seedings issue five | spring 2018 Jorgenrique Adoum – ʿā’ishAh Al-BāʿūnīyAh – rAchel TzviA BAck – dAn Bellm luis enrique BelmonTe – dAniel BorzuTzky – nAncy nAomi cArlson – krisTin dyksTrA george economou – sArAh Tuss efrik – PAul ÉluArd – luis feliPe fABre – JoshuA freemAn michelle gil-monTero – luPe gómez – JohAnnes görAnsson – hAgiwArA sAkuTAro TAhir hAmuT – kATherine hedeen – Th. emil homerin – Alexis iPArrAguirre – AdriAnA x JAcoBs cArlos lArA – JonAThAn lArson – michAel liPkin – AdiTi mAchAdo – friederike mAyröcker mArk mcmorris – Andrei moloTiu – JAmes monTgomery – erín moure – sAwAko nAkAyAsu nAThAnAël – mAríA negroni – vAAn nguyen – JosePh noBle – vícTor rodríguez núñez John olson – guillermo PArrA – omAr PÉrez – virgilio PiñerA – Tóroddur Poulsen Andrew schelling – ryoko sekiguchi – ʿAnTArAh iBn shAddād – richArd sieBurTh BriAn sTrAng – sho sugiTA – hArrieT TArlo – emily Toder – khAl TorABully – lindsAy Turner mATT Turner – rAndi wArd – mArk weiss – PeTer weiss – Jeffrey yAng seedings issue Five / spring 2019 edited by: jerrold shiroma Cover: “WhorldvieW” by randi Ward WWW.durationpress.Com Contributors Mark MCMorris on Labyrinths (2) CaMp transported (1) transported (2) invisibiLity inCoMpLeteness 9 14 15 16 17 19 nathanaëL the soLitary deaths oF MizoguChi kenji 21 peter Weiss (tr. MiChaeL Lipkin) FroM the aesthetiCs oF resistanCe voLuMe iii 25 ʿā’ishah aL-bāʿūnīyah (tr. th. eMiL hoMerin) FroM eManation oF graCe and the gathering union 38 oMar pérez (tr. kristin dykstra) FroM CubanoLogy 41 raCheL tzvia baCk What use is poetry, the poet is asking 51 pauL éLuard (tr. CarLos Lara) What has beCoMe in a neW night every right neCessity reCitation For a MoMent oF CLarity 62 63 64 65 66 68 brian strang the inFinite inFant 70 tahir haMut (tr. joshua L. FreeMan) the stone Mirror WaLL saWutjan the iCe CreaM Man prayer 84 85 86 88 CarLos Lara CeruLean rodeo transLating éLuard on kāʻanapaLi beaCh iMaginary euLogy 90 94 95 Friederike MayröCker (tr. jonathan Larson) FroM FLeurs 97 saWako nakayasu girL F Waits on the street Corner oF LiMber intentions horns, deLivery oF 108 109 george eConoMou rough trade--anaCreon 111 harriet tarLo FroM Cut FLoWers 116 jorgenrique adouM (tr. by katherine M. hedeen and víCtor rodríguez núñez) eCuador hiroshiMa Mon aMour task and vaCations the Majarajah and the saLaManders CoinCiobedienCe pastoLogy hoteL saint-jaCques 123 126 131 132 135 136 137 aditi MaChado Wear siMpLe CLothes 140 randi Ward photos FroM hestur 150 vaan nguyen (tr. adriana X jaCobs) Chaos For innoCenCe in the pyrenees 161 162 163 hagiWara sakutaro (tr. sho sugita) on transLating poetry 165 joseph nobLe FroM Mirror song / Winding graCe 174 aLeXis iparraguirre (tr. eMiLy toder) not a FabLe 178 jeFFrey yang 琮 Cave MarFa book CoMpany untitLed 193 194 195 196 khaL torabuLLy (tr. nanCy naoMi CarLson) [When the sea vanished at Last] [our Cargo hoLd is a territory] [the sea WiLts] [to the naCre darker than My FLesh] [i have seen the sea] [ahoy FroM the bLue boat] [burning aLbuquerque in goa] [beFore, to teLL about Leaves] 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 sarah tuss eFrik & johannes göransson FroM a neW quarantine WiLL devour My body virgiLio piñera (tr. dan beLLM) eLegy Like so 224 ryoko sekiguChi (tr. Lindsay turner) FroM adagio Ma non troppo 227 andreW sCheLLing FroM tenth song oF the MeadoWLark 235 Luis enrique beLMonte (tr. guiLLerMo parra) FinaL aCt book Fair bonFire as tiMe goes by this bonFire WiLL be ours even More 242 243 245 246 247 Luis FeLipe Fabre (tr. dan beLLM) stiLLed LiFe 249 andrei MoLotiu Four poeMs FroM the 90s 251 ʿantarah ibn shaddād (tr. jaMes e. MontgoMery With riChard sieburth) did poetry die? 257 Lupe góMez (tr. erín Moure) FroM the WiLd springs oF paradise 270 María negroni (tr. MiCheLLe giL-Montero) FroM berLin interLude 274 danieL borzutzky Lake MiChigan, sCene 13 280 tóroddur pouLsen (tr. randi Ward) suFFering bLazes 285 286 Mark Weiss a suite oF danCes Xi: hand gaMes 288 notes & revieWs 303 mark mCmorris on labyrinths (2) Camp transported (1) transported (2) invisibility inCompleteness on labyrinths (2) The labyrinth is a precise cryptogram of detours disappointed guesses defeated insights misreadings luckless voyages of discovery mirror symmetry Archetype of many things unconscious desire reason scholasticism chance metaphor of many places racial homelands impossible to escape 9 bantustans favelas migrant cities (unsolved conundrums) ghettos in Kingston cemeteries Though the archway admit the hero to navigate sheer walls to follow knowledge farther than prudent and to meet echoes of himself on thresholds armed with answers possibly valid the labyrinth is not your ally 10 The labyrinth is a igure that captures a igure of the archives faith and illusion inexhaustible corridors for study many temptations many fables with many doorways many paths to the light many deceits many rites of passage many ordeals the Minotaur lives there savage, cannibal, brute, barbarian the hero’s task to dissolve the hybrid 11 Lamentation women of the camps women of the ark in reverse sailing women of the provision grounds Doors like sentinels that open and close too soon or too late Although the moon laminate the walls of enamel blue mosaics tiled mural with bathers on the walls covered in the ash at Pompeii the labyrinth is not your ally 12 Although the diagram reveal the proligacy of mathematical idea display the elegance of ratio and number like the metrical form of complex stanzas or palace of synesthesia the labyrinth is not your ally The labyrinth is many things it outlasts the meaning anyone can think of to give to the building 13 Camp The camp is an enclosure Ringed with posts and barbed wire. Three generations have seen Untold circuits of the sun. There is only barbed wire ahead. 14 transported (1) The wooden walls of the hold Shelter things of darkness Torsos arranged in stacks Like books on shelves Unreadable pages pressed Together containing what Inscrutable writing. The faces more than empty History or tragedy or— The genre of the passage Erased from all catalogues. Shoulder to shoulder Costly replicas in the dark Forms are stirring. 15 transported (2) The slave ship is a labyrinth. The door lies in the past. The structure has no limit. The end of the voyage brings Another enclosure. The sun falls on living things In green pasture and level ield. Not all things are living. The sun falls on them that perish Behind the barracks. Tongues grow like weeds In hard dirt by the pens. Rain washes them away. (The future is more of the same.) Over the planted ields The silence is unbearable. 16 invisibility Most walls are invisible the wall on the inside that practices disguise the walls of amnesia behind which your past the past of your nation shelters and works. On a wall the picture of children reading a book on the grass. Cottages in a valley. The natives of the picture built on the slopes below lame-red poinciana branches. A donkey pulls a cart with cut grass and yams. 17 The deceit of painting spreads bright sunlight. Behind the invisible wall the scene turns grim: day after day of toil here wi dig, here wi hoe you know what I mean. 18 inCompleteness The labyrinth is not a womb. A chamber like a prison The walls cover many acres. No one has seen the last wall. How would you draw its map? The labyrinth is cunning. Built by reason, it imitates The disputes of reason In the jousts of Abelard. It copies itself endlessly. Every passage is a detour. The labyrinth will always Be undiscovered: Terra Incognita, like the future. Godel’s theorem explains: The system does not hold The complete diagram of itself. 19 nathanaël the solitary deaths of mizoguChi kenji Make away. If I stop at a single sentence as at an image, emptying the page of its signs having suddenly become superluous, or else propelling themselves like a current, displacing the exact frame of a philosophical convention, what is given, to me as to anyone, and in any case, abducts and assigns me, in the manner of a dream, sometimes terriically, and having arisen in a ilm, where, in the position of the only spectator, which is to say multiply, I become the mute witness, not by choice and therefore incidentally, and as a result by accident, and from reel to reel, of the solitary deaths of Mizoguchi Kenji, such as they arise in the thinking of Gilles Deleuze, suspended between the eddies of otherwise rhetoric, the seizure of movement, its temporality, whereas it falls under the purview of no language, ultimately, the desire to say so, nor the name of the ilmmaker, it is the words themselves detached from the density of a cine-philosophy,1 as of an unveriiable truth, in other words driven by what it is given to see, without in fact wanting to, and in the margins of its own limits. The “solitary deaths” of Mizoguchi are females, all, and without a doubt, it is not enough to enumerate them, nor to catalogue the ilms fallen from the history of cinema, including the castaways, bodiless and named, to each its grave, the late cinema, from ilm to ire, starting at the insolite, and already much discussed, post-war image of an impotent goddess of christianity, abandoned to her shame, and looking down from her stone tower in the stomach of the ruined church, and by the dulled brilliance of its devitriied stain, onto the square where the night women are warring, a posteriori, under a voiceless icon and so with nothing more than a syphillitic promise that rejects the occidental prayer implanted in Ōsaka, a presumptuous compassion, but human matter reduced to its voluminous dust.2 If, as the ilmmaker airms in his work notes, “emotion is needed, not a commentary,”3 one must question the aptness of verbiage intent on circumscribing the mechanism calling for light, into the netting of language, the senses in question, the sequence shot of scarcely a thought because reduced to the silence by which it unravels. This silence, made plural, bears name of city and body of sector, from Kyōto to Ōsaka, and from Gion to Shinsekai, exfoliating the eras as the ages, from Heian 1 Gilles Deleuze. L’image-mouvement. Minuit. Paris, 1983 (265). All translations from the French in this text are by Nathanaël. 2 Yoru no onna tachi—in English as Women of the Night, 1948. 3 Yoda Yoshikata, Souvenirs de Kenji Mizoguchi, tr. Koichi Yamada, et al. Cahiers du Cinéma. Paris, 1997 (107). 21 to Showa, and lingering over Meiji. The “solitary deaths”4 of Mizoguchi Kenji are females, all, and each dies in the eye of the cinema, under the invisible hands of convention, and in the lames of loves betrayed by their armatures, in other words the sensible stare of the ilmmaker, turned over under a fragile lid, the mists of the fogged ilm strip. The concentric circles descend, infernal, from lowliness to lowliness, efacing themselves as assiduously as they are produced, the body as much as the face, abandoned to the grating city or the deported song of a mother or a lover. As much as these names are posthumously conceded to the screen scansing their solitude, the individual subjects of the cinematic narratives prove themselves to be isolated inside the swell of history, an inexorable detainment as given aliction. Because death, without fail, is a sort of murder, decanted in time, with as its foil the devastated permanence (that of war and prostitution, conjugal or illicit). The inal gaze carried over the reeds onto the end of Oyūsama,5 committed against her own person, bespeaks the absolute limit of a subjectivity that reveals itself to be absence of a possible limit, and renunciation of succession, of all intimate bonds with the world such as it is refused her. World without I to which the ilmmaker bequeaths himself in aparté at the approach of the philosopher, giving resonance to the lines of Sōseki Natsume when, at the death of a friend, he writes : Those chrysanthemums That you ind, cast them all down In the coin deep6 In Mizoguchi there is no coin, but a hollow world, doubled over on the riverbanks, at the edge of a shallow island, or an uncrossable road, and even when its reach extends beyond a funerary mound, the gaze past an avowable lie, the body, weighted, loses face and the 4 The published English-language translation of L’image-mouvement renders “mort solitaire” as “lonely death” (196). Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I, The Movement-Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. The Athlone Press. London, 1986 [1983]. 5 Oyū-sama—in English as Miss Oyu, 1951. 6 Sōseki Natsume. Inside my glass doors, tr. Sammy L. Tsunematsu. Tuttle. North Clarendon (VT), 2002. These lines are dedicated to keishū writer Ōtsuka Kusuo (1875-1910). An essayist, poet and iction writer, she was the author of Sora daki (Incense burner). 22 present can only resorb itself in time. Notably when the last shot joins the irst, to the point of irrecognizability, for not being the same.7 The horizon is an ache, and its dizziness evinces a vertical incompletion, free fall of a statuied vision,8 a pall made ever more appalling for its obstinacy.9 * During an interview granted after the death of the ilmmaker by screenwriter Yoda Yoshikata, the latter interprets a calligraphy written in Mizoguchi’s hand : “You see, this tense (calligraphy) is comprised of four characters, the irst of which is simply the drawing of an eye. The four together signify ‘With each new look, one must wash one’s eyes.’ …”10 Mizoguchi’s mortuary mask was donated to Henri Langlois, and is today among the archives of the Cinémathèque française at Bercy. The mask, congealed skin, not only of the face of the ilmmaker, but eigy of his own “solitary death,” consolidates the concatenation of demises dissolved in his ilms, into the mute absorption of Anju,11 silenced to save her brother Zushio, sinking in the exact place where the extinguished voice of the philosopher waits. In what does the gaze assume the form of what it sees itself beseeching. If all of these deaths, said to be solitary, captured only to be evacuated, cast themselves each individually onto a female body without an actual world, one must believe, with Mizoguchi, placed under the eye of Deleuze, in their declension for all time, in the feminine. Whereas the impossibility of seeing and the reversal of the knowledge upon which this thinking rests. The “solitary deaths” of Mizoguchi Kenji under the ensign Gilles Deleuze are nothing other than the self-less appeal to the transgendered world having led the body thus designated. --Chicago, 2017 7 Ugetsu monogatarai—in English as Ugetsu, 1953. 8 Yōkihi—in English as Princess Yang Kwang-Fei, 1955. 9 Tōkyō kōshinkyoku—in English as Tokyo March, 1929. 10 Mizoguchi, Cahiers du cinéma, hors série, September, 1964. 11 Sanshō Dayū—Sansho the Bailif, 1954. 23 peter Weiss from the aesthetiCs of resistanCe volume iii translated by miChael lipkin She knelt in the snow, but she was not cold. Maybe it was soft, white sand. The hands grasped deeper and deeper, the light was blinding, even though the sky was overcast. Their arms were already sinking in up to their elbows, were lifting themselves, and lakes were falling from their hands. It was a constant up and down, a regular motion. Others knelt before her, she saw their backs, wrapped in gray, ragged cloth, she saw their naked feet, saw soles and toes stick themselves halfway into the white of the snow, and the hands went deeper and deeper. It must have been a beach they were kneeling on, facing away from the sea, whose edge was close, though there was no lapping of waves. Complete silence reigned. They were like children digging a moat, there were also children among the women kneeling before her. In the warmth some of them had removed articles of clothing, the skin on their shoulders and hips glistened when they bent their bodies and stretched them, and so it went on, no one stopped. My mother’s face was empty and dull, her mouth was half-open, her eyes stared forward and didn’t recognize me. My father sat next to her in silence, her hands in his. Outside, behind the window, the pruned trees in the schoolyard were turning green. My mother knew that this digging couldn’t go on forever, but she held herself back from what was coming, the glimmer around the faces stirred from the summer day’s warmth, the heat of the bodies, this could not be winter. Nonetheless she felt something behind her made of leather, something metallic, it was there and it was watching, the more strongly she felt it, the more impossible it became to turn around. She knew, however, that it had heads and claws, and that it didn’t even need to touch her a single time to completely annihilate her. A tiny movement, a breath would have been enough to make all of them straighten up, for her too, there was nothing left but to release herself from the digging, which was almost soothing. So she knelt, she saw how their backs straightened themselves up, how the children’s feet, their toes bored into the sand, and no one looked around. My father got up and walked to the window. He waved me over and pointed diagonally past the school to the freshly painted, light-gray façade of the factory on the street across from ours. This line, from the room of the apartment to the factory where he had found work, supported his existence, and it was as though a year of the darkest wandering did not lie between my parents’ departure from Varnsdorf and their arrival in the small industrial city in the west of Sweden. On the way from the train station he had told me how, after the occupation of Bohemia, he had been assured the job at the textile printers, which was to be built in Sweden by the owners of the Varnsdorf factory. We were walking along the deserted platform, under the low, blue-gray clouds that were lit up only in the west, where the rays of sun had penetrated the gaps in the clouds. I had wanted to spend the weekend with my father and my mother as soon as I received my father’s message. That he picked me up alone did not yet unsettle me, though in the sharp light of the late afternoon I could read signs of 25 agitation on his face. The station manager with the red signal sign had returned to his oice in the train station, which was crowned with a little tower, crates were being loaded slowly and sleepily out of the freight car perpendicular to the ramp, the train rolled past us, it had become smaller on the ramrod-straight tracks and disappeared from view between the rolling woods and a shimmering lake. Young people stood in groups in front of the train station, leaning on bicycles, the levers of the bells on the handlebars were in constant motion. Music sounded from the open windows of the veranda of the city hotel, and the sun illuminated a strip of chestnut trees along the edge of the path, caused the multitude of still-yellow leaf buds to sprout forth, like sticky insect wings just emerged from the cocoon, and at the same time cast black shadows into the depths of the foliage, where the pinpoints of light were becoming more and more sparse. Behind the street, a igure poured in bronze rose up in the middle of the marketplace, and to the right a row of sheds joined a wooden manor, whose overhanging upper story rested on white columns. On the way down to the park around the waterway, which, coming down from the brewery beneath the railroad embankment, expanded before us into a pond where strangely artiicial-looking swans swam between clumps of foam, my father spoke of dismantling and packing up machines and printing equipment in Varnsdorf, preparing drawings for the rebuilding of the dye works and the workshops where inishing was made. At that time, he said, as we found ourselves on one of the stone bridges that arched over the oily, shimmering water, a remnant of the Czechoslovakian state still existed, whose citizen he could have remained, in the disused factory, surveilled by the German state. There was still foreign capital invested in its velvet printers, there on the high-walled riverbed of the Mandua, which became torrential in the spring, and since the occupying forces were interested in foreign currency, the owners, who had emigrated to England, had been able to buy back the repossessed inventory, and received authorization to take it out of the country. In February of thirty-nine, my father had arranged the shipping and seen to the travel arrangement of the engineers and managers, but my father, whose specialization should have proved useful to the resumption of the enterprise, was surprised by the arrival of the German troops on the ifteenth of March, when he was staying with my mother in Prague to pick up his papers at the union oice and at the Swedish consulate. We walked on the long plangata, at whose end lay, as my father indicated with an extended arm, the factory that he called his, like the factory in Varnsdorf, we went by a house decorated with artful carpentry, Beth’s boarding school, where my parents had rented a room, they were then asked to leave when my mother became sick, and we reached the long wooden house in which my parents now lived. As he asked me about my work, explained his tasks at the printers, the wage rates in Sweden, discussed the situation of the unions, he wanted to airm a practical kind of commonality 26 between us before he spoke about my mother’s dazed state, and explained to me that the afterefects of the experience still held her prisoner. As we passed through the doorway to the apartment facing the courtyard, I saw that tears were running down his broad, worn face. If the peace, the perception of safety could just last long enough, he said, as we stood beside one another at the window, then she would overcome her apathy, see us once again, and once again be able to speak with us. More than two and a half years had passed since we had last seen each other. We sat down at the table next to my mother, who remained motionless in her armchair, and I told her about Stockholm, Spain, Paris, and if these were only tenuous hints of an abundance of experiences, and the silence of my mother nearly paralyzed my voice, my father nonetheless asked me to keep speaking, and I learned to direct my words, as my father did, to my mother, as though she could understand what we were saying. Her left hand lay in her lap, as though broken of, with the palm turned up, her right hand was raised into a gesture by her arm, which supported itself, like she wanted to stop something that was approaching. It struck me that the room’s carpet was the same green as the paint on the walls of our kitchen on Plugstrasse in Wedding. At the mention of the kitchen in Berlin, the attic apartment on Grünenstrasse in Bremen, the basement parlor in Bohemian Varnsdorf, there emerged a sensation of nearness, which took away the severity of that which had not yet been said. That for a long time we did not know anything of one another, and had no way of letting each other know that we were still alive, belonged to the condition that we shared with many others. If I could see distress in my father as we hugged on the platform, he nonetheless showed himself to be composed and conident in the presence of the sick woman. Never had I seen my parents so devoted to one another as I did this Sunday evening in May, nineteen hundred and forty, just as the news came of the German ofensive against Belgium, Holland, and France. My father spoke slowly, as though he wanted to make certain that every word imprinted itself on my mother. The measured, friendly way in which he spoke allowed the events to appear as though they were something everyday. My parents’ departure belonged to the great wandering, the gazes directed over and across the oceans, towards other continents, harbors like Marseilles, Genoa, Rotterdam, Lisbon, Odessa were oracular places, places of magic hope, consulates and embassies became temples, their thresholds damp with kisses and tears. It was the natural thing, the normal thing, this begging for certiications of approval, endorsements, for a place in the quotas, a visa signiied absolution, and this came only to those who possessed the money to buy mercy. The masses of those who had no more to ofer than their despair swelled, and despair was the most worthless of all superluous things, and soon there were to be found among the dispossessed those who were well-to-do yesterday, there was only the tumble into aimless wandering, with no rest and no way out. It was noted ohandedly, already 27 blotted out of his description of the last hours in Prague, how, after the destruction of the republic, in the midst of the confusion that ensued from the clearing of the union oices, my father had learned of my presence in Sweden. One of my letters, sent by the trade association from Stockholm to Prague, remained lying between the iles, had luttered up in the wind from the train when my father was given a card with a recommendation to the Swedish organization. At the party headquarters, my father still consulted with Taub, with the leader of the German Social Democrats in Czechoslovakia. This man, who intended to go in a sealed wagon with the other members of the leadership to Warsaw, in order to ly from there to Sweden, assured him that he would see to the journey of my parents right away. We, too, were supposed to try to reach Warsaw, said my father, and to get ourselves to the Swedish embassy, where Taub was to leave behind instructions. And yet, how were we, we who belong to the masses of those without inluence, to make it through Poland and bring our cause to the Swedish ambassador, he said, and brought the cofee cup up to my mother’s mouth. She saw the backs before her, naked or covered with tatters, wide, round backs and small, slender ones, she saw how they were shaken by an invisible force and were slumped forwards, at which point an indistinct beam shot out of their lesh, and how their hands had dug in so deep that they disappeared into the ditch. My father held the back of her head, passed her a piece of biscuit with care, and wiped of her chin. At the end of March nineteen hundred and thirty-nine, my parents successfully reached the so-called Tripoint, where Silesia, the Czech zone and Poland bordered one another. They had no baggage with them, only the advance that my father had sewn into the lining of his jacket. Amid the random movement in which they were caught up, another force, an overpowering one, made itself felt, a force that shook their nerves and tendons, that drove them forward and bore them along with it, a force that, exactly calculated, ran according to certain schedules, and while those in light still clung irmly to the thought that borders could be crossed, countries traversed, goals reached, the paths and the highways were already leading them towards a machinery that would divide them up, separate them from one another, designate them for slower or quicker extermination. While they still gave themselves and the surroundings through which they moved names, they had already become numbers, and the regions were renamed, the divided-up corpse of Czechoslovakia had yielded a Bohemian and a Moravian protectorate, as well as a supposedly autonomous Slovakia, the Sudetenland had become part of the body of the Reich, Poland and Hungary had snatched up its crumbs, border stations were moved, it was unclear to whom the land on which they tread belonged, even those who had felt before that they belonged to their nation as a race, even as the irst signs of persecution became visible, those who still believed that they were in good standing, were now forced to recognize themselves as outcast and condemned. These people, who 28 still dragged recollections of their own lives along with them, now began to stumble blindly, in the eyes of hidden observers they were nothing more than a herd, to be butchered in the cheapest manner possible. Against this tide, which advanced towards the East, creeping, shuling through the blooming landscapes, and whose waves were the dust kicked up by their graying shoes, loods rolled into the homeland of the Reich with waves of leaf-laureled, lag-decked trucks, here surging cries of “Heil!”, of victory frenzy, there a pause in the stream of wanderers, an evasion before the crushing onrush, exhausted, misshapen accumulations, then more panicked advances, from which they were to run until they had tired themselves out, so that later, when the appointed time came, they would let themselves be caught more easily, or push themselves into the traps of their own accord. However, before they had put the border behind them, my parents were arrested and taken to a prison from Ostrava, together with Jewish dealers and craftsmen. They could have counted themselves among the members of the German nation, but my mother wanted to remain among those who had been driven out. In the dusklight of the evening, which left the corners of the room in darkness, I now saw that my mother’s lips were moving, and for several seconds it was as though her eyes lingered on us searchingly. The sound of my father’s voice made me think of the evening hours we had once spent at the kitchen table, once again I felt the feeling of consolation that there had been on Plugstrasse, high over the railyard of the station in Stettin, or in the basement room of the villa on Niedergrunder Strasse in Varnsdorf. My father was speaking of a cramped cell. My mother’s ingers were moving. They stroked the grooves, the graininess of a stone wall. A moldy smell rose from the loamy soil, covered with wood shavings. More than a hundred people were in the cell, packed together. Use of the two cots was divided by the hour. The children, the women nursing infants, the sickly lay there. The bucket in which people relieved themselves ran over. Several elderly people died, were pulled to the doorway through the feet of those who were standing. The bodies clung to each other, asleep and awake. My mother felt the thick warmth, she belonged to these sweating bodies, she grasped one of the hot hands, clasped its ingers, and as the hands released one another, she pushed her face into a damp cheek. Arms, breasts, hips, shaggy beards, a jumble of limbs, beating hearts, wheezing breaths, and the fact that she was in the midst of them gave her strength. For her, the foul perspiration was like a blossoming, she drew the smell deeply into her, she lived in this organism, she would never want out of this closeness, a separation would have ruined her, been her downfall. One week, I heard my father say, went by in this dungeon. My mother would have stayed, had my father not pulled her over to the crowd of those who could prove themselves to be of German origin, when they were driven out into the yard and made to stand in rows in order to be transported to a camp. My father spoke forcefully, he emphasized the words 29 from the enemy’s vocabulary with particular care. In the green room over the school yard, in which a pair of children were playing soccer, my father put his hands in the pocket of his pants, took it out again, and opened it. There lay the Iron Cross second class that he had been awarded in Galacia in 1917. He had brought along this cross, along with its certiicate and the conirmation of his war injuries, as his only possession. And so he had become the young guards’ comrade. Why had he waited so long to say something, they asked him. My parents were led to the commissariat, they were issued a convoy notice, and they obtained tickets to Trenčín, to their jurisdiction in Slovakia, they were also given provisions. So, instead of going toward Warsaw, they went south, where they found shelter for the summer as ield workers. They had to save the sum of money necessary for a new attempt at reaching Warsaw. In the middle of August, said my father, as dull blows against the ball could be heard from the schoolyard, a guide led us by night through the mountains into Poland. They crawled carefully, anxious not to start the little stones along the slope moving, a few times, however, the stones slipped of into the debris, and an avalanche rumbled into the valley, they lay there, holding their breath, until it became silent once again. They wandered for another two weeks, often with groups of Czech and Slovakian Jews, in the direction of Oświęcim, the place where all the railroads knotted together, where they would wait for a train to Warsaw. Finally Bielsko Bialo lay nearby, which my father knew as Bielitz from his time in the Austro-Hungarian army. In the early morning, on a path in the ield, they heard the noise from an airplane. Something dark fell out of the machine. Someone just fell out of there, my mother said. It was a pointed chunk that made the earth burst. They threw themselves into the dried-out ditch and remained lying there for a long time, because a buzzing could be heard, as though from the motors of larger air squadrons still farther away, a droning that was still coming closer and only increasing in volume. The ields of grain were shining in the morning sun, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, no breeze stirred the ears of grain, though far below, between the blades of grass, the poppy lowers, there was a scurrying and a litting, tiny animals swished by, lizards, mice, rabbits, snakes, too. The noise grew into a clanging and roaring, as though thunder- and hailstorms were coming down, but still the sky remained clear and empty. They pressed their hands to their ears for fear that the clanging might make their ear drums explode, and they believed that the trembling earth was about to open itself beneath them. Suddenly the grain fell, as though from the sweep of a scythe, and gray monstrosities rolled towards us, on revolving treads, with arched armored backs, in dense rows, my mother pressed herself into the crumbling earth, through the grass she saw how the advancing tubes pushed over her into the grain, the steel bodies mowed their way through and receded into the distance. Sand ground in her teeth, the bits of earth before her were full of furrows and cracks, an