits of Creole, Spanish, or, in Shteyn- Spanish at age twenty when he read García Márquez’s gart’s case, Russian, invoke early life emotions is what One Hundred Years of Solitude in the original. Now he Cisneros calls “the spell of words spoken in the lan- immerses himself in Spanish, spending long periods guage of our childhood.” Like Danticat writing a Creole in Lima, directing a Spanish-language podcast, Radio that awakens the spirit of her Tante Ilyana in Haiti, Ambulante, and publishing nonfiction pieces in a Peru- Shteyngart finds Russian animating memories of living vian magazine he co-edits. But Alarcón chooses not with his father in Moscow. He told me he usually thinks

32 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 The Special Case of Jamaican Patois When the writers dip into the well by Erik Gleibermann of their childhood languages, the vocabulary in context feels arlon James’s use Mof Jamaican Patois anything but neuter. in his 2015 Booker Prize– winning novel A Brief in English while writing, but for his memoir Little Fail- History of Seven Killings ure, he often thought in Russian. Russian carries both extends the concept of lit- the pain and joy of Shteyngart’s turbulent relationships erary bilingualism. Patois, with his parents. His childhood nicknames included the first language of most Solnyshko (Little Sun), Soplyak (Snotty), and the titu- Jamaicans, is based in Eng- lar Failurchka (Little Failure). At one point, the father lish but, like other Carib- declares a sadistic Russian wisdom: “Tot kto byot, tot bean creoles, is classifiable ne lyubit, my father likes to say. He who doesn’t hit, as a separate tongue with doesn’t love.” distinct grammar and In a course he teaches at Columbia University, vocabulary. On the page, Shteyngart traces the development of immigrant lit- it’s only semi-decipherable erature, perhaps the core subcategory of bilingual for a non-Jamaican Eng- writing. He said the kind of inner cultural tension he lish speaker. shows in Little Failure is a relatively recent literary The novel features over a dozen narrators, weaving a cross- theme. “Earlier American immigrant literature was decade account built around a plot to assassinate a fictionalized about the American dream and assimilation,” he said. Bob Marley. Some of the most compelling voices are the gang “Now it’s more about loss and ambivalence.” Early in lords and petty thugs bound to the Kingston streets who speak his course he teaches Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin, a stylized, slang-laced Patois that James paraphrases into English which satirically portrays a Russian college professor while retaining Patois grammar and rhythm. enchanted by American life. Toward the end of the Using his stream-of-consciousness style, James can make course, students transition to Díaz’s short-story collec- even sexual violence or a backroom freebase overdose sound tion Drowned, in which Yunior also appears as narrator, lyrical. In one scene, gang member Demus describes attempting coping with the strains of his family’s immigration from to defend himself against a police officer who assaults him as he Santo Domingo. bathes. Shteyngart, Santiago, and Alvarez all use bilingual “Officer you no see that is bathe me a bathe and he come right strategies to express the tensions and growing pains over and kiss me mouth hard with the rifle butt. Don’t come tell of assimilation in which English becomes a complex me no fuckery, nasty man, he say. A play with yourself and love source of disorientation, shame, fascination, and power. up yourself like some bloodcloth sodomite.” In Little Failure, Shteyngart recounts the shame of This is largely English, but “A play,” for example, uses the being demoted a grade because of his poor English and, Patois connector word “a” that precedes verbs, while “blood- when he later becomes interested in girls, fears that cloth,” properly pronounced bloodclaat, is slang for sanitary saying “‘Oh, hi there’ in his Russian accent will sound towel and as common in Patois as the word fuck is in English. like “Okht Hyzer.” James enriches the hybrid style with striking figurative expres- In her memoir Almost a Woman, Santiago inserts a sions, such as this excerpt’s ironic rifle-butt kiss. question in Spanish, recounting how on her third day For the first time since Harlem Renaissance poet Claude in Brooklyn after arriving from Puerto Rico, a young McKay published the Patois collection Songs of Jamaica in 1912, girl skips rope to her side and asks, “Tu eres hispana?” James leads readers into the sensory tones of the island’s dusty (Are you Hispanic?). Though the words are Spanish, it’s alleyways and simmering kitchens. an English-derived racial designation that Santiago has never heard before. She suddenly feels her Puerto Rican With, as language consultant, self invisible, absorbed into a vague collective identity. Harvard University doctoral student “She redefined who I thought I was,” Santiago Patois instructor Khytie Brown reflected, “by suggesting the process of flying across the

WORLDLIT.ORG 33 essay inside the bilingual writer

Even today, some of the writers seem vulnerable, still caught between tongues, English remaining slightly alien even as it has been a primary voice.

ocean had transformed me into someone else. That had to draw from their childhood language, and the read- profound implications for my developing sense of self.” ing lists generally lacked bilingual models. Alvarez was In her poetry collection The Woman I Kept to pointed. “I was silenced,” she told me about her early Myself, Alvarez explores how she embraced English writing. “One writer read my first book, Homecom- and disowned Spanish to assimilate. In “All-American ing, and didn’t even know I was Latina. I’d written the Girl,” she writes, “I practiced foreign faces, Anglo grins, word ‘mother’ throughout, so I changed them all to / repressing a native Latin fluency / for the cooler mask mami. I didn’t know you could do that.” But even as of English ironies. / I wanted the world and words to Alvarez eventually worked to reclaim Spanish, she has match again / as when I had lived solely in Spanish.” talked about being judged in the Dominican Republic Even today, some of the writers seem vulner- for writing only in English. In Something to Declare, able, still caught between tongues, English remaining she describes how at a conference in Santo Domingo slightly alien even as it has been a primary voice. In our a renowned Dominican writer said publicly, “It doesn’t conversations, Alvarez and Danticat independently seem possible that a Dominican should write in Eng- cited the epigraph to Drown that Díaz quotes from lish. Come back to your country, to your language.” Cuban American writer Gustavo Pérez Firmat: “The According to Danticat, that choice to write in Eng- fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies lish can bring severe judgment. “I think people pathol- what I wanted to tell you. My subject: I don’t belong to ogize it,” she said, suggesting critics see the exclusive English, though I belong nowhere else.” In Create Dan- use of English as a kind of self-negation. She said it can gerously, Danticat simply calls English “This language become a double bind when writers like her selectively that is not mine.” integrate non-English vocabulary. Then “people will Alvarez said that she cannot fully own her native accuse you of exoticizing or flavoring.” tongue, a painful loss. “It really hurts sometimes Danticat said that growing into bilingual maturity when I’m in the Dominican Republic,” she said. “It’s a is both a personal healing and an artistic process in yearning for something lost. I can play in English in a which “we have to start with our own acceptance of our way I’ve lost in Spanish.” In her memoir Something to own language.” Declare, she recounts feeling inarticulate with a first The writers often model this process for each other. boyfriend on a summer trip back to the island. She “I learned a lot from Julia and Sandra,” Danticat said, points out the Big Dipper to him and the only words “how they used Spanish. I learned from them the she can think of translate as “the big spoon,” a seem- rhythms of another language. They taught me how not ingly small vocabulary gap, but one that for Alvarez to censor myself.” Though they may have grown up liv- Erik Gleibermann is signifies diminished intimacy. She referred to a similar ing different languages, often there is a kinship among a writer and social- emotional distance in Cisneros’s Spanglish short story bilingual writers. In reference to Danticat’s first novel justice educator in San “Bien Pretty,” whose narrator longs to make love in a and their shared Dominican–Haitian border, Alvarez Francisco. His work Spanish she feels unable to embody. said, “reading Breath, Eyes, Memory was so meaningful has appeared in the One could read Alvarez’s novel How the Garcia for me. It was the other side of the island and she was Atlantic, the New York Girls Lost Their Accents as a narrative wish to reclaim the sister I’d never known.” Times, the Guardian, her childhood Spanish voice because the story is told At the end of our conversation I asked Alvarez what and many literary in reverse chronological order, beginning with four the extended family of bilingual writers might offer magazines. He has sisters after they have lived their adulthood speaking a young protégé just finding her voice. “I’d give her also recently worked as English in New York, then tracing them back to their everyone’s stories,” she said. “I’d say this is the big circle a writing mentor in the Dominican childhood. and you’re invited. You’ll realize there’s only one story.” UC Berkeley Graduate When they attended MFA programs (all eight have

School of Education. MFA degrees), the writers were often not encouraged San Francisco THREE-SHOTS/PIXABAY PHOTO:

34 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 PHOTO: THREE-SHOTS/PIXABAY essa ys always challenged. be my students are they not and universally should true I refer to one of Imake them, it apoint to stress to teaching analyses time as guidemodels. these Each The Basic Seven Plots. In my own practice, I avoid Hero with a Thousand Faces, to Christopher Booker’s waswhich itself derived from Joseph Campbell’s The adored Pyramid, to Three-Act structure, to Hollywood- the ture and narrative conventions; from Gustav Freytag’s I have encountered numerous- on theories struc story A difference between “I don’t understand your normal” and “I to refuse recognize your normal.” As readers, weall prejudices, carry but acknowledging range awider of normals makes the by Structure theNotionExploring ofStory PowerThe ofNormal NiiAyikwei Parkes The Writer’s Journey, by Christopher Vogler, form or other for over In adecade. that time, I have teaching been creative writing insome s another year gathers it me strikes speed that recent success stories like Singapore and South Korea, women, occupied lands, slaves, children—and inmore nations were built on inhumane exploitation of serfs, any attention that to capitalist successful fact the all capitalistwhich models work better, without giving economists global in which spendyears arguing about and on focus the models is somewhat to way the akin become foundations for exclusion of stories— certain ger concern is that 3–5–7models the have largely also are littered with caveats and exceptions. No. My big- heritage of stories into single models, invariably which complexity the distill of world’s the eternallyevolving is them) notto call just from absurdity the to of trying My discomfort 3–5–7models (as Ilike with these WORLDLIT.ORG

35 (poetry). Heiscurrently (poetry). The City stories, The City short Bataillon, Will Love You (2018). 36 essay Parkes international awards working onacrowd- funded of collection The Makings ofYou France’s Prix Laure WLT Winner of multiple ACRAG award and including Ghana’s of Bird (novel) and Tail ofthe Blue isthe author

MAY –JUNE the Nii Ayikwei

power

2018

State University, Angeles. Los Iwas reading acollection incident I was when working in-residence at California variations of normal. Particularly memorable was an week of years those Ihavein every encountered new Ghana, Ihave worked as an editor for years, but thirty normal your don’tI normal your understand rangea wider of normals makes difference the between prejudice. We prejudices, carry but all acknowledging background like any other kindof institutionalized of world having (8)changed. paying price the for it, and (7)returning to normal the to world, new the (5)reaching desired the (6) object, worldnew to acquire desired the (4)adaptation object, (1) anormal series Harmon’s embryo, story on his which TV successful topurports answer why the of storytelling, and Dan British soap EastEnders Into book, , whose the Woods likesthe of John Yorke, aformer producer for cult the Booker, or relevance the of from newer perspectives Normal. That way to shifts focus the Vogler versus dominant essentially, what much of world the is to the does learn refuse “I authoritatively, are saying is, “I don’t recognize your 3–5–7sbutin the not prejudices the underlying them, sometimes, oftentrue what gatekeepers, schooled fully high enough quality things may, etc. these And while be their storiestheir aren’t mentioned.ever being have will told They that been margins have will by affected it been without word the tion the upheaval, drama. the Strangely, to seems nobody ques- are as normal—what deemed happens is in-between starting pointthe and, often, conclusion the of stories is misleading. nomic models and not historic the biases and nuances as it is within world the of focusing on- fiction, eco the laborunderpaid and suppression Just of liberties. civil of storytellers from themargins willhavebeenaffected byitwithoutthe What Normal? is remains unasked. It lurks inthe If Icount my work from schoolmagazines in but perspectives, areThese question the useful all What 3–5–7s share the is notion the of the

normal Strangely, , butwritersand nobodyseemstoquestionthenormal Community normal normal world, into (2)adesired (3)entry object, a . , but writers and storytellers from the and judge stories by that capitalized is based, that is based, argues for eight stages: relatable to recognize your normal.” So, , compelling and and word everbeingmentioned. I refuse to recognize normal,” or, more , structured normal , of of , ;

That opens shift door the for US remakes several but adding it of to dominant the vocabulary the Normal. male, his work graphic normalizes stylized violence, emergence of Quentin Tarantino. As awhite American was a growth of interest in Hong Kong cinema after the allowed to Normal. shift It is no coincidence that there level,a sociopolitical it is interesting is who to observe ing, for me, is construction inthe of Normal—and, on epidemicthe of from poverty porn Africa. it is absent. It is same the approach that gave to birth entire region, something that provokes questions when of many possibilities amarker of authenticity for an is “accepted.” This makes something that is just one but world in the of Normal, it is exotic and its use nonstory, one of many ways people inwhich exist, of a bigparts and America Latin family Africa, is a potentially impoverish readers. For example, inmany and what Iquestion. Thus dominant the Normal can of normals works ways—affecting both what Iaccept of normals. What’sulary is that crucial my vocabulary age-old the because sanwen would have interesting—to been say least—simply the tor it was submitted to for consideration, my notes was already published. However, ifIwere- edi the to admire. Icould love,a book author’s the craft amasterfulthing reading of stories the changed; An Empty Room became Suddenly,Xin. with context the of another normal, my ments of essay, poetry, and fiction—onwork the of Mu influence of sanwen at State Cal Ispoke LA; to himand he explained the Jun collection, the Liu, aFaulkner scholar, worked also butpoetic, Ifelt distant from it. Luckily translator the of Room of stories by writer, aChinese Mu Empty An called Xin, what Iquestion. ways—affecting whatIacceptand worksboth vocabulary ofnormals What’s crucialisthatmy Therefore, power the of transformation- instorytell What’s interesting in that is scenario that book the . The writing was evocative, competent, and —a Chinese genre—a Chinese that blends ele - was not within my vocab-

PHOTO: FRANCESCO GATTONI PHOTO: FRANCESCO GATTONI power of Normal. Vogler nor nor Booker Yorke can save you. That is the minorities. You are outside gates the and neither you are Nicaraguan, arural you are any number of tured is extraordinary, is just not relatable anyone knows who anything about your normal thinks well-researched, meticulously crafted work, which however, you are subject to some editor saying your entersmal grand of the hall dominant the Normals, Literature Russian on Lectures and, of course, Vladimir Nabokov famously published toldactually inone class how to read aRussian novel, spoken to be ofqualified realm in the of have of become part larger the Normal and have thus works of were as fiction curiosities. seen as sentimental andRussian lacking quality; in literary from were America largely by dismissed British critics Novelsof reads who globe, the an American book?” Review issue of Edinburgh the than angling,” and Sydney Smith asks inaJanuary 1820 Americanthe Shakespeare—a hobby more patient Brown narratives, “One of his hobbies was to wait for of taste; G.K.Chesterton inone jibes of his Father Great Britain at was time center, the the arbiter the Britishthe novel nineteenth inthe century, because is how American the novel was considered inferior to refused,can and be you are on left periphery. the This world you create is subject to question, your normal ent within lexicon the of dominant Normal, whatever vengeance is normal), etc. If your normal is not pres- what is accepted as ahappy ending), gangster (where as romance suchlabeled idea), the reject on (based ered realist, realist magical (you’ll many find writers of dominant the Normal determines what is consid- their Hong original also Kong to become films successful, the periphery. can berefused, andyouare lefton subject toquestion,yournormal whatever worldyoucreate is the lexiconofdominantNormal, isnotpresent If yournormal within As center the has expanded, and America Russia Where marker the of convention sits on scale the , quality of high enough quality. You are an Aborigine, suddenly self-evident. in1980.Until your nor , “In four the quarters , compelling quality , . I was struc Accra - - for and art the craft of translation. literary tion,” readers of rosch has argued, world literature is literature that “gains in transla - solvedto be but as an achievement celebrated.” to be If, as David Dam- songold /That blood-deep /And dragged banks us to cast those us in.” love you water in the /Where pretended they to wade, /Singing that simultaneously evokes “troubled the waters” of Middle the Passage: “I beyond bunker the mentalities of twentieth the century. ofcode sanctification,” for speaks herself as well, poet the moving up forspeak themselves.” In apostcommunist eramarked by a“new to coastal waters and beyond the continental USfor his summer reads. Based in landlocked Oklahoma, Editor in Chief Daniel Simon WLT will find much find will here appreciation their to deepen translation itself, treating it not as aproblem read not only translations but of act the also to publisher, the author the “shows us how to translator’s in this bear apologia. According credit, Polizzotti brings that prolific praxis to With more translated than fifty to his books MIT Press A Translation Manifesto Sympathy for the Traitor: Mark Polizzotti to speaker abaptismal the calls moment that Ring Gullah Shouters,Geechee poem the newest Dedicated verse to collection. the to reading it again in her as title the poem it New inthe Yorker, and now forward look Water”the on PBS the NewsHour read, then I first heard Tracy K.Smith recite “Wade in Graywolf Wade in the Water Tracy K.Smith voice have who to those historically to failed at reality the of her Albanian past, giving Lleshanaku enables author the to back “look “negative space” work inthe Luljeta of poet ship, Ani Gjika contends that concept the of 2016 NEALiterature Translation Fellow- In translator’s the statement discussing her Trans. Ani Gjika |New Directions Negative Space Luljeta Lleshanaku editor ’ s

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37 poetry

The Mandala from Amor sin fin (Forever Love) by Claribel Alegría for Bud

¡Sí, es azul, tiene que ser azul! – José Gorostiza

I can’t free myself from my boredom entwined the joy always completing circles pizpizigaña and drew your singing swallowing myself juguemos la araña* with crests of words like the serpent mandrakes opening in colors swallows its tail. fireflies the coarse beauty I’m scarcely a dream sirens of stones of some trivial unicorns that convert to flames poet poems that start and get inside me a flying carpet but don’t end and I rejoice that discovers trails the poem, even though they burn me then loses them. the poem I sing I am the voice that calls me I’ll never finish and sing. and I don’t decipher it catches up I oppose those the flame and abandons me who think love is docile that ignites hides in debris it appears as it wishes and lies hidden Ali Baba’s caves without being called my mandala covers me blurred faces and rises and falls drifts away scattered numbers – and transforms itself returns the one that reigns is the five and dies you are at the center petals that one day and resurrects sometimes holding a sword will dance on my grave and doesn’t die. and a flower you will be my juggler Love is pain surrounded by drawings and always were joy that trouble me you sang my sadness the ego altered spider webs our love surrender

38 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 possession her name of my earthly enjoyment Matarilililili. wandering. and yoke I’m exiled mystery Was the she-wolf mocking? in this threshold and battle April is the cruellest month my sense of smell revives prison horror Was her gaze one of mockery my ghosts desire to escape and not love? the city of my childhood vigil I’ve always been fearful its markets – and dream prophesying deceits no rumor subdues a challenge to life and disasters its rumors, and death. believed by no one. no aroma I’m Cassandra its aromas. What’s wrong with my love? suddenly Don’t say anything It’s turned to violet: silent free the heart an inescapable I’m the she-wolf Cassandra to travel interlude. and just howl and travel amazed by the world to ask death, Passions rule me that worsens day by day. who is alive, I don’t reason How do I sing this for that final kiss reason my minstrel? it craves. confuses me I don’t want you to sing it Let it drink the air and I sing your lips will wrinkle drink the green and sing, become white that surrounds it. “What’s your name? the horror and rage My life flickers Matarilililili.”+ will move you away from me. I burn with desire My mandala envelops me – explore new worlds I go on I discovered recently – see them with my ear among scorpions the sun was crimson. savoring their skin wounds When did you arrive? with the febrile tips and silhouettes You are the center of my fingers. herds of giraffes what matters is the search I want to liberate the heart trying to reach and that leap toward the search from lament the stars. challenges us. images I light my lamp again Navigating between light vestiges light the caves and dark so it plunges naked that guard my mandala there are floating memories: into the void my mandala a challenge Izalco, so it goes mad a hideout Momotombo whistles I don’t understand it Machu Picchu hurls its accumulated love an infinite those are my riches at the spheres. puzzle the memories that float my whole life there and never die Translation from the Spanish all my I they cover me By George Evans & Daisy Zamora the caves hold dreams reveal me that burst I have seen my mandala * pizpizigaña / juguemos la araña: A rhyme into my dreams at last I’ve seen you from the Central American children’s game I feel like the character you ignore my questions Pizpizigaña. of an impersonal tale but I know you are me + What’s your name? / Matarilililili: A who searches my compass fragment of song dialogue from the Central and searches my map American children’s game Matarilililili. but never finds anything the gypsy not even the obsessive traces

WORLDLIT.ORG 39 tribute

left Claribel Alegría, 1953. right Flakoll-Alegría family, 1959. Left to right: Patricia, Erik, Claribel, Karen, Maya, Bud. Photos used by permission of Erik Flakoll Alegría.