ant, 30 carrying another dead ant, lailed its antennae over an abyss, jumped over it, its forelegs outstretched, a black beetle clambered up a blade of grass until it drooped down and it crawled of once more. My father, however, turned his attention from the hour of the irst morning of the war to the two coming months. Just as he had attempted, technologically and economically, to secure his living in the little city of Alingsås by returning to the world of work, so too did he attempt to make the events in which he and my mother had been caught up lucid by means of mathematical calculation. Starting with the assumption that the exact number of all those torn out of their familiar lives could be ixed, he estimated the sizes of the various forces. Initially, he might have made these tens of thousands, these hundreds of thousands, tangible, they came from particular cities, one of them had left behind a certain address, and there were still traces of their work everywhere, but then they lost their faces in the masses. Again and again, in the vague hope that shelter might be found somewhere, unable to sense that they were wandering into their own annihilation, swept along by a superhuman force, not delivered to a natural catastrophe, not compelled by hunger and need to leave their countries, not in the search for a new land that might be built up, but rather swept away by a violence contradicting any reason, giving everything up that might have given their life order, not as pilgrims or pioneers, but having become overnight the lowest of the low, robbed of any aspirations, any dignity, now existing solely in a world that consisted of points of embarkation, transport, trans-shipment points and detention centers, they looded eastward, through the provinces that Germany had lost to Poland in nineteen eighteen, and had now snatched for itself again. And as millions they became still more formless, together with the Polish Jews driven out of their villages, crossed by the deportations of captured workforces towards Germany, and the trains of people of German descent from the Baltic and Belarussia, who were to settle in the areas that had been cleansed of Jews. It was only in October that something like a destination became apparent for those in light, the area between the Vistula and the Bug would be placed at their disposal, as it were, as a reservation. My mother seemed to hear nothing of what my father was recounting, although he was holding forth forcefully. She sat in the armchair, upholstered with worn green velvet, as though there was no reaching her anymore. Before her the straight white trunks of a forest of birches stretched into the murky depths, she ran between the trunks, sometimes straight ahead, sometimes sideways, the bark she brushed against was of a silky smoothness, and the thudding of the steps was closing in, the panting and chattering, once again she was among many, she ran over moss and crunching wood, and the others ran right and left, loaded with bedding, baskets, pots and utensils, a trampling and a hissing, lapping dresses with children clinging to them, a pair of riders, the horses damp with sweat, soldiers without helmets or weapons, cows, calves, poultry, there 31 was a screaming, a bleating and cackling, and it was like every other time, something was behind them, something overpowering was coming closer and was just about to pounce on them, and at the same time there was no end, it was like their kneeling in the sand, like the crush in the dungeon, the lying in the ditch by the road, it was all happening at the same time, they were inside and there was no way out. For a while, said my father, we pulled a cart behind us with the children, the elderly and the sickly. It went over the hills and over the mountains, this was in the old Austrian-Silesian country, in the country of mixed people, here Polish, Russian, German, Ukrainian were spoken, and Yiddish, the craftsmen, the shopkeepers, the innkeepers everywhere were Jewish, the Poles there were the farmers, they loosed their dogs on those seeking shelter. My father paused, after he had attempted to bring into recognizable coherence that which threatened to perish in strangeness. In the calamity that had befallen him and my mother in the spring of nineteen hundred thirtynine, he saw the result of perfectly determinable forces. In their Voivodeships the Polish aristocracy were only continuing what had been arranged the year before in the old industrial zone between the Ore Mountains and the Bohemian forest, the peaceful provincial life had suddenly turned into a zone where one side, furnished with all the power, could unleash their fury on the other. What my father saw in Varnsdorf, as Jewish manufacturers were bound by their works to the horses of their coaches and dragged over the pavement accompanied by roars and jeers, or as shopkeepers were carried out of their stores and made to stand on display with signs around their necks in the marketplace, already attained such a magnitude at that stage that it could only lead to worldwide devastation. He, as an individual, rejected the system that had always tried to leave him and those like him in despondency and paralysis. He had not allowed himself to walk in the dirt. He paced back and forth, his face gray. He had never been able to sit still in Wedding or on Niedergrunder Strasse in Varnsdorf, when he saw this violence carried out in the name of one class over the others. The violence that he now invoked was the violence of a pestilence, and in naming it, he also diagnosed the sickness to which my mother had fallen victim. It was asserted again and again that this pestilence, which caused convulsions every three, four decades, came out of nowhere, out of the inexplicable, and yet it was always planned down to its tiniest details. The fever never disappeared between its peaks, even when it could hardly be perceived, somewhere it brought trembling and terror along with it. The epidemic that came from Moloch was spread in innumerable ways, from the deceitful kiss to brutal deilement, and already carried away more lives than any other pestilence. As long as it could not be erased, for my mother, too, there would be no cure. If a scream were to awaken in her, no living person could bear it. But this scream, like the scream of all those who had gone beside her, was stiled before long. At irst those who spread the poison had taught 32 them silence, wherever the disgust wanted to come up it had been beaten down into silence with a single blow. And now, said my father, I am once again working for those who have oppressed me for my whole life, and I am still thankful to them that I can provide a tiny contribution for the maintenance of their bases, because it provides me my pitiful income. If it was my father’s will to cling to that which could be veriied, that which belonged to groups of numbers, orders, then my mother had distanced herself from everything with which we surrounded ourselves. And yet we were troubled by the question of whether she did not know more than we did, we who had preserved reason, and whether everything that was explicable by our standards did not become obsolete in light of a looming upheaval of thought. My father, who had remained standing, had once again turned to the late spring in Poland, while my mother drifted through images, none of which was able to evince a single sound of dismay from her, so far removed was she from any recollection of the familiar. Once, said my father, we came to a Catholic church, wanted to spend the night there, the priest refused us, foaming at the mouth, the children threw themselves pleadingly onto him, he struck at them with a cruciix. Only Jews, who were still located in this region of Krakow, could occasionally divide up the little that they had, they too wanted to leave for the east, toward the Red Army. German troops in wedge formation pushed past them with their baggage train in tow, they burnt down what was left of the cabins and stables, carried away sacks of grain, turkeys, piglets and now, this was near Gorlice, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, my father had lain there in the combat of nineteen ifteen, there the imperialroyal troops had pushed back the czar’s army, from there his regiment had marched on to Przemyśl and Lviv, now, on the Sabbath day, the soldiers rounded up all the Jews, the rabbi did not cease his prayer of consecration, the soldiers knocked the Torah out of his hands, he kept singing, the men’s black, broad-rimmed caps were torn of, they were yanked down to the ground by their hair and the singing did not cease, they were thrown onto a truck, men and women, children and the elderly, once again my father pulled my mother along with him, he showed his papers, he was a Slovak, formerly Hungarian, a war veteran, a distinguished recipient of the Iron Cross, wounded, here was the scar from the bullet lodged in his knee, and he was clapped on the shoulder, he was in the wrong place, he should head in the direction of his homeland, he got a pass, provisions, directions to the nearest authorities. They didn’t go back, but rather towards Galacia, they came to Przemyśl, where my father had been taken to a ield hospital in the late spring of nineteen hundred sixteen. They went around the city, in the loamy landscape surrounded by chains of hills, he recognized the old exercise grounds and the old freight yard, the locomotive shed made of yellow brick, from which he left for Bremen, bedded on straw in the livestock wagon. And the farther my parents, and with them a handful of Czech Jews, made it east, the more 33 quickly the trucks and tanks rattled towards them and past them, before them the villages were shot and ravaged, for the troops it was a matter of capturing several kilometers more, as was due them, soon they had run into the army that was moving towards them from the east. They moved through the haze and the smoke, came by the ruins of a courtyard, in the coal-blackened window frames of a stall, they saw a woman sitting, her feet stretched out on a board, her body leaning back onto the rubble, her legs spread wide apart, her hands pressed on her stomach, she pressed out the child, surrounded by the black lakes of grime. At the end of October, they found lodging in a village on one of the rivers branching of the Dniester, a Jewish baker took them in, you can live here, he said, the Russians are coming soon, they will protect us. How are they supposed to protect us, my mother had asked after the arrival of the Soviet soldiers, there was no motorized, oiled rolling, those who now came went on foot, in patched uniforms, with outdated riles, a pair of rickety trucks were drawn by horses, how are they, my mother asked, supposed to stop the Germans. They dug out trenches, they dug themselves in, what was going on with this pact that had been spoken of for months, did the pact no longer exist, no, it did exist, and why were they getting into formation, because the pact could not last, because it would go on, because the Germans wanted to have Ukraine and Belorussia and the Caucuses. Hundreds of thousands streamed towards Lvov with them, in November my parents entered the once rich, elegant city. My father had hoped to ind a position at one of the many weavers, printers, dye works that were located, as he knew, in Lemberg, but the concerns were all shut down, every space to be found was crammed full of people, the refugees camped in the streets, the Soviet army could not manage to provide for all the hungry. Still, something else unsettled us, said my father, among those driven out there were many Polish and Czech Communists, who had immediately come forward with their Party cards. They were rounded up, not, however, to be consulted for service, but rather to be deported to the German territories. The Communists who had led Germany to the Soviet Union years ago fared no better. We met several, he said, who were to have been sent back to the German Reich. They had escaped from the train, in the meantime many others had fallen into the hands of the Germans. The fear that spread was not only of the winter, which was approaching, but also the question of where one was even supposed to go, where a way out might still be found. As they made their way north, they had ended up in the German zone of occupation. There, they had heard of the sanctuaries that were now established for the Jews, and they saw many who let themselves be taken in by the temptation to ind a home inally and moved in the direction of Lublin. Once, my mother disappeared for an entire day, said my father, he found her in the driving snow, among Jews who had just lost their loved ones. Since then, he said, her sunkenness had grown worse, though he had often taken her silence during their wandering through 34 Belorussia, which had lasted nearly a quarter of a year, for exhaustion. In March, they arrived in Latvia and in Riga, at the Swedish consulate, received visas and plane tickets to Sweden. Once again my father mentioned this event, which must have been accompanied by endless diiculties, only in passing, as though he wanted to draw my mother’s attention to the fact that everything that had caused her pain belonged to the past, and that now there was nothing but safety. Late in the evening, when he had brought my mother to bed, and we sat for a long time at the table under the lamp, he told me that the union had ofered him a place for my mother in a rest home, however, he didn’t believe that a stay there would do her any good, instead he felt that, left alone among strangers, even with the best care, she would fall into a state of total darkness from which there would be no way out. The only possibility for her recovery would be, as he saw it, if my mother were to become aware of the change in their situation and then turn to something other than that unspeakable thing that held her in its grip. Every hour that he did not have to spend in the factory he was with her, concerned constantly with providing her a feeling of safety. He spoke to her mildly, as though there weren’t the slightest reason for concern anymore. He knew, he said, that she was moving towards him in her way and that a slow shift was taking place in the balance between the twilight and the waking state. Just the fact that, now and again, she stood at the window, looking out onto the street, waiting for him to come home, showed him that, at the very least, the possibility of improvement existed, and in that, he agreed with the doctor, a psychiatrist, a friend of Hodann’s as it happened, who had been to their apartment several times and had promised to visit several more times. What was holding my mother to life was this understanding, this silent acceptance of her absence, of her sojourn in the abyss. At night, in the little parlor near the kitchen, I heard my mother whimpering in the voice of a complete stranger. The following morning, however, I saw her diferently than I had at the beginning, when she seemed to be completely broken down. I spoke to her as what she had once been to me, as my mother, which she would always be. In the afternoons, after my father retrieved their meal from Beth’s Pension and assisted my mother as she ate, I told them what had been on my mind since my father had mentioned the city of Riga. The name Riga had stirred something that at irst remained as hazy as my father’s allusion to their departure from that city, though now, as I turned to my mother, without knowing what my thoughts might mean, I felt as though I were touching layers that might be accessible to my mother. I began with this city that I did not know, upon hearing its name, however, I thought of someone named Hjärne, a Swedish poet and scholar, who, in the middle of the seventeenth century, lived there as the private physician to the Governor of Livonia. I had put aside his play, Rosimunda, which was one of the plays that Brecht had wanted to rework, into a crate, along with my other books. I was thinking of how we, in 35 addition to our reading of strange songs, religious and folk songs, of choruses, of verse dramas about the power-mad, nymphomaniacal Langobard Queen interspersed with scenes of pranksters and harlequins, read the diary of Hjärne, in which he describes his journey from Riga in the year sixteen hundred sixty-seven, through Mölln, where he sketched Eulenspiegel’s grave, to Bremen. And now I suddenly understood why I was recounting all this, it belonged to the secret connections that existed between all of us, and which over the years had contributed to our ability to understand one another. In Delmenhorst, a village near Bremen, Hjärne had stopped to rest along his journey, and since this village had taken on such a special signiicance for us, his notes on that hour had afected me so greatly that I could cite them almost word for word. When he glanced at the landscape that I knew from my childhood, he was overcome by a spiritedness, as he called it, a trembling, an ecstatic exhilaration, a powerful joy was awakened in me, the joy of the poet. I saw the Delmenhorst highway before me as I read these lines, with its rows of poplars, behind them grazing pastures and mills. Here, in the convalescent home, my mother had met my father, here, in February nineteen hundred seventeen, she had conceived me. For several hours the web of recollection that surrounded us became perceptible, but just then it was lost once more, nothing in my mother’s face gave any indication that she had understood a single word that I had said. Looking out the window on the train during my return trip to Stockholm, I saw this face, large, gray, worn by the images that had torn themselves into it, a stone mask, the eyes blind in its broken surface. It was the face of Gaia, the demoness of earth, her left hand soaring up with its shattered ingers, the evening landscapes lew by, Alcyoneus fell, bitten in the breast by the serpent, tilting away from her. 36 ʿā’ishah al-bāʿūnīyah from emanation of graCe and the gathering union translated by th. emil homerin i love only you I love you, only you, and when my heart turns to others I love, this is only out of love for you, And when I must speak to someone else, my heart is still recalling only you. But there is no praise in this or that for me, my Lord, for in both, my praise is for your face. This sweet love and recollection, I did not earn, for they low from your pure and perfect grace. You are the true God, all else is false; You alone abide, all else will pass. So please don’t shun me, this would be Hell, even if my misdeeds would merit that. 38 lovers, be happy O lovers, be happy and joyful for the cup-bearer came ready to serve. His cup was clear and bright in his tavern as he plied the tavern-mates with wine, And they lived the blissful life with a drink that quenched them and cured all ills. They spent their souls for it and disappeared with nothing left and so found peace, As the gardens of my love were opened, where we drank a pleasant wine. With God, there is nothing left to desire, for the promise was kept and the veil torn away! 39 omar pérez from Cubanology translated by kristin dykstra In 2002, while temporarily living in Europe (mostly Amsterdam), Cuban poet Omar Pérez began writing in a notebook. His journey began as a short professional visit that shifted into something less deined after he fell in love. Eventually the notebook became Cubanology, a book of days relecting on three years of life at a remove from the island: “A memory of a light, a journey, jour.” The following excerpts are entries from 2004. They include reference to the Zen center where Pérez practiced throughout his years in Europe, as well as a stream of practical realities faced by potential emigrants. 41 Vrijdag 10 Up 7. Amsterdam: School. Eerste les na de vakantie. Summarizing my light from Habana to Madrid: long layover, jumpy landing. Boom! Ecuadorian classmate in Schiphol: he didn’t want to come back, but his love awaits. So does mine. Next day, Vondel Park, and then sea and dunes: for the irst time I take a swim in the Dutch sea. Cold tonic, so cold that I go back to my everyday tasks with fresh body & soul. Life continues. Zaterdag 11 In de dojo. Some eleven people. Loic directs and asks to dedicate the day’s ceremony to the 9/11 victims – not only in the United States, but around the whole planet. I propose the Exhibition of Cuban Painters, practitioners from the Havana dojo, to Paul. The proposal is accepted. Visit to Haarlem. Ken always has a good story to tell. He says he’d like to write a play using his conversations in the Tax Department. For example: Ken: So, what can I do if the Tax Department wants to take the money directly from my clients? (It’s the income tax.) Tax Man: You put that money in your wife’s account, but don’t forget to pay the VTV tax through your own account. Ken: Ain’t that fraud? Tax Man: No, as long as you pay your taxes, that’s good. Ken: So, over time I can pay of my debt using my client’s payments. Is that good? Tax Man: No, that’s bad. It’s proit. Then you have to pay tax with the money you owe. Ken: Then, I have to declare myself bankrupt and claim I’m in debt. Isn’t that bad? Tax Man: That’s good. You pay your debt with the loan’s money. Ken: That’s good. Tax Man: Yeah, but if you declare a debt, that makes it harder to get a loan. That’s bad. 42 Waiting for Godot in an oice. We talk about Le Droit a la Paresse by the Parisian born in Santiago, Cuba, Paul Lafargue. Then Ken gives us a lift to the train station. Good knight. Sunday The category 5 hurricane is getting closer to Cuba. It’s important not to complain, niet zeuren, get angry or lose your sense of humor. Also physical exercise and studieren come in handy. Concentrate on just a few things. I interrupt this note abruptly in order to clean my pipe. Va bene. On my way back home, I throw the paper away, try in vain to withdraw money using my card, buy bread, and all this is Cubanology. --That I listen to Cuban music and work happily during my translation of the North American anthology. I prepare the artworks for the painting exhibition. I clean the house, make a phone call to one Mr. Thomas, a Spanish Caribbeanized Dutchman, who contracts helpers for cleaning, schoonmaken: “I don’t have much, everything’s short,” he says in a serious voice. Well, okay. I puree potatoes with onions, mushrooms, chives and celery. A little bit of TV and of to sleep. I miss the reading of Women Who Run with the Wolves. Woensdag Sampai, do de dishes. Congo prayer, Dutch breakfast work. Of to school at 8:30. Something is changing in me, around me. It’s presence. Prescience, the science of foresight. I know, but it’s something more: ahselleraytion. Niente traduzione oggi. I try to ix the plumbing on the kitchen sink. Well, after cleaning out pipes, it’s clear I have to call in the experts. I quit, listen to Irakere and discover new things. Sometimes school is indecent. 43 At noon, I go home. My afternoon nap helps to pause the low of events. I wake up, inish reading The Open Veins of Latin America: thirty years later, things haven’t changed much. Watching some Moroccan lamenco singers closely on television in Amsterdam, I discover structural contaminations between overlapping poems in Dutch and Spanish, at the same time, with a beat. Bij voorbeeld, for example, Het Poem, the Pum, el Poema Probeert niet, Nederlander No intentes ser, holandés te origineel te zijn demasiado original Don’t you go trying, Dutchman, to get too original Cristina invites me to Ardis, the Royal Zoo, to visit the new girafe born ive days ago. It’s bigger than a Doberman. Mother girafe greets us. Girafes give greetings with their eyes and ears. Their eyes move as if winking, and their ears lick in all directions. We also visit the African turkey buzzards, or vultures, and they give us four feathers. The gorillas eat while maintaining thoroughly abandoned postures. A girl sitting by a giant window that separates her from the male exclaims, “What a beautiful stance!” We go home on the streetcar, and I think about the book. A novel of three 100-page sections, ongeveer. “For the wise, few words are enough.” The irst volume tells of the encounter with Gaspar Guevara, an andante poet with allegro. And a character we will call Homer, poet and storyteller, also itinerant. Slang: Gaspar, a lamenco singer, without hurrying his rhymes, goes rhyming down his path through Spain, France, and other lands, where he learns an urban English: the English of advertising. Homer operates in Donne’s elusive compositions: mystical gibberish: they converse in Tuscany, terra antica for poets, and in Provence. In Marseille, they eat at an African restaurant at the edge of the Old Port, and in Paris they attend a jazz concert directed by a Brazilian woman whose last name is Teresa. Their rhyme, Teresa Teresa. No interesa. I discovered Gaspar Guevara on the day that I launched a new novel: Into the Wind. It was the irst volume of the trilogy, “To Someone Understanding,” a hundred pages stewing with 44 religious, social, domestic and virile passions. L’Andría, as the Greeks would say, about a nomadic Havana gentleman in the twenty-irst century. He reserved some passions for the feverish joy of activities that lead you down the roads of the saints. To others he dedicated great surges of yang energy, as experts would say. He would lose himself, or escape stealthily, to a variety of celebrations: carnivals, parties folkloric or otherwise, a bembé; or a wedding, in a Catholic church in Miramar, of an Austrian and a Colombian. There he plays bongo and sings a rumbita. Open-air concerts. Nor did he reject the crooning called el feeling, or what he himself described as “lamenco with no relationship whatsoever to that tradition.” A concept diicult to explain, which manifested in romerías with a guitar and mint tea. You could say that this gentleman is Gaspar himself, who inds his recollections in the lavors of mint and mendacity, but there is no other meaning for “expertise” in the irst section of the story. Homer will compose a short essay, two pages, about the aforementioned novel. What will happen to Gaspar inside my novel is not what happens to him within his own novel: the irst is implicit, a vision of what is to come: science iction. Meanwhile, the other novel conveys what happened inside the legendary reality. Neither this nor that. Polyiction. For example: Similar to the player of soccer or chess, warm by the time he reaches the middle of the game and ield, one who tests an unexpected solution from a distance of various meters or moves, I write these notes. They are as uneven as I am. But suddenly, they’re warming up. My name is Gaspar and for the moment I’m waiting. I’m aware that I’m inside a bunkered oice by the Bijlmer prison, in a not-so-tidy Amsterdam neighborhood. How I got here, what I’m waiting for – like any other player, that’s what I’m moving to tell you. I arrived in Europe one steel-gray morning from Havana, then in lower. I had no reasons to abandon my walled city, only an impulse to set sail and stretch my frame toward other regions, like a bufalo crossing the steppe or a salmon swimming upstream. Like so many others, I crossed the open sea with a doctored resume, a fake letter of invitation, and twenty nasty dollars in my jacket. I don’t feel like describing procedures. It’s the wrong time to entertain details, and I won’t ofer an emigrant’s political explanations, much less economic ones, or any of the other chatter that humans invent in order to do what other species, supposedly inferior species, manage to do without thought. 45 But some nights, looking out through the open square window in my kitchen’s back wall, between two large buildings, toward ininity, I had observed a star’s sigh, and blinking slowly as I exhaled, as though my eyelids and bronchial tubes worked in unison, I felt nostalgia for the unknown. At the start of late spring, stretching myself, I set foot, a shaky foot, in the city adjacent to the Marne. I’ll call my friend, my smartass sometime girlfriend, by the appropriate name of Mademoiselle Savante. She was waiting for me on irm footing in her apartment. I won’t say that here we managed a walk toward some famous cemetery or a residence of illustrious rubble, or that at sunset the mist from a seminal river clogged my throat. These trivialities were quickly forgotten in the little bars nearby, in cheap food troughs that don’t even provide a place to sit down. Well: sitting down will cost you. And as I heard ça va ça va and said ça va ça va, the whole thing became real: I became savant, nothing mattered to me at all, and I learned how to shell and eat the nut. Mademoiselle had a cat, not a ine cat, not ine like a grand piano, not ine like a dress with a train, just a plain old cat … Moche! pour quoi? Demoiselle would get angry, too often. Pas du tout! She meant he was stubby, because he had no tail: his name, Tzigane, gypsy. Sounding a lot like Zidane, the soccer player. I’ll add that then she and I no longer felt attraction as lovers, no pure drama. Instead we enjoyed walking arm in arm, yes, sleeping together because the spring was still too cold; there was no more to it. And still, at times, a reminiscence, and we would curl up together: Out, Zidane! Out of the bed, stubby cat … And she, now more softly, C´est pas moche, pas non plus Zidane... Journals, pieces of letters, notes from newspapers interweave. Homer is a monk. At a retreat in the city of Amsterdam he meets another monk: “An expert in vacillation and in the theories, the most current versions, for accelerating the spirit.” Meanwhile Gaspar has a good time in Rotterdam. He is invited to a poetry festival, garlanded in new euros and the smiling discipline that emanates from his well-earned social status. What gets written down is crucial; what happened is indispensible. [. . .] Now it’s a question of Dutch. Huiswerk: Informatie over werk. Ethnic minorities, revalidation of diplomas, seats. Test u zelf, test yourself, are you lexible enough?! Dutch Curriculum Vitae: 46 send it, print it, turn it in. Flexibel, economische. Internet, mainly commercially oriented. Boring. Werk. Netherlands: translator (Spaans) niet gevonden. Listing not found. He’s busy. Later. On the other hand, Barbara’s new child is born. I talk to Ken; he calls for a quickie at Don Julio. Mo calls to get details for printing. Expositie Kubaanse Kunstenaars. A4 CD ROM. HANDMADE/ HECHO A MANO Exhibition of Cuban Paintings at the European Zen Center 15 pieces for sale, and one that is not: Zen Monk playing cajón. . in a North Amsterdam bar O Chung’s real daughter Chinese pumpkin belly behind the bar at “Don Julio” eyes scratched to amber ininity papaya boiled in agave syrup and another beer? Not today. For every thing there is a day, says my friend. Hallelujah. I’m not jealous of the mind. Solitary karakter characteristic, fuck it. Superior neither to dogs or sparrows. The friend is Ken. . Caroline works well with her hands and creates solutions for framing and hanging. Who said that women … ? Not me, man! Ik ga, i go, naar de copyshop, not the cofeeshop! 40 kleur posters: 60 E. Werken met de posters. Hoe? Take them to Cuba, distribute them, sell them. More things to take to Cuba: tools, paintings, material, charcoal, incense, needles, sewing items. Merchant sailor, A’dam. 47 C.V. I was on that corner one afternoon it was raining. Yesterday at night i was looking at the fool moon in the garden i have a son and it was one afternoon and it was raining i was looking at the full moon in the garden. [. . .] Friday I go to the dojo and then to the copyshop. Not only are the copies not ready, but they lost the CD ROM. Hoe kan dat nou! Sorry, sorry. Always sorry. Sorry, I’m going to school to learn sorry. Luckily, Cristina calls Han and he can make the copies: 50 in total, big and small, for just 20 euros! And the text is free! Bad becomes good. Allah akhbar. I am happy. Caroline, the monk from Alicate, is already in the dojo. The weather is magniicent at the start of fall: soft, relaxing rain. From cool trees the green, yellow and red leaves are falling. The temperature is right for taking a walk in shirtsleeves, if you like. Back at home I listen to Camarón: Old World! Florian calls to ask me to take care of his cat Nefertiti, just for three days. Living. What is literal is no good for anything: all is dream. Lights, rain, Danae, the Greek woman singing with the piano. Singing a Greek bolero to it. Why do you fool yourself, brother, dreamer why do you burn your wings so cruelly Icarus, Van Gogh … If from each according to his work, to each according to his lunacy the moon, too, take the moon literally: danger like a joke made in the wrong place 48 There’s a way to have a ine touch. As in baseball, where a good hit doesn’t have to go in a particular direction. like the grape: growing high it doesn’t have to get bitter the heights of aspiration have no exact zone. Going out for bread, doing zazen, these things have no exact zone. And in the end, Hunger makes brothers out of all men. Zaterdag I go out for bread. Immigrants don’t look at anyone. They go along with their head down, looking at the future, the one they already found: ah, a coin! Ten cents. To the dojo, zazen. I do what Paul requests. Then Cristina and I go to the public protest against the Balkenende government. Museum Plein, 300,000 people. Blessing: when the demonstration ends, the rain begins. Back at home, potato puree, the Dutch stampot. The afternoon is more peaceful than any other. Life, a succession of accidents comprehending all actions of the body in reality and dream. Accidental culture. Magical biological. Hey man! 49 raChel tzvia baCk What use is poetry, the poet is asking i What use is poetry, the poet is asking of the evening news where the experts of military afairs have been assembled, the political analysts and politicians amassed, ex-generals of measured pace and phrase all called to the ideological front, the starched and uniformed delivered as fact, in lieu of truth, expert and ex-general of the demarcated worlds, barbed-wire words hurled across the room, the anchor conidently moored with her earnest nod-nodding of head stating stately readiness for next round of certain warfare around the news table. There were troops moving south under rocket-lacerated skies, arced anger and armoured vehicles fully unarmed by ire, there were boys pulling other boys from the wreckage and lames, from the tunnels or into tunnels beneath it all, an underworld amazed 51 while whole buildings collapsed from above, bombed complete to the ground, perfect aim at entire worlds behind walls, all destroyed, until the buried alive and the buried dead the burned and the broken are all one in the hearts darkest undertow so what use is poetry, the poet wants to know. 52 ii They whispered peace in the dark corridors, as though it were a code. With gun thrust into his arms irst time, he saluted as trained, and shouted back I swear to uphold but the soldier behind him in formation heard green gold from out of the ire’s eye and glow in the rhythm of his marching boots. When the speakers blared red alert red alert across the desert base, he saw the furred and antlered faces at the horizon, waiting in watchful patience. In the barracks at night they listened for home as one listens for bells that toll only in foreign cities or for snow falling on the already fallen snow in remotest hills in contented and constant quietude. 