In Memoriam Claribel Alegría: Amor sin f in by George Evans & Daisy Zamora

laribel Alegría (1924–2018) was 1940s while both were studying at George ing their meeting, Claribel explained in born in Estelí, Nicaragua, and Washington University in Washington, an anecdote, she forgot herself and went raised in Santa Ana, El Salvador. DC. Beginning in 1951, she traveled exten- on with the queen as if with an old friend, HerC father, Dr. Daniel Alegría Rodríguez, sively with Bud and their four children— being her usual lively, loquacious, affec- a Nicaraguan medical doctor, was a Las Maya, Patricia, Karen, and Erik—living in tionate self, using informal language, tell- Segovias liberal who fought in Benjamín Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, ing tales and filling the air with laughter. Zeledón’s army as a boy, detested the US publishing books of poetry in each coun- When she suddenly realized she was talk- Marine occupation of Nicaragua, criti- try. In 1963 the family moved to Paris ing with a queen, she stopped herself and cized the Somocista repression of peasants for several years, then to Mallorca where apologized. “Oh, please,” said the queen, and dissidents, and voiced support for the she lived with Bud until 1979. That year “just go on, I’m having a great time—I revolutionary struggle of Augusto San- they traveled to Managua to collaborate never get to talk with people this way, and dino, which resulted in persecution by the on a book about the Sandinista revolu- if you lived here in Madrid we would be occupying US troops that forced the family tion, which had recently overthrown the friends.” So they shared a laugh and went into exile while Claribel was still a baby, an murderous Somoza dynasty, and remained on. exile that would last for her father until his there permanently. She was disarming, vivacious, by turns death forty years later. Her mother, Ana Among her many awards and prizes hilarious and profound, charming, learned, Maria Vides Segui, was Salvadoran, so they (including a beloved Neustadt Prize in and judicious but never bored by life or moved to El Salvador, and Claribel was 2006), her latest honor was the 2017 Queen people (though certainly anything but a raised as a native of two countries, though Sofía Iberoamerican Poetry Prize, which Pollyanna), and ever prepared to expand or she was always a citizen of the world. took her to Spain and, among other for- adjust her perspective on any subject. Her She met and married journalist Darwin malities and events, included to her delight last major work was the unexpected book- J. (Bud) Flakoll (1923–1995) in the late a private audience with Queen Sofía. Dur- length poem Amor sin fin (Visor, 2016),

40 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 Claribel Alegría in 2006, when she visited the University of Oklahoma to receive the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Photo: Simon Hurst

Pound, and Dante (incorporating the mys- her life. In her final poem, it’s no surprise terious descent and ascent of the latter’s the main subject is love, a love that involves masterpiece), and even, in the excerpt at infinite compassion, that understands, for- hand (“La mandala”/“The Mandala”), the gives, sees everything and listens to every- actual first line of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste thing, and, therefore, ends with an overall Land laid into the text. But the work is no comprehension of life and death, of a life collage, and Claribel Alegría no collagist. lived for love and for the love of poetry. Like many Latin American authors (con- Claribel once said that her mentor, Spanish temporary and otherwise), she presumes poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, told her that her readers’ knowledge of original sources whatever she did in life, to never commod- and echoes, but in a style that allows ify poetry, and that concept shines through for that not to be the case, with never a all of her work, from beginning to end. which, with an urgency we didn’t fully moment of condescension or intentional grasp at the time, she wanted us to translate obscurantism. Allusions to classical and San Francisco into English the moment it was finished, modern poetry abound throughout the and we did, as Forever Love, a section of whole book-length poem, for the most part For more by Alegría, read “The which is excerpted here. invisibly woven into the text so they don’t Sword of Poetry,” her acceptance The larger work is a searching philo- interrupt the flow, and the same might be speech for the 2006 Neustadt International sophical poem with mythological refer- said for her use of mythology and elements Prize for Literature, on worldlit.org. ences, a questioning of God and the self, of popular culture. observing the abyss that seems to await The very title of the poem, Amor sin fin Daisy Zamora’s poetry collections in us all. It is a death poem, an incantation, / Forever Love, reflects a fact always central Spanish have been published in Nicaragua, a force not unlike a Navajo Night Chant to the last twenty-two years of her life: her Costa Rica, and Spain. Most recently, her (a tradition from our hemisphere), and a love for her late husband, Bud (Darwin J. selected poems were published in Madrid: prayer exploring life beyond life and death. Flakoll), the love of her life, her inseparable La violenta espuma (Visor, 2017). Bilingual It’s a moment of peering into infinity to partner for fifty years. Even after death collections of her work have been published consider its potential horror without turn- his spiritual presence was always evident in England and the US, including The Violent ing away. It’s not the typical lyric expecta- in her work. The love that sustains this Foam, translated by George Evans. tion one has from such a vivid, lively poet, poem is one that conquers all (Amor vincit but if you look at the expanse of her work omnia), the love that transcends time and George Evans’s poetry collections have from the beginning to the present, it’s not death. It’s a rare kind of love in our time, been published in the UK, US, and Costa really surprising she would take on topics indeed, a time when the ever-banal self is Rica, including The New World, Sudden of such gravity, especially as a nonagenar- center stage, a time without time or dispo- Dreams, and the bilingual Espejo de la tierra ian facing the ultimate fate, which even sition to listen to anyone because we are so / Earth’s Mirror, translated by Daisy Zamora. in her darkest observations she embraces busy with ourselves and the noise around He has also published two volumes of completely. us until the only voice we hear and pay translations: The Time Tree, by Vietnamese By turns focused and elusive, in places attention to is our own. So, it might seem poet Huu Thinh, and The Violent Foam, by the sequence brings to mind the under- to us that love of such magnitude as Cla- Daisy Zamora. stated passions and muted sensuality of ribel’s has already ceased to exist, but her certain jazz ballads but mixed with the work demonstrates the contrary. She her- Editorial note: Excerpt from Amor sin fin sharp wit and linguistic beauty reminis- self was the living proof of it, maintaining (Forever Love) translated by permission of cent of, say, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Ezra a constant disposition for love throughout the author.

WORLDLIT.ORG 41 42 WLT An International Speculative An International Angélica Gorodischer 50 Speculative Fiction ReadingList60 MAY –JUNE Pierrette Fleutiaux43 Aleksey Lukyanov54 cover Rodrigo Fresán 58 Anne Richter45 Fiction Featuring

feature 2018 “The only thing that makes life possible “The onlythingthatmakeslifepossible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: intolerableuncertainty: is permanent, not knowingwhatcomesnext.” The LeftHandofDarkness —Ursula K. Le Guin, —Ursula K.LeGuin,

PHOTO: S. MISTRAL PHOTO: S. MISTRAL exasperated. “You’re standing right infront of it!” through narrow the opening, “I can’t way the find in!” hang, abit like on adoghouse. over Ibend and shout you come inalready, you’re late as it is!” end of a tunnel, saying, “Can’t you door? the Will see I hear her exasperated voice from far away, as ifat the go around sideand the can’t it find there either. Then aroundI look front for way the inand can’t it. find I and her abit see later. Surprise! The house is finished. ing on yard and sky. that visit. Mostly that spaceopen Irecall - big, exposed of disturbance. the In end, the Ididn’t much see of her complaints,these Iturned for abetter at look cause the dinfromthe birds and workers, cold. the With eachof about slowness the of construction, excessive the light, Cornered at far the end of room, the she complained and air the came rushing inthrough vast this opening. was missingA whole wall on one side. It was spring, paid her avisitit under construction. while was still thatlearn she is having ahouse built inher old age. I apair ofspace between double doors ajar. as flat on top as on bottom, the hardly than wider the much that so now she resembles anarrow rectangle, W shrunk, or has she always been arectangle? A mother inside, adaughter outside. Has her mother by House The Courtesy theartist/andreschulze.com of left “What are you about?” she talking replies, evermore back aroundI head front and spot of a sort over with remorseSeized at negligence, this Igo back worriesThis fragility me. Iam And so overjoyed to Pierrette Fleutiaux Duo III, 2013, oiloncanvasby André Schulze shoulders themselves forward, shifted so drawn her shoulders, back between her ith age, she Her has shrunk. has head - with Just them! tuck your inalready!” head come lugging filthy the humps on backs along their if only visiting once ayear weren’t enough, bad they yourbe downfall! Young people are such ingrates. As her temper.loses lintel. Neither she nor it to is willing give. Abruptly, she again; my Itry smacks head stone the So really trying. won’tstill fit. even squat down, Ievenget on fours. all But my head on lintel. the tions. She’s often so right. like making her wait, and Irarely question her asser and was waiting for me hallway inthe behind. Idon’t excessive light,thedinfrom birds “I always said you were hardheaded, that it would She is not happy. Ican tell sheme of suspects not “Look,” Isay, “my keeps head hitting top.” the I’d over bend backward for her. Ibow down, So I “Just bow down,” she says, to achild. as ifspeaking “Look,” Isay. “I can’t fit.” overI bend to go inbut wind up bumping my head And just door. the Isee then, She’d opened it already the slowness of construction, the the slownessofconstruction, Cornered at the far end of the Cornered atthefarendof room, she complained about room, shecomplainedabout and workers,thecold. - Jeremy Leggatt). We Are Eternal (trans. Femina for hernovel Fleutiaux won the Prix an opera. In1990 also adapted into and Horror 1992and Year’s Best Fantasy inclusion inThe was selected for “The Ogre’s Wife,” from this collection, stories. story The first for short Goncourt la reine, won the Prix Métamorphoses de collection, (b. 1941) 1984 Pierrette Fleutiaux’s WORLDLIT.ORG Les Les

43 at at Foundation andOxford Weidenfeld Translation ’s work Edward work ’s Gauvin Translation Award and francophone fantastic prize andthe Science Weird Fiction Review. prizes. The translator cover and Without and Borders the French-American 44 graphic novels, heis a contributing editor for at Words comics been nominated for Fiction andFantasy Dryden TranslationDryden has written onthe WLT of more than 250 has won the John MAY –JUNE

feature 2018

speculative to her through slot. the The interaction is lacking in myis still head, and rest. the all I make dowith talking reaches me only faintly. retreated to depths the of dwelling, the and her voice yardthe downpour. icy inthis she’s Besides, already slot like Ican’t dogs.After all, ask her to come out to You just pigheadedly doas you please. For shame!” but you won’t bow to convention else. like everyone reaches revolted. me, truly “I made house this for you, weren’t of thinking me at as usual!” all, yelling. Istart me.takes writhe—nothing works. Night and falls, anger over abstinence. That’s not my thing anymore either. It’dcurves? days take of depriving myself and arduous mythen butt sticks out. If only I could get of rid these rock,the and iffrom compassion Iflatten alittle, them Nowise. dice. Now my breasts are scraping up against ing what help Igain will width-wise me pass height- way anymore. Iswitch and turn sideways, tactics hop - and Ican’t mold opening it that to comes fit every my rubber. No, mine has hardened from contact with life, her. But I’m past age the my when head’s malleable as ter. I’d much like very to go inside and warm with be pile!” adds, “Or throw it away already, just toss it on leaf the Nonetheless, I come back next time. my Alas, head For an hour, we howl at eachother though the “What? Iwasn’t about thinking you?” Her voice “Why didyou make entrance the narrow? so You The afternoon’s over half now. Itwist, wriggle, Meanwhile, it’s starting to rain—an rain, it’s icy - win Her animosity to goes her head, and now she even hardened from contactwithlife,andIcan’t moldittofiteveryopening I’m pasttheagewhenmyhead’s malleableasrubber. No,minehas

fiction that comesmywayanymore. - before house the she cannot leave and Icannot enter. of keeps this me from suffering now, stationed alone sidered, I’ve never known her any other way. she always that been narrow things con rectangle? All - head, abutt, or breasts? Has she or really shrunk, has a few questions. Such as: has she had a everinfact anymore. me hear gular slot. I do it more for me than her, since she can’t I come and station myself right infront of that rectan- no joy Ifeel is whole. And yet whenever it’s again, time depths of acorridor Icannot enter. It poisons my life; And so, year after year, Iwatch her waste away inthe I say? She’s not wrong. I’m not incompliance with doorway, the and what can Her reproaches are hardest the She part. keeps saying I can’t even reach her with my hand to comfort her. her anymore. When she’s she ill, falls stuck far so back sincehall, she suffers from cold. the Ican’t Soon see her finds closeness. time a bit Each down farther the corridor Icannotenter. her wasteawayinthedepthsofa And so,yearafteryear, Iwatch Suddenly my past sufferings make none Alas, sense. stationedOnce, while there, asking Istarted myself Translation from the French By Edward Gauvin

PHOTO: QUITTERIE DE FOMMERVAULT-BERNARD

PHOTO: DARIA NEPRIAKHINA/PIXABAY PHOTO: QUITTERIE DE FOMMERVAULT-BERNARD

PHOTO: DARIA NEPRIAKHINA/PIXABAY landing to himbrusquely look up and down. The man was moving at abrisk but pace paused on the in hostile, almost totalburped solitude. front room where he ate, slept, burped, slept, ate, and thing unintelligible. He had refuge taken large inthe alone,all letting more than twenty rooms go to waste?” silence,born childish obstinacy. and profitable. This advice was always met with stub- and put up an apartment building inits place, modern urged old the man house, the to sell even tear it down T One fall morning,One fall he met aman stairwell. inthe He would turn his back on muttering them, some- “At least rent out afew rooms! What are you doing At one or time another, five of all his children had with aheavy bronze knocker. dows blind with frosted door glass, adorned he old man lived inavast, dark house,- win After refusing to sell his large house or rent out any of its many rooms, aman begins to notice he’s not alone. The TenantsThe by AnneRichter a finger. “You must joking. I’ve be renting been a room are you?” old man protested, recoiling despite himself. “Who and torn?” should bathroom in the I find morning, this soiled each one more than dreadful last, the what when waste them. drop one by one, as ifloath to go, let them scatter them, now,” syllable crisp. said man, the every He letthem throat. “But—” you dowith your tenants’ mail around here, anyway?” “Who said man, the am tapping I?” his chest with “I have what no idea you’re about,” talking the “My with mind assumptions, was wild running “I’ve waiting been forurgent avery letter for aweek His voice shrill hit old the man like ablow to the “Where’s my he said mail, sharply. then?” “What do WORLDLIT.ORG

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speculative A closed book lay on a table covered A closedbooklayonatablecovered said. “Calm down. Mere conjecture, and not very first one the that, be out I’ll door, the letme tell you!” farso away? The day we have to suffer an indignity like young miss hasn’t girl, eversince poor she moved seen, armoires inyour daughter’s bedroom—the ones the pling her pretty brocade coverlet, through or the rifling want some stranger sleeping inyour wife’s- rum bed, hips. “Are you she said angrily. serious?” “Do you really rooms lately?” old man like me. Have Imentioned renting out afew wanted to know. .This house big is so for alonely Hewe?” bottle the of down set milk on table. the “I just “We’ve known eachother long too to argue, haven’t and made no reply. he inquiredPlace?” timidly. feet you when can.” cleaningthe lady. “At your age you should stay off your doorway, watching. his bedroom. He for stock-still stood amoment inthe and was dusting various that knickknacks cluttered cleaning.the She had drawn blinds the against sun the morning’s the bending to collect delivery. milk door, was which ajar. stepsthe two at and atime vanished through front the it. What’s said is said. Just hope it doesn’t happen again!” ing it now. your to talk way And out trying no sense of have to pretend gall the you don’t know Iam?” who morning you on see stairs, every hall—I the and you that there’s no central heating and toilet’s the down the for amonth now—at quite aprice, Imight add, given “Oh, don’t please worry, my dear Mrs. Place,” he The housekeeper turned to on facehim,fists her “Please don’t offended, be Mrs. Place,” he said. She turned, gave of himalook surprise, shrugged, “How long have you working been here, Mrs. “You’re not going to just stand there, are you?” said It was Friday, and Mrs. Place had come by to do “What was that about?” old the man all grumbled, Brandishing letter the over his head, he tore down “I’m sorry, but it is,” man the declared. “No deny use - “That’s not .what Isaid,” old the man murmured. had happenedinthoserooms.

fiction door, unsteady. heavyhead and his mouth furry. He for headed the old to man, his feet. his Sleep had and left struggled and into darted hallway, the up then stairs. the brass inone fly hand. Suddenly he letout abrief cry no answer. He kept staring insilence, clutching the stared at eyes. himwith terrified small, each other, fly’s the wings clacked The like boy teeth. to get up.trying low for tiny stubs. tacks, erasers, objects: pencil was holding abrass apaperweight, housefly with ahol- drawers, and papers lay scattered on desktop. the He ten or so, his back turned. The boy had opened several almost black, and room the was sunkinshadow. blinds were adark red screen, the looked curtains wide, confused. He must have slept hours: several the woke him,like crumpling paper. He opened his eyes vulgar individual .Afaint stairwell. inthe sound apleasanthad left aftertaste; he’d almost forgotten the make out presence the of familiar The objects. broth through blinds; the through eyelids half-shut he could headache made himfrown. The sun was shining his feet rested on plain the Apersistent woolen rug. round his stomach. His into sank head acushion and were warm beneath blanket the Mrs. Place had tucked went, to rhythm the of his reveries, and his old knees his rocking chair. and Back forth, back and forth it for you; you’re not getting enough rest.” some nice light broth for lunch. After that it’s nap time nose. What doyou of think that, Mrs. Place?” you know, they’ve slipped upstairs right under your to live. Leave door the unlocked, and well, next thing many people out there hopelessly somewhere seeking might arouse covetousness? acertain There are so come to mind. Don’t you abig think house like this and night, and some things, just things, silliest the ing my abit memory lately. days These I’m alone day what’s going through our I’ve heads? Ithink los- been plausible at that, admit. I’ll But dowe everknow really I have to get to the bottom of this, thought the “Come here,” said old the man, but child the made The boy gave and a start pivoted; struck as they “What are you doing there, said old the man, boy?” Before his old mahogany aboy stood of secretary He his soup finished and begannodding off in “I’ll ready your infusion,” Mrs. Place “And sighed.

in the halls with that halls in the of her insistent Some- perfume. makeup, and smoked short cigars odor blended whose sheself; dressed inblack and mauve, wore much too Awomanrascals. of age entrenched acertain also her arguing and slapping swarm their of bawling, unruly tenacious, ayoung especially couple were who always oldthe man never saw himagain. were Others more haswho no doubt gone refuge to seek elsewhere, since days at most. Among was man the these with letter, the up, others, while only passing through, stayed afew vary. rooms Somethe never left wherehad taken they sure how exactly many there were. In to it fact, seemed house, the to and fill no rest. he knew He was never that reigned from to rafter. floor hand on banister, the distraught at absolute the silence now,fallen found muttering himstill dark, inthe one had happened rooms. inthose Night, well and truly a table covered by acloth. He shivered. Terrible things out inacorner of one window. lay book on Aclosed rooms of his wife and daughter; tree stood aleafless draped insheets and He stripped beds. by passed the found nothing but cold gray rooms with armchairs holes, through three floors pale he the all inspected hallways, muttering whole the time. But though he Where has that damned brat gotten to, anyway?” died, not one of five the has come me, to not see one! Children are ungrateful. so Ever since mother their leaving old apoor man inagreat big lonely house? dren had stayed close. Who and goes travels world, the things like would this happening never be chil- ifthe climbed steps. the “I haven’t there inyears. been Oh, he whimperedthere?” inalow voice as he slowly keyhole. Where they’dcomefrom, these people:achanceencounter in ahallway, orpeekingthrough a and howthey’dgottenhere, he’d Little bylittle,hediscovered all From that day on, undesirable tenants never ceased He bent through to keyholes the peer along the “Do I even remember how many rooms are up given uptryingtofigure out. - noise at all. young child accompanied her, and that she made no of whom old the man nothing, knew except that avery violin. The most discreet of lot the woman was athin playing various instruments at hours, the all especially man likely who seldom ate and found could his be fill Thereto walls. the aprematurely was also young bald upstairs with ashameless air and slunk away pressed young shetimes, had very visitors, slipped girls who ing forgotten what he had come to do. ing what he was looking for, or in adark hallway, hav- himself standing before a wardrobe or buffet wonder more frequent and violent, he and times found several ing, worn down by worry. His headaches grew ever short of things to complain about. His was health fail- issue and moved on to other subjects. He was hardly remained hanging over paper. the He didnot press the do it; he could not much so as move his hand, which of telling her about his inexplicable guests. He couldn’t sentiment halted whenever he was his on pen verge the revenge for abandoning him,but some complicated complained to her about or this that in little affliction roof without having agreed to in. them take toleft know no one tenants housed several under one’s stoppedridicule him.He had enough common sense midchord. He considered police, the but calling fear of quarrels tears the up, ceased, dried violin the broke off er didhe reach out ahand for doorknob the than the catch by them rooms intheir surprise above. No- soon or eveninside his own quarters, he never managed to one or another tenants of his so-called hallway inthe within his rights to doso. But though he often ran into of his place of residence, aware that he was perfectly once and for to incomprehensible this all violation than once he went upstairs, to determined put an end The plaintive More violin his teeth. made him grind voice rang out, fulminated against children’s the cries. he’d into flown afury, literally jumped a each time gotten here, he’d to figure given out. up trying At first a keyhole. Where they’d come from, and how they’d L He thought about writing his daughter; he readily chance encounter in a hallway, or through peeking ittle by little, he discovered people: a these all  - WORLDLIT.ORG

47 at at Foundation andOxford Weidenfeld Translation ’s work Edward work ’s Gauvin Translation Award and francophone fantastic prize and the Science Weird Fiction Review. 48 cover prizes. The translator and Without and Borders the French-American graphic novels, heis a contributing editor for at Words comics been nominated for Fiction andFantasy Dryden TranslationDryden WLT has written onthe of more than 250 has won the John MAY –JUNE

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speculative effort out into street. the Household utensils and little night he and dragged with them great halls, the every kitchen.in the Buckets of trash were often out set in surreptitiously and all them polished them collected finding pairs before shoes of dirty shut the doors, he state of mind and exploited it ruthlessly. One night, able to be to seemed They divine likethem avalet. this favor, their guests to curry going far so as to serve did not hesitate to himself abase abjectly before his at thought the of such adefection. At such he times day had come, as they without asound. He shivered house the find uninhabitable leave should all they one better,them last one, silently every admitting that he’d yet finding init measure some true of deliverance. achild’s when start suddenly rang out cry somewhere, his ears, anxiously awaiting giving asigh, a arustle, oppressed He him;he terrified. grew pale, pricked up above. Instead of providing any relief, emptiness this dwelling; not much so squeaked as asingle floorboard shadows.their life, All however the furtive,deserted roomsback the and corridors, abruptly delivered from afternoon nap, for example—silence to take seemed about were them quite mixed. Sometimes—during his unique relationships with his tenants, and his feelings him, but instead it reassured. In he maintained fact, hear This them. phenomenon might have worried andwhat?” He shrugged. had she to facefacts: couldn’t ten!” To Mrs. which Place replied, “Are you joking? To ment, old the man could not help but burst out, “Lis- young couple was having heated aparticularly argu- noises her totally left indifferent, and one day the when guests. Shouts, slamming doors, strangest eventhe from existence the suspecting of his inopportune whom usually nothing worlds escaped, seemed away had no trouble keeping his secret: his housekeeper, torefused revealpresence the of tenants the to her and Without any real reason for doing so, he adamantly would have asked after cause the of his apprehension. He prickeduphisears,anxiouslyawaitingarustle,sigh,givingstart when achild’s crysuddenlyrangoutsomewhere, yetfindinginitsome Some days he would have to liked get to know Nor didhe dare go whining to Mrs. Place, who

fiction true measure ofdeliverance. that his migraines came back, more than ever. painful beneath hisdeep covers, he racked his brains hard so anymore. From His himbedridden. left soon illness and hunched forward. He rarely dared leave his room a show of looking away. The old man hung his head musician he ran into one day on doorstep the made contempt, even spitting before on floor the him. The youngthe father would unashamedly display his tility. If by chance old the man lost his way upstairs, toward himchanged. no They longer hos hidtheir - her, ifonly for afew minutes. years of his life, her up even—to to see and close speak others, the all and he would have given agreat deal— he’d known before, but she appealed to himmore than him inalow voice. She didnot remind himof anyone began waving its hands about, and mother the sang to inher arms. Ithad a newborn was sunny out. The baby one day watering while flowers window inthe box. She stranger. He’d caught aglimpse of her from yard the ing coincidences. Rummaging through his memories, he found surpris- had always ofunderstood part they his own been life. house.in the More precisely, he he them: recognized intimate knowledge of that them predated time their his own. He discovered that he had aprofound and thoughtstheir from adistance, just could read as they actions and movements of his guests: he could guess at he began to realize he no longer to track the needed pied by lives the on upper the Little floors. by little, daughter grew fewer. His attention- was wholly occu forhis bed entire mornings at atime. The letters to his fatigued greatly himso these that to he began taking to go about asking for his things back anyway? really to his credit, since he wouldn’t have known how never questioned But his suspects. was such leniency thought pilferings, was these who behind he he knew disappearedknickknacks from his rooms. Though he And yet, as he grewweaker, tenants’ the attitude Only young the woman with child the remained a His worries, physical the chores himself— he set

PHOTO: QUITTERIE DE FOMMERVAULT-BERNARD

PHOTO: ANNE RICHTER PHOTO: QUITTERIE DE FOMMERVAULT-BERNARD

PHOTO: ANNE RICHTER back the covers,back the leaned then on child’s the shoulder. that there was no escaping confrontation. this He tossed pillow. that So was what were they up to. He well knew they’re waiting all for you upstairs.” voice trembling. did not move. The old man was covered insweat. riedly. “Thumbtacks, aballpoint apenknife, pen?” fell silent. fly?” the beckoned boy the closer. “So, what didyou dowith and upon gazed bed the sick the man hesitantly. whom he recognized, came in.The boy approached he saw door the to his room open gently. A young boy, snow outside falling and fever burning at his temples, ter’s night, he as usual with lay the while inbed deep adding, if only they’d just let me die in peace. world, Mrs. Place,” he told his housekeeper, silently asking her to visit one last time. “I’m not long for this monition he’d his daughter never see again and wrote to await death on a bench somewhere. He had a pre- quietly from his home through and cold the night flee of this house? The sudden desire overtook himto slip right, after all, he thought. By what right am Ithe owner One night his heeyes, defeated. closed Perhaps they’re they couldread hisown. thoughts from adistance,justas guests: hecouldguessattheir actions andmovementsofhis he nolongerneededtotrackthe Little bylittle,hebegantorealize “Very well,” he said. “Leadon.” The old and man back on lethis fall paled head the sent me to tell you,”“They child the said, “that why have“Then you he come?” asked, his “I don’t want anything, Mister,” said boy, the but he “You want said old the man something else?” wor “I don’t have it anymore, Mister,” said boy, the and “Ah, there you are, boy,” said old the man. His hand But he wasn’t done with his tenants yet. One- win -

and cold. voice uttered his name out loud. probably.me, about her. Agreat reigned silence room. inthe end sat young the woman with child, the a dreamy air ladythe with makeup the was less colorful. At far the angerAll was gone from features, their and it seemed lar table, tenants the were gathered, faces somber. their toward keyhole. the Oneither sideof along rectangu- heard a slight murmur from He awall. behind leaned him.Hebeside had vanished. The old man thought he topthe but floor noticed that child the was no longer but didn’t want child to the see. his dripping brow and catch his breath. He was afraid long; he very had to stopseemed to times mop several the Prix Robert Duterme.the Prix Robert Wever, the Prix Félix Denayer, the Prix duParlement, and have won hersuch Belgian as the Prix honors Franz De expanded into astudy ofthe genre. Herfour collections female fantastical writers, she whose introductory essay known for hertwice-reprinted international of anthology L’Âge(Éditions d’Homme, 2011). reprinted Pitié Grande inLa Zintram delafamille Editorial note: From Les Locataires (Belfond, 1967), In room the below, rested his body on stiff bed, the But he door opened the and in.Awoman’s walked What do they want? thought old the man. To evict “Well? Where he asked to?” they’d when reached wentThey up stairs. the To old the man, ascent the byBlue Dog Toklas. Alice B. She is andtranslatedof fifteen as The le coup,was written at the age collection, Lefirst fourmi afait and scholar ofthe fantastic. Her prominent Belgian author, editor, isa Anne Richter (b. 1939) Translation from the French By Edward Gauvin WORLDLIT.ORG

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fiction

ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL VINCENT MANALO

illustration by janna añonuevo langholz ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL VINCENT MANALO

illustration by janna añonuevo langholz gave her awhipping one day for drawing on adoor with colored drawer along with ablack crepe dress withcollar lace and sleeves. She catches cold often and keeps aphotograph album inabureau She has dark eyesand rough hands and she is starting to go gray. but she reads Radiolandia daughter’s house. She hasn’t to movies the been inalong time, eveningin the her sister-in-law comes to visit or she to goes her his name is Néstor Eduardo, and or ravioli,she noodles fixes and On Sunday mornings she washes clothes the her son brings home, thorough cleaning and washes windows the and waxes floors. the week, and at night late. she to goes bed OnSaturdays a she does lunch, she watches television, she knits she or irons sews, a twice her husband, washes clothes, the shopping, the does After cooks. shop. She early, gets up very says sweeps walk, the goodbye to and ason works who inSan Nicolás; her husband works inabody I wife. perfect Anything might happen beyond adoor opened by a by PerfectA Wife AngélicaGorodischer Her mother never beat her. But she when was six,her mother Between forty-five years andBetween old, fifty daughter with amarried other side and pick up your she pace: is a dangerous woman. f you should her meet on street, the cross quickly to the to the memory of María Varela Osorio and blotter police the newspaper. inthe WORLDLIT.ORG

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She threw the razor to the ground and rinsed her hands in the warm water of the tub.

chalk and she made her erase the drawing with a damp it, opened it again, and went into the bathroom and rag. While she was cleaning, she thought about doors, washed her hands for dinner. about all of the doors, and decided they were very Another time, nap time, many years later, she stupid things because they always opened to the same opened her bedroom door and went out onto a battle- places. And the one she was cleaning was the absolute field and wet her hands in the blood of the wounded stupidest of all, because it led to her parents’ bedroom. and the dead and tore from the neck of a dead body a And she opened the door and then it didn’t lead to cross that she wore as a pendant for a long time under her parents’ bedroom but rather to the Gobi desert. It buttoned-up blouses or high-necked dresses and that didn’t surprise her, although she didn’t know what the she now keeps in a tin can under her nightshirts along Gobi desert was and they hadn’t yet even taught her in with a brooch, a pair of rings, and a broken wrist- school where Mongolia was, and neither she nor her watch that had belonged to her mother-in-law. And mother nor her grandmother had ever heard tell of so without trying, by luck, she found herself in three Nanshan or Khangai Nuruu. monasteries, in seven libraries, on the world’s highest She took a few steps on the other side of the door mountains, in she no longer knows how many the- and bent down and scratched the yellowish ground, aters, in cathedrals, in jungles, in meat-packing plants, and she saw that there was nothing and no one around in sewers and universities and brothels, in forests and the hot wind messed up her hair, so she went back and tents, in submarines and hotels and trenches, on through the open door, closed it, and went on cleaning. islands and in factories, in palaces and in huts and in And when she finished, her mother scolded her a little towers and in hell. more and told her to wash the rag and get the push She hasn’t kept track nor does it matter to her: any broom to sweep up that sand and clean off her shoes. door can lead to any place, and that fact has the same That day she changed her hasty opinion about doors, weight as the thickness of the dough for ravioli, as although not entirely, at least not until she saw what the death of her mother, and as the forks in the road would happen. of life that she sees on television and reads about in What kept happening over the whole course of her Radiolandia. life, right up until today, was that from time to time, Not long ago, she accompanied her daughter to the Amalia Gladhart is the doors would behave in a satisfactory manner, although doctor’s office, and when she looked at the door of the translator of Trafalgar in general they went on being stupid and opening onto bathroom in the clinic hallway, she smiled. She wasn’t (2013), by Angélica dining rooms, kitchens, laundry rooms, bedrooms— sure, because she can never be sure, but she got up and Gorodischer, and of at best, offices. But two months after the desert, for went to the bathroom. And yet it was a bathroom: at two novels by Alicia example, the door that always led to the bathroom least, there was a naked man in a bathtub full of water. Yánez Cossío. Her short opened onto the workshop of a bearded man who had Everything was very big, with very high ceilings and fiction has appeared on a long robe, pointed shoes, and a cap that fell to a marble floor and closed drapes at the windows. The in Saranac Review, one side of his head. The old man had his back to her man seemed to be asleep in his white tub, short and The Fantasist, Atticus and was taking something out of a tall piece of furni- deep, and she saw a straight razor on an iron claw-foot Review, and elsewhere. ture with many little drawers behind a very large, very table that had feet decorated with iron leaves and flow- Recipient of an NEA strange wooden machine with a flywheel and a gigan- ers above the lion’s paws; a razor, a mirror, some curl- Translation Fellowship, tic screw. There was a cold draft and a sharp scent, ing tongs, towels, a box of talc, and a basin of water, she is Professor and when he turned around and saw her, he started to and she tiptoed closer, lifted the razor, tiptoed over to of Spanish at the shout at her in a language she didn’t understand. She the man asleep in the tub, and slit his throat. She threw University of Oregon. stuck out her tongue at him, went out the door, closed the razor to the ground and rinsed her hands in the PHOTO: SARAH GREW PHOTO:

52 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 warm water of the tub. She turned around when she of South America. She was on the point of going back, went out into the clinic hallway and caught sight of a but since the man hadn’t seen her, she pushed him and girl going in through the bathroom’s other door. Her then ran out to color in the map, so she didn’t hear daughter looked at her. the bump, but she did hear his cry. And on an empty “You’re back awfully fast.” stage she made a bonfire under the velvet curtains, and “The toilet didn’t work,” she answered. during a riot she raised the cover of a cellar, and in a Only a few days later, she slit the throat of another house, sitting on the floor of a study, she destroyed a man at night in a blue tent. That man and a woman two-thousand-page manuscript, and in a clearing in a were sleeping, barely covered with the blankets of a forest, she buried the weapons of the men who slept, very large, very low bed, and the wind strained the tent and in a river, she opened the sluice gates of a dam. and bent the flames in the oil lamps. Further on there The daughter is named Laura Inés, and the son has would be an encampment, soldiers, animals, sweat; a girlfriend in San Nicolás and has promised to bring manure, weapons, and commands. But there inside, her next Sunday so she and her husband can meet her. there was a sword among the clothing of leather and She has to remember to ask her sister-in-law for the metal. She cut off the head of the bearded man with it recipe for orange cake, and on Friday they’re showing and the sleeping woman moved and opened her eyes the first chapter of a new telenovela. She passes the as she went through the door and returned to the patio iron over the front of the shirt once again and remem- she had just finished washing down. bers the other side of the doors that are always careful- On Mondays and Thursdays, when she irons shirt ly closed in her house, that other side where the things collars in the afternoon, she thinks about the slit that happen are far less abhorrent than those that are throats and the blood and she waits. If it is summer, experienced on this side, as you will understand. after putting the clothes away she goes out to walk for a bit until her husband gets home. If it is winter, she Translation from the Spanish sits in the kitchen and knits. But she doesn’t always By Amalia Gladhart encounter sleeping men or open-eyed cadavers. On a rainy morning, when she was twenty years old, she Editorial note: First published under the title “La perfecta was in a prison and mocked the prisoners in chains; casada” in the collection Mala noche y parir hembra one night when the kids were little and everyone in (Buenos Aires: Hector Dinsmann Editor, 1983; revised the house was asleep, she saw a disheveled woman on edition 1997). a plaza, looking at a revolver without daring to take it out of her open purse; she walked over to her, she put Angélica Gorodischer (b. 1928, the revolver in her hand, and she stayed until a car Buenos Aires) has lived most parked on the corner, until the woman saw the man of her life in Rosario, Argentina. in gray who got out and looked for the keys in his The recipient of numerous pocket, until the woman aimed and shot; and another awards, she is the author of night, while she was doing the sixth-grade geography some thirty books. Three of her homework, she went to get colored pencils from her novels have appeared in English: room and she was beside a man crying on a balcony. Kalpa Imperial, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin (2003); The balcony was so high, so high above the street, she Trafalgar, translated by Amalia Gladhart (2013); and was tempted to push him so as to hear the bump down Prodigies, translated by Sue Burke (2015). there below, but she remembered the orographic map PHOTO: SARAH GREW PHOTO:

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speculative assemble yourself, two checking instructions the every isn’t one of your Ikea bookshelves that you have to collapsible,to be it compact. needed to be they This folding in half. But clients the didn’t rack the need The way it was constructed, kept pulleys the it from you got yourself arack. tion gear to cable wind the through and pulleys, the a winch on legand it middle the run through areduc - P corruption, and the latest in protective head the gear: Ex-Box. Outside the Special Instrument Factory, protesters rally against war, by (AnusHorribilis) Annus Mirabilis AlekseyLukyanov The only bummer about product the was its bulk. cot and up them link with eachother, stick then was child’s four screw play: into pulleys acamp rocrustes-1 name. was model the The design

fiction manufacturing plant but inChina, that because one had no competition,factory unless you count a similar was supposed to introduce product anew line. The pokers, brands, hooks, and pliers. The Procrustes-1 or five persons; a portable guillotine; and kinds of all deluxe torture collapsible set; gallows for one, three, Truth torture basic and Truth the set Speak the II garrotes, Spanish iron boots, maidens, the Speak the ready-to-use. InstrumentSpecial Factory’s products are delivered whereseconds to to or see this screw nail that. The Special InstrumentSpecial made alot of different things:

PHOTO: SKITTERPHOTO/PIXABAY

PHOTO: ALEKSEY LUKYANOV PHOTO: SKITTERPHOTO/PIXABAY

PHOTO: ALEKSEY LUKYANOV even the coloreven the range: Semyonov had to know of all it massspecs, and size, and required accessories, and different rolling names, and model mills; series their manufacturing capacity to put it into production. he’dtype, had necessary the know factory the whether thatto so dothis he when was developing aproto - As operations the director explained, Semyonov had cutting out blanks to packaging product. finished the technological stages of production the process, from cards. The first thing he the had to dowasall learn keep his above head water and pay down his credit wasn’t highest the he’d exactly but everseen, it lethim a dynamic, flourishing production facility. The salary Only an idiot moronic would so be as ajobat to lose to build himself ahouse and buy acar.” cut, after he was fired. Although he’d already managed equipment and test models.” workroom? Well, he didn’t. He deliberately ruined products new seven amonth.” had guy, this he when was here we were releasing up to duction, you then get acut Before of sales. the you we to Semyonov. “If you invent aunit that into goes pro- ly bonus on top of your salary,” director the explained did his training, and went to his work station. exam.ical After exam, the he got his work uniform, workofficial order, and sent Semyonov to get- med the attached. His operations director grunted, the signed slightly adjusting angle the at were pulleys the which make Procrustes-1 the more compact. He didit by bly fitter. The assessment gave task they himwas to with no difference inquality. farwas so away, its products cost again half as much Drill presses,Drill machines, trimming press brakes; the This explanation made to total Semyonov. sense “’Cause he’s an idiot. And he stopped getting his “What for?” “You camera inyour saw installed security the “Come again?” “Fired for sabotage.” “So where is he now?” “If you fine-tune amodel’s you design, get amonth- Semyonov was applying for position the of assem- It wasn’t toopleasantknowing youwere makingstocksforprison camp inmatesortestingtheKutuzovHomereye-punches (on mannequins,ofcourse).Nextthingyouknow, they’dbe inventing aportablewallforexecutions. cess without it pinned ever being on him.But sabotage could’ve caused severe damage to production the pro- Semyonov’s knowledge was such of that factory the he about ready to duplicate his predecessor’s mistake. and night turned all and barely afinger lifted at work. But eventually he feeling started low again. He tossed fastidious and views continue assembling test models. course. For some he time was able to renounce these not working and living off your wife.” She was right, of no such thing as shameful work. What’s shameful is her husband worked at, either, she’d so say, “There’s wife, but she didn’t really know what kindof factory about He tobase? talk his anxiety eventried with his from knowledge the that his work .hmm was so losteveryone interest quickly. But Semyonov suffered hangers .mass-market stuff, basically.” As arule, at work, Semyonov would “I reply: make folding beds, forportable wall executions. of course). Next thing you know, they’d inventing be a Kutuzovthe or Homer eye-punches (on mannequins, were making stocks for prison camp inmates or testing that alot more. It wasn’t pleasant too knowing you even with packagers, the and, tohe liked tell truth, the with welders, the or bending the machine operators, or often so Every Semyonovdevice). had to sub ashift of Phalanges the unit are for (it’s afinger-breaking don’t have to time wonder what holes the blanks inthe out later for cats o’ nine tails, and at press drill the you really get about batched to thinking be how they’ll a thousand hooks on abending machine, you don’t peoplethe there managed that. When you’re bending attention to what Instrument Special made. Most of job.landed agood As long as he didn’t pay much too workers, the all and considered himself lucky to have everything. hanging around, and he didn’t to even need memorize copy of “wraps”—printouts the of specifications— the of it, intently, workspace although almost had a every by end the of his month-long probation. He studied all His of worn sense guilt himso left out that he was that’sSo why, anytime asked his friends what he did He worked at awhile eachmachine, got to know

José Alaniz). José Alaniz). Veronica Muskheli & “Entwives” (trans. and Marian Schwartz) “High Pressure” (trans. appeared inEnglish: Two ofhisstories have Russia since 1998. been publishing in Perm, Russia. Hehas Solikamsk, near acity lives(b. 1976) in Aleksey Lukyanov WORLDLIT.ORG

55 cover feature speculative fiction

There was nothing bad about these and full. Special Instrument’s next lot of 500,000 Ex- Ex-Box things, and they really did protect Boxes sold like hotcakes. After that came an order for 1.5 million units, and the factory had to increase its you from rain, cold, noise, and dust. production capacity. Even then they might not have completed the order on schedule if Semyonov hadn’t went against his nature. He thought of himself as a developed a technological process that brought the time creator, not a destroyer. Any fool can break something, spent on helmet assembly down to under a minute. but just you try and make something. The biggest client was the MIA, the Ministry of Then, all of a sudden, he understood what was Internal Affairs. And at first it really was just the police really bothering him. going around in them. It looked funny, but evidently Up until this point Semyonov’s main task had been the constructs protected the head perfectly well, so ads simplification and the ensuing reduction in produc- for Ex-Boxes started showing up everywhere. Bikers, tion cost. He accomplished this with enviable regular- cyclists, skaters, and in-line skaters all cruised around ity. He introduced dozens of process optimizations, in their flashy Ex-Boxes. enabling the factory to significantly increase produc- Soon Ex-Boxes were made mandatory for schools tion volume while conserving both materials and time. and universities, and then for everyone, period. Clini- The only thing Semyonov couldn’t do was innovate. Of cal trials proved that the boxes did shield the brain the dozens of blueprints that passed through his hands, from the harmful radiation of cell phone towers, some were actually pretty clever from an engineer- microwaves, solar radiation, and wireless Internet. So ing standpoint, and he was able to find something to people wore them. All the more reason to, since there improve in almost all of them. But he couldn’t invent was nothing bad about these Ex-Box things, and they anything new himself. really did protect you from rain, cold, noise, and dust. He gradually grew more and more agitated, but not Orders for Ex-Boxes started coming in from abroad. at the people who invented instruments for execution- Semyonov’s wife and boss wore Ex-Boxes, as did he ers: at his own idea. (his Ex-Box was covered in gold leaf). The entire fac- Semyonov sketched it out on a scrap of paper and tory pretty much doted on him. showed it to the operations director, who scratched his All the same, Semyonov didn’t achieve true victory chin and said, “Might could work. Can you have the until the day the Ex-Box was used for its intended prototype in a week?” purpose. Semyonov knocked it together in half a shift. They This occurred right in front of Special Instrument’s sent a test batch to Moscow, and a week later they’d main entrance. already gotten not only extremely positive reviews but, Ever since anybody could remember, random weir- even better, an order for another lot, twice as big as dos with signs had been promenading back and forth the first. by the factory gates, in protest. They used to be bare- It was a very strange item for the factory, not least headed, but now they also had boxes over their heads. because it wasn’t meant for any kind of harmful appli- Wearing an Ex-Box was mandatory for participation cation. It was just a box, with fasteners to keep it on in all public gatherings, whether they were rock con- your head. The front wall was see-through, the others certs or meet-and-greets for singles over thirty. The weren’t. The only other thing was an opening in the protesters rallied against Ex-Boxes, war, and corrup- rear wall with an M12 metric thread, literally just a tion. Everyone at Special Instrument had already got- couple of threads deep. The specifications read: “Ex- ten used to these demonstrations and could tell all the Box Helmet/Headgear/Cubical.” The opening in the protesters apart by the graffiti on the walls of their hel- rear wall was plugged by a plastic cap, so people could mets. Nobody was the least bit put out by them. Why screw anything they wanted into it, from a video cam- get mad at an idiot? And anyway, there was always a era to a souvenir plaque with a registration number. police patrol stationed nearby. As he worked to perfect his design, Semyonov was This time, though, the police didn’t stand around so inspired that his wife fell in love with him a second and watch. Right in front of the workers (it’d been half time. His life acquired meaning; his days became rich an hour since the shift ended, and many workers had