53 iii The mother who sent her son To war, allowed her son to go To war, let the years unfold until Her son could not avoid going To war – The mother Who didn’t stop her son From going To war – Was called before the High Court Of mothers held on full moon nights At undisclosed Celestial sites, Stars of the Light Not yet evident on earth the only ones In attendance. There they argued her case in silver-tinged Syntax, crystalline intonations, verbed Asterisms composed wholly from the black holes Of her heart From when he irst left, When he irst called, when he Wept over the dark nightline as though Distance from life’s imagined places to frontline Frenzy greater than to remotest planet in space, and Distance from the child’s home to lare-lit fear no more Than the tug of a unravelling Cord. 54 The mother who sent her son to war, didn’t Stop her son from going to war, Was found to be Guilty. She, and the High Court, found her There where she was Lost, and forever Guilty. 55 iv Meanwhile, hating Crete, and his long exile, illed with a desire to stand on his native soil, the father applied his thought to new invention, and altered the natural order of things. He laid down lines of feathers, beginning with the smallest, following the shorter with longer ones, so that you might think they had grown like that, on a slant. Then he fastened the feathers together with thread at the middle, and bees-wax at the base, then lexed each one into a gentle curve, so that they seemed like real bird’s wings. His son stood beside him, and not realizing that he was handling what would be his peril, caught laughingly at the downy feathers that blew in the passing breeze, and softened the yellow bees-wax with his thumb, in his play hindering his father’s marvellous work. When last touches were put to what he had begun, the father balanced his own body between the two wings and hovered there in the moving air. He instructed the boy as well, laying down the rules of light, as he itted the newly created wings on the boy’s shoulders. While he worked and issued his warnings, the ageing man’s cheeks were wet with tears, and his hands trembled. No heat or sun, no delight of blue borne light. He was carried aloft in the metal belly of the roaring beast, unleashed into the sky. His arms were bare. His chest was weighted with vest and pack and gun. He rode the air until they landed in storming dust, into the bellowing battle. Even as his mouth cried his father’s name, he wrapped bandages around the wounded, 56 staunched bleeding, placed morphine in ravaged mouths of pain. The sky was orphaned of birds; there were no feathers, not on land or waves. Imagined wing-span of the fallen. 57 v There were the tales being woven of others’ lives, long narratives unfolding, crafted with devotion. She had been told, “This is the contract you make: you agree to believe, you agree to care.” But she was already otherwhere: what pretend could hold through despair. Old vows were now disavowed. Shelves weighted with books, second-hand stores sought in strange cities, her ceaseless travelling through storied worlds created as though just for her, for she had agreed to believe – That was over now. Henceforth the heart would disallow all tales that weren’t true. 58 vi He was only three years old. He was four and soon to turn ive. He already knew most of the letters. He was irst born, devoted to the baby sister. He was second born, always the younger brother. He was killed in the evening at play in the street. He was killed in the afternoon in the home’s shuttered peace. The domed play tent, yellow and red, stood undisturbed also after. In the photo, he is all little boy pride standing tall and erect beside the colourful tower he’s built, slender and so serious. In the photo, bundled in small denim coat, he sits by the sea, he is smiling, it must be a irst evening breeze. It was mortar ire. It was a missile. It was or it wasn’t pre-emptive, was or wasn’t retaliatory. The little-boy body wrapped in shrouds is now the single certainty. (for Sahir Abu Namous and Daniel Tragerman, in memory) 59 vii It was a sea of roaring lions, he had said, their soft white-padded feet are pawing at the wind. It was a sea of small feathered things, see how they spread their light-boned wings not to take light, she had ofered, but for the simple delight of hovering on air, over water, then touching back down on dark and quiet waves. It was a sea they hadn’t seen, it was possessed, delineated green depths, death-silent swimmers with explosives, barricaded waves, grey vessels patrolling water and wind. It was a sea of mortar ire ired – mistakenly, intentionally – it was that sea, so what use is poetry the poet keeps asking. 60 paul éluard What has beCome in a neW night every right neCessity reCitation for a moment of Clarity translated by Carlos lara What has become of you why the white hair and roses Why the brow the eyes rent heartrending Great misunderstanding of the wedding of radium Loneliness haunts me out of spite. 62 in a neW night Woman with whom I have lived Woman with whom I live Woman with whom I will live Always the same You need a red cloak Red gloves a red mask And black stockings Reasons evidence Of seeing you completely naked Pure nudity oh adorned adornment Breasts oh my heart 63 every right Simulated The lowery shade of lowers suspended in spring The shortest day of the year and the Eskimo night The agony of autumnal visionaries The smell of roses the smart sting of nettle Stretches of transparent linen In the clearing of your eyes Show the ravages of ire its inspired works And the paradise of its ashes The abstract phenomenon struggling with the hands of the clock The wounds of truth the unbending oaths Show yourself You may come out in a crystal gown Your beauty continues Your eyes shed tears of smiles and caresses Your eyes are without secrets Without limits. 64 neCessity With little earthly ceremony Near those who maintain their balance Above this misery of complete repose Very close to the right path In the dust of all seriousness I build relationships between man and woman Between the fonts of the sun and the sack of bumblebees Between the enchanted caves and the avalanche Between the eyes of intent and seaside laughter Between the heraldic martlet and the garlic star Between the plumb line and the noise of the wind Between the fountain of ants and the culture of raspberries Between the horseshoe and the ingertips Between the chalcedony and the pins of winter Between the blackthorn and the clear mimeticism Between the carotid and the specter of salt Between the monkey-puzzle and the dwarf’s head Between the forking rails and the red dove Between man and woman Between my loneliness and you. 65 reCitation for René Crevel Virtue this horn of fortune Audaciously vocation esteem ambition Raze the heads of the confused Rather take up irearms Against the leafy sycamore and the knife. In his numb armor In his armor that resonates with false shame Only from the last kiss This pirate without a feather in his hat Who provokes the barking of crows The pirate the boredom the enemy of waiting in the rain The alarm clock of religious maintenance The capacities of oil The alarm clock that shaves down the sleeper And leaves him only time not to get dressed. Weeks and months and years of sowing By paths that never even touch the cane A brain sabotaged by germs of bad will We do not cry and if we do not cry it is because of the ire That ruins the plaster that keeps the eyes on their shores That sears everything passing through animalistic doors in a panic. Beyond the ire there is no ash Beyond the ashes there is ire. The ragged bleachers roar in the rain Clamoring to the coquettes of laughter all the cobblestones of laughter And greetings of courtesy to secure the clichés The dust digs deeper into the pockets But this will only happen after the mud Celebrating this virtue that is not mine. 66 Beyond the ire there is no ash Beyond the ashes there is ire. 67 for a moment of Clarity for René Char Raptors Drinking Peaceful blood Greedy blood Poorly dressed in robes of lames The devastations of charms Smiles at the cleansing of spears At the shields of airy heads In the storm All is permitted Meet the halos At the hopeless promenade The countless swirls On the uncovered breasts. Inhumane deaths Oblivion Invisible deaths Imperishable blind eyeball Allied to what it would see A cloud reveals The night that was made without it. Drinking Day from the depths of a lock. 68 brian strang the infinite infant 1. horsemen “Now hear the fourfold roots of everything: enlivening Hera, Hades, shining Zeus. And Nestis, moistening mortal springs with tears.” --Empidocles the four cardinals are lat relics sacred bones like all bones anonymous prone the points of a compass: ashen ravens of rain milky land of winds carmine lips of Lucifer golden faces in soil crux of poppies worms become swollen scarlet through skulls trees bud scatter of petals four rivers from this osseous cross clouds crowd the sphere to the roots of creation deep in the other world where antecedents form a council stream bright as lame loam like the aether between elders who know this world is a shadow of their own of stillness of waves it multiplies and re-creates as golden poppies from the bones of cardinals 70 * the horsemen are consecrated are merciful exactly as pictured by that mind that wanders amidst faces waking or sleeping or liminal senses into the kingdom a newborn to be gathered a cradle of breeze into the unknowable eye into the remembered kingdom land of garlands and candles still eternal is rest is nothing is blessed in linen laid into the earth by murmurs breathed by beloved on skin then sinew then shining bone horses undulating across the land the wind through their ribs sings a diferent song for every soil breaks branches overextended into the land rattles the bones of trees the blood-illed limbs of every animal shadowed by furies across the plains medusas shred and scatter carve their song across the land their ashen eyes see nothing but impermanence * the elements are not four but ininite time relived eternally 71 caressed from itself ininitely multiple lotus upon navel upon lotus upon navel so that in the over and over of worlds in their arrival and destruction distances dissolve bend toward aching equilibrium without gravity governing earthbound days grind with gravitas straining us til we tick through the gate and into depth of nubile night where cells whirl and ires wake into the warm crust of earth in waters of the womb deafening drumbeat systole and diastole of devotion waxes and wanes rises and falls in the long slow universal rhythm * the kingdom within is sacred is profane every breath every hand every one every blood-dripping newborn beats with a red-black heart unforgettable the gift and curse of unforgettable the kingdom within the very wind ills the lungs of the furrowed wail chant in a circle of shimmering souls the kingdom is within and within it the sacrosanct other kingdoms creatures two legged and four feather and in and nothing at all 72 on the head of a pin every one within every star every star within a kingdom inside another lotus from navel and lotus from navel inside another inside another all of it a land once thought mythical but all the more real for it 73 2. falling forWard into the future “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.” Martin Heidegger You write as you look at the lat Italian skies. “Flat Italian skies.” You wonder what the phrase could possibly mean. What is a lat sky? What is an Italian sky? What is a lat Italian? What is a sky? You sit as a young person, the one you once were, at a kiosk café. What is a kiosk? A café? In a part of Spain, not Italy, you write the phrase that comes to you as a young person, seemingly from the air, from the sky, from the Spanish sky. The sky suspended over the café table, the one with the notebook and pen, the one with the cofee and spilled sugar and later that day with the red wine spilled from the nearby vineyards. Grapes grown and picked by people you know, by families who are not wealthy but prosper archaically, families that operate by land, by sun, by rain, by wind, while you struggle in an air-conditioned glass hallway over the ocean. At this moment you are here, every age, every possible self: ininite worlds. But the infant appears to you in the middle of the air. A newborn is suddenly present, in the middle of the air, right in front of you, slowly twirling, its umbilical cord twisting away into the distance. To where? The sun? The soil? You look at your surroundings to assure yourself you are actually here, not dreaming. Yes, you are here. Very much so. Yet the infant is also here, not a projection or a dream, but actually in front of you, very much so, just across the table and slightly above your head. It even casts a shadow. And so you write it down. You write words which approximate, which fail the experience. You leave symbols and marks, draw a picture, in your notebook. Each efort is a single experience, each a beautiful failure, each multiplies its presence. Each becomes another infant but none of them do anything to change the fact that this infant is in front of you. You imagined an infant loating in the air still dripping its umbilical blood. Infant with ancient eyes, gilded by the many versions of itself. You imagined it and it appeared. Did imagining make it so? And now it exists irrefutably, not imagined but actual. It cracks its golden lids, licks its marbled lips, utters the irst language, gives you the gift of language, a 74 language that creates itself, that loats a newborn in front of your very eyes. It looks directly at you. You see windmills all around. Dozens and dozens of wooden windmills spinning wildly, faster than the wind itself. You know you have imagined these, projected these out to the world, that they are uniquely yours, that they exist but nobody else can see them. They become deafening, ringing your ears, propelling the sound through your body. They haunt you day and night, powered by the fury of your nightmares, by the terror of obligation. But everyone sees an infant. You didn’t imagine it; you woke to it. Everyone has always seen this same infant falling forward into the future. It existed long before you ever did. The infant is the same infant billions of times over, as it always has been. Its form is nowhere but its center is everywhere and everyone is born, collective wonder spinning from its own center, and it smiles and reaches to touch you. It smiles and reaches toward anyone who is ready. 75 3. propheCies “Sadly we sing and with tremulous breath As we stand by the mystical stream In the valley and by the dark river of death And yet ’tis no more than a dream” Charles W. Ray the predictions went like this: “the ones who now dance will loat just above the ground the ones who lie will be shortened—about a foot tall the ones in the valley will be looded and will falter they will be made of wood and will become as old this is what will become of those left behind” and they were true in the lymph of your misgivings— the hands of elves— centipedes capsized and convenient the uninitiated fold themselves crows will grow to blind you swarming with bees harrowed holes for eyes a coiled snake skeleton is a coliseum of compost ruin of renewal—the very center of the world a wheel of toil—the very essence of the world this is the city of after city of forgotten faces 76 this is the holy city faces peeled of rinds of the roles they’re playing letting the precious gift of unfolding futures fade the prediction went like this: “half-sized souls sprout legs turning tadpoles to torpedoes abandoned to anachronistic outposts” each misfortune an omen an open mouth that refuses to heal that murmurs the story of people twisted from twigs by coyotes now under land under lie upon lie a heart in the soil keeps beating leaking blood all the while haunting the dreams of occupiers sores on the face of their god all around the dead listen through the grass hear your doubts and fears you were certain but now have only questions become cleaner clearer soporiic impenetrable replicable inconceivable city is this the same world? the same underbelly in the gravel of speech in a once-human igure circling unconcerned with gravity? 77 or the circles of lame and broken hoop of inheritance never wanting to see itself in either shadow or light? people beg and line the roads uttering a single whisper: “nothing in the world will be uncorrupted dear hearts a blemish and blight brought not by justice but by its abscess revenge please tell us how we are wrong” * the predictions went like this: “liminal hosts in a limitless ovarian heaven over agrarian land with glass skin and waxen hands will come loose when you shake” a circle of men in robes listening to signals in metadata * the eye sinks in the ocean ish swarm from a bottomless pit candy-colored and caustic 78 holy relics, divine images longing and heartbreak holy kneeling at holy places the land where the tide goes out where you may sleep day and night and dream of sable crowns empty sleeves sweet nothings below a painless sky here you reside eternally everyone lives eternally everyone you know anyway eventually caterpillar to chrysalis to butterly without a mouth with which to eat four paths six directions arc of a burning eye the center of the earth the tracing of a heart a precious name the tip of memory marked by an aurora new sky over the empty ancient cities over orange trees from infant hands kneel to say the prayer: “fatal garden fertile compass 79 cardinals axis of the world poppies splitting bone.” a city silk-sewn by a spider upon lotus upon lotus the eye entwined in the roots of a tree of a desire unwished says come sing my song: “a winter carcass hums with living voices” 80 4. the tree “Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in symbols and images. The world will not receive truth in any other way.” --Gospel of Philip Rooted into the underworld is the canopy of creation. The dead climb the branches and fall again with each leaf, born anew in the dying breeze, bedeviled by winter’s blackening until pierced by spring’s spears when they sink back into their circle, redoubling their eforts for the next cycle. During the day, necromancers, men in red robes lying prone, facing each of the cardinal directions, lie face down as stepping stones. They ritualize to ind the story they want to accept. You wander away and into your new reality, something is wiggling and gnawing into your head where it whispers intricate instructions, making you a cat’s paw to your celestial double. You sigh with relief. The land speaks through your mind. The indelible moment circles on itself, the irreversible: the forests, the plains, depopulated towns. Flesh and blood are cleaved, strangers to their cascading former selves, each of which falls to the bottom of a starless lake. Twins stare at you from within, not seeing but knowing. Their eyes are your eyes. Their eyes are the black mirror of water. Their eyes are the eyes of an infant. The tree is endless, boughs bejeweled by stars, sphere upon sphere, tree upon tree, bloom upon bloom. A clatter of bones in the branches, feathers alame. Cardinals dangle and adorn the branches, still seeking acceptable stories, until their gilded remains slip from their robes, blacken the soil and bring scions wherever they land: ininite infants, each with the snowy head of an owl. Witches tell a story from one thousand seasons ago, written in silk, a story that repeats itself so many times that it becomes a forgetful old man in an ininite spiral. While you slumber, they stuf your belly with needles, circle your lips and leave a diadem of dread. In the morning, you sit up suddenly awake, touching the coarse twine stitches on each articulated pair of your ribs. 81 Endless. Boughs bejeweled by stars, sphere upon sphere, tree upon tree, bloom upon bloom. The moon: a spoon of silver on the Elysian sphere, a medicine sewn into the sky. When swallowed by a fathomless blackened rose, when staring upward from the bottom of a deep lake, you will see the two birds in the sky, circling with wings spread, telling you of the shame of crippling servitude and how to loat on the soundwaves above it. This is the gift you will receive, a gift of rising song. This is the touch of ininity, forever outfolding. The gift is this very instant and nothing more. A newborn in the dark, initiates around a campire, radiant horizons, a slaughtered bull. Hawkmoth among the bees, rowan tree circled with candles, black-eyed raven, twilight forest of the hunt. Black ocean, wind-whipped alabaster plain, the stretched bones of a cardinal rose, pyramid of golden skulls. Saucers of stars for eyes, twin owls, messengers in a hail of diamonds, spiral arms of the Milky Way. This very instant and nothing more. Endless. 82 tahir hamut the stone mirror Wall saWutjan the iCe Cream man prayer translated by joshua l. freeman the stone mirror I saw you looking in the stone mirror before, dripping water, your idea was so close to me then. Today you tasted the winter wind, a bitter taste. The same depression, the same downcast features. Two drops of the black night, your eyes! You can’t imagine a homeland you’ve never seen. Where did you ind the stone mirror? In a bygone age, or in your dream? In those times all hearts were sand, were wind, and they had a black smell that wouldn’t fade. Now, clouds crowd into the bottom of your ear, you can’t hear, you feel the mournful cold, you slowly lift your head, loneliness follows loneliness, as sunlight sinks into sunlight. Tell me, can I kiss you with frozen lips? Tell me, will the sun that lights the stone mirror swallow us? Goodbye my dearest, lee, get far from here! But a tree will not defy the land. Here it’s still winter, the trees haven’t yet grown leaves. A handful of pale gold soul in my palm, in my ingers. The spring season is my resolve. Time is still long, like time itself. Oh my dearest, tell me now: which one of us should die irst? November 1995, Ürümchi 84 Wall At daybreak cold air brushed my face, dawn’s bitter smell is closing in. The stars above me are small and high, I stand wrapped in a coat of sheepskin. The cold of Kashgar is nothing new, nature is strange like my heart, and black as jet. Up on a high wall I wrote these words: My freedom—to remember, and to forget. Last night’s boiled water must be frozen by now, the bark on the trees has probably split. Rag shoes on my feet, a fur hat on my head, my mood sours, I look around me a bit. The sun will rise again from the tips of the trees, in the east, in the mountains, still no dim light in view. The wake-up horn will be sounded now, Rizwan’gül, at that moment I thought of you. February 1998, Kashgar 85 saWutjan the iCe Cream man On a familiar street where chilly winds stirred the irm city in a cool season when desire and lust were forgotten in a time when people whistled to the lowly roadside lower’s leaf taking it for an iron bird in conditions when no one could think of water or ice in a place without boys longing to sufer and be men without girls yearning for a thrill to quench their lames I came upon Sawutjan the ice cream man And before my eyes lashed the weak and hesitant door the humiliated bunk bed the pockmarked table that gambled with fate the constantly hungry half-open window the melancholy four-legged chair the spotless ceiling whose kin were senselessly slaughtered This was a college dormitory The dormitory where I irst met Sawutjan I thought someone had inspired him to write a poem as someone’s apprentice he had learned a craft someone had been his research topic with someone he had opened a restaurant he had worked for someone as an editor Who could imagine Sawutjan making ice cream at daybreak I haven’t seen him take of his clothes ache with illness become husband and father take out a loan 86 tease his wife vomit drunkenly hit his child dance cry mournfully and do so many other things How miraculous that we keep on for it makes no sense I mean to say we are miraculous 15 March 2015, Ürümchi 87 prayer Every time my two palms draw close to my face, the light in my eyes turns to silence between them. It’s true, I’m a sinner who takes care of himself, who swallows his fury soundlessly. When the heat of my palms and the wind of my breath are joined with no help and no compromise, my vague lips tremble without meaning. When I hesitate shamelessly amidst gratitude, songs of praise, blessings I recall that a camel passed through a needle’s eye. Straining to understand love I conirm that it’s an elliptical ield. When the steady voice illing the universe throws me of balance I stroke my face with my palms. Perhaps I do this too rudely, too quickly, because there’s something I’m hurrying to do: I must ind an old crow I can lovingly call Dad and look toward longingly! November 2015, Ürümchi 88 Carlos lara Cerulean rodeo translating éluard on kāʻanapali beaCh imaginary eulogy Cerulean rodeo Transient deibrillation of quotidian slur mentality with blood bucket * Depaginated hearing persona as fourth sun or ire’s warp and mbira nebula * Deregulated suggestion of weather’s amanuensis in a wig between winter and winter’s cream * Neutering symphonic verve with a looking bounty or beautiful Venn diagram death * Unusual depiction with tungsten interior and myriad of poplars in the tongue of light * Recuperative monitoring systems for emptied Aquarian blobs versus the dark web * Paginated difraction as exact bleeding feat as unblessed sky’s driveway druid * Defragmented conduction to sever palaver in discreet splendor with maple syrup * Substantiated spastics versus designated brain key in substandard housing projects * Translucent lecture on choler and the vertiginous kitchen within a turquoise bosom * Resourced mnemonics and European blow-up dolls or else a butcher blow-drying the fauna * 90 Clandestine trigger of chance surgical dispensation with acorns of light big enough to breathe * Proliferating perforation of the clinical layer of crows on Crow Beach * Connected triangulars within some exemplary she-male phantasms or mylar balloons * Triangular castration like immotile ocular theology or whatever slow scene corrodes * Patterning of the unequivocal substrata of other people or other pellucid octagons engorged * Cathartic seasons of proactivity without nuanced burst or engineering wheeze when vegetal baths go blind * Proactive recuperative nomination in auspicious lash distillery and similar Varsovian suit * Nonsensical egalitarian ministry as means of puriication of rubies and ice packs * Dehazarding strangulation for the sake of heat or French toast or rental car * Alchemical vortex fricative with reverse erotic lobbying of course meaning baseball tincture * Desensitized simulation elective or African architecture puddle with ruptured placemats * 91 Derivative orchestral polemics by three-digit code and four falconers’ words * Coalescing igmented mannerism in defense of immaterial savagery coupons cut from brass beings * Material for referential massacre or phony colonial equipment sandwich * The core of mnemonic juggling as surveillance by California sin or cashew butter * Breaching suggestive numerology without exposure to covetous comas that read through rose lenses * The signals of shuttling queries in regard to a mortal doorway or teaspoon in Saskatchewan * Sufering regions of temporal devotion versus North Star elliptical browsing of deiied dumplings * Residual sublimity in a survivor’s mirror squalor breach or blank black checkbook * Creative predestined wager on electrical polar bear experience with cranial torture pampas * Subliminal heart as subliminal purple searching for instance purple coroner cafeine * 92 Subliminal divination origin as prevalence of general neon fronds fallen by the bare bay * Retroactive sentimental pivoting bona ide and caustic with sporadic thespian tort riddles * Supernal gravitational botany foregoing any metaphorical quinine pie a la morgue * Adrenal wind gestation for a purposeful cipher of tangerine pursuits and pussies * Towing pure automatism like a puzzle of black lames in situ forgiving white trees * The bridge of coronal reasoning and sparrow-deepening with macro-distortion is a living creature * Dislodging atmospheric variety and somehow producing zealous totemic abuse tablets at dusk * Cerulean rodeo beyond a vestal conniption of spectra beyond non-breakfast and black mass 93 translating éluard on kāʻanapali beaCh everyone lives in Taiwan or China not to exist in the world of memories presence sponge there is a two and a three a dolphin of bread that is federal and warped smoking baby the fear of gazpacho at midnight the unmentionable outlandish ghost dunes stalks cut in the razor home red labrador all madness that’s all it is horror of ten wolves in time in a man in a shimmery pungent tux in a gorgeous canoe my life is stealth glass but it’s still mine image of love unright talking of huge alabaster talking of the unreined Camaro in your little putative residuum in general women try to prove a cause post-wreck and icy now now inancial chains and black crafts in American summer fable you prove by what you give and violently and remove the grand from larceny a little green rip in every M a screwy nest of dirt emboldened by the softest pain or name or circular sheet of wet whips and mainly this is so from Charleston South Carolina to Cubism all the entrances to the palace are locked from within it’s like Vanuatuan wallpaper and if I cared to break my word I would 94 imaginary eulogy where were we again never seeing in goodness’s camoulage or untrue distance ablation I’ll have the salamander bowl hold the pigeon pate as murals distract me dentists on the perimeter or printable lake blue Peshawar lube my tears don’t get out lest I lose them I’ve seen no such thing as white orally or in the pie of real gel real Gherasim Luca detaille putting ire froth of course in the visiting lanterns in the journalistic voir gilt supposing both desires keep their long labradorite schemes conjugating the few veterans I knew the few ducks in seaweed amputated door esperanza confetti for seeing doves doves doves come with more so many kittens so much mylar in my way volt spillage in my soul I’m on my way Bonsall diatribe skullduggery will the statues ever last again on the terrace I tell you to open wide slowingly the patience of indelible palaver oxygen the lightning of youth is a stab all at once why don’t you caress them a year apart so much bad stuf is slated to stop so much cake and jewelry destroyed in the hold-up unintelligible child truth god pumped you like a cowish like a medicine kept in the movies for corpses or candy boring comma good life it takes a good number to wear the desert down we’re not the only lungs that happen to appear in the here fowl weeds begin to drip on the glassy blue beam the smell of fennel or hydrochloric acid come with more your head is bald like a grocery store how do you deal with the womb of people 95 friederike mayröCker from fleurs translated by jonathan larson »the fairy-spook, thus JD, to just sit somewhere I mean bucolically. To sit somewhere and laugh, I mean on 1 bench, on this bench in front of the shoe-store, il giardino in your eyes. I felt as if I’d wanted to spell MUSICS ........ these unrecognizable igures that pass through my dreams, where do they come from how do they get together I’ve never seen them, felt them, since it’s raining scabiosas, etc., Pierrot, you whispered, as you turned over the page, the sentence not going on, broken of right in the middle the text as in GLAS by JD, proverbs I don’t like, you know, in this wheat ield we stood with the friends from America who suddenly appeared but I was unhitched and I was tired of having to stand and listen for so long namely snorting. So I let myself fall into the wheat ield, I say. Sterile is like SAINT = St. = I remember this word thus more exactly, the physiotherapist laid her hand on my HEAD that it should grow warm and the pain vanish. How inmost her inner warmth must be, that she should be able to hand over so much to me ........ for days on end not having pulled the curtains aside not opening the window, I’ve sealed myself of from the world, ach in tears the leaves of the olive tree in the dream the Carnic alps. Perhaps I’m crazy, my mother said 1 couple of years before her death, which I tried to talk her out of. Have lost 1 couple of limbs that’s how you’ve left me without arms and legs I miss you dearly, the following day this swarm o.tears where are you? Wind working on clouds, lace-blossoms in the window = (the secrets of conscience),« 12.10.14 97 »when I sit I sit (kitchen) leaning forwards and silver-ir plunges out of my eye: out of my memory, namely, then scrap the rest of the wood-honey from the plate isn’t it so wild duck, rank growth yellow pearl mimosa ........ 1 tiny piece of banana strawberry grape what color! Dominos you know, think of Roberta that she her mother’s fur coat (which was driven over by 1 car) gifted to 1 friend : 1 shock 1 tear 1 drop of blood in the fur etc. quietly quietly the curls grow along the brow the scissors of the tambourine and you kneel in front of the frogs there in the puddle the branchlets, isn’t it so and cry out »BRANCHLET!, BRANCHLET!«– and you start laughing and with your foot you ling 1 of the branchlets I mean fate’s conducting (I’m burning. Am your kitty or doll il giardino in your eyes ach in the cloth hall of my mania etc.) well yes like S’NOW and the like ........ I also stopped and stood there and we looked at each other: such 1 Ischl! thereon this genre painting near the end of summer, or whichever. 1 heavenly hint or just the new donning o.cap, sewing the interior and cleaning. I also took my pleasure in it: in this gala : that her = Angelika Kaufmann trembling like Cy Twombly beyond the margins of the page, which charmed me ........ I mean ‘s the memory-ear falling asleep, slumbering, »between ........«« Juliana Kaminskaja approached me and said, you look like your poems, 23.10.14 98 »in 1 cup cornelian cherry or rose hip red headlet, and fold hands then the crows staged their beautiful play on the sky etc., I felt as if I wanted to spell the music meanwhile, it rained scabiosas, since it rained scabiosas, you know. The physiotherapist laid her hand on my head that it should grow warm and the pain vanish: how mighty must the warmth of her body have been that she could give of so much of it to me ........ sleepy head you!, inally swallowed 1 host, JD, naked wet foot wears headscarf, someone says to me in 1 dream that he has bathed 153 times in his life so far then he peeped through the door-gap or the judas-hole, which alarmed me, how often the sun on your head shimmering: reveling, WRINKLE OF THE EYELID, as Marcell Feldberg. As I my inger. Me in the inger. I mean slaughtered raising the wounded hand to the stif eye and cried out »no! no!« because it was the red poppies (the Trabi that time), etc. for Susanne Neumann: I mean act of love since you repaired the typing machine for me, what were you doing lossing around in my mouth oral cavity, il giardino in your eyes ach heavenlet (valley of tears) it’s unbelievable!, I had taken this PRETTY AS PICTURE evening to bed. Ach the boys! : the paramedics took my blood pressure, the vows of the paramedics, the water service of the Sicilian water houndlet, 1 mezzosoprano on the meadow, I say, we rushed along we : cracked open late-summer’s eye on the horizon ........ have been listening to Fauré today, have the clear tear / ach so what! that at 1 great distance I only 1 couple of words on the phone, lashes o.silver longing, you know, I mean ........ ‘s the memory-ear, 9 o’clock in the evening falling asleep, slumbering, am out of my mind,« 27.10.14 99 »I mean it astounds me for about 6 ½ years now I’ve been reading from Jacques Derrida’s GLAS. The book has been read apart its seam or seal has dissolved itself it’s as sensitive as glass: 1 favorite color (it was THE POSTCARD by Jacques Derrida wherein I read daily before) Because I kept misplacing it, I’ve had to repurchase it 3X etc.) But back to GLAS which means death knell. I experience miracles with GLAS as far as my writing is concerned: I open the book e.g. to page 142 and catch sight of 3 columns of enigmatic text. At left the efort o.Hegel, in the middle the citation of 1 Jean Genet text (»like 1 thief’s diary, so that 1 will have to run through it in every which way, in order to cut or collect all the lowers there«) and at the right, in cursive print, kidneywards, 1 X more 1 citation of Jean Genet’s. Well yes, GLAS is my morning prayer: 1 word makes 1 word sequence, that I begin writing into my sketchbook: I let myself become infected with this language I throw up I throw up mind and mood in utmost arousal etc. On page 289 the book ends in the midst of things with the wordlet »from«: 1 heart- rending goodbye. I begin reading the book again, at night it lies on my pillow and I love it ........ yes yes this drive home: soft as when 1 sled over snow frozen solid. It’s the honey-licking it’s the consecrated it’s the scent of this book it’s 1 tumble of language. To my feet the little roses it was 5 and I wanted to inish sleeping to continue writing,« 30.10.14 100 »at my morning window« »swallow the host ach clear-cut blond wood, over the dinner table the lower lip (DALÍ). I style myself, my haircut, I puzzle over what day of the week, look back on my dream as I awake as if I were looking over 1 landscape that I had raced through, I ask myself, that time when I was writing this poem, how it changed. I mean expulsion of words: even in those times I let the doves lutter, I fantasized »1 morning window«: »my morning window« – that was not etc. The sentiment too lat: had I been listening to myself?: no depth : presumably 1 bad poem. VIGNETTES : I wrote vignettes the moon as 1 »jubilant guest« : 1 may not write like that : that just rattles, no lesh (of the poem) even though, 1 real (even if unexact) shadow namely the survived war (»shattered helmet of my church tower«), written on August 18, 1946, I was 22 then, had 1 long way before me, etc., was romantic was solitary. Well yes, I waved around for the longest time with Eros, lower and reverie, evermore these PRETTY AS PICTURE marginalia, at the feet (red poppy, delirium), wrinkle of the island (eyelid), »for every date 1 drop of blood«, JD. In the present time to be cared for (»I’m cared for«). Meanwhile, he photographed her: that time with my irst book between her bared breasts. I’d enjoyed it: this GALA : Angelika K. how she trembled beyond the page margin, while the cones I mean the sparse wood etc. and we felt around for the new virtues, (I thought of Cy Twombly),« 1.11.14 101 »agnus dei the TINY FEET bound together, 1 tuftlet of white lowers in the mouth (to wipe the eyes with the back of the hand, I awake with a smile meanwhile my foot over stony preterite etc., the little plastic-lamb in its stablet stands between rotten raspberries and nappy samani woe is me I watched how the green bud of the amaryllis began to unfold itself there I held my breath, the laying out of 1 dead bee in 1 hand towel that’s unbelievable, bucolic namely am torn to pieces. 2 diminutives after another that won’t work. The bud of the amaryllis has brought forth 1 red blossom overnight that’s unbelievable ........ ½ public Valkyrie ........ ran 1 kilometer around my apartment today,) woe is me the multiplication of the lilacpeltlet on my skin etc. left ingerlet fallen asleep meanwhile, it thundered, spooned 1 meal, meanwhile the red mallow in the red dawn. 1 dog’s barking woke me up, but there was no dog, the townlet’s houses diced down above it »the great alpine chain« = Goethe. I sit there every morning in fact in my kitchen that wears 1 gloriole etc., already ‘s the birdie warbling the dirge, you know. Woe is me I’m 1 torn human, woe is me, I’m treated like 1 child, woe is me nearness of death, I mean it was 1 Kahnweiler day. Horriied they glanced at me I mean as I wanted to part with the words »these little roses belong to me«: someone had given me this bouquetlet in the course of the evening and put it in 1 glass of water etc. the trees with rings around the eyes ........ 1 hyacinth bent toward me, I mean the St. Nicholas in Bari you know ........« for Nikolaus Brinskele 6.11.14 102 »this our roped party, I say from my sleep, the plastic-lambkin like plunder the tousled red-cheeked apple in the stable Franz Liszt tears apart my veins. What concerns the art of this yg. Russian poet I didn’t admire her language so much as her intimate = hidden imagination, but this wasn’t grasped woe is me what I feel but can’t describe (Beethoven), the pain walks back-and-forth in my body and sometimes he squats in this sometimes in that corner there where the föhn-clouds blossom in the westerly sky and change color, after the big storm in the night the yg. trees felled in the street, isn’t it so, I say »but see the branchlets« whereupon you glance at me namely in tears ........ it thunders in my chest and it lightning lashes in my skull and I scratch up my face with my black nails, or the woven fabric e.g., as little grapes I mean the luttering smoke of my ........ since we with the car: past the DOG-AREA »I met him in Barcelona etc.« Woe is me what 1 looking back (in little jabs) my 1st French book in grade school with pleasant every day sketches: the butcher, the dog, the vehicle, the cyclist, the lantern: »dans la rue« ach how charming this was! – After 1 half page am I DOPEY = after I’d written half 1 page ........ this breakdown you know, 1 open tavern, as Ely with wet garb: he was to be no longer able to hold back the urge, my God / when I read in GLAS, I receive 1 text that I myself would have liked to have written, I’m touched because the shadow of JD’s writing falls upon me = upon my mind etc. I’m charmed and enlamed while airplanes and gusts of wind, I say, namely so blows the wind in my innards (because he looked to mirror me so, I found it hard to bear him ........) with 1 raw tongue I lick the crumbs from the table, ach as single berries of 1 grape bunch and bundle in the depths of my throat and I struggle for air I mean, TONSURE,« 7.11.14 103 »I promptly turned 13, ‘s the istlet pressed up against th’mawlet : no! 2 diminutives 1 after the other: that won’t work, play dead, close the eyes »AS ERROR« on the blood pressure measuring-device (was I confused, etc.), ach spring-tenderly billy goatlet in my dream while opening eyes pastose dark-red of my sailor-dress ........ was 1 ighter pilot in the 1st World War, the sun’s fawn in the condition of the forest etc., hamster wheel TIME, the moon as vignette, you know, and planted hydrangeas in front of your bag, well yes 1 twilight-sleep : 1 Samaritan with 1 cravat in the »little café«, night-lip red (torn) by Bernadette Haller, Jean Genet in the vase I remember, garden-make-up in dainty air etc., this tear-literature, heartfelt greetings with larkspur I mean LUNA!, the cold points on your body your open arms when we see each other again!, listen here! it was somewhat like I read from the presence of your face: the reeled out lowers namely that it startled me and I jumped away. The landscape I’ve watched incessantly: mountains valleys and pastures meads miracle of the stars (domin0) gesture of glory ........ the beloved mangy Christmas tree from the year before on the tablet you know, your musing, I’m cracked up and crazed,« 9.11.14 104 »I dreamt I SANK in your pair of eyes that looked like this in each of your pretty large eyes loated 1 rectangle in which fairytale characters romped about ........ then you ran away with the words »must go to the theatre to sing XERXES«. Woe is me I bar-belled over the ocean and listened to the opera to Xerxes o.Georg Friedrich Händel’s (she asked, do you still think of Georg H. sometimes) nothing but little Honeggers, »it’s too early to regard etamine«, JD, Mom sewed me tiny dresses out of etamine ........ slept long today and dreamt 1 lot: if you hadn’t woken me up I would have slept over into the drunklet = into eternity etc. We phoned in the morning mostly (but with hands full of lowers, JD), I always want to learn something from you but you say, I can’t talk about anything in the morning I haven’t experienced anything yet! this alpine glow slipped from my hand, this moss in erring at the sill of the house in D. Soletti on the kitchen loor 1 cat plate, when you’re on 1 TRIP when you hearten me that I nearly lose my mind, the reeled-out lowers and 1 rain in the window. Listen here it may have been like that, like 1 violarain, leur in the shower. That time in the 50s when we read the writings of Konrad Bayer for the 1st time, you said »I don’t understand 1 word, etc.« 105 the swallow turns southward the bushes wilt but I’d waved to the beloved mountains every morning from the window, the dew in the gardenlet, resounding of impressions I mean most agreeable LUNA and branchlet the thin thread of your voice from far away. In the morning »efusion of the holy spirit« b.Arnulf Rainer 1952 watercolor on paper, etc.« 14.11.14 106 saWako nakayasu girl f Waits on the street Corner of limber intentions horns, delivery of girl f Waits on the street Corner of limber intentions I can see her body pressed into what is commonly acknowledged as empty space as if the angular turn of the street could inversely cut her open, as if she was not already open, spilt, missing something here and there. I acknowledge her as I crawl by, she acknowledges me as I roll myself into a ball of tin foil, tightly pack myself in, to weather the impending ight. The team of tin foil balls is usually disqualiied pretty early, and that’s just ine with me, I’m wussy that way. That said, there are a whole bunch of tin foil balls gathering behind Girl F here on this corner that is quickly converting itself into a platform, which makes me just a touch anxious. Last time we only used four, but this time I can’t count what must be hundreds, thousands of tin foil balls, oh here come a couple more Girl Scouts with the foil that was used for tonight’s roasted turkey dinner. Ball it up, little girls. Who roasts turkey on a regular weeknight that’s not even a holiday. That kind of troop leader. This is the kind of troop leader I need to keep Girl F away from – to the naked eye, Girl F may look like an innocent girl on an innocent corner, but I have been made of tin foil for quite a long time now, and let me tell you, do I know how these things work. Soon the corner will be an isle, for starters. Then an island, then a mountain. Just let me make sure I make it back safely and I will tell you everything, about every single forehead I have had the privilege of hitting and bouncing, hitting and bouncing, of of and of of and of of again. 108 horns, delivery of Don’t look directly at the horns of Girl H. The aggregate time you spend with your retina focused on either of her horns will, by some estimates, be equivalent to the number of speech acts you make, supposedly voluntarily, that will come back to haunt, bite, or exploit you in the end. Calculated in one act per microsecond. The horns of Girl G, however, are relatively innocuous. She gets them delivered weekly to her home. You can look, even stare, at them with no direct consequence. Sometimes she covers them with a homemade felt cozy, but that’s just for efect and there is no physical harm in having retinal contact with the horns of Girl G. This ofer, however, is not valid in the realms of spiritual, ethical, micro- and macro-emotional realms of your well-being and that of the world, so I would still caution you against removing the felt cozy from the horns of Girl G, even if she invites you. Especially if she invites you. 109 george eConomou rough trade--anaCreon rough, rougher, & roughest trade “In representing more adequately what translation does, and in raising awareness even among translators of the implications of textual instability for their task, this book may encourage us to translate diferently––to expand our notion of what translation can do, and to imagine modes of translating that break the mold in which the reigning (if often disguised) discourse of originality and derivation seems to have trapped us.”––Karen Emmerich, Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (Bloomsbury, 2017), p.31. Having explored the possibilities of and on for several years of translating poems from ancient Greek in stages I thought of as rough, rougher, and roughest, I made a irm commitment in the early spring of 2017 to the efort by formalizing it in two sets of translations following this three-way paradigm entitled “Theocritus: Rough, Rougher, Roughest Trade and Commentary” for a special issue of Golden Handcufs Review: “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou Art Translated” (Vol. 11, #23, 2017). Put directly, the idea behind doing what I have come to call the “rough stuf” involves starting with a rendition that presents a version that is as faithful to the content and form of the original as I can make, followed by two more versions guided by the comparative and superlative degrees of “rough,” levels conceived and executed with the intention of exploring new and unexpected contexts and textures for the poem rather than by a wish to produce a more inished adaptation or do-over of the level of “rough.” As the “roughest” version in the latest addition to this project from Anacreon presented here begs, these inal renditions can also––often should––be read as independent poems. My urge to reiterate––to tell again and again but with a diference––the poem in translation mirrors in its own way the textual condition of the variance of originals that Karen Emmerich so brilliantly explores in her rich and important new book Literary Translation and the Making of Originals. Though arriving a year later, it comes in good time for me to enjoy a sense of conirmation and newfound inspiration for this work in progress. 111 anaCreon (c. 563 – 478 BC) quoted by Athenaeus (c. 170 – 230 AD) The Deipnosophists, 12. 533e, following his observation that in these lines Anacreon says Artemon “shot from poverty to luxury”: In the past he appeared in a shabby wasp-wasted covering, with wooden knuckle-boned dice in his ears, and a bald oxhide round his ribs, the never-washed wrap of a useless shield, hanging with women who sell bread or who choose to whore, pulling of a life of fraud––that arch rogue Artemon, whose neck was often strapped to the wheel or whipping stock, whose back was often lashed with a leather whip and his hair and beard plucked bare. But now low-life Kyke’s son rides in a carriage sporting gold earrings and handles an ivory parasol oh so very ladylike. * 112 Once he was deeply down and out, and really looked it in his shredded threads––tricky Artie, who lived of recruited boys and girls on the street while dodging the cops and his competitors, too often without success. Yet here he is now rolling by on fancy wheels with windows down and volume up. * 113 Once he popped out at Coney Island Hospital he was bound to turn hedge fund tricks and Ponzi schemes–– that fool for fraud, Marty–– and raise the price of life saving drugs ive thousand percent with his impishly venal smirk ear to ear but heading now with a hop skip and a jump into jail back in Brooklyn. That’s the way the money goes–– Pop goes the weasel! 114 harriet tarlo from Cut floWers cut lowers why would they when it came to it lasting longer long days before dawn sees a fair light crows & robins upright on the wall look out, learn to travel in deep time blood ish & bone, ind new ventures prepare, parse, prey for vegetables 116 ofering a night’s accommodation only one understanding, staying there while dog eats breakfast neurotic we may not enjoy this maybe checking all the time still here really we made her she ate it apparently empty 117 I thought it was on the cover, on cover shredding quilt imprisoned access to silk, to skin not an amazing machine give yourself a little lift, lovely listening to nothing, not radio waves listening to loud in the night thudding doors wild 118 waiting for the percentage to cut out access to screen stage writing in wood frame hostile hacking against running a temperature , then out night-gathering nuts & fruits, moulden berries 119 lowly land, we lost years of it (in this country) when all came sliding, side-fall in all of all quietside before spring dives too early draws out dawn grows colder enlightens earlier everyday too late for address redress some kind of season 120 slept at all the wrong tones, tines slower than warmer, the train four-square seats facing, make light of legs look - between people - look tessellation oblong out at weather who actually comes around any more stuck for single words 121 jorgenrique adoum eCuador hiroshima mon amour task and vaCations the majarajah and the salamanders CoinCiobedienCe pastology hotel saint-jaCques translated by katherine m. hedeen and víCtor rodríguez núñez eCuador 1. the geography It is an unreal country bordered by itself, split by an imaginary line and still sunk in the cement at the pyramid foot. If not, how could the foreigner have her picture taken openlegged over my homeland as if above a mirror, the line right below her sex and on the back: “Greetings from la mitad del mundo.” (Children, great eyes surrounded by skeleton, and an Indian crying century mountains behind a burro.) 123 2. the memory The soul decayed, the pasillo aches in the rootnerve, and I, a Pavlov dog, in one jump sit down at the door of the tinsmith’s (it was always daytime there) to snif around the street I went down to go back and they keep on hitting me. When you still don’t have a homeland but for this irremediable sadness underneath the pride, homeland is the memory pocket where I take this out: corncobbed Indians in Catholic mass drunkenness and kickshelled on Sunday afternoon, the cemetery where I was a mate to so many classmates to review the law tables: this, bits of an ancient animal, this is enough for me, I rebuild the torrid patriotic paleolithic folkloric completely, the republic cracks, the commonlaw clay where we slip to our liking. (You too, tiny dinosaur bone, your ankle where you’re tied to me, great quartered girl, and your other ankle where you’re tied, because I am your banishment.) And the song lulling the murdered man so he’ll die without saying a thing and making the dog sufer to see how its gland ills up. Gladly. Just to experiment. 124 3. history No one chose the iguana: Saurian military periods: irst Monday on earth where the Pleistocene is still the future the Bolshevik talks about. When the Beagle docks, the autochthonous quadruman still doesn’t know he’s defeated God and gets scared, crosses himself with salt, repentant: “Only the vulture is right.” (The turtle, with its historical sadness, still dragging its laziness shell on its back.) Volcano islands and beast, Darwin data. A slow hungry fauna follows him in the hungry landscape: only the vulture rules. “Harassed for spreading false rumors about natural selection and survival of the ittest.” I was talking about the banished comrades. 125 hiroshima mon amour* 1. the Cenotaph insCription Around the second night of that day I gathered my family in the hollow of my hand caressed dry sediment until the verge shoulders in dust crushed hair not even pieces of the bride or half a child not even skeleton checked for teeth and shoes recognizing the name only from the lavor divining in which street I’m sorry I don’t know why the burning didn’t reach me why my shadow didn’t incrust the splendor along with yours in the stone letter to the happiest generations and I can’t ask you Perch settle deposit mill sawdust ferocious explosion only for the wind to scatter your bone syllables and even the greeting even the voice even the breath and the cough pushing you down the roads and the cry dissolving you with the years and the river cry openmouthed fear lye Peaceless for the last time Maybe this way the error maybe maybe it won’t need to be repeated 126 2. robert junk’s horse It ran up against bones and metals in the walls against stones and unread deaths statue water cursed the cranium rehearsing the whinny it learned for this century searching for the eyes it had until the temperature seized its gallop tempering its mane and treading on the whips that hung from its very hide it smelled of sadstep helmet grass or stable no longer on the earth You’d have to kill it so it wouldn’t sufer but who can kill now so sick of death it makes you want to throw up and we who said we’d sufered so much so our shape would be wiped out with just one blow before time so the hero with his compassionate helixes would come what bird more human than the American would devour us Today the murderer and even more the soldier loved because it’s easier than forgetting I rummaged beneath the rubble and there’s nothing but rubble remains of swearwords like humanism god see you later I love you that we played with in childhood (Where is tenderness? It’s turned to ash And love? It disappeared in the water. Where is my brother? He dried out) Nothing’s left but this coagulation of surprise trotting exterminated frantically not knowing which spine where it chose the wrong hell it went back to the future hitting up against today against the fears 127 3. letter from the reverend kiyoshi tanimoto, methodist pastor Yesterday, August 15, was the happiest day in our history We were told that we were to hear important news. We were the ruins of to the station in ruins where a loudspeaker had been placed. Cemetery marching fellow mummies whose bandages opened the animal necessity to know what’s going on, why it’s resuscitated. Those who ended up eyeless leaning on their daughters on crutches those daughterless. Then we listened. It was the voice of the Emperor himself speaking to us to men as common as us so incredibly common that we’d never listened to him. We could hear him in person voice for the irst time in four dynasties. When we realized it we were crying I don’t think we’ll ever feel so happy again. He spoke of what had happened to us and we already knew but thanks to so much destruction we were listening to him. Oh wonderful blessing to have deserved it. We are satisied with such a voracious sacriice. 128 4. monument to the Children “It weighs” said the girl holding the bit of paper between her ingers “too much” If you make a thousand tiny birds you’ll get better (empiricism of someone who had nothing but measles or tonsillitis) It’s so hard to fold it wooden bird tin bird bad little bird Surrounding her kneeled down addition tables gathered adding units to certainty I put down ive and take twenty to the column of gullibility In a corner someone made a dove and threw it on the pile where the lock grew to make it live even if it was a hoax helping the woman project to know what it’s like to be a grown up running down igures like in school years ages When the choir was going to sing “ive hundred eight” they swallowed the number with a fear sip She couldn’t inish the other wing Then the children who were left went to knock on the doors’ extinguished coals they went into the undone room stones cleaning their irst doubt with the backs of their hands they stirred bones collected papers ruin wrappers newspapers where nothing had happened yet and on the stiled city streets along the walls where the shadow of a man on his way to work lingered the tiny hands folded day and night as they cried they folded as they grew tiny birds pink yellow green blue white so no one dies that way before dying goodly so each one has their quota secured various times a thousand doves various times a thousand days Because the murderer moves everywhere tourist tour selling his carrot with gunshots returns to the site kicking the cat so the ghosts don’t recognize him brains marrow lights lilacs in the bar among the timid Japanese survivor breasts how many dollars to admire the monument the ashes to place his author signature at the foot of the fortythousand identiied and the eightythousand who were never named a thing to photograph smile disigured girls 129 as if we could forget as if we could sleep yes Souvenirs from Hiroshima Souvenirs from the wonderful world of childhood Who gives a fuck about love or poetry now if we don’t use them anymore Goodbye Greek statue sciences of man golden proportion Goodbye God 130 task and vaCations to be being –but deeprooted– and ind the trace of our own toes from our own steps and not hiding in the other made for us in parts with signs ID card 251/99/7 anobody voting the whodoeshethinkheis guy poorguy the one who’s changed so much to be able to be –if you could– honest intact like an animal or at least not fall into respectable citizen the one who has it all igured out (the heartjunk in the bottom drawer) or the one who only demands what he’s given or the one who only loves what he should or the one who with all his halves has never been alone and to take a break from yourself wake up all at once occupying your nothingness stuck in your deman as if you were Hindu and died and it was true you come back lizard spider dwarf normallikeeveryoneelse wellbehaved oddball cadaver burglars by phone talking about some bones sent in the mail and to be the addressee get them back whole like you had them with all my musing splinters with my dear problematic nails and then to forgive me (even if I laughed so much) for having gone and left me waiting 131 the maharajah and the salamanders plaza with the taciturn crowd the sicklysweet of its ancient quadruped open in the drought the bridge shrine to the river memory defeated by the last squadrons of the rain dust wickedness its drifting fabrics trap young girls shroud the great ly of their bellies gathering lies it is poverty scratching away at its lies bodies in exodus in the evening remains of the battle against midday in search of shade like someone seeking a tomb easier than the black umbrella palate market of small sticks pieces petals of things from someday stones of a country ended never was wagons of the void dragged along by bovine skeletons from another prophecy a thousand years rawboned cows a thousand years hides gnawed at the joints of history (but somewhere on earth I gripe because the beer’s lukewarm) at the market no shoppers or onlookers charcoal food feldspar cereal and mica mucilaginous drinks and the birds screaming syllables more human than desert wind instruments merciful parrots tarnished in their box with predictions of goodluck charmers of snakes defanged bitten long ago by friends and disciples every beggar is a philosophy survivor every man is untouchable and drones epidemic litanies in this monastery of sores or pustule terrace paralysis and scrofula consumptives gilded by fever from the inside mangy syphilitics hemiplegics women with ataxia and gonorrhea women with hydrocephalus and cholera dazed by melanosis 132 saints twisted by wisdom tightrope walkers spasmodic cataleptic rickets hypertrophy emphysema languid mystical in agony skeletons lined in brown parchment skeletons wrapped in mosquito netting two knees I recall of another leg two teeth on a cheek old religion relic and the woman whose forehead was washed by widowhood tries to defend what the dead man left her of a breast for the new wedding chews on a betel leaf adorned unsettled by it her red gob of spit spider swallowing up the scorpion from the loor and her furious love feet keep the mythological dogs at bay they brush by her sexual papaver dampen her age beneath her soft hairs (but in some hotel on earth the English woman asks me how much sugar and I respond with my room number 32) near the sky on the hill the maharajah’s palace and the maharajah’s hunting lodge and the maharajah’s zoo and the maharajah’s stables and the maharajah’s summer home and the maharajah’s guard barracks and the maharajah’s resting place and the maharajah’s guest house the temple is near I don’t know which century uninished by architects prophets of ruin the last gods representatives of the rock content in their sculpture their bodies clustered from desire the changing baroque lower of their copula giving audience to the lasting oblivion delegations procession of summer cripples their stuttering in another tongue their ingers upon a tallow lame not burning their antiquity or the crust of the antiquity of their poverty or the bacilli of their poverty leaving behind alms price for an ashmark between eyebrows to be carried away by the wind like a sign of the rubble to follow and the maharajah’s concubines and elephants 133 (and now somewhere on earth other delegations ungrudgingly gather their coins from memory for another less content god solitary in his wood and another secondrate maharajah on his horse) one day this too will be the human condition I think 134 CoinCiobedienCe in my cyclopedic yet even more mathematic ignorance i’ve just learned a group can be one in other words i’m not as alone as i thought i keep myself company unawares but my other i’s bore me so much i’m always better of alone than in bad company and so once more we’re back to square one and by the way i’m not breaking the rules of the state of siege we live in 135 pastology againstthegrain againsttraic countercurrent againsttherain counterheart and counteroblivion counterblow of the been surviving counterspouse againstdestiny and against governments which are all that’s absurd about destiny counterclarity and counterlogic againstgeography (because it was against passports dictators continents and against custom which is badder than our dictators*) against you and your i’mafraids against me and my backward certainty against ourselves in other words counterall and all for what 136 hotel saint-jaCques wakemeupearly tomorrow so we can relove and redo body pairedup before the day splits us in two and slathers your watch your stocking cognac and hardens the evening wax in your havens and closes on me your gateways where night burns and washes your hands that having me so touched they always wake with a scent of my exsorrows 137 notes * Title of a film by Alain Resnais, based on a script by Marguerite Duras. * Because dictators were already the worst and because that’s how it’s said in my country and I’m not sorry. 