56 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 already made it out the front entrance), some beefy Now that was real sabotage for guys in gray uniforms and square helmets (special you: not preventing people from order for the MIA) wrenched the protesters’ hands behind their backs and slammed them on their knees doing things but forcing them to in a row along the edge of the factory parking lot. A dig their own pits and pitch into man in sergeant’s stripes spent a few minutes going them face-first. down the row screwing something into the back wall of each detainee’s Ex-Box; it was some kind of little was real sabotage for you: not preventing people from cartridge that looked like a single-shot powder load doing things but forcing them to dig their own pits and for a stud driver, the kind you’d see at any construction pitch into them face-first. site. Several muted pops went off, one after the other, He paused for a good minute at the gatehouse, Anne O. Fisher’s and the detainees sprawled face-first onto the ground. then walked slowly to the nearest home improvement translation of Ksenia Their bodies, along with the protest signs, were briskly retailer. He checked and rechecked before he was satis- Buksha’s novel The piled onto a flatbed truck and carted off somewhere. fied that he could easily screw the load in himself, and Freedom Factory The workers were shocked by what they saw. In a that there would be no misfire. is forthcoming with frenzy, one of them even started trying to rip his Ex- Phoneme Media Box off. But come on: where do you think you’re going Translation from the Russian in 2018. With poet to go outside the factory grounds with an uncovered By Anne O. Fisher Derek Mong, Fisher head? Especially now that you know that the helmet’s co-translated The purpose is not to protect the head, but to contain the Translator’s note: Anus horribilis is not a scatological play Joyous Science: splattering of the head’s contents? on the phrase annus horribilis; it is a gesture toward the Selected Poems Semyonov had observed these events from a dis- Russian phrase polnaya zhopa (“total ass”), a colloquial of Maxim Amelin, tance and grunted, gratified. Inventing a way for phrase indicating any very bad situation. By way of winner of the 2018 everyone to carry around their own personal execu- metonymy, anus horribilis has been appropriated by the Cliff Becker Book

PHOTO: SKITTERPHOTO/PIXABAY. FISHER PHOTO: DEREK MONG DEREK FISHER PHOTO: SKITTERPHOTO/PIXABAY. PHOTO: tion walls had been a flash of true genius. Now that common parlance to mean the same as polnaya zhopa. Prize in Translation.

WORLDLIT.ORG 57 cover feature speculative fiction

above Blood War, 2016, by Jia How Lee. The concept art is based on the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Rodrigo Fresán (b. 1963, Buenos Aires) is the author of Historia argentina, Vidas de santos, Trabajos manuales, Esperanto, La velocidad de las cosas, and more. Translations into English include Kensington Gardens (Natasha Wimmer, FSG), The Bottom of the Sky (Will Vanderhyden, Open Letter), and The Invented Part (Vanderhyden, Open Letter).

Cecilia Weddell is an editorial assistant at Harvard Review and a doctoral student at the Boston University Editorial Institute, where she is editing and translating the essays of Rosario Castellanos. Her translations and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere.

58 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 Ancient History by Rodrigo Fresán

Would it be easier to save his marriage or save the Aztec Empire?

ears ago the man got married and back in time, and it does not take him long been abolished. Moctezuma agrees to do years ago the man became unhap- to find an Aztec who, after falling to his so. When Cortés lands on the beaches of py in his marriage. The man lives knees, shows him the way to Tenochtitlán. Mexico, the Aztec emperor asks him in inY Buenos Aires and he passes his time, or The man discovers that he speaks the perfect Spanish how the queen is doing tries to make time pass, thinking about the Aztec language pretty well and that his and compliments the elegance of the pure- Aztec Empire. The man is obsessed with blond beard makes him look like Quet- bred Spanish horses that the conquistador the Aztec Empire, ever since his teacher, zalcóatl, the god whose arrival the Aztecs has brought from across the ocean. Cor- long, long ago, told him all about it. The have been awaiting for centuries. The man tés is enraged, burns down his ships, and man comes to the conclusion that it is discovers that he has arrived in Mexico destroys the Aztec Empire. The man under- easier to save the Aztec Empire than it is ten years before Cortés. And so a way to stands that the past cannot be changed, he to save his marriage, and so he decides to save the Aztec Empire occurs to him. The returns to his age, he gets divorced, and the save the Aztec Empire. The man sits in his man becomes friends with Moctezuma, he rest is history, ancient history. favorite chair, in front of a window from teaches him Spanish, he makes him memo- which he can see the lion cage in the zoo rize the Spanish royal genealogy, and he Translation from the Spanish across the street, he falls asleep, and he explains to him that, when Cortés arrives, By Cecilia Weddell awakes in the middle of a jungle in the he should say that he is Catholic and that Yucatán Peninsula. The man has traveled the practice of public human sacrifice has © Rodrigo Fresán

WORLDLIT.ORG 59 cover feature speculative fiction

An International Speculative Fiction Reading List by The Editors of WLT

Michael Andreasen, The Sea Beast Takes a Lover (Penguin, 2018) John M. Keller, The Box and the Briefcase, the Moleque and the Old Man and the Yoshio Aramaki, The Sacred Era, trans. First Coming of the Second Son of God Baryon Tensor Posadas (University of (Dr. Cicero Books, 2014) Minnesota Press, 2017) Leena Krohn, Leena Krohn: Collected Fic- Lesley Nneka Arimah, What It Means tion (Cheeky Frawg, 2015) When a Man Falls from the Sky (River- head Books, 2017) Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Dark- ness, intro. by China Miéville (Orion Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death (DAW Hassan Blasim, Frankenstein in Baghdad, Books, 2017) Books, 2010) trans. Jonathan Wright (Penguin Books, 2018) Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem, trans. Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Ken Liu (Tor Books, 2016) Yours (Hamish Hamilton, 2016) Kawamata Chiaki, Death Sentences, trans. Thomas Lamarre & Kazuko Y. Behrens Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Michelle Pretorius, The Monster’s Daugh- (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) Stories (Saga Press, 2016) ter (Melville House, 2016)

Berit Ellingsen, Vessel and Solsvart (Snug- Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Del Samatar & Sofia Samatar, Monster gly Books, 2017) Other Parties (Graywolf Press, 2017) Portraits (Rose Metal Press, 2018)

60 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Karen Tidbeck, Amatka (Vintage, 2017) Fantasy from Transgender Writers, ed. Casey Plett & Cat Fitzpatrick (Topside Élisabeth Vonarburg, Blood out of a Stone, Press, 2017) trans. the author, Howard Scott, & oth- ers, intro. by Ursula K. Le Guin (Nano- Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Specu- press, 2009) lative Fiction Anthology, ed. Ann Vande- meer & Jeff Vandemeer (PM Press, 2015) Zoran Živković, Impossible Stories, trans. Alice Copple-Tošić (PS Publishing, 2006) Latin@ Rising: An Anthology of Latin@ Sci- ence Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Matthew Johanna Sinisalo, The Core of the Sun, David Goodwin (Wings Press, 2017) trans. Lola Rogers (Black Cat, 2016) ANTHOLOGIES Red Star Tales: A Century of Russian and Chandler Klang Smith, The Sky Is Yours Iraq + 100: Stories from a Century after the Soviet Science Fiction, ed. Yvonne How- (Hogarth, 2018) Invasion, ed. Hassan Blasim (Comma ell, trans. ed. Anne O. Fisher (Russian Press, 2016) Life Books, 2015) Anna Starobinets, An Awkward Age, trans. Hugh Aplin (Hesperus Press, 2011) Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of the Margins of History, ed. Rose Fox Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fic- Drew Hayden Taylor, Take Us to Your & Daniel José Older (Crosssed Genres tion, ed. Mingwei Song & Theodore Huters Chief (Douglas & McIntyre, 2017) Publications, 2014) (Columbia University Press, forthcoming)

WORLDLIT.ORG 61 Taking flight with Eugene Nausheen Eusuf ’s David Bowles’s Vodolazkin’s aviator elegy and eros myths of Mexico Fiction, page 65 Verse, page 82 Miscellaneous, page 89

World Literature in Review FEATURED REVIEW

Dubravka Ugrešić Fox Trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać & David Williams. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2018. 308 pages.

Neustadt Prize winner Dubravka Ugrešić’s latest historiographic metafiction bears her trademark erudition, wit, and nuanced cul- tural critiques. The fox—trickster, bound- ary-crosser, siren, and thus “the writer’s totem”—pervades its pages, but as Ugrešić highlights our struggle to survive, fox becomes “everyone’s totem.” The narrator shares Ugrešić’s essay voice and much of her biography. Braid- ing fiction and history, she raises familiar questions: What is narrative? How do his- tory and fiction differ as narratives (or do they)? How does high art relate to low, world to text, margins to centers? What makes us who we are? Like Borges’s forking paths, the narra- tor’s tale meanders, its six parts marked by digression, disruption, and footnotes. Con- flating the real and the imagined to prob- lematize both, drawing epigraphs from Brodsky, Bulgakov, Nabokov, a fictional author, a Hollywood movie, and a Bulgar- ian folk song, Ugrešić’s globe-trotting novel investigates many of her trademark issues: the migrant’s plight, cultural commodifi- cation, the curse of nationalism, and the whitewashing of history. In several sections marginal characters become central. The title of part 1, Pilnyak’s “A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written,” signals a major theme, while a

62 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 Nota Bene

treatise by I. Ferris, the imaginary wid- claims in her imaginary treatise—the pre- owed daughter of writer Doivber Levin, sumably reliable narrator finds evidence a real, but minor, Russian avant-gardist, for this novel only in the memoirs of peers. supplies its epigraph, “The Magnificent Art She writes a footnote questioning witness of Translating Life into a Story and Vice reliability and, after Ferris’s reported death, Versa.” Drawn from the autobiography of deems her text, “whether real or fictional,” a Russian bride whose Japanese husband a “monument,” “a tombstone,” beneath transforms her life into art, Pilnyak’s actual which Ferris “buried herself.” tale masquerades as history. But the narra- With its epigraph from Lolita, part 5, tor’s research reveals that he “fills in” details “Little Miss Footnote,” intensifies Ugrešić’s Kazim Ali and that literary historians don’t know if his theme: “Human life is but a series of Inquisition characters existed, disrupting the categories footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished Wesleyan University Press of literature and history. Again, when part manuscript.” Here we learn how librar- 2’s Widow shapes an imagined writer’s ian Dorothy Leuthold, who chauffeured Kazim Ali’s collection of eclectic legacy, “a monument to him into which she the Nabokovs to California, “became an poems examines the many facets of inserted herself,” the narrator notes that essential footnote to the history of modern identity expected to arise during such “history, especially literary history,” creates literature,” the butterfly Nabokov named a reflective eponymous activity. Both illusions, like literature. for her “her entry ticket to eternity.” In deeply evocative and widely varied At the heart of Ugrešić’s labyrinth, part 6, the narrator lectures at Scuola in style, the pieces lend themselves to the longest section, “The Devil’s Garden” Holden, a real institution where students deep investment and engagement, tak- (part 3), counters the intellectual riddles apparently learn that all texts are equal and ing the reader through the twists and that come before and after the immediacy everyone can tell stories. Mourning the turns of navigating today’s world. of story. Longing for home, the narrator “theatricalization of everything,” censuring claims an inheritance in Croatia, a pretty the marriage of art and capitalism, new cottage whose garden houses a fox. A generic labels like creative nonfiction and male “intruder,” Bojan, has maintained twitterature, and devices like Rory’s Story the home and tried to tame the fox. From Cube, she demands “some higher ‘truthful- shared values and fresh-cooked eggs, “a ness’” and reasserts the magic of literature. deep metaphor for home,” an intimacy As Fox convincingly demonstrates, “We develops. After their first lovemaking, the are all footnotes, all of us in an unrelenting narrator thinks: “home.” and desperate struggle . . . against vacu- But Bojan’s history literalizes Croatia’s ity.” In part 3, the narrator invokes Sche- lethal buried past. Ostracized for antin- herazade, a fox whose stories bought her ationalism, he de-mines in “The Devil’s time, to underscore how narrative, com- A. M. Bakalar Garden.” The two grow closer until Bojan, prised of fact and fiction, helps us resist Children of Our Age walking in a “safe” area, detonates a mine. the void. In her story about how stories Jantar The narrator then ponders the “trite meta- come to be written, Ugrešić, another fox, phors” that convert life to art, declaring has shaped a “truthfulness” that embodies Children of Our Age is centered on “our story . . . on the verge of soap opera.” the power of art. the Polish community of London. Yet leaving the village for Europe after his The book is filled with a wide variety death, she reflects, “In Kuruzovac—I now Professor emerita at of characters, with different threads felt—I’d spent a goodly portion of my life North Carolina A & T leading back to their pasts in Poland yet I’d been there barely three weeks. . . . State University, and tying them to their present lives The world is a minefield and that’s the only Michele Levy has in London. They become connected as home there is.” published on major their lives converge and their desires Returning to puzzles, part 4 again jux- Russian and European come into conflict. A thrilling story taposes fictive and real. Tracing the poten- writers and, since 2000, on postcolonial and of exploitation and deceit, Children tial existence of a last novel by Doivber postimperial issues in Balkan culture. of Our Age is a powerful look at the Levin—as his possible daughter, I. Ferris, immigrant experience.

WORLDLIT.ORG 63 World Literature in Review

FICTION

Mia Couto Woman of the Ashes Trans. David Brookshaw. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 272 pages.

The first entry in a planned trilogy, Mia Couto’s Woman of the Ashes is a beautiful and grotesque force interweaving history with myth. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Gaza province of Mozam- bique is drowned by a torrent of war. Imani, a fifteen-year-old girl, struggles with her cultural identity as she is torn between her VaChopi roots and the occu- pying Portuguese. Her life grows further fractured as her family is broken amid the conflict. Germano, a sergeant wres- tling with guilt and grandeur, recalls his attempts to subdue one of the last African kingdoms while losing himself to an infec- tious madness. Couto’s prose carries the weight of a creation story in nearly every passage. Bounding between the perspective of Imani and the correspondence of Ger- mano, the former does seem to outweigh the latter in terms of intrigue, but both adequately build toward a narrative whole. Germano’s segments are compelling, illustrating the cascade from prestige to desperation to feverish visions. Imani’s sections, however, interweave spirituality with the plight of her family, injecting a cosmic relevance into a personal tale. The characterization of Imani’s fam- ily is consistently the text’s most arresting aspect. For instance, the abrupt depar- frame to the prior passages but do so clini- assessments come close to feeling unnec- ture of the girl’s grandfather, Tsangatelo, cally to emphasize the sergeant’s distance. essary. Fortunately, the latter half of the to a distant mine spurs a legend that Couto is careful not to deflate or trivialize character’s correspondence forgoes this further animates the beliefs of her kin. the rationale of Imani’s family in these trend, instead favoring his growing albeit Germano’s letters often provide a realistic chapters, though periodically Germano’s tumultuous sympathy for the VaChopi.

64 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018 Nota Bene

Eugene Vodolazkin The Aviator Trans. Lisa Hayden. London. Oneworld. 2018. 387 pages.

Eugene Vodolazkin’s engaging new novel Ishaq Imruh Bakari opens with a mystery. The main char- Without Passport or Apology acter—Innokenty Petrovich Platonov— Smokestack Books wakes up in a hospital ward in 1999 with no memory of who he is or how he came Drawing on experiences of migration to be there. “Was he in an accident?” he and African diaspora, Caribbean-born asks. “One might say that,” the doctor writer and filmmaker Ishaq Imruh answers carefully in response. Told that Bakari unfolds his new book of poetry he must remember everything except his across many places, invoking figures name and encouraged to use a journal to like Marcus Garvey and Stuart Hall record the knowledge of his personal past along the way. Bakari’s tight, multivo- that he recovers, Platonov begins a journey cal verse makes frequent use of physi- of self-discovery. Memories of the summer cal shape and space, the boundary-less cottage life that defined his childhood, the flow of text hinting at the “new forms” Woman of the Ashes is a strong, inde- death of his father, deprivation, arrests, that come from migration “without pendent piece, building a world on the and a terrible place of confinement in the passport or apology.” verge of a cataclysmic transition. The far north return to him jumbled and out of tug-of-war between both Imani’s past and sequence. Although he looks no more than future lives is in constant flux and proves thirty, he is, he gradually understands, as itself the catalyst for most of the novel’s old as the century, a real Robinson Crusoe, action. The novel is just as concerned with cast ashore in a strange modern world that cultural longevity as it is mortality, and the he does not understand and, as a result, battle of both never strays far from the dis- feels fundamentally isolated from. And yet course itself. However, the nature of such how exactly did he arrive in the post-Soviet a subject is both timeless and universal. era, transported apparently straight from The upheaval and assimilation of VaChopi the 1920s? parallels both the Syrian refugee crisis and Those familiar with twentieth-century Bessora & Barroux the ongoing waves of urban decay spurred Russian history will delight in the swirl Alpha: Abidjan to Paris by gentrification within the US. of memories that emerge over the course Trans. Sarah Ardizzone Couto has ensured the staying power of the narrative. We clearly see places and Bellevue Literary Press of his imminent saga with Woman of the moments in time that matter profoundly in Ashes. Though the young heroine endures Russian cultural memory, including Revo- Bessora’s prose and Barroux’s illustra- a myriad of challenges, the text’s indepen- lutionary and post-Revolutionary Petro- tions join to illuminate the heart- dent strength is careful not to compromise grad and the Soviet Union’s most notori- wrenching journey of a West African anticipation for the subsequent episode ous early labor camp, Solovki. Platonov’s refugee on a quest to reunite with his and leaves room for Imani’s growth amid a unique, temporally fractured biography family in Paris. The reader is drawn new and twisted landscape. gives him a broad perspective on Russian into the refugee’s experience and shares Daniel Bokemper life: just as an aviator might survey an his agonizing odyssey via the graphic Oklahoma City expanse from above, his memory arcs from novel’s blunt yet poetic language.