138 aditi maChado Wear simple Clothes Marceline? she says, that’s mostly cotton. We have left her a pile of cloths in the corner mottled by the angular dusk visiting peripherally. For the moment, suicient to say: she views us a strange deacon, we minister ably. Location: she is centrally located. She does not mention muslin, she fears velvet, has had fourteen coninements. . . . . . . . . ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... . . . Today she worships the word GLOVE, especially when marked with the use of a woman. We have not read in weeks and are most attentive to outward aspects, the mellow insinuation of light through the closures bursting open as though by buxom strain from the ambrosial child within bursting open unduly late, for the efects of the child are upon every thing now and the less we read the more we tend the reverberations of our 140 impecunious subject. Presently she deranges the furniture. A sudden, pure stillness. . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A dream. But whose. A red zone beyond the scrim. The absence of reading is a bit lacerating. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................... I feel my throat, she says today, I feel my throat swelling. I feel my belly swelling. Then I lose consciousness. When I crush it, there is a pang, then there is a climax that stops my breathing. I am as though drunk, I cannot restrain myself, I tremble but not from fear, she (mimics a frisson) says. I don’t think about the wrong thing I just did. I sit apart from everyone so that I can touch it. That’s when I’m caught. Once the climax has passed I become dejected. Sometimes my breathing speeds up. She says, my limbs are all aching. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 . . . . . . . Her intellect is dull. Periods of disillusion appear to rouse her perversions. Some attention might be brought to the nature of being caught. For the moment, suicient to say: degeneration, depression, electriication by silk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................... ....................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mottled by light. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mottled by movements of shadow, the pile of mottled cloths. A sudden, pure stillness. She is awake. We have not read in weeks and are attentive to outward aspects of the abyssal room in which we mind the child and the child dissimulates. Bare shelves. Embarrassing lack of speech. Kidskin gloves, preferred when marked with the use of a woman. Adoration of the left glove. Desecration of the right. Semaphores. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sometimes we wield her like a sieve against the 142 light, afternoon mesh, and are able to view a distant feature, water tower. This is our human interest, which vibrates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Today we note a brightness of the eye, a pouting, certain kinds of locutions and retorts. Calicot, she says, cretonne, these make no sound, little cries of nothing. What did she dream? She dreamed thickly furred animals. We have not read in weeks. The sensation is of violet leaking through the blinds. Epidermal sensations are necessary and decisive. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... When she tears silk, she says, it is not out of sadistic violence but the violence of better understanding it. An expressive manner of speaking, an ingenious way of doing, and a lexibility with time, place, and person, as only the practice of an ancient passion would suggest. For the moment, suicient to say: copacetic. . . . . . . . 143 ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... Angular cloths, mottled dusk. Confusion. Or depth, as by inverse inlorescence, talismanic, into which the pile of cloths is deranged. Their rectoverso scintillate diferently. This is intense. Ocular. Presently, she pees. It wets the dress. She palpates the textile. We ofer the anecdote of a comrade (mimics). Ever since he became impotent he is given to dipping his penis in milk, which gives to him the sensation of velvet. No erection follows. He drinks the milk with indiference. The sensation of velvet, we ofer, is not the sensation of light. Light? she squawks. I’m perverse? You’re perverse! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................... ....................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . continual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . mottling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . of the cl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . oth piles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 ....................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wet cerebrum. . . . . . ....................................... We are keen to read and therefore distracted from the present. In wielding the silk, she has soiled it, evidently by placing it against her genitalia. We refrain from asking precisely what sort of satisfaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................... ....................................... It is suiciently clear the cloth does not intercede for the masculine body. In fact, it appears to agitate of its own accord, by dint of its solidity, brilliance, odor, and sound, properties nevertheless secondary to its tactile qualities, which are variegated, subtle, and bountifully responsive to the suggestions of a reined epidermis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................... She is organically motivated. She is sensoriocensorious. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................... 145 ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... . . . . . . . . . . In the absence of reading every thing vibrates out of orbit. Shadow-mottled. Wetmottled. The epidermis feels itself becoming passive. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................... ....................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . shadow-mottled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . wet-mottled . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................... ....................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the absence of reading milky description coats us. This is intense. Picturing it in the mind (mimics a frisson) 146 cannot compensate for it. Palpating, she says, palpating the textile is necessary here. Must the silk, we ask, be clean? Would a bit of mottled silk be entirely, we ask, devoid of charm? Would a man do, clad in silk, as silk does? A singe of activity on the brow lit by angular light. Light? she squawks. You’re perverse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... Was the girl dressed in silk or did she by the softness of her skin simply resemble silk? Is she aroused by the animals in her dreams? Does she associate fresh silk with some abstract notion of virginity? Etc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................... ....................................... ....................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . Other examples of haptically stimulating materials: roses, milt. 147 This poem (re-)translates portions of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault’s report “Passion érotique des étofes chez la femme,” which appeared in the Archives d’anthropologie criminelle in 1908. 148 randi Ward photos from hestur Hestur, which literally means Horse, is one of eighteen storm-swept islands situated northnorthwest of Scotland, approximately halfway between Iceland and Norway, in the North Atlantic. These remote Faroe Islands, a self-governing archipelago under the sovereignty of Denmark, are home to ifty thousand people. During her last six months in the Faroe Islands, Randi Ward lived on the island of Hestur. Fewer than twenty people reside in the island’s lone village. There are no longer any children living in the village, and nearly all of the remaining residents are over the age of 65. Faroese politicians have decided that an undersea tunnel, currently slated for construction between the islands of Streymoy and Sandoy, will not incorporate Hestur. Being connected to the main island of Streymoy, via tunnel, was considered Hestur’s last hope for revitalization. vaan nguyen Chaos for innoCenCe in the pyrenees translated by adriana X jaCobs Chaos A fountain exits the city to water the village. On the way—roadkill, a stoplight, a car Overhead—helicopters hovering late at night returning from the north. Later, the girl from Dimona arrives. Later, buildings in Beirut collapse. This age is an ongoing epidemic, poetry’s slaughter. A bubble of dying butterlies. 161 for innoCenCe A seagull and her hair, always seasons of sickness In her cup She serves a tralalalala spell from this toxic brew. Hold him! For me. Revolt— He’s naked. Notes of eucalyptus and sage Dung rise I’ll write on leaves because people are fed up. Outside the window, foliage screens the noise Sweat under the sun Almost a breeze but no storm. You taught me how to grab pomegranates Before they fall Careful, they are bursting on the ground. The doors are locked again, they took the shoes But left the laces. This poem is written For the sake of innocence. I wish I could love you now The sky is grey and two birds have taken of from here. Tanks Are standing quietly in the desert. On the bus From Abu Dis, An old poet wonders If his dead wife Is his last one. 162 in the pyrenees We sat in an indoor pool in Firenze, staring at two hunters dragging wild boars down autumn slopes you met me without a map, with my high heels and combed hair living with that guy who starved me I am always living with someone and hungry. At the evening market, by the monastery, a seller pointed at his wares a doll lying under a toy car bang bang the peddler cried then ofered me panther milk and a siren passed by I thought about that stairwell in Tel Aviv, waiting for the shock of the Fajr it’s happening now since the last Minister of War, I am someone else. 163 hagiWara sakutaro on translating poetry translated by sho sugita The haiku that Miyamori Asataro translated into English is said to be fairly popular outside of Japan, but the impressions transmitted for foreigners through those translations are questionable. Most likely, the level of understanding of the Japanese is either through The Mikado or a reading of haiku as haikai humor. Too often, Japanese authors revered by foreigners are not purely Japanese, but rather the conceptualization of “Fujiyama” or “geisha girls” they would like to accommodate without any inconsistencies, a kind of “tempura frying” of pseudo-Japan. Because they do not understand what is truly Japanese, what is truly Japanese makes them yawn. Perhaps the reason Miyamori’s translations are accepted in the West is due to his translations of typical haikai-esque haikus. Komiya Romioka, who wanted to provide examples for the impossibility of translations, references the following translation by Miyamori: The ancient pond! A frog plunged—splash! (koike ya kaeru tobikomu mizu no oto) Komiya claims that the rhetorical axis of haiku is placed on particles like ya from koike ya that serves as a kireji 1. In this particular example, ya implies a temporal development, accentuating the ancient pond as something that existed from long ago. In addition, he also claims the particle implies a permanent idea of reality in conjunction with the aforementioned idea of temporality, as the two are displayed against an emotional subjectivity. The poem is split by the kireji, and the following kaeru tobikomu mizu no oto (“a frog plunged—splash!”) is expressed as an “immediate impression of the real.” By cancelling out an “immediate impression” with “permanent reality,” Basho’s quiet view of “nothingness” is achieved. However, Miyamori translates this ya by using the “!” of foreign languages. The symbol “!” merely signals an interjection, so it cannot possibly express a conceptualization of the temporal or existential. Because kireji like ya used in haiku holds a wealth of meaning in this complex language, Komiya states that this very point is most problematic in translations. Komiya also writes on the associativity of language. For example, the work koike (“pond”) can directly associate itself with ponds in old temples or the small moss-covered pools in gardens for the Japanese imagination; in the West, they would probably imagine the bright blue lakes found in the Alps or Switzerland, because they do not have the same kind 1 Lit. “cutting word,” a Japanese particle used in poetry to often provide emphasis/es on the preceding words. Because Japanese poetry does not traditionally use line breaks, the efect could be thought of as analogous (though this is only my own interpretation for the function of kireji) 165 of humidity in Japan. A frog jumping into such an image can’t possibly be of any poetic value. Moreover, a “frog” has a special poetic value attached to it, making us feel a kind of seasonality speciic to our experience of summer. For a Westerner, these special associations are probably replaced with hideous bullfrogs. Komiya’s criticism seems common sense and obviously truthful, and it’s even strange to think that it caused a problem in the literary coteries. Even for someone like myself without much knowledge of foreign languages can read the English translations of Basho and think his haiku was not properly interpreted. To be honest, reading these translations is too much monkey business, and I can’t help but to always bust out in laughter. What is more convincing of the impossibility in translation is that these translations are by a respected language scholar like Mr. Miyamori and regarded as a “classic translation.”2 Someone long ago translated the poem hana no kumo kane wa ueno ka asakusa ka as the following: The clouds of lowers Where are the bells from? Ueno or Asakusa Westerners read this and responded by asking, “is this a poem about a funeral?” For such an eccentric question, their reasoning was very convincing. With the word “lower,” the Japanese readers immediate associate the word with cherry blossoms, but to a Western reader, lowers are often associated with lowers like dahlias, tulips, and cineraria. And so, the phrase “clouds of lowers” provides an image of a lowerbed, wreath, or bouquet full of these Western lowers. In addition, the word “bells” would suggest to the Japanese reader a Buddhist temple or a subtle and profound temple bell; however, the Westerners think of the lively melodious bells of Christian churches. Thus, perhaps for the Western reader’s mental image, a Christian church rings throughout the town and beautiful bouquets pass through them like clouds, rendering an image of a funeral. If one is supposed to legitimately translate these haikus, some words should be kept in its original language, e.g. hana should replace “lower” and kane should replace “chimes” or “bells.” In other words, without using the original words from the original poem, translation 2 Miyamori’s translations are still reprinted today by Dover Press (2002, 2006, and 2011). 166 could be thought of as an impossible task. Possible translations of haikus are limited to ones with very little associative and poetic content, but in place of that kind of content, provide an intellectual description. An example would be Basho’s mono ieba kuchibiru samushi (Were I to say a word / my lips turn chill / in the autumn wind), or Buson’s makemajiki sumo wo nemonogatari kana (An invincible sumo wrestler / never should have lost / a bedside conversation with his wife). Particular representative works of mediocre “humanist” haiku like that of Kagano Chiyojo, like tonbo tsuri kyo wa doko made itta yara (Dragonly catching / where was it / that they went today?), mi ni shimiru kaze ya shoji ni yubi no ato (To impress deeply in the body/ the wind and shoji window / like ingerprints), asagao ni tsurubetorarete morai mizu (Morning glory / robbing me of my bucket / I ask my neighbor for some water)—these poems have diluted the poetic values from image and vision into primarily “humanistic” concerns, which makes the poems easy to translate for a foreign reader. Although Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (also known under his Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo) was perhaps the most informed of Japanese culture of the Japanese, his understanding of haiku was limited to the type of mediocre haikus written by Kagano Chiyojo. Needless to say, there is no way that a Westerner who has not read Japanese literature or know anything about Japanese culture would understand Basho and haiku by reading Mr. Miyamori’s translations. It is likely that what they would feel from the phrase koike ya through the translation would be akin to the aforementioned hana no kumo, painting an entirely diferent subjective poetic-vision with what they imagine through their fantasy of Oriental exoticism. Quite reasonably, poetry’s special characteristic is that each reader can have a diferent kind of subjective fantasy in relation to the work, and translation of poetry can construct a capricious vision by the foreign reader with a capriciously subjective interpretation of the work. It could be said that the translation of poetry actually welcomes that kind of interference, and that that interference is one of the goals of translating poetry. A rigorous linguistic investigation is therefore unnecessary, and from the personal standpoint of the translator, that free and capricious adaptation is favored. One could even say that all translations are better if they are mistranslated. Against Mr. Komiya’s opinion, Mr. Miyamori’s response on the Yomiuri Newspaper was utterly senseless. Mr. Komiya simply quoted Mr. Miyamori’s translations to illustrate an opinion that claims the haiku is impossible to translate into foreign languages. The intension 167 was not to criticize the work itself. However, Mr. Miyamori, after proudly boasting how his translations have been accepted abroad by making a list of his translated works, expresses his anger by stating that Mr. Komiya’s criticism is outrageous—that even foreigners are praising his work, and that a criticism from a Japanese is a disgraceful act, not something a compatriot should do. For all that bickering, he never addresses the fundamental issue on the possibility of translation, not once providing an honest argument, only to cry like a little child that it’s possible, playing a wily trick with a straw-man to beat up on Mr. Komiya’s “linguistic capabilities.” Though a person like Miyamori is a famous language scholar, reading the Yomiuri article made me feel a kind of disdain for his character. The things he says are completely senseless, and his mind is like that of a junior high school student. Claiming that a Japanese couldn’t criticize a translation that is praised abroad because of the social standing of a Japanese, he probably thinks that Komiya is commenting upon the linguistic results of his translations. Komiya’s opinion, however, is not about Miyamori’s linguistic capabilities, but rather about the mere possibility of translating poetry. In Miyamori’s mind, the translation of poetry is possible as long as one has the linguistic capacity to do so. I thought to myself, language scholars must really be stupid. All honest translators in the past have put disclaimers in prefaces that are similar to that of Mr. Komiya’s opinion. Horiguchi Daigaku, for example, titled one of his prefaces in a book of translation as “A Lost Jewel,” and Professor Ueda Bin has constantly apologized in books for the impossibility of translations. The reason for this is that the more one reads poetry, or the deeper they get a taste for poetry, the more they eventually understand that it can’t be translated into another language. Provided that Mr. Miyamori actually understands haiku, he must feel a sense of embarrassment when he is praised abroad. That would at least indicate that he understands that the translation of poetry (especially haiku) can never satisfy itself as a translation, no matter how much linguistic talent the translator might have. Poe’s expressive efect in the vers libre titled “The Raven” comes from words like “never,” “more,” and “Lenore”—words that suggest a remoteness, like a wind blowing through a cemetery, somehow sorrowful but at the same time creepy, with phonemes that constantly reverberate in that way. Poe consciously repeats these as a motif in his poem, and the poem is composed through the cyclic reverberation of his expressive language. Take out that reverberation out of “The Raven,” and the reader is left with nothing but a meaningless word salad. With that in mind, can anyone translate his poetry into Japanese? I think this example illustrates again the impossibility of translation. 168 I once wrote a poem called “Fowl.” To be honest, this poem was an adaptation of Poe, expressing the cry of a fowl by elongating the mora of phrases like toutekuuru or mourutou3, imitating his poetic imagination and techniques of expression found in the “Raven.” What can be taken from this exercise is that poetry is something a poet should “adapt,” and not something a poet should “translate.” Someone long ago translated the Chinese poem Er yue san yue ri chichi. Dongxing xixing yun youyou4 into Japanese. This was translated into Japanese as Kisaragi, yayoi, hi nodoka. Todamayuki kozamayuki, kumo uraura. This is deinitely a faithful translation. The problem is, this Japanese translation doesn’t have any value as a work of art, and it fails to transfer a poetic impression into an efective representation. There is a waka in the Shin-Kokinshu that is a Japanese-style translation of the Chinese poem Lushan yueshen caoan zhong5, rendered as Mukashi omou kusa no iori no yoru no ame ni namida nasoeso yama hototogisu. This is not a translation, but an adaptation of the poet Bai Juyi. However, the song possesses an independent value as art, at the same time retaining the essential poetic mood of the original. In terms of a poem translated from a foreign language, what readers really want are not verbatim translations of a poem, but a direct poesie of the original, the poetic mood as a whole. That explains how poetry is something to be adapted, not translated. What I mentioned earlier about mistranslations being the favored translations of poetry lies here. The function of translated poetry is merely to transfer the ideas of the original poem. Its self-imposed limitations cause people to think translating poetry is possible. But thoughts in poetry are carried by words that wrap associations, images, and rhythm inside itself, living as an organism that can’t be analyzed by science. Only translating the literary composition of the original can’t possibly convey the meaning of the poem. To be able to convey the holistic meaning of the poem, one would be forced to analyze every single word of the original and provide exhaustive annotations, but ultimately to make it work, the translator would have compose his own creation as an adaptation—his only surviving tactic. All translated poetry is a creation of the translator, and holds its own value as an adaptation. In other words, the translator infuses the original inside of himself as a “cellularization” of 3 Adds an extra moraic vowel sound to the phrases meaning “to pass through” and “in coming,” respectively. 4 “February, March, the days are slow. Towards East, towards West, the clouds meander.” The Japanese translation reads as a “Japanese reading of Chinese,” rather than a translation. 5 “While on Mount Lu, I listen to the night rain in a grass hut” The Japanese version metaphorizes the “night rain” as a cuckoo’s cry. 169 his artistic body, and with that successful infusion he gains authorship for the irst time. An example of this can be Baudelaire’s translation of Poe, still considered a “classic translation.” All classic translations are the translator’s creation, and are ultimately adaptations. Mori Ogai’s translation of “Improvisatoren” is said to have surpassed the original. The people who read the translation expressed their discontent and loss of hope when they read the original. “Improvisatoren wasn’t a translation. That was Ogai’s creation. We were duped by Mr. Ogai,” they said. They’re completely right about that—the Improvisatoren that we read in Japanese was deinitely Ogai’s own adaptation. Furthermore, that’s what makes it a “classic translation.” All good translations are “creations.” People who are reading Poe through Baudelaire’s translations are actually reading Baudelaire’s poems—they’re not reading Poe. Horiguchi Daigaku is well known as a poet and translator of French literature. The Verhaeren, Simmons, and Cocteau translated by Horiguchi are written in Horiguchi’s singular style, a “Horiguchi-style lyric.” In essence, his translations are his own creations. I met a young kid once, who claimed he loved Verhaeren, passionately read Verhaeren, and adored Verhaeren in his heart. He wanted to show me his own poems, and he said, “I think I’m quite inluenced by Verhaeren…” I answered him when I inished reading his poems, telling him, “I see no inluence of Verhaeren here. It looks like an imitation of Horiguchi.” There was a time when the Symbolist Verhaeren was popular amongst the Japanese coteries. Back in the day, young progressive poets were praised for “being inluenced by Verhaeren.” Reading the poems written back then, what amazes me is that they’re complete imitations of Kawaji Ryuko. Kawaji Ryuko translated many Verhaeren poems back then—there’s no truth as laughable as this. What I caution people who read poetry in translation is, irst and foremost, that they make sure the translator is as a poet and literary scholar who is at least in equal footing or above the original author. In a worst-case scenario, the reader should see whether or not the translator has talent in line with the original author. If the translator doesn’t have the credentials that compare to the original author—a bogus poet—it would be much smarter for them to avoid reading the translation. The reason is, poetry in translation is the creation of the translator himself, and only through the uniication of the translator’s various characteristics like conception, technique, and style passing through his bloodstream can one see through the spirit of the original poem. Moreover, the value of the original poem continuously matches the value of the translator as a poet. If 170 the translator is a bogus poet, the original poem’s value becomes that of a bogus poem. Baudelaire sold Poe to the French at its retail value. However, many other translators have depreciated the value of its original authors, selling them at a give-away price. The impossibility of translation, all together, as a fundamental problem, is not limited to poetry. It is a problem related to literature in general, and more essentially, it is related to the process of transplanting foreign cultures. As one example, the word real was translated as genjitsu in Japanese. The problem is, the word real has more implications than our word genjitsu—implications of a deeper philosophical meaning related to “something truthful,” “something certain,” something devoid of illusions and semblances, absolutely “something existential.” Because the Japanese mistranslated the word real into genjitsu, the so-called realism of Japan simply wrote the aesthetics of the everyday, penning the lat and meaningless reality of their lives, reduced into “mijika shosetsu,” a novel depicting the author’s personal life. Such kinds of “realism” do not exist overseas—not one example of this would you be able to ind in the West. Similarly, naturalism was translated as shizen shugi, a mistranslation of a similar magnitude. The malformation of naturalism in Japan created a fad in Japanese literature with a unique sense of sketch-like “ekphrastic” novels. To be truthful, there is no way that we can translate foreign languages. We have similar words that can approximate the original—nothing more than rough “make do’s.” However, because the Japanese don’t historically have a literary ideology, we didn’t have the approximate words for the importation of Western literature that is rooted in philosophical ideologies. Diving deep into the seas of words, we reluctantly chose the words “genjitsu” and “shizen,” forcing a strained translation onto ourselves. Eventually, realism and naturalism, along with various other Western literary movements, ended without ever faithfully translating its ideals. In terms of importing foreign cultures, we ind through the above example that translation is impossible, that we actually only “adapt,” and that all importation of foreign cultures are nothing more than our subjective “creations.” Our own Japanese history that assimilated itself with Chinese culture can be a testament to this truth. The Japanese military takes all foreign loanwords and translate them into unnecessarily diicult Japanese (though actually Chinese). For example, they call tanks gunyou jidousha (“military automobiles”) or soukou jidousha (“armored automobiles”). Certain military oicers tell their new recruits, “the Japanese military is fundamentally diferent from foreign 171 militaries,” and their naïve recruit asks them, “Sir, aren’t sabers Western swords?” The oicer responds, “you’re not holding sabers, son, we call these shidoutou (“parade sword”) in the Japanese military. Do you understand me, rookie!” The recruit asks another question, “then what do we call rappa, sir?” The oicer says, “you idiot! Rappa6 is Japanese!” This illustrates a caricature of ultranationalism. Ultranationalists work hard to unnaturally create a strained translation of foreign cultures. In contrast, progressive and international people try to faithfully translate the original as it is. If we look at the end result, both merely adapt, but speaking in terms of conscience, the latter is more correct. The former mistranslates foreign cultures with a goal of mistranslating. The converted Marxists knew the impossibility of translation. They’re more intelligent than literary scholars. The reason is, Japanese literary scholars still take their mock-naturalism and mock-realism, latter themselves with their later-period capitalist modern literature, and they act as though it’s in equal footing with current trends abroad. Absurdly enough, the scholars are still proud of themselves. 6 Rappa: trumpet. The word “rappa” is usually written in katakana, a phonetic writing system that diferentiates itself from hiragana. Katakana is usually used exclusively for foreign loanwords, while hiragana is used for domestic/domesticated words. Katakana is occasionally used for Japanese words when the kanji characters (Chinese characters) are excessively complex, which creates Hagiwara’s caricature of the ultranationalists. In addition, the caricaturized oicer doesn’t realize that the word “rappa” is itself a domesticated word of Dutch origin. 喇叭 (roeper [Dutch] → laba [Chinese] → rappa [ Japanese]) → ラッパ rappa 172 joseph noble from mirror song / Winding graCe carrying his word he could hesitate what he didn’t know coming to say the walking altogether beside he recognized what growing before dark for light the threadbare wait enlighten turn grass bell we move and abide fable rain in time if stone carries eyes conjoined and unwritten he turned the hammer reel to frame touch was diference skin deinition his word was image signal tree mirror song forbidden recognition 174 revolve and wrist gesture noon he was visible dance threading link its own inger wrestle avail skin cypher measure as beat his mistake a tongue simple as dust confounding complexity for truth we carry them through the trees there was not enough breath distance in dust the eye a brass bone told apart spine rope phrase wall erased radio room riverbed we turn space on its song limb stair another glance each warning a lexicon hand span reeling smoke 175 the blood carried with it an iron deliverance wake each reconnoitering momentum as a room his displacement a riling through breath gradient gaze at hand and winding link, decipher, measure secrets stringing their rituals shoulders ripening into light tadpoles in the shallows 176 aleXis iparraguirre not a fable translated by emily toder Not a Fable It ought to go something like this, although it isn’t a fable: “A few years ago, a young man returned to his native city and inquired about a job with his former mentor, a freethinking liberal. The latter asked him about his recent employment in the neighboring town. The young man replied: ‘I was a professor at a large, rural university that paid quite well. But the books of the prophets and the wise men were hidden away in a guarded chest sealed with seven locks because the professors feared their knowledge would corrupt the people. For that reason, I decided to resign my post and return to my native city.’ His old mentor praised the idealistic act, extolled the indiference to money, and pledged to do all he could for his former disciple. A few days later, the young man learned that his mentor had ofered his services to the neighboring university, the well-paying one, and naturally, was of no help to him in inding work in his native city.” That’s how I came to understand how the university worked in my country. The fable, or what might be a fable, doesn’t end there; it could go on to include further similar episodes, just as an album always has room for a few more photos. Some might throw in my own misfortunes: times I accepted posts for which I was overqualiied, times I served over and over as teaching assistant on useless courses, times I monitored students, for miserable wages, verifying that they weren’t copying one another during exams given at remote departments. Until I found out that my former mentor had grown too senile to carry on making any decisions, and that the new go-getting academics on the upswing amidst their downfall didn’t understand quite what to do with the minor detail of their old debts, pranks, and betrayals. Then I went back to sufering all the ceremonies of a sluggish novice, and efectively did everything I never did the irst time by virtue of youth. I was lowkey when fellowships were awarded to unqualiied favorites, kept quiet when preferences were expressed on the basis of sex, race, or political orientation, criticized others only behind their backs, in the civilly fervent manner of the young teachers getting into gear. In fact, one of the new academics, when faced with my cultivated dullness, pointed out enthusiastically that I’d matured. I felt at peace, because after all, I’d been able to devote myself, at a meager – but stable – wage, to the two things that fulilled me most: reading and teaching. I know that teaching requires a certain degree of idealism, and surely I believe that such a notion has stayed intact in the text of my classes (on occasion, text means truth, only sometimes lending it a posthumous, and therefore cowardly, nod). But, as is always the case, every paradise, 178 even those built in secret, has its serpent, and in this instance it came in the form of a little academic, that of one of my rotating bosses who gradually grew to understand what my old freethinking mentor had known all along: that false friendship wins more battles in rivalry, that rivals are best when they don’t realize they’re enemies, and that the only loyalty truly possible lies in a ive-second smile and a irm handshake. I won’t spend too much time on her. But a little description is necessary in order to understand how I arrived at this point, at this slightly sinister professorial post, at a place of forced exile within the voluntary exile of the world which lives and breathes outside the university walls. The viper, with an almost genuine smile on certain sunny days, made an unexpected move. She managed to team up with old adversaries from the prehistoric era of formalist criticism on the basis of the promise of bigger budgets, resorted to the familiar kindness of old classmates who might support her in a series of elections, invited friends of hers out of their golden exiles to postulate to snazzy professors who embodied a blend of exoticism and novelty. And with the airmative backing of dead dinosaurs, she achieved the readmission of the cast-out, and with the additional votes from the trusted ex-classmates, she achieved an overwhelming majority within the council of professors, to the extent that she was met with a prominence not seen even during the most lucid years of our senile patriarch who, by the by, retired with the title of emeritus professor and a sloppy kiss on the forehead. Then she arranged for excursions to ine eateries in an exquisite gesture towards her new star professors; she met ceaselessly with university presidents, deans, and various authorities, switching of between exhibiting a reined dexterity and integrity; and when even old colleagues from her college days complained of the subtle but nonstop emergence of the principal department heads around her person, and of the gang of ousted popacademics, the chains of power were so solid in the hierarchies of the heavens and the earth, that it was all one could do to mimic her half-true smile when bidding her goodbye, all the while appreciating, intellectually, that she actually allowed one to carry on in her employ. As far as I’m concerned, she owed me the same treatment. I was obliged to remain unruled before all her imperfections borne of a fondness for power that the world’s inest literature illustrates much better than I ever could. I had to ignore her cheesily bigoted and telenovela-inspired melodrama: the privilege and renown that she, in an old-fashioned manner somewhere between miserable and moving, bestowed upon the student with the foreign or noble-sounding last name, in the dolled-up garb and inlected drawl of a heavily made-up stepmother on General Hospital. I had to have more faith in poetic justice. Or in myself. Or in my own strategy, whereby my dullness blended right in with the dark walls 179 of the department halls, or at least stayed far enough away from her so that no indication of my opinion ever reached her. I know that it didn’t happen. I know that I haven’t learned anything, as it’s obvious that we can learn only very little once a certain temperament is ixed in our genes. Genes are also to blame for all of this. The fact is that very kindly, one summer afternoon, she told me that my professional training wasn’t a good it with what the department was promoting (I recall that she smiled patiently at my unease) and that, in any case, the prospect of my staying on was contingent upon my performance in an elective course ofered at an insuferable hour, nine p.m., in a semi-dilapidated lecture hall, that somehow suited me on the basis of my “adherence to orthodoxy in these times of shocking revolution.” In short, she assigned me a course in Spanish Meter and Rhythm, a subject so arcane as to drive the pop-scholars away, and which the students, spellbound by how sex and evil capitalists could be so relevant in the writings of El Quixote, never wanted to take. That is to say, it wasn’t just an exile within a land of exile, but a slow and grueling death: eventually the course would disappear from the curriculum due to a lack of willing registrants, and I would be ired; it was only a matter of time. I must confess that I ended up appreciating the care which the viper, now looking like a satisied anaconda, took with my execution (my old mentor, most likely, would have gone to such eforts only for someone of a higher status; but there’s no denying that my boss exacted my punishment with a level of devotion of which only woman is capable). I threw myself into preparing for my classes and reviving the old curse of Oldrich Bělič, who understood the nuanced music of Spanish feet that nobody appreciated anymore. Once all the metaphors for my situation had been explored, it was ine to die in uniform, right there, giving a lecture. I needn’t say that I would impart my dignity with the greatest respect for my students, for their commitment to classic Spanish letters, their heartfelt melodies and ominous cacophonies. I don’t think I write for any other reason. The tyrant has made me careless. Her inal intervention was only an additional conirmation that my country’s university, that my country itself, and my very genes, were as I’d always seen them: halfblind, and in pieces. I met Mario Venza my irst year and he was perhaps the most intelligent of them all. He had transferred from the Law program, a discipline his parents had futilely pressured him to pursue. In the end, he got out of it because he convinced himself that it wasn’t quite his thing during a creative writing workshop that he took with Paco Trigoso, a former student who later told him about me. He went on faith. I don’t know if the students went 180 on faith to the other literature classes that discussed the phallus, the vagina, and a host of symbolic penetrations. But this kid came on faith to mine. He started of almost rickety, with Rastafarian hairdo, but without disavowing his convictions, little by little he began to adapt to the shirt-and-pant combination in the palette of grays that we young professors typically avail ourselves of, more from a lack of imagination when it comes to fashion than on account of any pre-accorded understanding. In his irst paper, he managed to igure out that a poem by Góngora to the city of Toledo presented a rhythmic regularity that conigured, in a Cartesian diagram, an analogy with the plateau upon which the old Hispanic urbane sat. To me, his interpretation was exaggerated, but that was well in the spirit of a true researcher. We worked on a few Machado poems that required the detailed analysis of a rhythm which was highly unique but generally regarded as being slightly problematic (that is to say, predictable in terms of the poet’s habitual lyricism). Whenever I left work from my oice, which is where I always ended my classes with him, we’d go and have a cofee at García’s, a little bohemian joint where everyone took me for a journalist because my tortoise-shell glasses seemed like something a show-biz paparazzo would wear and not just a pair of frames salvaged from my father’s belongings, which of course they were. Venza was shy and, in the beginning, only spoke to me in variations of my own specialized old-fashioned half-Spanish, half-modern formalisms. But later he let loose a bit. He lived alone with his older brother, where the ways of rural life were carried on by both brothers in a little pension near the university. He liked poems because they sounded to him like mysteries whose charms rationally escaped him and which he tried to reproduce in his own verses, which he never entrusted me with (but I knew they existed, and his squinty, narrow eyes and beakish mouth eventually tried to express his will to share them with me, but there was never that translucent vibe in the air that forewarned of an imminent poetic confession). He had a cute and poor girlfriend who worked as a tightrope walker, like many lost youths who devote themselves to sword-swallowing or street performance. But she had to make money some way or another. It was a delight to see Venza when his dark black and brilliant eyes lit up while analyzing the poetic rhythms of the works of Góngora, his favorite. Góngora seemed to him an awfully intelligent priest, a true “little gem” who had “escaped all the while from the evils of the Church” to push buttons and to write “splendid and sad magic.” Sometimes he would tell me, lost in thought: “But how does the beloved in Góngora turn into nothing,” and I believe he was picturing, in his frequent pauses, his beautiful tightrope walker tumbling ever forward. He told me that one night, as if inspired by the nearing onset of a nervous it, he detected that the Petrarchian poems of the national poet Ernesto Amézquita had copied certain metric and rhythmic structures which corresponded, respectively and alternatively, to the compositions of Francesco himself. That was going 181 to be his bachelor’s thesis. He didn’t wind up using it in the end, because one day he felt fear, a greater fear than usual, a tachycardia or just a horrible kind of exhaustion from so much reading or studying. Or maybe it was the ailment of poetry itself, on which such a great deal had already been written, which exposed him as a sickly man, or perhaps a more lucid one. The fact is that the panic came over him after hours of thinking, surrounded by poems, just before the dawn. I still have his papers, and I can’t accept that the solution for Venza’s blend of audacity and shyness, of brilliance and submission, was that sad fact, that coarse and uncouth act of spending the entire day in bed out of photophobia, agoraphobia, or side efects sufered from copious doses of pharmacological drugs. I still remember when he wanted to buy my cofees for me but didn’t have any money. The truth is he never hallucinated or heard any voices. It was just that he was “afraid… of understanding more,” he told me, the time I went to see him, and he was skinnier than ever, and much quieter. “In poetry there was a secret that I couldn’t see clearly anymore,” he told me. “I understand it, but it makes me too frightened.” He was almost crying. I, to be frank, only half understood. Samanta Varas showed up in the ifth year (it seems incredible that the course could carry on with a mere half a dozen literature students sitting around at midnight, but so it was). I saw right from the beginning that she couldn’t care less about meter and rhyme, she just wanted to see how poetry could be distilled in its purest state. She had registered for the course because she’d been told that I was the only one who’d be able to explain how poems came to be, unlike the others, who talked about Marx’s balls or the small alpha object (the nickname they’d given to the Lacanian professor for his discreet stature and dependence on platform shoes). Really, her mistake was displaying a surprising ingenuity in how much she believed in the power of verse to rouse people, and in fact, she emotionally broke down from the work of Blake, whose poems I was able to include in the syllabus, by dint of pleading and conceit, when we were stuck on some anomalous French poetic foot, or perhaps it was English, by some minor author from the Generation of ’27. She managed it by embellishing her former Anglican school student sweetness with a Goth-girl style, enhanced by an Egyptian cross necklace, an ashen paleness, and strokes of eyeliner that thickened the leonine lines of her eyes. She was intentionally clumsy when assigning merit to a certain poem by Calderón; when he was good, it was “What a motherfucker”; and Lope, “So fucking hot”; and Lorca, “Damn that shit’s ine”; and Pedro Salinas, “I’ll take it lying down any day of the week.” But more than the street-savvy posturing, what prevailed in Samanta was that desire to share an experience that seemed to touch her only through extreme efusions of pleasure, which she delivered with every good poem we read before proceeding with her formal analysis. Later she’d lose herself riling through her little books 182 of visionary English verse which was, without fail, the arbitrary conclusion which all my explanations led her to. To confront it directly, and without changing the subject, I introduced her to Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and on a whim, expounded my theory on their rhythmical innovations (it was undoubtedly a weird class, particularly for those expecting the articulate analysis of Bécquer, as promised on the course syllabus). But I managed to capture her attention for the class and for myself in an absorbing manner when I referred to the project of representing Nothingness in a collection of Mallarmé’s sonnets. Then she enrolled in intensive French courses, she told me, and she read the complete works of the poet, meditating deeply on the Nothingness in each of his verses. She was also roused by eforts to spot a certain constellation described in those short songs that aspired to extract even space and time from the world. Her candor moved me, with that sickly tenderness that often drives men of letters straight into states of platonic enchantment. If nothing ever happened, it’s because, one, I was her professor, and two, I preferred to think myself well beyond achieving any state of infatuation after having read tons of novels to the point of absolute boredom and knowing that that kind of attractive girl in all her defenselessness and vitality was already a known entity: she was half Natasha Rostov and half Nadja, with a little bit of the La Maga from Cortázar (or I fell in love with the young and wild Samanta. Who am I kidding. But I did so at an age at which one knows very well that such a mental efusion is useless, an age at which one can see love as no more than a lare of light that sparks and trembles in the shaky hand of a diabetic, before the limb is irremediably amputated). We ended up becoming good friends because Samanta had a job working as a seller at an enormous bookstore that was impossible to avoid, and while I looked for books she talked to me about Swedenborg’s angels, about Mallarmé’s pytx sonnet, about how maybe she was better of falling for girls who attracted her awfully in her lonely nights when she lay between her Winnie-the-Pooh sheets, about how horribly frustrated she was that she couldn’t sit down and write the beautiful verses that she heard as clear as kettle drums in her heart and mind, but that she was trying to live as though her entire life were a poem, because she wanted that to be her only and vibrant work of art. She also told me she was nervous because, as is often the case with a big bookstore, most of the university students would steal the books and the managers, guided by a keen sense of the abundantly obvious, thought her suspect and had her under strict supervision. Naturally, she was the thief, but it didn’t occur to me consciously then because Samanta left me no time to think: she’d go on about her musician boyfriend who played keyboard like Chick Corea and her lesbian lover who was the most beautiful Palestinian Arab in town, and the nude health spas of the legendary south, and what did I think about drag queens, being the García Lorca expert that I was. The only time she slowed down a bit was when I asked her about her 183 family. She would switch of between explaining that she was very happy with dad, mom and her two brothers, or that she was terribly cursed by her step-father, a fat clumsy man of dark coats who went to pick her up at the gates of the university when it got to be late at night and whom the class had nicknamed Umberto Eco. The fact is, one day when she failed to inish the exam and stayed after in the classroom grumbling on about her own slacking, she ended up confessing to me, perhaps in a call for help, or as an onslaught of sincerity, or maybe as an act of pure exhibitionism, that her biological father had been a cocaine addict. He had died of cardiac complications when she was twelve and they lived in a happy Portuguese city with beaches and thousands of diferent ethnic groups, and that her step-father had appeared in her room at midnight to molest her, or she had tempted him when she’d irst met him, she admitted to the contradiction, to show that she was an adolescent with an uninhibited sense of sexuality, but, be that as it may, now he disgusted her, and he never failed to appear at midnight, and threatened to walk out on her mother if she didn’t let him touch her or if she told anyone. That idea seemed awful to her and she’d thought it over about a million times, not so much as a conscious notion, but rather as a sensation that sometimes manifested itself in an electric numbness or in chest palpitations, or simply threw her into states of anxiety that forced her to crawl out and hide under the bed. On one occasion, when she was going out and getting dressed and taking ice-cold showers, she told me, she felt as though someone had stolen her feelings and stowed them on the other side of glass shower door. The rest of the day she read English and American poetry, or French, or she studied for my course on Meter and Rhythm without much interest, and later she went to work or went out dancing, but, another time, in the nightclub full of lights and lovers, life seemed like a movie to her, playing itself out in an empty theater. In that state, she sabotaged my course at her whim, listening intently to the images that led her adrift, as they issued from the mouths of others, and repeating them to herself in faint whispers, leading her still further astray. A single verse by Aleixandre could bring her into the stratosphere: “In your beating mouth his sky-blue quill.” She relished them. But the rest of the day was devoid of images at all as potent, and her project of making her life into a poem was of lower priority because the beauty of her life of meditation, transgressions, and astonishments, seemed too instantaneous or suppressed by pain’s control, or by the pain’s imperfection. Besides, the kettle drums in her head had no more verses in them, they were intolerable echoes in her chest and only kept her up at night, as did the ingering of her step-father or the trembling which was itself an uncontrollable fright. At last, in her despair, she ended up drinking a bottle of toilet cleaner. “It will be a party of liquid phonemes,” she scribbled in a written exam for the course and for me, but damn me to hell if I had any idea then of what I know now. She also wrote that poetry was rotten somehow 184 or had something wrong with it, and when I reread that after inding everything out, it wasn’t only as though my quaking, lare-laden limb had been amputated, but a fair chunk of my mind, as well. Miguel Kuwae took my course in the seventh year, after two years of classes without Samanta, in which everything was at irst a blur to me, then a fog, the kind from which voices and even whole topics emerge, but certainly nothing human. I taught year after year using the same tattered notes and I myself grew sick of delivering monologues in class (my lectures during those years were far from inspiring enthusiasm, to say nothing of attracting avid followers). But Miguel Kuwae renewed some sense of brilliance in me, from his mere apparition alone, because it was immediately evident that he hadn’t come to learn anything. He was ten years older than the average student in class and had inished his degree ive years earlier. If he hadn’t been my student before, it’s likely because the gang of exiled popacademics had lured him into graduate programs whose names were unpronounceable, with the promise of letters of recommendation, taking care to artfully dissuade him from taking any courses featuring the dinosaurs of formalist criticism or the like, hoping to save him from falling into such a mistake. He had lived abroad for ive years, in a teeming metropolis of underground subways that stopped up dark tunnels, with tumults of people emerging from stations bisected diagonally by a sort of daylight which didn’t seem to come quite from the sun, but rather from some alien star. On top of all this, he felt little empathy for anyone because his new graduate classmates didn’t want to know a thing about literature outside of class, while he was himself propelled by an insatiable passion for poetic expression. In addition, his university was set in the middle of a meticulous city grid packed with bars where one had to drink like a ish in order to simply participate in a society that taught one nothing. Plus, he was trying to save money. He lived outside of the student housing because it was expensive, even with his fellowship (in a city that unpredictable, it was the norm to be only partially funded). Before bed, he read Whitman, or Faulkner or Miller, because he thought he’d likely be able to understand that country better by getting to know the works of the geniuses of its native tongue. He failed, however, with each attempt, because his level of literary English was a bit poor and because his housemates were amateur rappers who liked to freestyle into the early-morning hours, and his own Dominican landlady, trapped in the misery of charging rent, was in the habit of hosting raucous parties on any given Saturday. In the context of that routine, the seminars of his graduate program quickly became an amorphous blob of images and voices that seemed ever-leeting, and most of his time was spent traipsing through the sudden snowfall only to arrive abruptly at empty dining halls, wondering what the hell he was doing there, why he wasn’t warm and cozy at home, like everybody else, with their brothers and sisters and parents. 185 “I gave in to stupefaction,” Kuwae told me. In my classes on Meter and Rhythm, he delivered spontaneous and subtle relections on the poetry of Whitman and Vallejo while taking long drags on his cigarette, which I didn’t prohibit because honestly, using tobacco seemed just as stupid to me as not using it (the students, like me, paid more attention to Kuwae’s musings; he thought that avant-garde poetry ought to contain the tight coherence that he introduced in his analysis; most times I was unable to follow him, but on certain occasions, the metaphors he used approached the most illuminating of hypotheses). He told me that in order to not understand himself, or to not lose himself, he’d tire himself out walking up and down the streets in the heart of the party-going city (amongst 500-inch screens, multitudinous 50-block parks and a half a dozen gentlemen’s clubs). He spent money he didn’t have to forget himself in the rooms of washed-out over-stylized nudists from Eastern Europe and sharp, eloquent ones from Southeast Asia. He even found conirmation, which the days had instilled in him, that losing himself was like being stuck in a traic jam that delivers you to the same spot, because the sensitive contortionist whose body he chose to fondle was obsessed with whispering the writings of Whitman. She wasn’t a day over twentyive, he later learned, she had left India a few years prior and had studied Old English, for beginners, purely for the pleasure of the sound of its verse. That was the most unusual thing about her, because aside from the poems, she had almost nothing whatsoever to say, and she focused on the bare necessities: food, money, and clothing. It seemed only natural to Kuwae when she told him that she loved taking Cloud Nine because the verses always kept better tempo when they were reverberating without other distractions in her head. The animal brain freed her of her inhibition, the most primitive part of the animal brain, it produced a mounting perspiration and a need to walk quickly around in circles. And then both of them would take their clothes of, because the heat gave way to a reciprocal sufocation, and they ran around throwing their clothes all over the place, out of the irrepressible desire to simply move around. And they recited Whitman’s Song of Myself like dueling rivals. Kuwae screamed softly whole passages of its verses. They crawled up the walls of a room in whose center their eyes met, at the same time scattering their glances any which way, as though hunting antelopes or toads. And the Indian girl would read from Leaves of Grass without missing a beat, taking it in as if she was earning a degree in it, in that or in talking. “You understand?” she asked him. “One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person!” And he understood. Vociferous multitudes rose up from the poem. “A work by Picasso or Juan Gris,” Kuwae noted. “Each voice had its own unique, distinctive rhythmical sequence.” He was returning to the room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art on that other planet which was the graduate land of exile, his ifth visit, so that he could learn 186 the marvel by heart. The irst time he mentioned it, I wasn’t sure if he was serious or if he was just a victim of loneliness, or of addiction, or of love for the nudist Indian and of general stupefaction, but it was completely reasonable when one recalled that Whitman, on more than one occasion, wrote that in his verses, he was singing to the multitudes he contained within him. Kuwae explained that the voices sang in unison, but each was unique, like the planes traced by a Cubist, and that the meeting of a glance, like the blending of diferent voices, produced a chorus identical to that of a symphonic hymn. He did not ignore the fact that airming as much was almost akin to suggesting that any rhythmical analysis made previously lacked any basis. He was experiencing time in the frenzied way it sped by in the halls of the Metropolitan. He saw in the poems an invisible polyphony that multiplied itself in verses composed deliberately like works by Picasso or Juan Gris. He introduced me to the nudist at a little table at García’s, one day after class. He said she was his partner or his wife, or his escape to poetry without anyone after we read César Vallejo’s Trilce. “In those poems, he made everything up,” I explained to them. He held his Indian’s hand. Vallejo had put himself in the center of a cube called reality and discerned various scenes without actually separating them: a claustrophobic prison, an isle on which the sun sets, a bird in the fog of the sea. “Pure Cubism,” noted Kuwae. “Just some of the poems,” I corrected him. “Let’s the three of us read Trilce in unison,” he said, squeezing his Indian’s hand. The idea was simple: just reading it aloud with our three voices would unleash all the resonance of the multitudes in each of the three planes. “Trilce, just as Vallejo imagined it.” And every echo of that time went motionless into the room that Kuwae shared with his partner. Cloud Nine, cigars, the four whitening walls of the cell. How was it possible? I myself didn’t even care. And under the efects of Cloud Nine, an almost unknowable synchronicity in thinking and speaking came about. Perhaps it was poetry at the center of life at last, in some way? And the three of us with the power to utter it and enjoy it. Or was it just a hallucination induced by Cloud Nine? For practical purposes, it didn’t matter. In that room that two poor lovers used only to read in, we shouted in unison that the future was made of montages, close-ups and panoramic shots, lines inhabited by rain, by thousands of voices of a strange and unknown people. Lacking all control, we shared the poetry of the brute. Soaked, like Vallejo says, “in the water that stokes all ires.” “This piano travels within,” we crooned in the whirlwind of rain of a thousand ingers, of a thousand bodies. We could perceive that Vallejo was talking about us when he presaged a glass that waited to be drank from by a coming mouth. That mouth was our mouth. And the glass was the poem that lay clearly in the future and that had inally arrived, today. But the future was ending as well. The last poem came in an instant. “And then what?” asked the Indian, and asked Kuwae. I didn’t pause for a second: “Spain, take this cup from me,” I told them. “Vallejo writes for the new 187 man who vanquishes death because it is all men at once.” That’s what it was, or so I wanted to think, or Cloud Nine was allowing me to understand that that’s what was happening in those poems with a greater lucidity than I’d had in all my years of teaching: Vallejo had chosen, in Spain, each sound, each word in each verse as if it were a complete and perfect thesis in and of itself, and the next verse, the next word, the next sound, as though it were its antithesis, and the result in the new verse was the complete synthesis of the new word, of the sound, of the new man, which in turn was the thesis of the next verse, of the next word, of the next sound, of a new man dialectically always superior to the anterior. It was an ascent of glances that could cross all conceivable voices and planes in all their teeming variety! “Volunteer of Spain, militiaman,” we called out to the new man, “of trustworthy bones, when your heart marches of to die.” But that night, nobody came. Nor the next night. Nor in the naked mind that shot potent glances at the ininity of rafters holding up the darkened room. “Poetry doesn’t fail,” said Kuwae. However, we were still on the edge of darkness. We were the same, the same voices, the same vertiginous coninement of rhythms. The diference, and it couldn’t be anything else, was the potency of the songs. They were simply shocking. The poem lung our voices afar. Kuwae was the irst to realize. We weren’t quite naked enough. We still hadn’t lived of the same marrow of the brain like the brute, and the vestiges of a domesticated human consciousness were impeding our access to the vision of the poem in all its purity, a vision of the new human being. We had to break free of all that residue. The next night, Kuwae increased the dose of Cloud Nine and recited Vallejo’s last poem and it wasn’t as though a veil had fallen, but more like a quick and precise movement. He had the vision of the bird, the instinct to hunt, the sensation of the vociferous cannibal, and the thirst for water undrunk, of the mind uncorrupted. It was with that movement that he drove into the middle of the Indian’s face the kitchen knife that had been left on the table, and then used it for leverage, and burst it open, and chewed up her sphenoids, and swallowed her tongue, and chomped hard on her bone and conjunctive tissue, and he choked on her brains until inally taking deep breaths and almost sufocating on the sacs of coagulated blood that had emerged from the pressure. Then he ran to the kitchen. Smashing the cabinets to bits, he found a meat cleaver and drove it swinging into his forehead. That same night, Mario Venza threw himself out of the ninth loor of the clinic in which he lived murmuring. 188 That night I wasn’t with Kuwae because I had to go back to my classes. I had almost abandoned them, but the survival instinct drove me to hold onto them because a nebulous anxiety like mine called for a malleable beneiciary. My classes had always been for me like a fundamental room, even more than the little room for Kuwae’s rhythmical delirium. In this other room, my bones were docile: I expanded, I contracted, I dilated, I seemed to pass out and then again I swelled. I was overinlated like a balloon blown up by a mischievous, invisible child, perhaps the child was in fact myself, or even poetry. The room always saved me and it also saved me from that night, after which all the organs of my body did a 180. I hadn’t been able to look anywhere without seeing the panicked expression of death, but I had just stopped giving my class and the rhymes were rhythms, just for a few more hours. The administrative assistant who gave me the abominable, incomprehensible, latest gossip, went back to her desk. The other details I know by way of the cultured psychosis of the triles of the sensationalist press of my country, of its police, which drops information and leaks sensational photos strategically in exchange for grisly crime tips. And they return like the atmosphere of a surgical intervention in the midst of a battleield. That night, I took a cab home. In the morning, I still didn’t understand, I couldn’t hold onto any part of the scene of the crime, which I believed I’d experienced with complete abundance, with joy, or with the miracle of the verses themselves. But I gave my class. I received the new day with an anxiety which grew in time with the light, but without any expectations. I got dressed and headed to the university. I was told that the viper who was my boss, that victorious anaconda, wanted to see me immediately. I walked towards the administrative building with a chill in my spine. She received me, equipped with an arsenal of arms for Armageddon, I foresaw it all, or what in her understanding she had on deck, the smile for the sunny day. Her tone progressively shifted into nuances of cordiality and she admitted to a professional solvency. My classes had acquired questionable standing at the university. It wasn’t that my approach was conservative, she explained. But she couldn’t ignore the lamentable amount of guys registered in my course who’d made fatal decisions. These kids are impressionable, and I understand that you have nothing to do with it; I even realize that your conversations with some of them in that passé little café are part of the anecdotal university experience that oldschool professors tend to have, and which young romantics feel the need to cultivate. But they aren’t advisable, because the kids have a tendency to conlate the study of poetry with their own personal troubles. The students lose sight of the fact that the study of literature is a professional track, and not a sentimental journey. I ind it hideous that that girl Samanta, the niece of the poet Sandra Varas, my friend, ended up believing in hallucinations that arose from an overactive imagination. And that boy Miguel, who was so promising, and came to us so highly recommended by Danielle Protheroe, my graduate professor at the 189 New School, how could he have committed such an atrocity. This morning I had to deal with police oicers who wanted to see you for questioning. Luckily, you know how criminal investigation works in this country, and the name of our university does hold some weight. But I’m sure you’ll understand that it’s rather inconvenient for both the department and for yourself to maintain any relations that lend themselves to such suspicions. Of course I understood. I had broken out in a cold sweat. It was moving to see how she emphasized the most ridiculous aspects of it all. Her oration was a hodgepodge of clichés and prejudices. Characteristically, she left out any mention of Mario Venza, who we both knew was nobody’s relative or friend (I went to his funeral, and saw his tightrope-walking girlfriend, who had fallen into a nothingness, of which he used to speak, and now inhabited. Or was it a conscious fear of poetry?) And in the half-light of words that never appealed to reason nor led to any requests, my boss was magniicent: she exposed the possible consequences of my insubordination and laid out the threats of ordinary slander. I signed the resignation papers she handed to me with an emotional convulsion. But I had nothing to complain about. The pencil ran across the page mechanically bidding my farewell of its own accord. But I had always known. That’s how these things work. Perhaps I’d nourished the illusion (no, I deinitely believed it) that, if sent to my lonely building to give my classes in my own way, they’d leave me alone. But I knew that all my actions and my classes were devoid of reason, even if they led every now and then to that sensation of mutilation and to all those dead kids. While I headed home through that confusing city behind my eyes, like the emotion and impetus of the classes, I was sure that I was experiencing what Samanta had told me about before dying, that my feelings were hanging on the other side of a glass shower door, plainly visible but still out of reach. I wanted to sneak into the irst open door and I realized that nothing was working properly. Was this, in the end, photophobia, agoraphobia, the disease of poetry? I don’t know how I got home with one leg trembling frenetically and one eye completely out of focus, with an electric current that ran from the base of my spine to the tip of my cranium. The fable would go like that, but this isn’t a fable: “The middle-aged teacher who didn’t believe in wise men nor in the books of wise men but rather in the gold of kings and in the grand mirrors of courts, or in the tight-isted shine of the skin of noblemen receiving the visit of the young professor who returns after being sold at a slave auction, or traded to butchers getting ready to feed the beasts in the pens of the coliseum. The young professor 190 explained that he had returned thanks to those wise men, and to madness. She thought it was a nightmare from which she’d soon wake up. He woke her up with a dry bullet to the head and explained that it was the revenge of the God of Poets.” But it didn’t go like that. It would be itting, but I’m not like that, and the fable should have a bit more truth to it, like genes or like the imaginations of my dead kids. Like Samanta, whose voice I sometimes hear from afar, in a static early morning, as I write this memorial. The fable should say that there is no such thing as poetic justice, or that its pursuit is violent or thoughtless, depending on who’s watching. But it’s not a fable, or it would have to be a wholly new kind of fable, one which captures the movement of the present. The young professor wouldn’t be so young, he should have a PhD in unpronounceable matters, wear platform shoes, and be known as the little alpha object. And she would receive him with the welcoming smile she bestows on all her favorites. But he had just arisen from a bad bender, and had pledged himself a radical Communist before the feces amongst his Lacanian friends in a bar with art deco lighting, and the DTs had given him all he needed to go, with a loaded gun, to kill that ugly and mediocre woman, whom he had served only because she’d paid attention to his fantasies, omitting that he was good for nothing when it came to everything else, and that any civilized country on earth would have only granted him a guaranteed slow and starving death. 191 jeffrey yang 琮 Cave marfa book Company untitled 琮* Alive in the fragments heaven-shattered shards of stone divine particles gleaned in the half-light perquisite of the gods bestowed in the shadow of the signs by the gravity of the center seated spirit humanity encodes for the given sequence a simplicity of form channeled energy entombed for millennia now unburied useless absolute in the actual object function lost to time and circumstance civilization long gone its power lost its aura unfading gently tapers down the carved symmetry corner bars theriomorphic mask heaven embedded in earth ladder bracelet or marked ancestral heraldry found around the dead body placed in a circle the relevant passage * cong (or tsóng): Neolithic ritual vessel made of stone, often jade, carved as an elongated square block that encloses ahollow, cylindrical tube. Its original use possibly astronomical. 193 Cave Carbon handprint in a cave beside a ferrous oxide antelope Figure approaching a gate to sun, one standing astride lowering star, swallow nests of mud above: barnacles on the clif-face 194 marfa book Company Tim & Caitlin sew the blue sail at the center of Echo City hoist Pythagoras’s “friendship makes the many one” with Sun Congtian’s “books occupy the same position in the universe as the soul does in the human body” 195 untitled Like the land of the lost driving down to the old fort Pterodactyls in the air really glossy ibis, passers-by watering in the pool at the center of the lat crater orbiting the air, returning to water 196 khal torabully [When the sea vanished at last] [our Cargo hold is a territory] [the sea Wilts] [to the naCre darker than my flesh] [i have seen the sea] [ahoy from the blue boat] [burning albuquerque in goa] [before, to tell about leaves] [before forging through] translated by nanCy naomi Carlson When the sea vanished at last like wizard’s ink I saw Signal Mountain casting its ires directly north. My seaweed-illed dreams slid toward the Citadel, look-out of light, and I set foot on land like a bird fallen from a cage. My compass in my lesh, I touched my ship yet never resented the waves. Translator’s note: Signal Mountain and the Citadel are located in Port Louis, the capital city of Mauritius. 198 Our cargo hold is a territory that’s lost our birds: let the muled sound of bed sheets make the light call out between our dreams. Only the sail is unnerved by a woman’s cry. 199 The sea wilts for the drowned. And mermaids perform their ablutions when camphor wafts by. O praise be to phosphorus whose legend interred the stars in my native land. 200 To the nacre darker than my lesh: for the star to ind the full-ledged sea, give me a single name lush with light on my marrow’s lesh. 201 for J.M. Fournier I have seen the sea, the pond, bees, compasses, triangles, zithers— designs of starish I measured with your golden rule— and in the green water I saw trees give shade to the stars. 202 Ahoy from the blue boat. How do you lull dusk to sleep without shutting the eyes of the untouchable orb? Without passing through to the other side of the sky and making a ball of sparks? Ahoy from the gangway of wind where the light absorbs me to such a degree that thinking makes me live on in my soul. 203 in memory of Poivre, from Lyon Burning Albuquerque in Goa at the cape of storms without hope, stealing spice from the Maluku Islands and ripping up Marco Polo’s book— tearing my gaf sail muslin of wind, the only mission I didn’t fulill! 204 Before, to tell about leaves, I’d watch the wind. Before, to close the sky, I’d draw the curtains. And to absent women, I’d picture their birth. O never before the wound had I sufered so much from my senses! 205 Before forging through irm sea, irm mother-of-pearl— scar from now on— I seize the dawn without wavering wearing my turban of waves. 206 sarah tuss efrik & johannes göransson from a neW quarantine Will devour my body 5. LOUISE BOURGEOIS’S WEDDING IN THE RIBCAGE OF THE BOURGEOISIE 208 Oh mon dieu! I hang myself in the noose and watch how the red lowers grow out of my strangled head, how they proliferate and grow their own tiny skulls. I don’t remember anything anymore. Who is sending the images and who is receiving them. I just know I want to rest. Don’t I deserve a little rest? Fuckers. 209 There is no rest for the wicked. There is no pomegranate for my mouth. The bomb has made a big hole in the garden. Every leaf has been torn or burnt. Or every leaf has been infected by mildew. Or the spider mite. Or my skull has mildew on it or my mouth Has Hanahaki disease That is how you know we’re in the underworld. Everything here is so beautiful, for example my face. Or this tattoo of a spider on Sara’s thigh. The face is always in the sun. The thigh is always with the spiders Underground, in the ground, in the suburbs. It’s not a genuine spider but a translated spider. It used to mean something more in the mother tongue. I used to tongue the spider while listening to a shark rot some 20 feet away. In the corner of the factory. The superstars of Chile come here To party. When it’s a party I play the mother Of all bombs. I’m so small. So small. I open my eyes slowly and look at you. I have a tube in my mouth In parties I always have a tube In my mouth. I party on other texts For example the poetry of Emily Dickinson Or hospital manuals from Indianapolis. 210 I’m sitting under the beams. I’m sitting here yearning for the ugliness and the fat man with the belly. I am your hostess. I sit here and send out hologram of Shirley Temple from exactly the moment she will be shown to the world. I’m the only one to see her age. No one knows that she belongs to me. I’m also the only one who gets to witness her menopause. I’m the one who plays with botox and illers in her face and pussy. Do you see how she changes? How she becomes herself? Overall, I think her most elaborately bodily feature is her drowned violets. 211 The underworld is a kind of factory where Sara Tuss can reshape memories and acts of violence and turn them into ruins and where Johannes can hang himself in the noose and see how out of his broken head lowers grow, how they proliferate. All these lowers, all these skulls. The singular is what’s lost in translation. I can’t remember anything except the bomb. I say bomb but it was really a child, a daughter with a hole in the diaphragm of her lungs. But the lowers grow out of the hole in my head, the story is changing. 212 I acknowledge everything as the raw material for my self portrait as mother. I call out to Louise. I ask her to bring me the rain water. I know it’s toxic I tell her. I am making art. Fake art for a fake child. The mother of screams. I’m becoming her in the poem by the American Son. The counterfeit son. I will fuck this poem up but the poem is already inside me. Louise is inside of me. With her spider veil. I can’t even see my own face in here. 213 I only remember riding around with daddy. That was America. 214 In the translation of your trip your dad becomes the foreigner and you become the nymphet. A rewrite in which the grotesque sexuality that the classic withholds seeps back into the foreground. It’s a book about prostitution. About counterfeits made in translation. The Swedish girl, the Polish whore. It’s a book about childhood. The underworld is littered with your daddy’s cigarettes. 215 Here’s what happened to you in the poem about pig slaughter: You fell in love with the arms manufacturer’s daughter. When you fell in love with Shirley, you thought you were falling in love with an arms manufacturer’s daughter. When you led from her, you hid a ist full of Christmas decorations in her dress, maybe as a gift, I do not know for sure, maybe it was a totally irrational act of revenge, I don’t know, maybe because she was your hiding place. You still think of the arms manufacturer’s daughter when you feel alone and want a pistol up your ass. You always return to the uncertainties of that light, whether it radiates from your mouth or ass, whether it is a light at all. I know at least one thing for sure and that is that Louise’s care is not enough. When she turns your insides inside-out, you think of the Greek chorus which also has knowledge of what is going on inside the skin. Perhaps you just want Louise to accept you for who you are. 216 Sara takes of the beaked mask. She’s butchering a sex poem. The creature that was just breathing a second ago is now making strange noises. Someone puts on a soundtrack by Satie. I’ve never ever fainted because I’ve never ever relaxed. Not now either. I play the lead role in my own farce. The music repeats and repeats. I can’t put it into words because it’s not words. I cannot translate it except to say it’s black out music. 217 Repeat after me: Shirley is a girl. Shirley is a stained pig. Shirley thinks she’s a celeb but she isn’t. Shirley is a hologram. Shirley gives me her tiara because I meet all her demands of masculinity. The tiara is full of rusty nails. The tiara is my thorn crown. I thank you humbly. She seems to keep track of the story, Shirley, maybe she already knows the end I’m heading toward. Shirley applauds my feminine masculinity. She believes in my sufering. How lucky. My sufering is the only thing I believe in. Shirley isn’t dumb. 218 There’s enough parasites in this bed to make me royalty. King of milk. Street of thighs. I could make such a wonderful cake of your face, Shirley, but I’m too tired right now, I can’t perform my own farce the way you want me to. Also you are a farce, my little thigh-cake. Oh Shirley, I could have made such a beautiful paradise out of you if you had only let me. I could have illed your body with even more: candy, drowsy pigs, abducted children, soldiers who have been tortured to death and continue to be tortured to death, poison candy, candy apples, appropriated death reports. Oh Shirley I could stuf your silk band in my mouth if it hadn’t gotten so ilthy. Oh Shirley, I’m a pig and you know it and I know you know it. That’s why you will never leave me. That’s why I will keep loving you. Because you can’t leave me. You’re locked up in my ridiculous story and I’m locked up in yours. I only talk about things that make you anxious. I have started numbing my anxiety with alcohol. I stand in line with the other animals. This is our army. You will not get away. Shotgun. 219 What am I going to do with my own wreckage when I’m lost in the quarantine? What am I going to do with my body when everything seems like carnage and paper roses? Will I ever get out of here? 220 The gnats are drawn to my wine. I have to follow the cut to get out. My ex died two months ago. No one informed me of his death. That too is a farce. But his parents will be punished with hellire. God has promised me that. Virgin sieve, birth sieve, death waits around the corner. Why did you not take care of the child that blew up? I think it’s late. Everything is too late. I leave cigarette butts with lipstick marks on his grave. I fantasize about fucking all his friends to get him close again. It’s a wonderful party we have, me and my dead boyfriend, even though I no longer remember what we’re celebrating. That we are sober or that we are dead? That there’s only one of us left living? Now I have to start over again from the beginning again. How does one do it? Take a deep breath. Empty your lungs into the balloon. Leave the balloon for the grave even though your boyfriend doesn’t need either nitrous oxide or breathing. 221 Do you still have air in your dead body? Do you still have a sow in your dead body? Are you still a sieve? Still stuck in your sty. If I bend over your face while pushing into your chest, can I get the air you once breathed? Will you give back? No, you’re not the type who gives back. That’s why I still love you. You hit me and it felt like a kiss. Now I don’t have any more room for love. I have nothing to give you, you stole everything. I only inhale nitrous oxide when I feed all my children, all other breaths seem unnecessary, and ininite. 222 virgilio piñera elegy like so translated by dan bellm elegy like so I invite the word to wander barking and deserted among dogs. Everything’s sad. If it crowns its breast and brow with shiny leaves a cold smile will lower on the moon. Everything’s sad. Later the sad dogs will eat the leaves and bark out words with shiny sound. Everything’s sad. A dog invites hyacinths into the river. Everything’s sad. With moony words, with doggy arrows, with toothy little leaves the hyacinths hurt the mute maidens. Everything’s sad. The black grass grows with a tranquil hum, but shiny blade edges stroke the rhythm. Everything’s sad. In back of words, serpents laugh. The deaf earth won’t allow a sound. Everything’s sad. A celestial bird barks across the sky to ward of death, uncovers it with lowers of night, entices it with words of dogs, buries it with a cup of earth. Everything’s sad. I invite the earthy word to bore through life and mirrors and the echo of its image split in two. Everything’s sad. A play on words, with barking. 224 Everything’s sad. A wand whips through wild wind with the machinations of a man. Everything’s sad. Half a cup of earth silenced the music. Everything’s sad. Later the earth drank itself. Everything’s sad. And when the time of death arrives, stand me at the mirror to see myself. Everything’s sad. 225 ryoko sekiguChi from adagio ma non troppo translated by lindsay turner When one of the apartment buildings in the city center is demolished, though the space might remain entirely empty, a part of the naked wall remains attached to the buildings on either side of it like they couldn’t quite get it of all the way, and the variation of colors and wallpaper patterns, like a multi-colored screen, gives a sense of each of the rooms as they once were. If streets are also like this, the meetings of long ago will be stacked on one of those loors and the meetings to come will be suspended, or—following several times with my eyes the phrase “to keep in my heart,” in spite of my new leather shoes, my pace didn’t slow at all. 227 “There are extraordinary things. I was missing you a lot. I wanted to see you.” 228 The faces of the living who aren’t here and the shadows of the ghosts and the air stirred by those who never existed: in what ways are they similar, in what ways diferent? 229 The map of the city spread out on the desk, I was hunched over wanting to identify a building, on a whim I wanted to look for the street called Morais Soares and soon I found the letters “rua Morais Soares,” but the street seemed larger than I thought it should, as if it were a boulevard, and a bend in it that should certainly have been there wasn’t on the map although I can even now make it materialize before my eyes, the climbing vine halfyellowed and falling from the top of the short white arch that runs between the sides of the street, the scent of those lowers, fully in season despite their state, or the dark magenta door just to one side, just a little shorter than a person’s frame, and then the breath of the person walking beside, the little movement of her switching her purse from one hand to the other, the feeling of the moment when we turn the corner, where we slow just an instant and where her cheek brushes my chest: I stand up, suddenly dizzy, is it that I was reading the map all wrong until now, or is it the wrong way of crossing the street, or is it that we’ve misread your story, 230 Ghosts don’t need to arrange their meetings, but for you it’s still necessary, 231 At the moment when our lips touch I think: this moment in which we encounter each other, really, the only space where we don’t have to wait for the hour to approach boldly, face-on, what happens there, between meetings, in general? 232 In a city built among the hills so consequently all the streets are sloped, the irregular relections of sunlight reach their fullest and for almost half the year, from May through September, this paradoxically deepens the shadows. No way to know what phenomenon this might cause among the strata of those who lived here long ago. The southern zone opens wide onto the Tejo river, the streets exist for those who pass through them, and in front of the English bookstore, a man who arrived some time ago for a meeting at six o’clock starts awkwardly up the hill, while the meeting set for seven descends in a rattle of beating wings. 233 andreW sChelling from tenth song of the meadoWlark One question One question where does a book begin does it begin the last 1000 years paper parchment sheep’s hide palm-leaf bamboo it changes what you think of the petroglyph to see frog as a clan sign horned igure pecked into desert varnish it was cold the night Jack Collom died we had a dream we were chipping acrostics into rock 235 The hand that shapes The hand that shapes the mind clay or written word is subject to accident & time inding it is the meander they say purity or straight lines let troublesome spirits arrive the good teacup has a law it wobbles the avant-garde continues an exotic not very hardy species, survives in greenhouse environments academia the so-called art world the gallery ghettos once outside it tends to shrivel and die sheer irrelevance on the phone a message nearly a year old I intend to keep it my dead father’s voice it may help me imagine a new Kuksu a bird mask to cover or is it sheepishly disclose a lifetime of error accidental design in the imprint 236 In his visions In his visions he’s composing acrostics the dying enter a sphere of visions this is a no shooting zone the binding is Japanese, sewn, he inscribes it for me in running grass script black ink jotting left to right unseen electric currents grief preys on the living but not the dead I hear footfall darjeeling lute blade sunlight day can you give your name away? that’s from a friend a poet whose name I withhold we all might have been going to have lived a long, long time ahead but on this continent outlaws & anarchists by the ire listen to Kishori Amonkar sing the rain-season song she regulates the monsoon here the Southern Rockies skirts of rain go trailing down valley 237 In my tradition In my tradition we don’t tell coyote stories, said James in Cañoncito— until the irst hard frost. I marveled as the three hard syllables fell like three raven feathers, no, like kernels from a raven’s open beak Next morning blue corn atole, crisp ice on the windshield when I took the sleeping bag out to the car A pinch of corn pollen rubbed on the hands for the drive north I came through Blackhawk canyon blasted into a furious gorge dynamite & heavy equipment Clear Creek’s seen it all a thousand yards casino glass & cement bigger than Mesa Verde crow crow crow rip up a wild place for thrills crow How diferent is walking? what’s it to you gambler dog-face? If your heart don’t know that walking is diferent than gambling no one can tell you crow crow 238 crow tomfoolery Four Mile Creek its bramblebush of dialects— They kept manhandling Algonkian words—last century’s Scottish miners— & we all enjoy bunkum, limlam, moonshine the jazz language North America Up here’s pettifog & taradiddle (sleety rain fog cloud spits down-ridge) tomfoolery makes me think of King Lear I bet that’s where it comes from moor thrashed with night wind, lightning (white quartz in blocks on the far hill add bedlam ghost hulks to storm) Denver or DC this land of beguile, swindle, bilk, defraud rock & each pine needle clump sways its own careful pace gypsy cant, bog Latin, jackhammer sound in the distance, a truck hauling Amazon boxes (night ponderosa shagged juniper really snowing now you can hear deer hooves scrape the hillside 239 Dog Tank Spring Not a light between here and Blanding way past Comb Ridge a swarm of dreams into the wintry tent it was Freud’s old book a handbook for seeing & symbols I can’t read under sandstone clifs balance it with Teton Sioux dream songs looked up in the library How-to-do-it excavating the strange things come out of slickrock Dog Tank Spring bear paw bear paw crumbled droppings whole juniper berries in the mash Here it goes again one more treaty broken— solitary older Navajo man in a pickup watches the sunset wavering clifs of the Bears Ears Buttes reddening behind him Winter Solstice 2017 240 luis enrique belmonte final aCt book fair bonfire as time goes by this bonfire Will be ours even more translated by guillermo parra final aCt Turn of the streetlights hurry the last cup, let’s listen to stories in the dark until the curtain falls. Because the table is already covered in ashes and you can’t hear the hooves in the square anymore. They’ve taken the cauldron away, comrades, and the crackling embers seem to say it’s time to go to sleep, lunatics, mountain critters, moving shades, the same vampires as ever, dear readers. 242 book fair Some writers come to follow other writers. Other writers go to be followed. Some writers come to compulsively buy books. Other writers go to buy electro-domestic appliances. And other writers go to compulsively sell their books. Some writers come to get drunk. Other writers brag about being sober. Some writers come looking for girls. Other writers go looking for boys. And other writers are satisied with a pat on the back or a discreet grab of the ass from either sex. Some writers are on the hunt for editors. Other editors come for the hunt. Some writers go to rubricate their books. Other writers wait in line to be rubricated. Some writers are tenured professors who talk about books. Other writers talk about what the professors say about their books. And other books talk about writers who aren’t professors. And they all talk about the same writers. Or about certain books that some writers always wished they’d written. Or about how you feel when no one shows up to a book presentation. Or about how hard it is to write when you don’t have anything to say anymore. Some writers come as representatives of the Poetocracy: they write in hotels with pools about what happens to them when they’re alone in their rooms assailed by books they were given by their authors 243 and napkins with telephone numbers and directions or requests and messages for other writers who couldn’t come. Other writers go as representatives of the Poetariat protesting because no one paid for their plane tickets which is why they stared out bus windows trying to ind inspiration in the Egyptian darkness of nighttime roads: they write in hotels with no pools about what happens to them when they’re alone in their rooms assailed by books they were given by their authors and napkins with telephone numbers and directions or requests and messages for other writers who couldn’t come but who might already be on the list of those commissioned for next year’s Book Fair. 244 bonfire I write in the kitchen. The night nods of like a dozing sentinel after all the whirlwinds have passed through the polar arctic circle. I write in this kitchen where your hands ind the best herbs, where your hands ind my own hands. And the fresh, quiet night like a song by Otilio Galíndez. I write in this kitchen where we chop add condiments simmer this sweetness at a low lame this joy of being here together and alive. 245 as time goes by As time goes by you learn how to make a compass of silence, we accept the noise of crickets, we remember our grandfather’s jacket. As time goes by you don’t get mad when you stumble on the same stone, you decide to sacriice yourself [for anything] and no one leaves the room without a lighter in their pocket. As time goes by you’re not overwhelmed by distance. And in the darkest night you’re better of whistling low. 246 this bonfire Will be ours even more The boats will burn on the shore. We will wander foreign lands. Surviving comrades will appear who will once more pulse the Lines of the World. [And of course someone will slap hands or stamp with joy when some rabbit crosses our path]. We will inally reach the promised forest: the creek will lull us to sleep. This bonire will be ours even more. 247 luis felipe fabre stilled life translated by dan bellm stilled life The man’s a seminarian: the cassock launts it: the ugly worn shoes betray it. The shoes are morally neutral objects that in theory serve so it won’t hurt his feet to walk. To walk: for now it’s time to return to the seminary, or not to return. Perhaps it’s the hour for standing still as a tree: does he have the vocation of a tree? He stays motionless and ready as bread enveloped in cloth on a table. Table: a furnishing composed of a plank made smooth and one or more legs. The: deinite article, feminine, singular. Envelope: a covering of paper surrounding a letter. Bread: may it never fail. And the idea of Jesus crumbles his heart and the utter fool lets it. Let birds come down and eat the crumbs. Bird: vertebrate animal, oviparous, provisioned with wings, an envelope of feathers surrounding its light. 249 andrei molotiu four poems from the 90s lullaby Not fathom this tower of puppets; unravel the stutter of signs: tremulous, speaking only of what’s three days past & their chatter deafening. Nor to waver over the hours; for it’s the same in the mornings of spearing light, where wombats unfasten your eyelids: the waking forgets there the cassowaries & the marionettes alike. 251 midmorning Into the spilled horizon of your daydark loor— its squirreling away into the powdered light— allow for the small soft tatters of the night— they overlay your bed & scattered upon your arising. 252 from a beaCh-guard toWer Like seams span things: the cast strike’s lilt & slack astride these stacked stilts scan— untying near & there— the sea’s dreamed glare: its quilted back & the sun’s wings. 