WORLDLIT.ORG 65 World Literature in Review

the early Soviet period to the end of the twentieth century. At its heart, The Aviator is a work of memory and forgetting that is about the hard work of knitting together and under- standing a century in Russian history that seems in so many ways broken in its awful- ness. What, the novel seems to ask us, is the connection between individual and collective memory? What matters more in our understanding of the past: major his- torical events or the small details of daily life such as sounds and smells that are so evocative of our personal experiences? The Aviator has been ably translated by Lisa Hayden. The novel will hold special appeal for those with an interest in Russian history and for fans of literary mysteries. Emily Johnson University of Oklahoma most at home with her grandparents, who Nora Ikstena as the devout Russian Orthodox Chris- remember and dream of a sovereign Latvia. tian, the hermaphrodite, and the dissident Nora Ikstena’s autofictional tale, courte- Soviet Milk teacher, all of whom influence the women’s sy of Magita Gailitis’s smooth and sensitive Trans. Margita Gailitis. London. Peirene perception of the world they inhabit. translation, allows us into the minds of two Press. 2018. 190 pages. The atmospheric narrative infused with women for whom we feel an almost instant evocative imagery reflects both the physi- empathy and who will remain with us for Every so often, you come across a book cal state of Latvia under Soviet rule and the a long time. Soviet Milk is the first in Pei- so beautiful that you ration the pages to mental states of the protagonists. Bambi rene’s Home in Exile series; two additional extend it. Nora Ikstena’s Soviet Milk is most the hamster, whom the daughter keeps at titles are set to be released later this year. certainly one of these. her grandparents’ flat, looms like a pre- Catherine Venner Set in Soviet-occupied Latvia, we monition in the background throughout. Durham, UK encounter the two memorable voices of a Trapped in his cage, Bambi yearns for free- nameless mother and her daughter. They dom, eats his own children, and ultimately Dag Solstad tell their story in a simple language that gives up on life. The daughter’s relationship elegantly reveals their conflicted emotions with her mother can be summed up in Armand V and frustrated ambitions. The mother is her astute realization, “My presence meant Trans. Steven T. Murray. New York. New a promising gynecologist who, due to an Bambi’s freedom.” Directions. 2018. 240 pages. unfortunate incident with an old soldier As the title suggests, milk emerges as in St. Petersburg, has been banished to an underpinning theme. The mother goes Prolific Norwegian author Dag Solstad run an ambulatory center in rural Latvia. missing for several days immediately after redesigns fiction in Armand V, his fourth She is accompanied to the countryside by her daughter’s birth for fear of poisoning English translation. The original subtitle, her daughter, who suffers the separation her by breastfeeding. As a result, the daugh- Footnotes to an Unexcavated Novel, fore- from her grandparents in the capital and, ter is unable to drink the milk provided shadowed Solstad’s intent, for the timeless from a young age, assumes responsibility to each child at school, symbolizing her story is indeed rendered only in footnotes. for her workaholic and sometimes suicidal fractured relationship with both her moth- Via these annotations to a nonexis- mother. The pair meet other outcasts, such er and the state. Unsurprisingly, she feels tent text, Solstad follows his protagonist,

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No surprise then that Armand is shocked when Are enlists, ending up on a murky mission “serving with a superior Western military power in impoverished Asia.” Solstad hints at mythology, modern- izing the ancient lore of conflict. Consider the Norse god Odin and his sons, Thor and Paul Colize Höd (half-brothers), reflected in Armand Back Up and his son, Are. Odin hungered for wis- Trans. Louise Rogers Lalaurie dom, trading one eye for it, while Armand Oneworld / Point Blank Books yearns for esteem, exchanging his ethical standards for it. A mystery thriller translated from the Armand’s son exhibits elements of both French, Belgian author Paul Colize’s Thor (god of thunder and war, who trav- novel follows a journalist’s investiga- eled to the enemy realm of the giants) tion into the connection between and Höd (the blind “warrior” god). Are deaths of a rock-and-roll band’s journeys to a faraway land, fighting along- members and another death separated side the giants (“the world’s one and only by forty years. The rock-and-roll aes- superpower”), and loses his sight. Solstad thetic of the plot kerrangs through the evokes Thor when a lightning bolt nearly swift and exciting prose. Armand V, an ambassador in Norway’s for- strikes Armand and Are as they hike. eign service: Oslo, Cairo, Jordan, Budapest, All the while, Solstad chats merrily Madrid, and, finally, London—his career away with himself. Readers eavesdrop as pinnacle. This diplomat had “a way with the author toys with his emerging “us vs. words” that allowed him to “master the them” tale, departing at times from the game” for the “small country he served.” storyline to mosey around on other top- Supporting roles go to childhood ics. His intellectual maneuvering is often friends, college classmates, other diplo- hilarious. mats, two wives (N and her twin sister), Already renowned in Scandinavian a daughter (unnamed), a son (Are), and literature, Solstad once again brilliantly Gerty Dambury the son’s landlady. The ultimate focus, defies categories, this time in English. The Restless however, is on the father/son relationship Lanie Tankard Trans. Judith G. Miller between Armand and Are. Austin, Texas The Feminist Press at CUNY Armand’s profession dictates that he publicly support his country’s involvement Négar Djavadi Acting as witness to police violence in foreign wars, yet privately he scorns in French Guadeloupe in the 1960s, combat, having lived through the Cold Disoriental this debut novel from English writer War, the Vietnam War, and the still-run- Trans. Tina Kover. New York. Europa Gerty Dambury recalls the racial ning War in Afghanistan (on which Solstad Editions. 2018. 320 pages. and class hierarchies that caused the had based Armand V in 2006). Through- massacre. Nine-year-old Émilienne out, the ambassador frames the United Disoriental is the first novel of Négar Dja- deals with the disappearance of her States with disdain in an unrelenting bar- vadi, a screenwriter based in Paris. It trav- teacher, while narrators both alive rage of deferential diplomacy: “the world’s els to Djavadi’s birthplace, Iran, to tell the and dead recount the history of the mightiest superpower,” “the most powerful saga of the Sadr family and, through them, protest through prose that brings nation in the world,” “the world’s one and that of Iran. The narrator of the novel, culture and characters together in a only Superpower,” “the superpower US.” Kimiâ, one of the three daughters of Sara probing investigation.

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Tadjamol and Darius Sadr, starts her story the family, their life after their departure in Paris, at a doctor’s office where she is to from Iran. get the test results for an in vitro fertiliza- The title of the book, Disoriental, beau- tion. While waiting, she takes us, nonchro- tifully encompasses not just the experience nogically, to many places and moments of the narrator throughout her life across in her recent and distant past. Her stories geographies, eras, and identities but also go all the way to the northern province of what Djavadi seems to have envisioned Mazandaran, to her great-grandfather, and for her readers’ experience of the book. to the birth of her grandmother, Nour, who The captivating story of a girl who grows plays an important role in Kimiâ’s destiny, into a woman dealing with the burdens even though the two never really meet. of history on her country, her family, and Growing up with parents who are intel- herself, Disoriental offers so much to both lectuals and forces of opposition to both non-Iranian and Iranian readers. the Pahlavi regime and the Islamic Repub- Poupeh Missaghi lic, Kimiâ, who adores her father, and her New York City sisters go through a lot. Kimiâ becomes a complex character, struggling with history Dietmar Dath and identity, with opinions she doesn’t shy away from sharing with her audience. By The Abolition of Species directly addressing her French-speaking Trans. Samuel P. Willcocks. Los Angeles. and, through Tina Kover’s fluid translation, Dopplehouse Press. 2018. 384 pages. an English-speaking, non-Iranian audi- creation of the Gente,” the species that will ence, she gives herself the freedom to bring When, in the late nineteenth century, H. G. supplant humanity. characters and events to life by going into Wells set out to satirize capitalism, industri- During the ensuing Wars of Liberation, the details of the complex national his- alization, and the Victorian class system, he genetically engineered animals, insects, tory of Iran—explaining, whenever need- chose evolution as his extrapolatory device. and plants, endowed with language and ed, cultural differences and discussing the The first of his self-described scientific enhanced intelligence, all but wiped out hardships of immigration and exile. romances, The Time Machine (1895), plung- the human species. Afterward, technology The book is divided into two sections, es readers into the Earth of the year 802,701, further enables “the greatest diversification Side A and Side B, with two different nar- by which era Darwinian forces have resulted of the total terrestrial gene pool since the rative modes. In Side A, Kimiâ constantly in the new forms of humanity Wells needs Cambrian Explosion.” moves back and forth between the present to concoct his novel, the work that begat Now, hundreds of years later, Cyrus, and past as well as different places and sub- modern science fiction. Now, over a century “the Lion that was once a man,” rules the jects. This is a great stylistic choice, reflect- later, German novelist Dietmar Dath has Three Cities, the political and social locus ing how one’s memory works, especially contrived another evolutionary romance. In of the Gente. Preoccupied with court and at emotionally charged moments; at some The Abolition of Species, genetic engineering personal intrigues, Cyrus, his court, and point, however, it begins to feel too forced, has enabled humanity to manipulate the the denizens of the cities are only dimly making you wish she could just pause in direction of evolutionary development. aware that, across the ocean in the jungle each moment and go along with the nar- Hundreds of years before the novel, near Brasilia, a new life-form has gestated: rative a bit longer, just a bit longer. In Side a group of humans began a project “to a machine intelligence “composed of [its] A, Kimiâ also relies heavily on suspense as identify descendant species of the mega- logical premises.” Once embodied, this one of her main tropes. This, too, after a fauna which had lived . . . in the Pleistocene entity “devoured, digested, excreted, and while feels unnatural based on her charac- epoch and herd them into special nature transformed, launching new waves of life.” ter and the nature of her sharing. Side B, reserves.” The enterprise was a disaster, its These creations, the Ceramicans, will soon unlike Side A, flows forward and allows us only achievement being “a small pride of swarm across the planet absorbing its to go with the narrator and the story, which lions, which finally provided the substrate biomass and threatening the survival of now focuses mainly on the later history of for [a far more ambitious] experiment: the the Gente.

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don’t let that put you off. In Samuel P. Will- cocks’s masterful translation, The Abolition of Species is a transgressive revelation, a worthy philosophical successor to Wells’s generative novel. Michael A. Morrison University of Oklahoma Anneli Furmark Masatsugu Ono Red Winter Trans. Hanna Strömberg Lion Cross Point Drawn & Quarterly Trans. Angus Turvill. San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2018. 128 pages. Swedish graphic novelist Anneli Fur- mark brings 1970s Sweden to life by Lion Cross Point is about a young boy intertwining the fierce political atmo- named Takeru, vacillating between his sphere with a forbidden love affair. traumatic past and present and coming Furmark’s raw, crude language nestles uncomfortably close to the pain he hasn’t into the illustrations of a rugged, been able to reconcile. The story centers wintry backdrop, pulling the reader on his time in the city with his mother and into the harsh realities and nuances of older brother and the ways in which that northern Sweden. The second half of the novel jumps experience follows him all the way to the more than a thousand years ahead and small fishing village where a relative takes moves off Earth to the newly terrafor- him in. med planets of Venus and Mars, now The phenomenon of place plays a pow- home to the descendants of the surviv- erful role in shaping the story. Of course, ing Gente. Here Dath’s concerns about the environment influences the characters identity, morality, politics, and evolution in the novel, but it becomes something merge dynamically as further genetic self- more. Setting is so prominent that it seems sculpting spawns a new fusion of human, to be another character at times, with animal, and cyborg. its own motivations and personality. The The Abolition of Species is essentially a characters don’t just interact with the set- philosophical inquiry into evolution and tings; rather, the settings exert their own Linda LeGarde Grover identity, enmeshed in a plot that partakes influence, alternately trapping Takeru and Onigamiising: of (and sometimes subverts) many story rehabilitating him depending on the place. Seasons of an Ojibwe Year types: political thriller, war novel, quest One of the most powerful aspects of University of Minnesota Press narrative, tale of speculative future sci- the story is how Masatsugu Ono captures ence—even coming-of-age story. Dath’s his protagonist’s voice. Takeru is a young In this collection of essays, Native elaborate plot, populated by a mélange of boy struggling with his past, and while American writer Linda LeGarde Gro- posthuman life forms, explores an urgent Ono does not write the story from Tak- ver follows the Ojibwe over the course concern: what will happen to the meaning eru’s first-person perspective, the narrative of a year and explores the ways they of “human” once technology can enable inhabits the boy’s mind, getting as close to harmonize their lifestyle with the cycle evolutionary powers heretofore reserved his suffering as possible. Takeru’s internal of the four seasons. Grover’s well- to nature? This novel demands sustained workings display his childlike understand- researched, reflective, and descriptive attention; immersion in its philosophical, ing of the world, including the gaps in that storytelling captures the essence of scientific, aesthetic, and political concerns; understanding. Takeru is constantly trying Ojibwe culture amid the chaos of a and no small amount of persistence. But to make sense of the situations to which he rapidly changing modern society.

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finds himself subjected, which highlights has, for his emotionally distant mother, a these gaps and results in a tension within medium, evinces little interest in his prob- himself that underlies the story. lems. His nonnormative home life, within Takeru’s unique relationship to the which his tribulations seem only amplified, world around him allows for Ono to play finds a gentle, liberating resonance with around with slight tinges of the fantasti- Tutti’s equally unusual home life focused cal. The past and present seem to meld on films. His blossoming relationship with together at times, and Takeru even begins Tutti, borne of the trust he develops as he to experience the presence of a young boy comes to understand their shared situa- who vanished from the village years ago. tion, allows him, finally, to live honestly. Without the assumptions that color the The struggle to achieve this liberation is perceptions of adults, Ono’s character can the novella’s dénouement, and Kawakami investigate aspects of the world in a differ- handles it well, tying together loose threads ent way, creating a unique experience for while remaining faithful to the character- readers that blurs the lines of reality. ization of the young boy we have come to Lion Cross Point is marked by a dichot- know. His life moves on, and he, for the omy between the inevitability of suffering moment, seems happy. and the potential for compassion within Erik R. Lofgren those moments. Being a child, Takeru is Bucknell University constantly at the mercy of others, and, time and time again, their decisions place him Carmen Boullosa in painful situations. Every step of the way, by chance association and whimsy, as the though, there is someone to help carry him fourth-grade narrator tugs the reader into Heavens on Earth through it, creating a book that is equal his world. From pocket money to school Trans. Shelby Vincent. Dallas. Deep parts heart-wrenching and heartwarming. lunch to his mother embezzling funds Vellum. 2017. 384 pages. (Editorial note: Turn to page 20 to read an from her bedridden mother-in-law to farts, interview with Ono.) his mind leaps hither and yon. Yet this “This book is composed of three differ- Reid Bartholomew light banter resolves itself, slowly, into ent narratives. For reasons that I do not University of Oklahoma a poignant consideration of relationships understand, it was given to me to turn into and their fragility. The underlying sense a novel.” These words of a fictitious author Mieko Kawakami of transience harkens back to classical open Carmen Boullosa’s 1997 novel Heav- Japanese literature, to be sure, but this is ens on Earth. Published five years after the Ms Ice Sandwich no derivative work resting on the laurels quincentenary of Columbus’s “discovery” Trans. Louise Heal Kawai. London. of past greats. Neither is the narrator pre- of Nueva-España, its main voice is that of Pushkin Press. 2018. 92 pages. ternaturally aware, nor the vessel for some Hernando, a sixteenth-century Franciscan Kierkegaardian philosopher shoehorned monk during the early years of the Spanish Ms Ice Sandwich is a delightful novella by into a boy’s consciousness; yet from the invasion of his native Mexico. His memoirs Akutagawa Prize winner Mieko Kawakami mouth of this babe—or, more appropri- are then rediscovered in present-day Mex- (b. 1976) that asks us to join an unnamed ately, from the mouth of his female friend, ico and translated from Latin into Spanish narrator, with an obsessive interest in a Tutti—come tender, insightful observa- by Estela. Learo, the last of the three, is an sandwich vendor, as he tries to navigate tions on the pain of loss and the necessity archaeologist. Living in a postapocalyptic the uncertain currents in his young life that of living an authentic life. future, he discovers Estela’s translations. have brought him to our attention. The narrator does not, of course, artic- Boullosa’s ambitious, many-layered con- Kawakami’s dialogue, fluidly rendered ulate it this way. He grapples with his deep struct follows clear themes. All three nar- into English by Louise Heal Kawai, cap- concern about the gossip targeted at his rators are translators and chronologists or tures beautifully and with great humor the obsession by talking to his dying, mute historians, all facing the imminent destruc- eager dynamism of a child’s mind, guided grandmother. This is the only refuge he tion of their world. Hernando is witness

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Ramin Jahanbegloo On Forgiveness and Revenge: Lessons from an Iranian Prison University of Regina Press

In his follow-up to Time Will Say Nothing: A Philosopher Survives an Iranian Prison, Ramin Jahanbegloo examines the politics, philosophy, and ethics of his experience after release from wrongful imprisonment in Iran’s Evin Prison. This philosophical trea- tise draws on multiple traditions to create a compact rhetorical polemic against violence.

Hristo Karastoyanov The Same Night Awaits Us All Trans. Izidora Angel Open Letter

This historical novel translated from the Bulgarian is set in 1923, the year when Aleksandar Tsankov takes con- trol of Bulgaria by means of a military coup. As his grip is tightening around to the slow death of his pre-Columbian other remaining humans abandon language the country, a pair of men named culture and people. Estela, much like Boul- and rapidly devolve into beasts. Geo Milev and Georgi Sheytanov losa, seems to sense a “beat of a destructive Despite—or perhaps because of—all create an incendiary literary maga- violence . . . in the air,” a sense that will this structure (not even having men- zine, for which they are assassinated. ultimately culminate in the disintegration tioned the abundance of literary quotes, Karastoyanov has created a bold story of her world into the dystopian future of the author’s use of names—such as Lear of resistance that illustrates a tumultu- Learo, who himself lives only to see the few or Ulises—pregnant with meaning, or the ous time in Bulgarian history.

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Esperanto opening and closing lines of each chapter), Boullosa’s book comes with one severe shortcoming: it finds little plot to cover its elaborate scaffolding. Through the inclusion of Estela, Boullosa ties the bleak realities of the other two worlds back to her own present. It is ironic that the author is at her best when she lets this minor voice recount what must be largely her own memories. The two actu- al protagonists, in contrast, remain less vivid. This is particularly true for Learo, who witnesses what might be the end of mankind purely from the outside. Liv- ing mostly through Hernando’s memoirs, Learo’s narrative takes up too many of the book’s almost four hundred pages, devel- oping little momentum of its own. While Alagbé’s Yellow Negroes and Other Imagi- Hernando’s memoirs do feature interesting nary Creatures. individual passages, they never really con- A collection of Alagbé’s comics from nect to a plot that would make us truly care 2004 to 2011, this is his first publication about their author. in English, translated by Donald Nich- Neither Learo’s repetitious outsider olson-Smith. Rendered in all black-and- Loving or hating him, what does it matter? accounts of his fellow men nor Hernando’s white brushwork, the dynamic narrative Pity tortures horror. Goodwill is attached somewhat scattered memories keep the is emphasized and complicated through to disgust like a rose climbing up my leg.” promise of Boullosa’s ambitious structure the illustrations, starting with the cover Alagbé deftly and articulately intertwines and form. In a good novel, the author dis- depicting a black man being choked by the body with the narrative, as colonialism appears behind her story. In Heavens on disembodied white hands. Many of the continues to choke those trying to escape. Earth, the framing too often reveals itself illustrations resemble deep woodcuts. Oth- Alagbé captures the discomforting real- beneath the novel’s thin layer of plot. ers are highly detailed historic scenes and ity of the body, as it is simultaneously com- Felix Haas cityscapes. All are hypnotically beautiful forting and painful, familiar and alienating. Zurich, Switzerland while often upsetting. As immigrants, black men and women, In the titular “Yellow Negroes,” an older and refugees are persecuted and killed, Yvan Alagbé white Algerian man, Mario, grows desper- Alagbé assumes the personal responsibility ately attached to a younger black African of not only remembering them but giving Yellow Negroes and Other man, Alain. Alain works to secure papers them a voice to accompany the body that Imaginary Creatures so he can work legally in France, and Mario allows them to live but evokes such hate. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York. holds this over his head in a perverse Alagbé concludes his work by saying, “Tell- New York Review Comics. 2018. 112 attempt to force his love. Mario’s behavior ing tales is the business of survivors. . . . pages. is inappropriate and unethical, but Alagbé Removed from myself, I remain alone on allows for pity for Mario as he is consumed my lips. The lightness I once had I have no Comics have the unique capacity to create by guilt and loneliness borne of his nefari- more. Can the world hold all of the woes of meaning between the verbal and visual ous role in the African colonial wars. Alain, the world? Can my love?” as illustrations challenge and surprise the in spite of everything, is also conflicted Claire Burrows reader, but few comics capture the politics in his feelings, saying, “I sleep alongside Austin, Texas of the body and race as poignantly as Yvan him. My breath the breath of the victims.

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Paolo Maurensig Theory of Shadows Trans. Anne Milano Appel. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 179 pages

Paolo Maurensig’s Theory of Shadows uses the game of chess as a vehicle to meditate Tehmina Khan on the Holocaust. Its central character is Things She Could Never Have the infamous Alexandrovich Alekhine, a Mawenzi House grand master who collaborated with the Nazis. This novel of ideas opens in spring Through her short stories, Khan takes 1946, with Alekhine living at the Hotel us into the complexities of the lives of do Parque in Estoril, Portugal, just as the modern Pakistanis, writing through Nuremberg trials in Germany have issued lenses of class, race, gender, and sexu- their first warrants. In his tense and fact- ality. Charmingly modern language based mystery, Maurensig returns to his surrounds readers, soaking them in fascination with the relationship between the culture of her world while dem- chess and war he first explored in his cel- onstrating the subtleties of an often- ebrated The Luneberg Variation (1997). misrepresented Muslim society. In his framing prologue and epi- logue, the author recounts his obsessive investigation of Alekhine’s death in April the middle of dinner, a stranger stares at 1946. Traveling to Estoril to reconstruct him, drawing her index finger across her Alekhine’s final days, Maurensig writes, “I throat. In the brilliant darkness of his story, like to think I am retracing his footsteps.” Maurensig investigates the cost of complic- A waiter at the Hotel do Parque during the ity with evil. war claims there is an official version that Elizabeth Fifer leaves many questions still unanswered. No Center Valley, Pennsylvania one even knows for certain where Alekhine is buried. Javier Marías Maria Laina By presenting the story from Alekhine’s Rose Fear point of view, Maurensig allows readers to Berta Isla Trans. Sarah McCann discover the many layers of his self-decep- Madrid. Alfaguara. 2017. 552 pages. World Poetry Books tion, including that chess is not political: “My adversary was on the chessboard, In his latest novel, Berta Isla, Spanish writer Rose Fear is the first English collec- not in life.” He thinks his art exempts him Javier Marías delivers an intense, emotion- tion from Greek poet Maria Laina, from moral judgment. Only when he feels ally charged story based on what, at first elegantly captured here in a dual endangered does he confront his evasions, sight, could be labeled as a story of love translation that carries us through his impostures. He ignores the persecution and espionage. Set between Madrid and enchanting yet unsettling sections on of the Jews and does nothing to stop the London, the novel tells the story of Berta, a “Time,” “Witches,” and “Travel.” Like violence. He attacks Jewish players in print Spanish woman who for twenty-one years a grim fairytale, Laina’s silvery lullaby and does not protect Jewish grand masters (more precisely, between 1969 and 1990) lyricism morphs into beautifully dark when he has the chance. Photographs of awaits the return home of Tomás (or Tom) chants and hanging, haikulike scenes him with Josef Goebbels and Hans Frank Nevinson, her Spanish-British husband. as it moves between voices and scraps surface. His dreams contain evil portents; Both characters first fall in love as young- of stories, complicating and recoloring he imagines interrogations. One night, in sters while in high school, but once they are the feeling of fear itself.

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married, Tomás’s schooling will take him is a rich and complex novel and can be to Oxford for a doctoral degree in foreign regarded as some of Javier Marías’s best languages. A stellar student, whose learn- storytelling to date. ing of Spanish and English began naturally César Ferreira at home in Madrid, Tomás soon becomes University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee an admired polyglot by his professors at Oxford. Upon graduation, because of his Kamel Daoud great ability to speak many languages and imitate many accents, he is recruited by the Zabor ou Les psaumes British secret service and thus begins his Arles, France. Actes Sud. 2017. 328 life as an underground agent. pages. As is the case with many of Marías’s protagonists, Tomás, or Tom, is an indi- “Writing is the only effective ruse against vidual of many identities. Truly multicul- death. People have tried prayer, drugs, tural and multilingual, he can claim more magic, endelessly repeated verses, or than one place of belonging while also immobility, but I believe I am the only being perfectly capable of feeling at ease in one who found an answer: writing.” Thus more than one cultural setting. Such a trait begins Kamel Daoud’s second novel, Zabor proves to be useful for his job, although he ou Les psaumes, in which a social outcast in is never free to reveal his many identities or an isolated village finds his purpose in life his whereabouts to his wife; instead, he is by staving off other people’s deaths through forced to create many masks for himself in his writing. After years of being shunned by mostly spends his days sleeping and his order to justify his long periods away from his father and his half-brothers, Zabor finds nights roaming the village. Occasionally, he home. As a result, identity and deceit take himself at the center of a family drama is called upon by neighbors who normally center stage in this narrative along with when his father is sick and dying. Should avoid him to write a story that will delay other recurring topics in Marías’s fiction. he try to save the father who long ago repu- the death of a family member. Useless as a Case in point are the trials and tribu- diated his mother and banished Zabor to worker, unable to marry and have children, lations of love and marriage and, more an isolated house? Should he use his skill Zabor’s only interests seem to be collecting importantly, the hidden secrets each indi- as a writer to help those who despise him books and writing texts that are incompre- vidual carries during his or her lifetime. At and the texts he produces? This allegorical hensible to most of the villagers. Normally, the same time, Berta Isla is a subtle reflec- novel draws on several sources, includ- they only treat Zabor with pity or disgust, tion on the nature of fiction and the novel’s ing One Thousand and One Nights, with unless of course they need his seemingly ability to serve as a tool to explore the storytelling as both a framing device and magical writing skills, which have pro- many nuances of human nature. Marías’s a temporary respite from decay and death. longed the lives of many. intense, sentimentally charged narrative Throughout the narrative, numerous Kamel Daoud’s debut novel, Meursault, seems to underscore that only the art of the flashbacks allow Zabor, the pathetic and contre-enquête (Actes Sud, 2014), has a novel is capable of making visible facets of strangely misshapen son, who brought only fascinating intertextual relationship with the human condition that seem invisible shame to his father, to tell both his story Albert Camus’s classic, L’étranger (1942). In to the common eye. Moreover, literature is and that of his family: his father the pros- his literary “counter-investigation,” Daoud the only tool available for unveiling what perous butcher, with his flocks of sheep; gave a voice and an identity to the anony- lies dormant in our most hidden emotions his repudiated (and now dead) mother; the mous “l’Arabe” assassinated by Meursault and our many masks and desires. unmarried aunt who shares his status as an in Camus’s novel. Daoud’s second novel An ambitious work filled with mys- outcast; and his half-brothers, who long to confirms his status as one of the most terious and sublime moments, Berta Isla take over the dying father’s business. Zabor important currently active francophone

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fully develop a different perspective on the same overarching themes of immigration Liu Zhenyun and xenophobia. Rania Mamoun, in “Birds Someone to Talk To of Paradise,” tells of a woman waiting in Trans. Howard Goldblatt & an airport, longing to fly like a bird, but Sylvia Li-chun Lin instead finding herself stuck on the ground, Duke University Press unable to leave. Zaher Omareen chronicles a young man’s hectic journey across Europe Originally published in 2009, this as a refugee. “Phantom Limb,” by Fereshteh novel won the prestigious Mao Dun Molavi, illustrates the life of an undocu- Literary Prize. Translated into English mented worker living in the US while his for the first time, it tells the story of family waits in his home country. tofu peddler Yang Baishun, his kid- Works by Wajdi al-Ahdal, Najwa Bin- napped stepdaughter Qiaoling, and a shatwan, and Anoud are the anthology’s man named Niu Aiguo, all connected strongest works. They each tell a unique through a mysterious bond. Liu medi- story with captivating energy. Al-Ahdal’s tates on loneliness and the importance “The Slow Man” reads like a fable, full of of family through a third-person close Algerian writers. This reviewer also rec- warning and wisdom. Incorporating the narrator, allowing readers to walk a ommends the recently published collec- story of Yusuf, he effectively illustrates how mile in another man’s shoes. tion of Daoud’s journalistic work: Mes a small action can have ramifications thou- indépendances: Chroniques 2010–2016 sands of years into the future. Anoud’s (Actes Sud, 2017). “Storyteller” centers on a woman telling her Edward Ousselin story in a London restaurant, chronicling Western Washington University her life as a child in Iraq during the sanc- tions and her experience as an immigrant in London. “Return Ticket,” by Binshatwan, Banthology: Stories from is an energetic tale of a woman’s journey Unwanted Nations to and from her peculiar home village of Luljeta Lleshanaku Ed. Sarah Cleave. Manchester, UK. Schrödinger. It takes the form of a letter Negative Space Comma Press. 2018. 70 pages. written by a grandmother to a grandson she Trans. Ani Gjika may never know. New Directions In 2017 President Trump made the con- As a whole, the anthology is a short but tentious decision to institute a travel ban effective act of resistance to the 2017 ban, The peculiar magic of the almost that effectively barred individuals from with ideas transcending customs and bor- unseen and the inner “negative seven different countries from entering the ders. Reading it was like stepping into seven spaces” in which both “rest” and United States. As a response, Comma Press different lives in seven different places. For “ruin” are born are just a few of the decided to publish Banthology: Stories from those who want to ban entire countries, this themes Albanian-born poet Lul- Unwanted Nations, which features seven anthology sends the clear message that ideas jeta Lleshanaku approaches in this different stories, each by an author from a can never be shut out by borders and invites scene-rich collection. Kicking off her “banned” nation. readers to see that individuals from these poems with bold, declarative lines, The stories, while cohesive, are not so nations are not enemies but neighbors. Lleshanaku discloses autobiographi- similar that reading them feels monoto- Claire Riggs cal cut-scenes in cohesive stanzas that nous. Rather, utilizing uniquely different University of Oklahoma allow her to dip into raw political and styles, each author manages to capture and historical content without losing a moment of personal vividness.

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Alessandro Barbero staged in Athens and descriptions of the The Athenian Women horrible abuse that Charis and Glycera suf- fer at the hands of Cimon and his friends. Trans. Antony Shugaar. New York. Europa The scenes of beatings and fear that the Editions. 2018. 253 pages. women suffer are extremely difficult to read, and they highlight the abuse that In his novel Athenian Women, newly trans- women have had to endure for centu- lated from the Italian, Alessandro Barbero ries. The book is described as a “romantic attempts to give us a view of daily life in comedy,” but scenes of violence and deg- ancient Athens during the tumultuous year radation against women, even though they of 411 BC. Thrasyllus and Polemon, two end up highlighting Cimon’s impotence, do old veterans of the Peloponnesian Wars, not make the tone of this book feel either are neighbors trying to squeeze out a bare romantic or comic. subsistence by farming their land in the Melissa Beck Athenian countryside. Both men are wid- Woodstock Academy, Connecticut owers and both have a single daughter, old enough to marry, and feel pressure to Sergio Chejfec find a suitor wealthy enough to allow their daughters to live in better comfort. Baroni: A Journey Eubulus, in contrast to Thrasyllus and Trans. Margaret Carson. Mumbai. Almost Polemon, is a resident of the Athenian Island. 2017. 155 pages. countryside who can afford a lavish life- her wooden sculptures of local saints and style that involves drinking parties and Works of fiction are sometimes excerpted virgins, brightly colored and fantastically orgies. The licentious behavior of this rich in literary magazines ahead of their publi- adorned, she is also an original perfor- man is overdone in the book as his sexual cation. Baroni: A Journey, Sergio Chejfec’s mance artist. exploits with prostitutes and his slaves is eighth book and his fourth to be translated Chejfec tells us how occasionally “Bar- described in detail. It is unclear whether into English, debuted at the third Kochi- oni performs her own funeral: she dresses this exaggeration is done for comic effect Muziris Biennale in 2016. Portions of it in the appropriate attire, a blue dress, or to enhance the economic contrast with were pasted on the walls of Kochi, in the which she put together for that purpose, his much poorer, more modest neighbors. southern Indian state of Kerala, to form the and she lies down in the coffin, homemade But whatever the reason, it was unneces- artwork Dissemination of a Novel. Origi- as well, where she remains motionless for sary to the plot. nally published in 2007 in Buenos Aires a long time.” At the heart of this enact- One day while Thrasyllus and Polemon (Chejfec’s hometown), Baroni is Almost ment is what Chejfec calls a “double gaze,” are at the Theater of Dionysus watching Island’s first incursion in non-Indian ter- enabling the artist to see “herself through a production of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, ritory and a remarkable choice of both the eyes of those who have stayed alive, and Eubulus’s son, Cimon, invites Charis and author and book. [to offer] to the living the lesson of seeing Glycera, the neighbors’ daughters, over The Baroni of the title is Rafaela Baroni, her dead.” By the same double perspective, to his house to buy some figs. Cimon is a Venezuelan folk artist born in 1935 and the funeral performance is Baroni’s way to portrayed as a crass, spoiled, and abusive living (as of March 2018) in her anagram- look simultaneously backward, to her own young man who is always used to getting matically named house museum, “El Paraí- experiences of death as a result of catalep- what he wants. Despite his stated inten- so de Aleafar,” some 370 miles southwest of tic attacks, and forward, to the real event tions, what Cimon really wants is to exploit Caracas. Like many folk artists, Baroni is a that, although irreversible, she will have them sexually and humiliate them. complex and many-sided cultural mediator rehearsed too many times to go wrong. Barbero alternates his chapters between whose work blurs the boundaries between Chejfec has a unique and compel- descriptions of the Lysistrata that is being creative and healing powers. Known for ling way of exploring the inner and outer

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Donia Maher Ganzeer & Ahmad Nady, illus. The Apartment in Bab El-Louk Trans. Elisabeth Jaquette Darf

Written in the style of an expressive noir poem, The Apartment in Bab El-Louk was first published in 2014 by Dar Merit and went on to receive the Kahil Award in 2015 for the Graphic Novel Prize. It features “the reflections of an old recluse in busy downtown Cairo” with varied high- contrast, gothically minimalistic illus- trations by superstar team Ganzeer and Ahmad Nady.

Migrant Shores: Irish, Moroccan and Galician Poetry Ed. Manuela Palacios Salmon Poetry

Pulling together poets from three worlds of an artist who, thanks to his own book that is much richer, deeper, and more different countries on the Atlantic to peculiar (multiple) gaze, emerges as far fascinating than any of these three genres explore a shared experience of exile, more sophisticated and intriguing than the would have allowed, given their scope Migrant Shores paints poetry as “a categories of “folk,” “popular,” or “religious and limitations. A book that enthralls and quintessentially migrant art.” Each art” may suggest. His allusive, engagingly delights the common reader but should Arabic and Galician poem is followed manneristic style hints parodically at the also engage the critic and the scholar, espe- by a collaborative English translation fact that he could have written an essay cially if concerned with folk art (or, for that and a response poem from one of on Baroni’s art; or a novel inspired by her matter, art in general). fourteen Irish poets, creating poignant life; or even a travelogue focused on Ven- Graziano Krätli connections between these distinctly ezuelan folk art. Instead, he has given us a North Haven, Connecticut personal experiences.

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VERSE

Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir Stormwarning Trans. K. B. Thors. Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 2018. 68 pages.

Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir has done the seemingly impossible: taken our contem- porary capitalist culture, suffused with moralism as well as not-so-hidden preju- dice, glorying in its achievements while squandering its wealth, and submitted it to critique while making us laugh at the whole thing. Not all these poems are funny, but the most strikingly original ones often are. Her type of humor is not a common type: it is accessible but not juvenile, humble but not trivial. The speaker of these poems is not afraid to invite us to laugh at her as well. Perhaps this has something to do with gender—women who live and work in a male-dominated world (in other words, in our world) learn irony and comedic self- effacement as coping mechanisms. The light touch that Tómasdóttir brings to her humor prevents it from becoming heavy, overwhelming, or inaccessible to her read- ers. She never places herself above us but develops a relationship of trust and friend- ship throughout her poems. At times, this is the explicit subject of Tómasdóttir’s verse: in the poem “My Flu,” the speaker points out, in an isolated stan- za, that “someone else’s flu / is a flu of little consequence.” The world has more impor- tant matters to contemplate. But how does son’s. Thus the endlessly complex matter they call for: just as she asks for a broaden- this change when we are the sick ones? of empathy and individual suffering finds ing of perspective and an attention to the “Then she comes for you,” writes the poet a beautifully simple illustration. Alexander workings of human empathy, so her poems in another hilariously isolated stanza. And Pope’s quotable phrase about what oft was reach out to us with just such an inclusive, so our perspective shifts: now, our “dignity thought but never so well expressed comes empathetic spirit. It is a pleasure to accept is lost forever” as we suffer the illness our- to mind. their invitation. selves, leading to the understated conclu- Here we need to add that Tómasdóttir’s Magdalena Kay sion that yes, there is a world of difference means of expression are also so compre- University of Victoria between our own flu and another per- hensible as to enact part of the process

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Whitman. To read this collection from the start is to experience the evolution of Kin- nell’s understanding of poetic form but also to witness his unique voice and sensibility, essentially present from the earliest years. Jo Nesbø Free-verse rhythms, however, were not Macbeth the only influence of Whitman; Kinnell Trans. Don Bartlett also sings the “body electric,” and he knows Hogarth that the metaphysical is and must be expe- rienced with—if not actually through— Translated from the Norwegian, the physical. In many of his poems, we Jo Nesbø’s Macbeth is a retelling of may feel that we are fully immersed in a Shakespeare’s play set in a 1970s town description of something material (some- cloaked in industrial drear and fraught times sexual), only to find ourselves pivot- with substance abuse. The intrigue for ing in a moment to an instance of great which the original play is known takes emotional depth. Open this book to nearly place amid the police force and the any page and an instance will present itself. inner rings of the town’s drug trade, This recognition of the importance of hinging on an ambitious Inspector the body extends to the bodies of words Macbeth in this crime thriller packed themselves—namely, their existence in with adrenaline, manipulation, and Galway Kinnell sound. In his midcareer, when he gave detailed prose. Collected Poems guest lectures on the music of poetry, Kin- nell would bring a recording he had made New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. of the sounds of various animals—crickets, 2017. 591 pages. frogs, birds, whales, wolves—and he would remark that all species with voices used At nearly six hundred pages, this beauti- rhythm to communicate with one another, fully produced book is comprised of eleven along with other aspects of song. Kinnell sections of poetry (Galway Kinnell’s ten loved the bodies of words, not just their books and a section of his last finished denotations. In “Blackberry Eating,” we poems not previously published in book read: “the ripest berries / fall almost unbid- Chuma Nwokolo form), an insightful nineteen-page intro- den to my tongue, / as words sometimes The Extinction of Menai duction by Edward Hirsch that connects do, certain peculiar words / like strengths Ohio University Press Kinnell’s evolving poetic style with devel- or squinched, / many-lettered, one-syllable opments in the poet’s thought and life, lumps, / which I squeeze, squinch open, An unethical drug trial has beset the a biographical afterword, notes, and an and splurge well.” Niger village of Kreektown, causing index. One additional lovely feature is the Yet this is not the only side to Kinnell: the downfall of the entire Menai cul- inclusion of a photograph at the head of he is equally fond of humor and word- ture. Characters spanning the globe each section that is contemporaneous with play, which too can suddenly pivot to the star in this novel alongside a spiritual the time of the original book publication. serious and emotionally resonant. If the leader trying to preserve the soul of his As did his friend and fellow poet, James material, the body, is the home of the spiri- people. Nwokolo touches on bioethics Wright, Kinnell began by writing poet- tual, the body is not in itself that which is and language extinction; his prose is ry in traditional accentual-syllabic lines, ultimately sought, though celebrated. In steeped in imagery, surrounding read- often with end-rhyme, but in time (as did one poem of consolation, we read: “Forget ers in a fictional but representative Wright) he permitted himself to write in about being emaciated. Think of the wren time and place with shocking relevance rhythmic free verse, influenced by Walt / and how little flesh is needed to make a to modern history.

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song.” In other words, in poem after poem, God in terms of what He is not, emphasiz- even the ones seemingly abandoned to the ing the mysterious, the unknowable nature sensual, we find a poet of remarkable depth of the divine. In “Little Songbook of the and originality who finds in the corpo- Dark One,” Hart writes, “All afternoon, my real world that which animates it and gives scalene heart, Dark One, / My mind runs it meaning. and clatters after you, / And then all night Kinnell is also importantly influenced the wild track of your love.” by Rilke, especially his Duino Elegies, and Like many mystics before him, Hart like Rilke he bears witness to a world that often speaks of the divine in erotic terms. wants to be seen by us and arise again in In the same poem he says, “Yet when song. Of all the poets of his generation, I watch the rain, Dark One, I’m home, Kinnell is likely the most sanguine and / And when we touch, I also touch the sane, the one most exuberantly in love rain.” “It’s not too late, Dark One,” he later with life—all of it, and he embraces it all to pleads in a poem called “Prayer,” “For you rise again in his poems. A brief quotation to come / And hold me close / And stay of Whitman serves as an epigram to his an hour or two[.]” Later, when the book final book: “Tenderly—be not impatient, turns to frankly erotic earthbound love / (Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, / poems, the holiness of the erotic mysti- Strong is your hold O love.)” In the late cism is carried over, creating engagingly poem “The Stone Table,” from his last sacramental love poems. book, Strong Is Your Hold, Kinnell writes: Benjamin Myers “I, who so often used to wish to float free my arm: / Not even your shadow’s there to Oklahoma Baptist University / of earth, now with all my being want to touch,” he writes in “Little Book of Mourn- stay,” and I suspect that he will stay, an ing.” In “Eclipse,” he asks, “Where are you, Fady Joudah undefeated spirit in the enduring body of father, in these ragged hours?” This sense his collected words. of distance, however, doesn’t preclude ten- Footnotes in the Order Fred Dings derness, as in the title poem, in which the of Disappearance University of South Carolina poet creates an inversion of Dylan Thom- Minneapolis. Milkweed Editions. 2018. as’s famous plea: “Don’t sleep tonight, dear 84 pages. Kevin Hart father, darkness eats // Shadows and men alive, just walk barefoot / Into that other Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance Barefoot world.” Many of the volume’s most striking progresses through gradual inoculation. Notre Dame, Indiana. University of Notre lines are from this emotionally charged Bit by bit, the reader becomes accustomed Dame Press. 2018. 92 pages. section of the book. In “Again,” he speaks to the irony and paradox with which Pales- of “mosquito gangs / Falsettoing in hot, tinian American poet, translator, and phy- In Kevin Hart’s eighth book of poetry, he dark rooms at night.” The vivid images and sician Fady Joudah works. Joudah writes uses poetry to talk to the absent or, rather, imaginative phrasing are a testimony to the with a “fever,” crafting a dense lyricism the ambiguously present: his late father, authenticity of feeling. that forces the reader to become a “foot- God, past lovers, and versions of himself. As is often the case, everything Hart noter,” inking the margins with glosses to Barefoot begins with elegies for the says about his earthly father seems to apply his medical metaphors. Tracing the smoke poet’s father (see WLT, Nov. 2017, 61). also to his Heavenly Father. Beginning trails of philological, global, and personal Hart movingly explores the way that his with the opening villanelle and continuing themes across the book’s three main sec- father, unknowable now in death, was throughout, Hart addresses God as “Dark tions reveals that Joudah’s own lines are, as unknowable in life. Death highlights the One,” a phrase that evokes the tradition of the title quietly hints, the antithesis of foot- inscrutability of our parents. “I hear the “negative theology,” which has roots deep notes, working not to explain or unpack silence of two crows // Then look down at in the Christian tradition and thinks about but to convolute.

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Lidia Ostałowska Watercolours: A Story from Auschwitz Trans. Sean Gasper Bye Zubaan

Journalist Lidia Ostałowska recon- structs the story of artist Dina Gottli- ebova-Babbitt’s time at Auschwitz in a haunting character study translated from Polish. SS doctor Josef Mengele takes a special interest in Dina, allow- ing readers to delve into the somber horrors of the concentration camp. Ostałowska writes in a way that is stark but compelling, and her matter- of-factness honors Dina’s legacy with poignant reflections on racism, history, and the way we’re all tied together.

Carl Phillips Wild Is the Wind Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The fourteenth book of poetry from Joudah exploits the fuzziness of lan- (“not chasm but chiasm”) and moments Carl Phillips, Wild Is the Wind takes guage from the outset, toying with false of ambiguous syntax foreground words as its title as well as its indelible note of chiasms and faux epigrams like “the falafel words, functioning originally in their “sta- longing and persistence from the jazz of truth / and the truth of falafel.” Bathetic, tus as feeling.” The question of origins, too, standard. Phillips’s capacious verse ironic, and obscure by turns, the book’s recurs throughout Footnotes. What begets suggests at times the fluid move- first section complicates the “common” what? “Do cucumbers bear / the stars of ment of prose as he embarks upon a with roundabout epithets like “the grackle, their flowers?” By the final, title poem, the progressive meditation on memory, common, / indigo, icteric-eyed New World speaker, lapsing in and out of fever, appears weeping, and the impossibility of for- // passerine.” Associations that hinge on to both sublimate and revert to a state getting, his poems leaving behind a sonic rather than semiotic connections of pure materiality, leaving that question distinctly redemptive residue as they wash over the reader.

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dangling: “Consider me a color / an unspo- ken sound / aphasia won’t clarify.” The enticing middle section of Foot- notes is written in conjunction with the Syrian Kurdish poet Golan Haji (see WLT, Jan. 2018, 20–21). While poems like “After No Language” venture into the metatex- tual deep end, Haji’s wry narrative voice, when mixed with Joudah’s, provides a lucid respite from the denser lyric poems that precede it. Alongside moments of intima- cy, scenes of death and despair are handled with a quintessential blend of irony and transparency as the speaker encounters “hordes of refugees in riot control forma- tion without the gear” or sees again the face of the “woman who awakened your first lust when you were a kid . . . killed in the morning while talking to her sister on the phone.” While Haji and Joudah intentionally efface the lines of authorship in their col- laboration, meaning remains hermetic. The primary content of all of these poems, these “footnotes,” is hidden away some- where in the poet’s (or poets’) private mental library. The lines in this book are simply the scraps that, somehow, escaped into the outside world, tasking us with summoning the excitement of an archae- ologist sorting through ostraka—an arcane path to the ordinary. Perhaps we owe the absent fragments to one of Joudah’s most powerful paradoxes: “I call the finding of certain things loss.” And the losing of cer- tain things? Grant Schatzman University of Oklahoma

Nausheen Eusuf Not Elegy, But Eros New York. NYQ Books. 2017. 88 pages. strangers—a carousel of sobriety and som- though we must “honor the spirits / who berness. Perhaps, even, the wonderment step lightly through / the garden of our Trauma and grief tend to control one’s life at what could have been done differently. disgrace,” the sorrow eventually transfig- once they have interjected themselves, and In Nausheen Eusuf’s debut poetry col- ures. Eusuf teaches us that recovering from yet we continue to write about them as lection, Not Elegy, But Eros, we learn that grief or trauma might be the longest lesson

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one may ever have and that recovery does not always have to look like tears and black veils (see WLT, Sept. 2015, 50). There is no absence of lament in this collection, however, as the introductory poem “The sorrows of the dead” teaches us. In the world, according to Eusuf’s Mercedes Roffé speaker, we carry the sadness of loved ones Ghost Opera through the continuum of our own mortal Trans. Judith Filc lives. We “tend to them the way [we] water co•im•press the plants.” A poet’s job is to translate emo- tion, and Eusuf recognizes the nature of the Moving through scenes as ethereal as grief process: it includes a litany of what-ifs the title suggests, the logic of Ghost and should-have-dones, “the way regret Opera seems to straddle two worlds, unsettles like a feather / on the windshield music and dreams seeping in at its that turns, stalls, lies still, / and disappears.” edges. This book of poems from This poem, as many of the poems in this Argentine author Mercedes Roffé, collection do, asks to be read slowly, and presented here in dual translation, is the words turn over just so. The imagery typographically striking: Roffé’s poems and use of language invites us to celebrate become material as they skip across each complex moment, especially those the page, sometimes facing off with that are strange and difficult. their English translations in suggestive In the penultimate section of the book, yet elusive patterns. some of the poems bounce around like Sophia Naz child’s play. Poems like “Ode to Apostro- phe” and “Overall” announce themselves Pointillism in such a way that one might imagine Dr. Glen Ellen, California. Copper Coin. 2017. Seuss-esque drawings in accompaniment. 58 pages. The use of language is playful and quick in these poems, as in the lines “A jigger, a Sophia Naz walks a tightrope between two poker / a poker-faced joker, / a two-timing languages, English and Urdu, and her new stoker / of fire and smoke” in the poem collection of poems, Pointillism, is a point- “Ode to a Joke.” On first read, the inser- er to that. Point is an English word and til- Moriel Rothman-Zecher tion of such levity within the necessary lism an Urdu one denoting a talisman. “It Sadness Is a White Bird lamentations felt almost chaotic. To feel the signifies poetry as holding a magic power Atria Books spread of deep pain that somehow leads to both evoke and transcend linear time into giddy wordplay is almost like being and perceived reality,” she says. But later Seventeen-year-old Jonathan moves in a mirrored fun house. What I learn we read in the poem “Pointillism” about an back to Israel, excited to join the army from Eusuf’s lesson is that the ecstasy and actual Point, which is an Indian military and have a place in his family’s tradi- delight of this frolic in language is part of pellet gun pointed at the people of Kash- tion of securing and defending the recovering oneself. We are as much silly mir, and a tillism to ward off the pellets in Jewish state. He isn’t without his con- as we are somber, and when we finally the form of voodoo words “to impale at cerns, however, and after befriending embrace emotional transitions, we will penpoint the lifelong timelines of lies.” The a pair of Palestinian twins, he finds begin to grow from our traumas and accept poem, thus, marks an ongoing real struggle himself questioning his loyalty and his the sum of all our experiences. as a clash of two languages. place in the historical conflict. Filled Sarah Warren Naz’s poems are well-crafted pieces that with poignant and lyrical prose, this University of North Texas cleverly hide within them this dichotomy book is a brilliant coming-of-age tale.

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of language and culture. “Names of birds” ship. Scholem had not written his poetry never uses English names for them and with publication in mind—these were ends with these intriguing lines: “Hamsa/ private poems, sent in letters to friends Soham / Repeat this / Until the bird / And or hidden in his diaries for his eyes alone. its meanings / Are merged as One.” In Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), born Vedic literature, this combination of two Gerhard Scholem, came from an urbane words, So’ham and Hamsa, is interpreted German-Jewish family in Berlin. Among as “I myself am the Swan,” the swan sym- German philosophers there has been a bolizing the supreme state of being. long tradition of writing private poetry, In a poem addressed to another poet, sent to friends in letters but not written Agha Shahid Ali, she asks, “Shahid, you for publication. Walter Benjamin—Scho- said / never to write that / word ‘soul’ so, lem’s friend to whom most of the poems how to explain / porous anatomy, that in Sieburth’s translation of Greetings from atomic stinging?” Naz deals with words Angelus were sent or dedicated to—also in this metaphysical way and makes the wrote epistolary verse, as did the great lack of a clear-cut center or a well-defined German philosopher Martin Heidegger home a constant refrain. Thus, even with to his muse and lover, the Jewish philoso- a mundane object like an onion, she is pher Hannah Arendt. very apparent in the poetry in Greetings able to say “lunar onions are just home- The friendship between Scholem and from Angelus. As a critic, he expressed less tears waiting for the eyes to take them Benjamin was a deep and passionate intel- his creativity through interpreting his in.” Elsewhere she reflects, “Are we not all lectual communion that had begun when philosophical and literary idols and, most thumbnails / Filed away and forgotten / Scholem was seventeen and Benjamin importantly, God himself. In writing poet- Under Time’s thumb?” twenty-three, and only ended in 1941 with ry, however, Scholem has chosen a plat- In “Chappan Churri’ (Fifty six stabs), Benjamin’s suicide (or murder) on the form in which poets traditionally speak in the word churri (knife) is autocorrected border of Spain in his flight from Nazi- their own creative voices, espousing their to cherry, Cheri, and “occasionally, chai.” occupied France. Most of the poems that own ideas, feelings, and judgments. “When I type / churri, autocorrect is also Scholem wrote before Benjamin’s death are Scholem’s voice is strong, and what sur- / a stab at language.” Thus, she consid- private conversations, exchanges, respons- prises in his poetry is that the poems are ers herself stabbed fifty-six times like the es, and interpretations centering on Ben- in fact highly distilled critical responses to, woman in the story stabbed by her jilted jamin and his ideas and works. There is and interpretations of, ideas and texts. The lover. a love poem in Greetings from Angelus subject of his poetry is mostly focused on But “each wound gives her a new that Scholem wrote to Grete Bauer, but other people, specifically the literary fig- mouth,” and that’s Sophia Naz’s strength. even here Benjamin is doubly present—the ures and intellectual circles around which Ravi Shanker N. poem’s erudite title, “Paraphrase of the his career as a critic revolved. He used Palakkad, India Prose of the Diary,” has the subtitle “after writing about others to communicate his Walter Benjamin” and the postscript “on own ideas, while nominally appearing to Gershom Scholem first reading [Benjamin’s] ‘The Metaphys- stay absent from his poetry. We see a great ics of Youth.’” As Steven M. Wasserstrom, analytical mind at work, and as Wasser- Greetings from Angelus: Poems the editor of this volume, remarks in an strom points out in his introduction, Scho- Trans. Richard Sieburth. Brooklyn. endnote, Scholem confessed in a letter lem was a poet who insisted on traditional Archipelago Books. 2018. 150 pages. to Grete Bauer that she was—with Wal- forms and an early twentieth-century Ger- ter Benjamin—the “‘midpoint’ of his life” man who was not distorted by Third Reich When Richard Sieburth published the first (Grete was to reject Scholem’s advances). ideologies and neologisms. Richard Sie- translations of Gershom Scholem’s poetry Scholem was primarily a critic and burth’s deep understanding of Scholem’s in Bomb magazine in 2002, it was a great commentator on the Kabbala and on other thought, and his masterful re-creation of revelation to Scholem’s dedicated reader- literary and philosophical texts, which is Scholem’s rhythms and rhymes, reflect the

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tatively defamiliarized, but this poet who claims to have been “born into this world innumerable times” also understands a phenomenological role for poetry, in which linguistic inventions can open new vistas where “Word was not word till now.” In spaces where the poet can spend “a night in an aeon” and “starlight melt[s] like ice,” Ko poses a question that perhaps defines his poetics: “might I be able to say Del Samatar & Sofia Samatar / whether it’s imagination or not?” The Monster Portraits same rhetorical question seems imbricated Rose Metal Press in the texture of each poem within Grass- hoppers’ Eyes, and the anthropomorphized Del and Sofia Samatar, a pair of mountains, waterfalls, birds, bees, grasses, Somali American siblings, combine seas, etc. are predisposed to talk together their talents for drawing and writing, throughout this book, engaging the poet respectively, to create an examination directly in their conversations. An evening of another world that, while strange, “visits the sky,” and together “they gossip helps inform understanding of our inner workings of these original German about the bellflower’s love affairs” as if the own. Fantastical and grotesque, this poems. Sieburth’s translations offer a fasci- intersubjective chatter springs beyond that mixing of text and sketches stokes nating insight into the thoughts and liter- which human language can know, beyond the imagination. ary sensibility of one of the great minds of the always-already social strictures and the twentieth century. codified structures of “the human flow- Peter Constantine er” and into confabulatory spheres where University of Connecticut “another kind of existence” is witnessed. From these vantage points, the poet Ko Hyeong-Ryeol casts a glance and asks, impossibly, “Blue mountain, what is man and what is living?” Grasshoppers’ Eyes In places where Ko walks “with a painless, Trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé & Lee clear head in the morning shadow of a Hyung-Jin. Anderson, South Carolina. Seoul skyscraper” before revealing (per- Parlor Press. 2017. 121 pages. haps associatively) a cicada “crying inside Ghada Samman a tooth,” the poet demonstrates a style Farewell Damascus In the short introduction to Grasshopppers’ that essentially “mock[s] and refuse[s] the Trans. Nancy Roberts Eyes, the book’s translators assert a “Bud- conventional beauties of lyric verse.” At Darf dhist influence underlying [Ko’s] vision the heart of this book there lies a probing of existence. [These are poems] located at ostranenie, Ko’s oeuvre releasing readers Zain al-Khayyal is a university student the intersection of being and non-being, from the confines of merely human logic. in Damascus who sets out to get an illusion and reality,” where that which is The inventions and epiphanies within illicit abortion behind her husband’s inchoate can be at least partly revealed. Grasshoppers’ Eyes are partly surreal, partly back, a journey that leads her to exile Addressing a passing cricket, Ko avows, mystical, and wholly a reimagining of the in a bordering country. Translated from “I want to see, want to touch your name,” possibilities of human apprehension. the Arabic, Samman’s words brim with while elsewhere gazing uncannily at the Dan Disney humor and pain as they explore issues “strange man in the mirror.” These poems Sogang University faced by women around the world. stake out places at once familiar and medi-

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MISCELLANEOUS

Dunya Mikhail The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq Trans. Max Weiss & Dunya Mikhail. New York. New Directions. 2018. 240 pages.

In 2014 Daesh militants launched an assault on Sinjar in northern Iraq, home to hundreds of thousands of Yazidis—a religious minority whose belief system is linked to ancient Mesopotamian religions and combines aspects of Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The Salaf- ist militant group known as Daesh, ISIS, or ISIL considers them “devil worshippers” and murdered over three thousand and kidnapped around six thousand more— mainly women and children—to be trained as Daesh soldiers or sold as sex slaves. The Beekeeper, by Iraqi poet and jour- nalist Dunya Mikhail, offers a window into the almost unthinkable experiences of those persecuted by Daesh either for religious belief or refusal to submit to their rule (see WLT, Jan. 2018, 48–52). The book is a collection of transcribed survivor testi- monies, interviews, and research into these crimes, which, combined, stand as a stark and vital work of testimony. The seamless fusion of statements with Mikhail’s almost haiku-like poems and phone conversations with the eponymous beekeeper, Abdullah, make this book a riveting work of narrative nonfiction. Characters disappear only to reemerge as the family member of another Testimonies are kept immediate by use suicide attempts are told matter-of-factly, missing woman, or patron of a survivor, of the first person, keeping our proximity but rather than turning away one feels and the reader learns in slowly increasing to their suffering almost too close to bear. compelled to bear witness, out of respect, horror the tragedies inflicted by Daesh. Accounts of rape, torture, murder, and or perhaps duty to the survivors. As the

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Umberto Eco Chronicles of a Liquid Society Trans. Richard Dixon. New York. Houghton Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno Mifflin Harcourt. 2017. 304 pages. There Are No Dead Here Nation Books When Umberto Eco died in early 2016, he had just finished putting together a collec- There Are No Dead Here follows the tion of essays entitled Pape Satán Aleppe: three Colombians—a human rights Cronache di una società liquida. The Eng- activist, a prosecutor, and a journal- lish translator, Richard Dixon, dropped ist—who worked to expose the politi- Dante’s phrase from the title, perhaps for cal corruption of collusion between fear that American readers would fail to the Colombian government and make the connection, and kept the subtitle. paramilitary forces. Maria McFarland Yet “Pape Satán Aleppe” is infamous for Sánchez-Moreno deftly guides the its elusive meaning, which ties in wonder- reader through the related events with fully with Eco’s theme in the book—one of a thorough and engaging hand. exploring, at least in part, just how difficult it is to discover any meaning, let alone an absolute meaning, in contemporary “vessel” of their stories, Mikhail seems to society. use her poems to process the assimilation Chronicles of a Liquid Society is Eco’s of these women’s experiences into her own final gift to his readers. Made up of pre- personal trauma as a survivor and refugee, viously published essays from his long- and the resulting combination conveys standing column in L’Espresso, titled “La something of Iraq’s decades of conflict and bustina di Minerva,” this collection takes tragedy. as its point of departure Zygmunt Bau- While Mikhail’s focus is on the escape man’s conceptualization of a liquid society, attempts of kidnapped Yazidis, and though specifically as outlined in his book Liquid Gábor Schein these accounts are harrowing, what is Modernity, published in 2000, followed by The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus most striking is the love, hope, and com- several more books on the subject. In his Trans. Adam Z. Levy & Ottilie Mulzet passion that permeate their stories. These opening essay, “The Liquid Society,” Eco Seagull Books qualities are most apparent in the utter- claims that the “crisis of grand narratives,” ly remarkable strength of the survivors perhaps first heralded by Jean-François In this two-volume collection, Hun- and the enormous kindness and support Lyotard in his work The Postmodern Con- garian writer Gábor Schein melds shown by the friends, families, and strang- dition, led to the ripple effect, or after- family drama and biblical teachings ers—like the beekeeper—who risked their shocks, that we are now experiencing in with Hungarian history by examining lives to help these women. The capacity society. Each age experiences a certain the significant moments of the Holo- of all people to defy oppressive doctrine degree of uncertainty, but contemporary caust, World War II, and Communist to save lives serves as a reminder of our society, with its collapse of ideologies, sig- rule. Schein’s fluid narrative style innate goodness, buried as it may be under nals an age where uncertainty may be the employs descriptive and probing lan- dogma or xenophobia. latest manifestation of a grand narrative to guage to capture the search for iden- Rosie Clarke emerge in the twenty-first century. Thus, tity in a convoluted society marred by New York Eco’s original title. This is not to say that the unhealed pain of the past.

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als. We should be thankful that Eco’s part- Even Primo Levi provides his own per- ing form is the essay and not an academic spective on the process. Lynne Sharon book or a novel. Certainly, Eco was highly Schwartz, who has translated into Eng- skilled at all three forms, but the essayist in lish such luminaries as Natalia Ginzburg, Eco is, I suspect, closest to showing us who bookends this collection with her factual he was as a reader, which is really where his introduction and her fictional story. After spirit resided in its truest form. the recent wave of essayistic books around Andrew Martino translation, from Kate Briggs’s This Little Southern New Hampshire University Art and Mireille Gansel’s Translation as Transhumance all the way to Karen Emm- erich’s Literary Translation and the Making Crossing Borders: Stories and of Originals, it comes as a surprise that only Essays about Translation five of the eighteen pieces gathered within this volume are essays. The other thir- Ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York. teen texts imaginatively give flesh to the Seven Stories. 2018. 320 pages. metaphorical “kind of alchemy” Schwartz describes in her introduction, privileging “We have just said that we have our own the imagery of mysticism and magic over words in English for the same things,” the less rarefied idea of quotidian labor. Lydia Davis intones within the carefully If translation has arisen out of a founda- calibrated paragraphs of her story “French tion of difference and incompatibility, then the English title is insufficient or robs the Lesson I: Le meurtre.” “It is in fact just the the translator’s work is to reconcile these book of its identity, but the Italian title pro- opposite—there is only one word for many contraries and create a new reality. In Lucy vides readers with a slightly different and things, and usually even that word, when Ferriss’s “The Difficulty of Translation,” complicated take on Eco’s overall theme. it is a noun, is too general.” When read- her protagonist can “be with someone who Chronicles of a Liquid Society presents ers mistrust translation, they often do so thought in another language, but not with Umberto Eco at his most playful and pierc- because of this lack of isometry between someone who thought in no language at ing. Exploring everything from the future languages, a disconnect that gives many of all.” In Michelle Herman’s “Auslander,” a of the European Union to Twitter, Eco the texts within Crossing Borders: Stories translator finds herself able to reunite a demonstrates once again just how smart and Essays about Translation their narra- couple at war. and thoughtful he can be. The essays col- tive impetus. Every attempt to translate As uneven as the anthology may be, a lected here present us with a mind as sharp well is compounded not only by endless deep-rooted belief in the possibility of set- as it was in youth but with the wisdom to asymmetries but also by distractions, by ting the world to rights still sustains these discern the subtleties of things from the quarrels, by mundane realities. “Nobody various pieces: these are stories of encoun- vantage point of age. This collection also understands translation isn’t an act of con- ters and relationships occasioned by the presents us with Eco the curmudgeon, the venience,” the subtitler narrating Susan need to bring together different spheres of one who deliberately bumps into people Daitch’s “Asylum” fumes. “Every company existence. No matter that the gaps revealed who are talking on cell phones while stand- wants their job toot-sweet.” in translation may sometimes—as in Lydia ing on a street. Largely absent is the young- Davis’s and Daitch’s contributions Davis’s story—cache outright murders, er, self-deprecating man who struggled to are joined by those of Joyce Carol Oates, translation turns out to be less alchemy and eat peas on an airplane. Michelle Herman, and other authors. more adhesive, taking languages or peoples Eco had more than just a general Translators themselves share their insights or individual texts that had been separate knowledge about the world and our place as well: Michael Scammell on Englishing and binding them together. in it; he was one of contemporary society’s Nabokov; Harry Mathews on the devilry Jeffrey Zuckerman most resonant and gifted public intellectu- of Oulipian constraints in a new language. New York

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Short Circuits: Aphorisms, Fragments, and Literary Anomalies Ed. James Lough & Alex Stein Schaffner Press

Following James Lough and Alex Stein’s Short Flights, an anthology of short-form writing, Short Circuits has expanded its scope beyond that of its predecessor to include such writing as flash fiction, mini-essays, and concrete poetry. The collection strives to give readers a series of “little enlighten- ments” in an effort to rewire the brain for the reader’s own well-being.

Maria José Silveira Her Mother’s Mother’s Mother and Her Daughters Trans. Eric M. B. Becker Open Letter

Translated from Portuguese, Her Mother’s Mother’s Mother and Her has historically bolstered claims to national Daughters traces back five hundred David Bowles and (white) racial greatness by drawing years of Brazilian history and the his- Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart on the heritage of the robust mythic and tory of a family through the women of of Sky: Myths of Mexico folkloric traditions of Ireland, Scandinavia, that family, starting with a Tupiniquim France, Germany, Russia, and others trans- warrior in 1500 and ending with a El Paso, Texas. Cinco Puntos Press. 2018. mitted orally and written down in epics woman in 2001. While critical of the 368 pages. and sagas, or penned by the fairy-tale col- aspects of culture that oppress women, lectors of the sixteenth through nineteenth Silveira’s powerful, vivid prose details We are always revisiting our myths. In centuries. Today, a vast field spanning the ways in which these women are Europe and America, attention to myth both popular and literary fiction attends to the bedrock of society.

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continued retellings, pastiches, and subver- gods and the order of things came to defying book translates, recovers, retells, sions of the Euro-American myths; most be, including a wealth of etiologies, from and pastiches histories and myths largely recently, Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman ultimate concerns with the purpose of lost in the wake of colonialism. Here is won acclaim for their retellings of Norse human and animal sacrifice or the sanctity the Mexican approximate of the Greeks’ mythology and the Grimm brothers’ fairy behind sacred sites; to natural and animal Theogony, Iliad, and Odyssey, the Malin- tales. Rarely, outside of Pantheon’s uneven phenomena, like animal morphologies and ke’s Sundiata, the Hindus’ Ramayana, the Fairy Tale and Folklore Library, have the habits; and the ordering of time, causes Babylonians’ Enûma Eliš—a singular work mythofolkloric traditions of Africa, Asia, of eclipses, or spots on the moon (these of art, yet in conversation with the many Australia, and the indigenous Americas caused by Feathered Serpent hurling a voices who, over centuries, shared the sto- been given similar treatment. rabbit at the moon). At the heart of the ries that Bowles sutures into one. He offers Enter David Bowles, Mexican Ameri- story of the gods is the conflict between new, engaging translations and retellings can novelist and translator of Nahuatl and Feathered Serpent, creator and protector of of scenes from what few sources remain, Mayan. Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of humankind, and his brother, Heart of Sky including Aztec codices, the Mayan Popol Sky is the most recent of Bowles’s several (Hurricane/Tezcatlipoca), a tortured, jeal- Vuh and Songs of Dzitbalché, and oral books that bring the folktales, myths, and ous deity who seeks to destroy the people and folkloric traditions from a range of poetry of Mesoamerican cultures to anglo- of Mexico in every age. Mexican cultures, producing a mythic phone and hispanophone readers. With The final four sections tell of the chronicle of Mexico that draws on Cora, Feathered Serpent, Bowles has given us a human world, the world after the “Reign Huichol, Maya, Mazatec, Mixtec, Nahua, rich, vast, and complexly woven tapestry of the Demigods” and the exploits of great and Otomi storytelling. of the heritage of stories that circulated heroes, like the trickster Lord Opossum, Feathered Serpent is a significant work in pre-Conquest Mexico. It is a compul- Maya twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque, toward the recovery of a pre-Columbian sively readable account of the history of Mixtec archer Yacoñooy, and Aztec warrior episteme of Mexico, arguing for an ethical the “sea-ringed world” of Mexico from the Huitzilopochtli. These sections narrate the relationship between humans and the cos- formation of the very first entity, the dual rise and fall of the Toltecs, the Maya, and mos, since it is humans’ good deeds (and god Ometeotl, out of the eternal life force the Aztecs, concluding in the final portion sacrifices) that keep Xiuhtecuhtli (time of the universe, down through the creation of the book with the coming of Hernan and fire god) and Nanahuatzin (the sun) of the many generations of gods and the Cortés, which Bowles recognizes as the in motion. The prose is artful, often play- four ages of human beings (all destroyed final triumph of Heart of Sky in his battle ful, leading the reader through worlds and by infighting among the gods), and to the against Feathered Serpent and Mexico’s times she will want to read more of. It is a present of the fifth age of humans molded people. Yet all is not lost; at the end of needed infusion of teotl, of vital life force, by Feathered Serpent, Divine Mother, and the time of myth emerge new peoples into the study and circulation of world the many gods from the ground bones of of “palimpsest souls”: Mexicans, Mexican mythologies today. Bowles’s Feathered Ser- the humans who came before. A masterful Americans, Chicanos. pent, Dark Heart of Sky will be crucial to storyteller, Bowles packs the richness of More than a compelling work of nar- Mesoamerican literary and cultural stud- the Mesoamerican cosmos into every sen- rative art, Feathered Serpent is a project ies as well as important to Mexican and tence, bringing to vivid life ancient charac- in restoring and forging a mythohistorical Mexican American rediscoveries of effaced ters who are by turns funny, heartbreaking, identity for contemporary Mexican and pasts, for many years to come. Scholars and lovable, grotesque, and venerable. Mexican American peoples from whom readers of mythology and folklore: add this The book divides its history of the these stories were taken by the ravages to the classics. universe into seven sections that narrate of Spanish conquest, which included the Sean Guynes-Vishniac the epochs of Mexico up to the conquest. burning of nearly all manuscripts record- Michigan State University The first three are cosmogony: how the ing Mexican mythologies. Bowles’s genre-

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Ana Simo Heartland Restless Books

Cuban-born novelist Ana Simo takes the reader on a surreal journey into a world of love, art, and betrayal. Simo’s wry and methodical writing provides a juxtaposition to the sus- penseful, dystopian plot driven by an unhinged passion.

Tom Sleigh The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees Graywolf Press John Porcellino stories with heart and intelligence that In this book of essays on the refugee From Lone Mountain paradoxically show us the wonders of our crisis, Tom Sleigh recounts his experi- Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2018. very large world. ences inside militarized war zones and 304 pages. When I was in training to be a com- refugee camps, demonstrating how mercial copywriter, again and again it was writing explores the complexities of “The world is very large,” John Porcellino drilled into my head that the more speci- human experiences during this time tells us early on in From Lone Mountain, ficity and detail you can include in your while honoring the political emotions. and we are convinced. Porcellino’s greatest copy, the more universal it becomes to He captures the nature of relationships gift as a cartoonist—and he has many—is those reading, watching, or listening to it. while meditating on youth, restless- his knack for telling very small, specific The truth of this is revealed in such small ness, and illness.

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lino’s distinctive hand lettering, and all are evocative, intimate, and moving, like hand- written letters from a faraway loved one. That’s really Porcellino’s work in a nut- shell. He offers up observations from the whimsical to the profound and every shade of emotion in between. I’ve been reading autobiographical comics for nearly forty years, and it’s the genre of comics that most appeals to me. From Harvey Pekar’s gritty, urban short stories to the magical realism of James Kochalka and the family dramas of Jason Marcy, autobio comics have given me a glimpse of the inner lives of many great cartoonists. But none are more gen- erous, thoughtful, and mind-expanding as the deceptively simple works of John Porcellino. In From Lone Mountain, John P. lives his life, makes his observations, and reports back to us with honesty, humor, and insight. To me that is literally the high- est achievement possible in comics. Alan David Doane Whitehall, New York

The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology moments in From Lone Mountain as John sorts of regional dialect variations, and Ed. Mark Andryczyk. Boston. Academic P. (as he is known to his legions of fans) Porcellino is well traveled enough to have Studies Press. 2017. 336 pages. discovering his dad saying the word “roof” stockpiled hundreds. in exactly the same apparently unusual From Lone Mountain is dense with This dense, exciting anthology brings way he does, and I found myself imagin- haiku-like short stories in the form of together fifteen Ukrainian poetry and ing the sound as I read his recounting of comics. It also features text pieces from prose writers with works from the late- the incident. It probably vaguely rhymes Porcellino’s King-Cat Comics series, from Soviet and, mostly, post-Soviet period of with “hoof,” not with “goof,” as most which the book was compiled. Some of the the last twenty-five years. These writers people I know would say it. I love those text pieces are typeset, others are in Porcel- were featured in live readings in the Con-

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Domenico Starnone Trick temporary Ukrainian Literature series in way . . . / I won’t follow at Your heels / I’ll Trans. Jhumpa Lahiri NYC and Washington, DC, between 2008 shut my eyes like falling leaves / I will not Europa Editions and 2016, sponsored by the Harriman see / when the tracks’ leaves fall / from the Institute of Columbia University and the time-worn branches of the paths.” Italian author Domenico Starnone Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson In contrast, Ivan Malkovych has been tells a poignant, witty tale of the International Center. hailed as a “phenomenon” of “new wave” reimagining of purpose and happi- Freed from imposed Soviet artistic poetics. It is from his poem “An Evening ness when an isolated old man in the strictures yet questioning also the inherited (Goose) Pastoral,” in keen translation by twilight of his life is reunited with his default narrative of Ukrainian national- Michael M. Naydan, that the title of this vol- energetic and disarming four-year-old ism—in both subject matter and style—this ume derives: “it’s as though the geese / are grandson. Starnone’s intimate, emo- period has been one of immense discovery, small bundles of the white chalk of days— / tional, and sharp writing unpacks a broad experimentation, and intense debate God’s big bottles walking to the white . . .” domestic drama that has the power to among contemporary Ukrainian writers. Taras Prokhasko is represented by both define and change a man’s life. The range is great, from rock stars to excerpts from his publication FM Gali- children’s authors, from old-guard intel- cia. It consists of three-minute diary-style ligentsia through the newest lights. There fragments based on the author’s experi- are Viktor Neborak’s Bu-Ba-Bu (burlesque- ence working at a newly created Ukrainian bluster-buffoonery) poems, popularized FM radio station—a startlingly free-form since the 1990s, Serhiy Zhadan’s funny, edgy, project that may not even be possible any- and strange poems, and one prose piece more in today’s Ukraine. (“Owner of the Best Gay Bar”), and the sen- The White Chalk of Days is notably sual, mature prose of Sofia Andrukhovych concentrated. A generous introduction by (see WLT, Sept. 2005, 24–32). series organizer and editor Mark Andryczyk Poet, story writer, and novelist Yuriy helps situate works in recent Ukrainian Susanna Tamaro Vynnychuk is an example of a writer who literary history, and fresh translations add The Tiger and the Acrobat has straddled generations. Unable to pub- to the high caliber of this book. Yet to Trans. Nicoleugenia Prezzavento lish his earlier works directly under the appreciate each chapter fully, one should & Vicki Satlow Soviet regime, he managed to get many really visit the webcast recaps of the Wilson Oneworld into print anyway by pretending they were Center online, to hear the expansive, great- “translations” from Old Irish, Old Welsh, ly informative introductions there. Even This English translation of Susanna or “Arcanumian”—a civilization he had so, far more than a record of the reading Tamaro’s Italian novel tells a coming- invented. The older generation is repre- series, this book stands as a notable con- of-age story from the perspective of a sented also by poet Hrytsko Chubai; active tribution to appreciating major currents young tiger wishing for independence. in the samizdat underground, many of his in Ukrainian literature of the last genera- Her prose is soft and welcoming poems became popular only posthumous- tion—an appreciation that, for most of us, while still indulging in the fantastical, ly, when set to music and performed by his is notably overdue. which illuminates and enlivens this son: “let the silvery bass carved out of the Andrew Singer testament to the beauty and power of moon / run before you / lighting the water’s Trafika Europe nature and innocence.

WORLDLIT.ORG 93 World Literature in Review

Chris Arthur Reading Life

Mobile, Alabama. Negative Capability Press. 2017. 202 pages.

Chris Arthur knows what an essay is: an attempt to reach a further, transcendent understanding through writing. Chris Arthur’s 2017 collection of essays, Reading Life, keeps an eye to the particular while exploring perennial questions—on the one hand, his daughter’s feet, the contents of a bookshelf, words themselves; and on the other, our human condition, the violence of his Northern Ireland homeland during the Troubles, and the vastness of time itself. In his essay “Priests (Reading fishing and desecration),” Arthur connects his early experiences growing up near Bel- fast during the rising and deadly sectar- ian/nationalist violence to the way that the essays)” offers both a justification for the word priest has evolved for him in the years form and some useful teaching in how to György Konrád since. Originally it was a word steeped in read the genre. mystery and suspicion, and while most of Though essay collections rarely out- Falevelek szélben (Ásatás I) that was stripped away by his experiences at shine crime novels, biographies, or histo- Budapest. Magvető. 2017. 500 pages. university, Arthur admits to some lingering ries on the best-seller lists, readers who apprehension. Turning over his experiences come across a collection such as Chris Although it is advertised as “the first part in language leads him to a “general truth.” Arthur’s Reading Life know its value. Such of György Konrád’s roman-fleuve” (regé- Arthur writes, “Words can continue to a reader will probably know of the essay’s nyfolyam), Falevelek szélben (Ásatás I) carry illicit cargoes long after we’ve ceased origin as I did, and so it was with bemused (Leaves in the Wind [Excavation I]) is to be complicit in their smuggling.” pleasure that I thumbed open Reading Life not really a novel. Its genre is hard to These essays often take a simple object for the first time to find, right under my define: a mixture of personal memories and invest it with significance, such as the fingers, a quote from Montaigne’s “On and mini-essays on a wide range of sub- way a mechanical mile-counter mounted Solitude.” These words from centuries ago, jects from philosophy and politics to the to a youth’s bicycle stands in for the click- and Arthur’s reflection on them, came to atmosphere of the author’s weekend house click-click of our own mortality. Arthur me just when most needed. at Hegymagas near Lake Balaton. This suspects the indirect, analogical nature of I expect this book would offer such should not surprise Konrád’s readers, for the essay collection is met with discom- moments to anyone. out of the thirty-odd titles to his credit, all fort by readers more familiar with fiction. Greg Brown mentioned on the sleeve, very few could be His closing essay “Afterword (Reading Mercyhurst University defined as “pure” fiction.

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Konrád’s subject matter (is this his auto- to some extent Budapest), the investiga- biography?) may be traditional, but the tion of Jewishness, and the deliberation Roma Tearne technique he uses is postmodern: it starts on emigration and on the fate of émigrés/ Brixton Beach with his birth in April 1933 and continues immigrants stand out as the most interest- Aardvark Bureau with reminiscences of his childhood in a ing. The latter take up several pages, and small town near the Romanian border, but even if we do not always agree with Kon- In the wake of a family tragedy, Alice by page 50 we have moved to 1995, and on rád’s conclusions, his views on the subject Fonseka and her parents leave their the next page the date of the miniessay on are worth considering. Though he himself home in Sri Lanka to live in England, the nature of writing is 2008. This adds to decided to stay in Hungary after the sup- where Alice finds that even as she the liveliness of the discourse but disrupts pression of the 1956 revolution by Soviet begins to find a place for herself and the continuity most of us would expect tanks, he understands those who left the her art, she is still dogged by her past. from an autobiography. Still, the careful country (they included his sister and two In Brixton Beach, Roma Tearne skill- reader will be able to pick up dates that of his favorite cousins, the Zádor brothers, fully navigates the political and social really matter in Konrád’s life and will find of whom the elder, hugely talented István, waters of a tumultuous history. that stories connected with those years are died tragically young), explaining how he among the best parts of the book: 1944/45, became an “internal” émigré for years, an 1956, 1969, and 1990 are all important officially tolerated but partly banned writer times for the writer’s survival and con- of fiction with long periods of traveling, tinuous rebirth, though I suppose he would enjoying authorized absence from Kádár’s also regard the year of his marriage to Judit Communist Hungary. He also analyzes the Lakner (1980) also significant. reactions of those who willy-nilly cooper- In 1944 Konrád and his older sister, ated with the regime by the simple fact of born in a Jewish family, had been marked not leaving—many years later they resent out for deportation to Auschwitz but man- the personal success of those who had fled aged to escape from the countryside to or emigrated: “If he/she was a success, that Emmanuelle de Villepin Budapest just in time. In October 1956 the is unforgiveable, but if he/she failed that is The Devil’s Reward writer of this review happened to recruit what he/she deserved.” The octogenarian Trans. C. Jon Delogu György (George) for the revolutionary Konrád surveying his own eventful life Other Press National Guard, which meant that the defines his stance as “familiar foreignness” author became the proud possessor of a (otthonos idegenség) “a dual relationship to The Devil’s Reward is a novel about tommy-gun for a couple of days. Though everything that he had received and inher- family relationships. It explores his first novel, The Case Worker, was pub- ited, what his destiny inflicted upon him.” eighty-six-year-old Christiane’s lished to great critical acclaim in 1969, it In other words, György Konrád, while strained relationship with her daugh- was only in 1990 with the collapse of the a part-village-dwelling local patriot, is at ter and granddaughter as they visit Communist regime in Hungary that he the same time thoroughly cosmopolitan, her in Paris, while weaving in stories became not only publishable once again a proud European from a small country in from Christiane’s childhood with but almost popular and widely appreciated central eastern Europe who finds national- her father, a veteran of both world in his native country. istic bragging or self-pitying lamentations wars. The story’s lighthearted and Falevelek szélben contains a number of truly embarrassing. approachable nature allows it to thoughtful mini-essays, among which the George Gömöri explore both the pain and joy of these praise of cities (Berlin, Amsterdam, and SSEES/UCL, London, UK connections in an honest way.

WORLDLIT.ORG 95 Outpost

tures classics of the genre, a large collection events including readings and signings that The Mysterious of Sherlock Holmes literature, and many sometimes happen multiple times per week. difficult-to-find books such as first edi- Joyce Carol Oates, John Hart, and Charles Bookshop tions, rare hardcovers, and signed copies. Salzberg are among the writers who have The exterior features light gray paneling recently presented. In addition, the shop by Tyler McElroy and red brick columns with large windows works with well-known writers to publish that allow natural light to filter in, giving and distribute short mystery novels directly bustling center of business and passing pedestrians an enticing view. Once from the store. Known as Bibliomysteries, culture, New York City is host inside, the floor-to-ceiling polished wood these novellas feature plots involving books to one of the most vibrant liter- bookshelves work together with soft indie and those who collect them (see WLT, Sept. aryA scenes in America. Manhattan and its and folk music to create a peaceful, library- 2008, 9–11). surrounding boroughs are often featured like atmosphere. The carpet is a dark shade The Mysterious Bookshop offers a won- in classic novels, and Brooklyn is known of green, and a poster on the wall is remi- derful opportunity to spend an afternoon worldwide as a place for thriving young niscent of a 1940s pulp murder mystery. To browsing new and old thrillers alike, seated artists to gather. It can be easy, however, for reach the books occupying the tallest ledges comfortably on the maroon couch near the avid readers and writers in the city to miss of the shelves, it is necessary to grab one of vintage paperback collection. Whether you some of its more avant-garde spaces amid the sliding rail-mounted ladders and climb. love mysteries or prefer a different genre, the many sprawling bookstores and com- Near the back of the store, several rows this shop is worth the time for any reader fortable coffee shops. Located on a quaint of hardcover novels are arranged in glass who appreciates the tranquil atmosphere side street in Tribeca, lower Manhattan, the display cases by the reading area. Taped and remarkable personality that can only Mysterious Bookshop is one such space. to a small door on the right side is a large be found in small, independent bookstores. Opening its doors in 1979, the Myste- section of yellow police tape and a sign that rious Bookshop is the oldest and largest reads, “Nobody shoplifts from a store that Tyler McElroy is a WLT intern majoring in mystery-focused bookstore in the country. knows 3,214 ways to murder someone.” English writing at the University of Oklahoma. It stocks choices from among the newest This charming little bookstore is, how- He enjoys reading, writing, and traveling in his selections of current authors, including a ever, more than just a place to find a good spare time. He intends to become an author

large collection of imported mysteries by mystery. It often hosts authors who are and plans to see as much of the world as TYLER MCELROY PHOTOS: British writers. In addition, the shop fea- traveling to promote their new books, with possible after graduating.

96 WLT MAY – JUNE 2018

Mestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity By Robert Con Davis-Undiano International $29.95 HARDCOVER · 336 PAGES Latino Book Awards, Best Latino Focused “Robert Con Davis-Undiano’s brilliant analysis and presentation of casta paintings and what they Nonfiction Book mean to the development of New World racism are of immense importance. Mestizos Come Home! is a clarion call, reminding us of the intransigent racism mestizos have suffered over the centuries. With great understanding Davis-Undiano calls on mestizos to take pride in their mestizaje.”—Rudolfo Anaya

The Mexican Flyboy “Anyone who enjoys By Alfredo Véa magical realism $19.95 PAPERBACK · 384 PAGES would be committing a crime by skipping What if we could travel back in time to save our heroes from painful deaths? What if we could rewrite this remarkable history to protect and reward the innocent victims piece of work.” of injustice? In Alfredo Véa’s daring new novel, one Foreword Reviews man does just that, taking readers on a series of remarkable journeys.

THE SORROWS OF FORKED JUNIPER YOUNG ALFONSO Critical Perspectives By Rudolfo Anaya on Rudolfo Anaya $24.95 HARDCOVER · 224 PAGES By Roberto Cantú $26.95 PAPERBACK · 328 PAGES The story of Alfonso, a Nuevo Mexicano, begins with his birth, Widely acclaimed as the founder when the curandera Agapita of Chicano literature, Rudolfo delivers these haunting words into Anaya is one of America’s most his infant ear. What then unfolds compelling and prolific authors. is an elegiac song to the llanos of The Forked Juniper illuminates both New Mexico where Alfonso comes the artistry of Anaya’s writings and of age. As this exquisite novel the culture, history, and diverse charts Alfonso’s life journey from religious traditions of his beloved childhood through his education Nuevo Mexico. It is an essential and evolution as a writer, reference for any reader seeking renowned Chicano author Rudolfo greater understanding of Anaya’s Anaya invites readers to reflect world-embracing work. on the truths and mysteries of the human condition.

THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY INSTITUTION. WWW.OU.EDU/EOO

World Literature Today Jan 18 IFC ad.indd 1 2018-1-29 2:28 PM WINDHAM CAMPBELL PRIZES

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University congratulates the recipients of the 2018 Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes

DRAMA Lucas Hnath Suzan-Lori Parks

FICTION John Keene Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

NONFICTION Sarah Bakewell Olivia Laing

POETRY Cathy Park Hong Lorna Goodison

Recipients are awarded $165,000 to support their writing. Prizes will be conferred at a ceremony and literary festival at Yale University on September 12, 2018.

WINDHAMCAMPBELL.ORG