253 third elegy after Propertius, Elegies I.3, 1-30 Like Ariadne, asleep upon the empty beach as Theseus’s ship stole into the faraway— or like Andromeda, her wrists once freed from the rock— or else like the Thracian dancedrained bacchante collapsed on the river bank’s damp grasses— so lay Cynthia, her lips barely breath-shivered, her cheek’s lesh crushed on her ingers, when I staggered in, enslaved by Bacchus (drunk, that is), dragging my unsteady feet by the slaves’ uncertain torchlight that withered and died in the senescent night. Urged on by two unyielding deities—Wine and Love— I leaned above her on the couch and meant to touch her— slither my arm beneath her wasp-waist and raise her to my long-overdue kisses: but then I didn’t dare. What can I say? I feared her sharp and cruel tongue she’s often had me taste; so I kept still and watched her 254 like Argos stared at Io’s knobby, misshapen horns. There I was, tearing garlands from my hair to drape them round your temples, my Cynthia, delighting in curling back your unkempt curls, and then I placed on your sleeping breast the apples I’d brought you; but you stirred and they rolled of. And whenever you sighed and your chest heaved and swelled (oh, how I knew that heaving!) I held my breath and bit my lip, afraid some demonlover in your dream was taking you the way that I wished I’d been, but wasn’t. 255 ʿantarah ibn shaddād did poetry die? translated by james e. montgomery With riChard sieburth ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād lived in the second half of the sixth century (CE), on the eve of the advent of Islam. The greatest warrior of pre-Islamic Arabia, the black outcast son of Shaddād, a free-born Arab father, and Zabībah, an Ethiopian slave mother, ʿAntarah was doomed to the life of a slave in the highlands of Najd, in what is today Saudi Arabia. The story goes that it was on the ield of battle, when he single-handedly defended the tribe from a surprise attack, that ʿAntarah won his father’s recognition and his freedom. ʿAntarah was a poet as well as a warrior and a small corpus of poetry attributed to him was written down in Iraq in the early ninth century. This is his most famous poem, one of a collection of the canonical poems of pre-Islamic Arabia known as the Muʿallaqāt, “the Suspended or Hanging Poems.” Legend has it that these poems were so called because they were inscribed on fabric and “suspended” from the walls of the Kaaba. The original meaning of the word was probably “Choice or Precious Odes.” ʿAntarah’s Muʿallaqah is a complex work in which its poet’s crazed war-lust and psychotic bellicosity plays itself out in radically paratactic fashion against a background of his hunt for ʿAblah, the unattainable woman who is the object of his obsessions. Grotesquery abounds and the ode is driven by a manic energy. Many pre-Islamic odes engage in a conversation, whether with the poet’s beloved, his patron, his tribe, or his opponents. ʿAntarah’s ode is not in conversation with ʿAblah, as we might irst suspect, but with Death, who, with its avatars (the hyenas and vultures), arrives at the end of the poem like a god in response to a prayer. Through its presence in the world and in the poem, Death, the ultimate absence, sanctiies the poet’s worshipful act of killing and the soundscape in which he piously chants its majesty. In the end, the exultant savagery to which the ode gives voice wreaks havoc on all but its own stridency, as ultimately meaning is found only in Death, and in the poetry that sings of it. –J.E.M. 257 did poetry die? Did poetry die in its war with the poets?1 Is this where ʿAblah walked? Think! The ruins were deaf—denied reply, then shouted out in a foreign tongue.2 My camel tried to withdraw— I couldn’t move, ranting at the charred stones. “Speak. Live. Prosper. Here in Jiwāʾ ʿAblah dwelled, a timid gazelle, doe eyes, sweet smile, soft neck.” I reined in my camel, big as a fort— I needed to weep, needed the shame. ʿAblah lived in Jiwāʾ, our people in Ḥazn, Ṣammān, and Mutathallam.3 Rise, desolate traces, from dust, now that ʿAblah’s gone too far for a lover to chase. The pursuit’s too hard, Bint Makhram.4 By chance we came together as I battled your tribe. By God, this is no idle boast. You seized my heart, make no mistake about my love— with your people in ʿUnayzatān, ours in Ghaylam, how can I come? Did you decide to leave? The night was black, your camels readied. I shuddered at the sight of pack camels by the tents, chewing khimkhim5, and forty-two dark milch-camels, 258 their sheen like a raven’s wing. Then a sudden light, a lash of teeth sweet to mouth and tongue. I’m caught—the thought of this young fawn and her tender stare,6 her scent wafting before her smile, sprung from a merchant’s musk pouch7 or strong Adhriʿāt wine which foreign kings like to age, or from a rain-soaked ield of lowers known to few beasts of the wild, where showers have been kind and pools glint like silver coins in downpours from the clouds— evenings when water lows unchecked and the lone hopper, look, screeches its drunken song scraping out a tune leg on leg like a one-arm man bent over a irestick. By day and dark she lies on her pillow. My nights I pass in the saddle of a black horse, bridled, its leg strong, lank round, girth lean. Can I reach her on a shadanī camel8 her teats snipped, cursed to be dry? She’s a high-stepper, tail still twitching after a long night’s ride, feet like mallets as though I were smashing stones and hills on the back of a dock-ear, pinch-toe ostrich dashing to his lock as Yemenis rush to a stuttering stranger,9 sprinting to his nest in Dhū l-ʿUshayrah10 259 his crown like a cover draped over bier posts held high, tiny head and thin neck a dock-eared slave wrapped in furs. My camel drinks at Duḥruḍān and sprints from Daylam’s wells with a mad stare11 swaggering to and fro, groaning as if leeing a cat strapped to her right lank, against whose claw and fang she wheels in a rage.12 At the ride’s end, she looms, massive as a fortress, kneeling at Ridāʿ’s well long legs like hoarse bass horns13 sweat oozing from her neck like syrup or the tar blacksmiths boil for pots— an angry, noble tail-switcher bulky, big as a bite-scarred stud. Turn away, if you wish, ʿAblah. Hide behind your veil! I crush knights in armor and mail. Praise me for what you know me to be— easy when not wronged but when wronged, savage in wrath bitter as a desert gourd. After the midday heat I drink good wine from a streaked yellow glass strained from a gleaming jug held fast in my left hand, paid for with minted gold. I squander all I have on drink— keeping my honor whole. Sober again, I’m still lavish ʿAblah, as you know. 260 With quick thrust of my pliant spear I felled a decent man his jugular hissing, split like a harelip,14 spurting ʿandam resin red.15 ʿAblah, Daughter of Mālik, ask the riders if you want to hear how I live in my horse’s saddle swimming through troops exposed to spear thrusts wound after wound charging the great harvest of bows. The riders will tell you— I enter the fray then decline the spoils. I gave the iron-mail warrior relentless, feared by his foes a swift thrust with my war-tested spear straight and true. A gash opened, wide as a bucket the thud a signal to hungry hyenas— nobles like this are fair game. My spear mucked him up. He didn’t look so fancy lying there, a feast for night predators ripping him head to wrist.16 Next came the standard-bearer that ierce champion— My sword split the ripples of his mail! He was nimble gambling in winter 261 and blamed for his largesse with the year’s stock of wine17— a hero born for battle sarḥah-tree tall18 an only child19 in soft leather boots. He saw me charging and bared his teeth without a smile. I speared him and inished him of with a keen, hard Indian blade.20 That morning his chest and head lay dyed dark in indigo. Why, my doe, is it lawful for others to hunt you, but not for me?21 I said to my slave girl, “Go! Find out what you can.” Her news: “Your enemy’s distracted. The freeborn doe is yours for the taking— a snub-nosed gazelle ofering her tender neck.” ʿAmr, I hear, didn’t like my gift— ingratitude blights the soul. When battered by waves of war heroes do not gripe, their teeth aglint in a grimace as the ighters grunt in a sea of battlerage. I heeded my uncle’s counsel. The soldiers used me as a shield against lances— even sore pressed, I wouldn’t linch. The army was on the march. 262 I wheeled and charged— true to my code. “ʿAntar!” they roared— spears taut as wellropes pierced my black steed’s chest. Again I battered them, and then again. My horse, its withers and chest robed in blood, withdrew from the spearclash, grumbling softly —if he could speak he’d have grumbled more— as the steeds and giant mares scowled and sank in the soft soil and the knights shouted “Ho ʿAntar, Onward!” And how it healed my soul. My camels go where I wish. My heart and will comply. You think you know why I’ve been unable to visit you, ʿAblah with Baghīḍ22 barring the way with spears petty warmongers, picking a ight? I wheeled my bloodied colt. The knights cowered behind Ḥidhyam’s sons.23 I feared I’d die before war’s mill24 could grind Ḍamḍam’s sons to dust. Unprovoked, they vowed revenge and stained my honor. 263 There’s still time for them to act! I killed their father— carrion for gimpy hyenas and grizzled vultures! 264 endnotes 1 My rendering of this famous opening hemistich may seem unusual to those familiar with the standard renderings such as Arberry’s “Have the poets left a single spot for a patch to be sewn?” (The Seven Odes, 179). The pre-modern commentators and lexicographers focus on mutaraddamī, a hapax in the corpus of ʿAntarah and in the anthology of the ive other pre-Islamic poets to which ʿAntarah’s poetry belongs. The line is then construed in terms of the meaning ascribed to this rare and obscure epithet and in terms of the unexpressed substantive the epithet is presumed to qualify. The missing substantive is implicitly and invariably taken to be shiʿr, “poetry.” Thus, al-Shantamarī (d. 476/1083) glosses the half-line as follows: “The phrase min mutaraddamī has the sense of ‘I patched (radamtu) the thing,’ i.e., I ixed it and repaired its weaknesses.” He then explains the hemistich as follows: “What he means is, ‘Have the poets left any theme (maʿnā) for anyone that they have not already used?’ This resembles the phrase, ‘Has the irst person left anything for the second person <to do>?’” This is corroborated by the variant ascribed to Abū ʿUbaydah (d. 209/82425): mutarannimī, i.e., “trilled, or modulated <presumably chant, or verse>.” My reading of the line seeks to give full weight to the verb ghādara, and harmonize it with its two other occurrences in the corpus of ʿAntarah’s poetry and with the meaning it carries in the wider corpus of pre-Islamic poets, where the verb invariably means “to leave an opponent lying dead, and unburied, on the battleield.” This raises several possible interpretations. If the sense of the hapax mutaraddamī is that of being patched up or sewn together, then in the context of the verb ghādara, it could mean “a piece of cloth that requires patching up as a result of the thrust of my spear and slash of my sword.” The trope of a weapon spoiling an opponent’s ine clothing is found in line 56 of our poem, for example (“My spear mucked him up.//He didn’t look so fancy//lying there.”). The lexica also note that the root r-d-m can be applied to the protracted nature of a conlict or illness or fever. The example given is taraddamat al-khuṣūmah, “the conlict became long-lasting, protracted.” In this case, the meaning would then be something along the lines of: “Did the poets leave <poetry>, which had persisted so long <like a conlict or hostility or fever>, dead and unburied on the battleield.” I ind the grotesquery of my reading of the line much in keeping with similar instances of the grotesque and crazed bellicosity I hear in the rest of this magniicent poem. 2 Both of these irst two verses begin, unusually, with a double instance of a technique (known as tarṣīʿ in Arabic) encountered in the opening verses of many poems, whereby the irst hemistich of the verse closes with a repetition of the rhyme of the ode (in this case, mutaraddamī—tawahhumī and yatakallamī—al-aʿjamī, respectively). Some scholars have 265 construed this as a sign that line 1 is a later addition to the poem, which would then have originally started with the current line 2. The Muʿallaqah (the “Suspended Ode”) of Zuhayr is a companion piece (known in Arabic as a muʿāraḍah) to this poem. Zuhayr’s ode is a panegyric in honor of the chieftain who brought peace to the warring clans of ʿAbs and Dhubyān and thus brought to an end the conlict (known as the War of Dāḥis and alGhabrāʾ) that nearly annihilated ʿAntarah’s clan and its wider tribal group. For example, both poems share the same rhyme consonant, though they do not share the same meter, and there are resemblances between ʿAntarah line 1b and Zuhayr line 4b, and ʿAntarah line 7b and Zuhayr line 1b. See Arberry, Seven Odes, 170–71. 3 The topography in line 7 and in line 12 is geographically precise, however polysemous the names in the ode may be. Larcher, “Fragments d’une poétique arabe,” argues that the toponyms and proper nouns that are scattered throughout the poem contribute to the poem’s linguistic and semantic polyvalence. 4 That the beloved has four names in this poem—ʿAblah, Umm al-Haytham (i.e., Daughter of Makhram), Bint Makhram, and Bint Mālik (i.e., Daughter of Mālik) (line 49)— is a sign of the poem’s instability. Most pre-Islamic poems attribute only one name to the object of the poet’s desire. 5 Khimkhim was a non-stinging nettle (Forsskaolea tenacissima), dried and used as camel fodder. The name is variously given: it is also written as khumkhum, ḥimḥīm, and ḥumḥum. 6 The fawn described in this line is said not to have a twin. This is balanced by the same claim made for the hero felled by ʿAntarah in line 60 (“an only child”). 7 Musk heralds the presence of the divine. 8 A shadanī camel was one bred in Shadan in Tihāmah, the western littoral of Arabia. 9 The “Yemenis” who “rush to a stuttering stranger” are usually taken to be Yemeni camels, though the phraseology is also used elsewhere by ʿAntarah of a “troop” of raiding horsemen. 10 Ostriches live in groups of about ifty birds, led by an alpha female. They lay their eggs in a nest dump, tended diurnally by the female (which is dust-colored) and nocturnally by the male (which is black and white). They do this to take full advantage of the camoulage ofered by their diferent plumage coloration. The Arabian ostrich (Struthio camelus syriacus) was declared extinct in 1966. 11 The commentators explain that “Daylam” is the mountainous region of northern Iran on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. Presumably an alternative local toponym has been masked. 12 The origins of the image may lie in the practice of conveying cheetahs by camel to 266 the hunt. See Montgomery, “The Cat and the Camel.” 13 A diicult verse. The groans made by the camel as she kneels to drink are compared with the bass notes of the qaṣab, properly a reed ife or pipe, and not a horn. One commentator proposes that the poet is describing the sounds of the camel drinking from the water. 14 This line is fully, “<the air from> his jugular hissing like <breath from> the lip of a harelipped camel.” 15 ʿAndam was a red tree resin or plant dye used by women to color their hands. 16 One commentator suggests that the monorhyme constrains the poet to say “wrist” (al-miʿṣamī) rather than “toe,” though the bottom half of the slain warrior may be clad in full-length chain mail, thus preventing unhindered access to the scavengers. 17 There are two distinct heroic virtues intoned here: excessive generosity at the communal game of chance, when camels were slaughtered to feed the tribe in winter and times of famine (known in Arabic as maysir); and excessive generosity with and consumption of alcohol. 18 Sarḥah here means a large tree, in what is a poetic usage, as the word sarḥah generally designates the plant meru (Maerua crassifolia) or the shrub Cadaba farinosa. 19 The reference to leather boots does not mean that the poet’s opponent is soft, but rather that he is rich and so has never wanted for anything or gone hungry: in other words, he is at full strength. The remark that he is an only child (properly, “he does not have a twin”) has the same force. The commentaries suggest that having a twin makes a person weak. 20 The curved Indian blade (hindī, hunduwānī, and, as here, muhannad) is distinct from the straight Yemeni blade (yamānī). 21 In other words, the object of the poet’s obsession, ʿAblah, is both a wild animal in a sacred demesne (ḥimā), and so cannot be hunted, and a woman promised as bride to another. 22 Baghīḍ was an ancestor of ʿAntarah’s clan, ʿAbs, and their kinsfolk Fazārah (a clan within the larger group of Dhubyān), foes in the War of Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ. 23 The Arabic speciies “the two sons” of both Ḥidhyam and Ḍamḍam, in the next verse. 24 The pre-Islamic poets often think of war as a mill-stone that moves on its pivot and grinds combatants to death. Some seem also to have viewed the cosmos as such a mill, i.e., as a universe of war. 267 bibliography Arberry, Arthur J. The Seven Odes: The First Chapter in Arabic Literature. London: Allen and Unwin, 1957. Larcher, Pierre. “Fragments d’une poétique arabe.” Bulletin d’Études Orientales 46 (1994): 111–63. Montgomery, James E. “The Cat and the Camel: A Literary Motif.” In Literary Heritage of Classical Islam, edited by Mustansir Mir and Jarl Fossum. 137–45. Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1993. --J.E.M. 268 lupe gómez from the Wild springs of paradise translated by erín moure 52 You made cheeses on the hearth and I lay in the sentimental lap of my father, facing you, on the hearth bench. You looked at me without stopping. You were happy reinventing yourself in me. —The eyes of cows brim with foundlings.— 53 You tended your cheeses with so much love! You formed prodigious architectures, like a woman who disguises herself in a lourish of camoulaged hair, while the world vanishes in the throes of war. I was a peach, a girl of democracy, quiet, good. 270 54 In the afternoon I did my homework, and you fed me warm fresh cheese. Maps of an totally new geography. A poem of love that no editor would wish to publish. —My brothers took the bus to Betanzos, to the Professional Training School. They walked on appalling muddy roads when it was still night and the frost barked underfoot. An aching dog. I liked to go to school. I felt myself leave darkness behind and knock mightily on the radiance of clouds.— 55 I too learned to make cheeses and saw myself tall as the Tower / of Hercules / . Going out with the cheese basket to the fairgrounds / in disguise /. Playing the violin. Starring in ilms in the Rosalía de Castro Theatre. Camoulaging myself in a foreign country. Slaking the immense thirst of automobiles that need cheap and urgent oxygen. Crossing myself. Confessing sins to the priest I did not commit. 271 56 We all went to bed and you stayed up in the political silence of the hearth. Sometimes you dozed of with a cheese in your hands. The village glowed, like a guerrilla girl in the Viet Cong. 57 Death is a political project. 272 maría negroni from berlin interlude translated by miChelle gil-montero Who’s afraid of an artist’s self-portrait? The thought assaulted me when I was half-asleep, and I had no answer. No elitist retorts, I told myself, no jargon that leaves the reader dazzled and devoid of faith. Then I found a method and applied it: I jailed myself in a play pen, to explore theories of malice, the hazards of harmony, the desires that linger when desire wilts. I stopped peeping out at the world. Every author in transit ends in herself, in her resultant syllogisms. 274 “Poor but sexy” would apply to this city if I didn’t happen to be here, like a queen, her melancholy wafting through museums with precious little sun and smoldering cold. But the clocks of the world aren’t urban, and no one’s free from the prosodies of what they need. Here, east and west and the shaded area, there’s plenty more to come. Shit and gold splatter. That blind music where one thing gets lost inside another, until no one has a home, not even a home in language. 275 Dear author: What do you get from an imported item, other than lessons edging on trauma? Never trauma itself, which is the stuf of confusion and the poem. Don’t write what they expect of you, even if you’re drawn to deception in its many forms, soaring as whims. There must be some abstraction somewhere that isn’t abstract. Some autumn. A kiss with no translation, to polish your astonishment, now and at the linguistic hours to come. 276 Today I wrote eleven words. I tossed ten. That left the word music. Wiggly like a child who, unable to sit still, rolls cherries across the table cloth. I look at it without understanding. I don’t know what catastrophe it’s announcing, what night of visions, what sound of gushing water, all lost causes like me. Levity and the luxury of shutting up. That music in the life of life, which always falls and rises, to attain grace in all its senselessness. 277 Hours staring at the wall, all the loftier for having fallen. Brief theater travelling for a cold you can’t see. In what, not where, am I? I make it precariously from the shade to the sun, from arrival to departure, from a gashed landscape to a gash with suixes. Don’t even say that I can’t conjugate pain. Or that I can’t martyr myself. It’s not easy to embark on the scandal of creation, on the luxury of living like a hungry, skittish little animal. Listen well to what I’m not going to say. 278 daniel borzutzky lake miChigan, sCene 13 The police came but we confused them with terrorists The terrorists came and we confused them with our neighbors And there were nationalists who spoke to the early Americans about love And the early Americans spoke to the economists about protecting the homeland And the economists spoke to the nazis about iduciary responsibility And the nazis spoke to the journalists about hope And the journalists wrote about the disaster and we said no no our bodies don’t look the way you say they look they are not illed with yellow clots they are illed with purple holes our skin is not ashen it’s luorescent our bones are not broken they are mending And they took away our pills and said be happier And they took away our doctors and said be healthier And our perspective shifted from we to I from they to you And they shaved our heads and burned us and asked us to ind the perfect word to describe the water And the lake looked like a ilthy mop and we searched for the perfect word and I said disaster And they searched for the perfect word and they said peace And they said listen listen if you stand over here the voice of god says one thing in the wind and over there the voice of god says something completely diferent 280 And the authoritative body said the city has a collective challenge ahead not with our words but with our deeds in our everyday work whether it’s instructing or leading or guiding We must continue to move the needle we must signiicantly push the envelope think outside the box the bubble the vacuum we must We have only scratched the surface of our full potential and we are ready to cement this chapter in the city of Chicago’s history We must be the highest performing city in America Do I believe that’s doable said the authoritative body to the functionaries absolutely absolutely it can get done we are not there yet but it can get done and it will get done so let us build a lasting culture of accountability to sustain our excellence I look forward to the beach becoming a new beach said the mayor lake God is a tough act to follow to the lake becoming a new the mayor said to the functionaries The mayor is a tough act to follow the nazis said to the nationalists The nazis are a tough act to follow the nationalists said to the economists The burning lake is a tough act to follow We must provide our citizens with a transformative experience said the mayor to our bodies as they broke on the shore We do not want to merely retain your bodies we want to recondition your bodies We want you to know that our collective commitment to your development relects the city’s collective commitment to what is small to what cannot be seen to what cannot be heard and nothing is more important than you Nothing is more important than your bodies 281 You have the most face time with your children You have the most face time with the media You have the most face time with the terrorists You have the most face time with those to whom we deliver our services and you are not alone in this crucial work Your bodies are our machines and every day we will use your teeth your eyes your hair But right now there’s too much sand in your mouth There’s a lightning storm in your mouth There’s too much light in your eyes There are swarms of bees in your nose This is not what the city intended for your body This is not what the city intended for your collective experience The rain that falls is trash and the bus can only get you home if the door opens I speak to you today said the authoritative body about social security But what I really mean is that the windows only appear to be covered in shit Look closely and you will see the horizon Look closely at the lake it only appears to be covered in blood it only appears to be colonized with E.coli Look closely at the healing body it only appears to be covered in wounds 282 I do not know your name or your number I only know that your body is the burden the border 283 between light and the balance of time tóroddur poulsen suffering blazes translated by randi Ward suffering sufering is set on the table and eaten before she’s had a chance to beg for mercy 285 blazes a blaze out in the jord has to convince us the devil doesn’t exist so long as the bonire burns 286 mark Weiss a suite of danCes Xi: hand games a suite of danCes Xi: hand games First and last gardens. A gray day and I cast no shadow. Doubt this, doubt that, and doubt the other. What did I say and what forgot to say? Dark form on the water skimming the surface. Each hollow space a habitat. Brief life, eternal this-or-that. A dull brown down the trunk of a gray tree. The “is” of isness. “Am” of amness. Amless, am lessness. “Let’s chatter about the cat, chatter, clatter, and the cha cha cha.” 288 GRAVESEND BAY 1945 Sea-bleached, a house by the bay and a yard full of weeds and the junk of sailors. Hark! I say, as if the bark of grief across the continent. “Diferent place,” he said, “dead wench.” Here failed the body’s symmetry. Each writes in an alphabet fashioned to hoof or hand. A is for Aurochs B for Behemoth M for Mammoth. I am whatever beast. This the mother this the daughter sorting bones. 289 Who from among would hear of angels? Have been was will be won’t. The tattooed lady dreams of her newborn adorned with pictures–a rose grows from its navel and its vulva a pair of lips. HALLOWE’EN Dogs are dressed as dogs asters asters and the wind says farewell to wind. The dog is aware of its master’s freedom. The mouth of the gifted horse the horse with the gifted mouth the gift of the mouths of horses. One sees a hand in a mirrorless place. 290 CONTEXT It’s a matter of scale. From the point of view of gods and the dead, Troilus looks down and laughs. On the scale of feeding the kids it’s a question of who gets fed who starves. Snif the air–there’s something that wants you. In the rhythm of things we eat the young. Lebensraum lebensraum no easy answers. Imagine a pathogen at the base of the food chain. A scale of values: there are microbes kept in storage in case there are more to kill. Put otherwise, lords of creation: we decide what lives, what dies. A casual triage: Let us impose a limit on biomass per species. Let us include ourselves. In the hunt for this, kill that. 291 The cut worm forgives the plow? Poor beastie. Nice to pray for the souls of the dead as a cow prays for grass. Do we imagine an end to be wished for? Not or, but and be eaten. In the war between those above and those below the river killed everything. I am the master of grass the master of cattle the master of men. Eat, then, until there’s nothing. Store up corn against the morrow. Come, I shall give you fat and meat. The tree came down, and the mocking birds shouted their panic in all their languages. “There is a war of all against all of which I’m not a part. I’m not! I’m not!” he said. I killed the woodchucks that ate the lettuce 292 trapped the skunk that dug the garden and the fat green things on the tomatoes I squeezed until they popped! Catastrophe, he wrote, rides in on pretty horses. PARADISE LOST: SHORT FORM Oops, lost garden. Was lovely. Here at the shore border edge a child made much of. A leaf a twig a furry thing. Great sigh of the sea. HELEN Here’s a girl who bears a warning. Makes much of an ordinary self, a face reconigured as the launch of a thousand ships. “I deal in death,” she seems to say, “and sell it wholesale.” Dressed, as she was, to kill. Replaced the laying-on of hands, body-to-body a transmission line. Let us. The mad salad of intent. 293 The day the daze the test. To make of brother “other” and set him wandering. Sometimes it seems a bad bargain. Noise of dogs. Strangers. For a’ that. Ah weel. This brittle desert morning a rough cabinet beside the irises. Pattern of rust and aquamarine. Must be mountains, these clouds with rocks. Clouds rocks mountains. How do we see. How do we know. For instance, a slow arrival, or a dawn advancing across meadows. The shadow creatures retreat before it and those of daylight emerge in the clearing. Where is that school to say nothing? A song marks the hour. 294 Up from sleep, tapping the surface. Just a bone of contentment in the house of the king of teeth. Let’s remember the built environment. Mother and daughter in jeans. What the one what the other. “You’re the daughter I never had,” he tells the boy. Faster than the bird the shadow falls. Charting storms in the age of saplings. The tree rots, become prey to stray breezes. So the dog’s death kills the marriage. Do I have to tell you it’s a jungle here, that he she it walk past and he she it, aware, his hers its theirs. A pendulum. Like a dance. Now clouds move in and a wind from the south catches the torn pennant at the station across the street, where, as here, if the man was right who struggled to tell me “rain is coming,” there’ll be no sun in sunoco. Finished. A boundary found, foundered, become one with “the destructive element.” 295 Springtime, and a new life. Today the sun shines on the woman shoveling it in at the table by the window and on the space between the infant’s toes, visible above the pram. Am he who sees and listens. As if the light were tide-swept. TYPO On the back of her shorts: “Peace.” Ofered to all who seek to see. But noli mi tangere, as it’s always been. ANNOINTED Oil for food or light. So, marinate the king and bring the ire for the people’s feast. So much did he love them. The pulse in im pulse passeth one to another, body to bodyness. 296 A matter of much sweat blisters infections insect bites the random itching that troubles sleep. To wake to renewed exhaustion and another slog. Accident acting on a multitude of compounds that, when the mix proved optimal, quickened. The ancient costumes of humility. The act of tunnel and slither. It seemed at the time worthwhile to allow their self-deception. Appetite seemed suicient, asked no apology. Try to decode the songs of birds. In the interim the tide rushed in. There might have been other continents no less improbable. The man of beautiful business the beauty business man the beautiful man the man of beauty. Occasional stops at the mirror, and the moments when distracted by a hungry stare. Somewhere there’s a clue to this, the day for the moment broken, instinct as sure as rain or river. What lingo you slingin, hombre? Restless/reckless/reckoning. 297 And saw in him a kind of gentleness. A daily ritual. The plea involved in tooth paste hair brush soap as if the order of things. So, a man in shirt and tie strides down the street and another in shorts and sandals and another in sweats and the girl in slacks looks at the window and smooths her hair. To extract the pattern from. The sweet boy become a father the sweet girl a mother. A bird alights. An end of time. Beyond is the true forest, and a squirrel attentive to my presence foregoes an itch till it inds me harmless. It’s the cleft that counts. In mind or mindful of. The lost America of porches. Never replicates but replaces. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a world of concerns. 298 On the subway sings a Mexican love song and plays the accordion. Does what he can. His worker’s hand held forth. Two little girls play hand games. They alone know the rules, and will never tell. Of the clapping of hands and the diferent manners of the clapping of hands. THE PASSING SHOW The show keeps passing. Think of the pointy parts. A catalogue of clouds. Loves of the sun god. Will end unctuous. No one before had asked of us such restless perception. Rattle of coaches on cobbled roads, the noise of chariots on stone, the jolt of wagons. The present clangor. There where the stained light strikes. No one has told these children about winged things. Raised in an aerie and learned their strategies. Inhabited fantasies. 299 Convinced of insects crawling beneath his clothes. Sloughed of the deaths of friends. I am become what I see and hear. A gathering of consensus too slow to save the farm. Destruction in the service of distant masters. Borne across rivers and mountains to sustain a set of lives. Something we thought to sing about and still to sing about despite the consequence. Time was. Chasing wind. Straining to make static this constant motion. How many have been at home there? Eat if possible the less familiar. Incorporate cows, pigs, ducks. Blasé cat shuns the inger. “Hidden, in the dark days that followed...” As if youth were a catalogue of expected behaviors, or a set of textures. Paths through the mind-ield. To have learned the languages of power at an early age like lord or servant. 300 The bleat of a desolate cow. Was a time when winter’s rasp was breath of life and an uphill run was life itself. “Who would you be if you were she?” As she sat collapsing downwards. You were talking about you were talking about you were talking about Long strides. She binds her yellow tresses, oh. At the back of it all the awareness of slaughter. HIS FANTASY So this guy gets on– rumpled suit, bad day at the oice—fumbles for a moment at the closing door as if to hold it for the redhead juggling her metro card at the turnstile, the sum of all his longing, but it’s too late, and his face follows her as the train pulls away. How do I tell this story? Worn feet in sad sandals. 301 NIGHTLY NEWS To place her in the frame with the building behind her she’s posed on a platform, and to be just right she’s barefoot, perfect, what the frame contains, but her feet are cracked and uncared-for. 302 notes & revieWs Arrivals and Departures: Poems, Memoir, and Chronology, Wai-lim Yip Hong Kong: Musical Stone Publishing, 2017. 378 pages Reviewed by Matt Turner The poet, translator, and theorist Wai-lim Yip was born in 1937 in southern China. When he was a child, his family led Japanese imperialism to Hong Kong, and Yip himself later ended up in Taiwan — which, in the 1950s, was embarking on experiments in democratic governance and society unlike those happening in communist China. As a young man he ailiated himself with writers in Taiwan and Hong Kong who were attempting to understand China’s cultural past as well as its new directions in democratic governance and language. This required engaging more than traditional Chinese learning. They looked to their immediate forebears — the generation that included modernists Lu Xun, She Zhecun and Bing Xin — as well as to the European litterateurs like Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Eventually, they discovered Pound and Williams. These cross-currents of Chinese poetics, European symbolism, and American high modernism were decisive in shaping Yip. Arrivals and Departures: Poems, Memoir, and Chronology is a major selection of Yip’s Englishlanguage poetry spanning much of his life — poetry that is a refreshingly uncomfortable hybrid of dense French symbolism with a more laconic voice, the afected kind of verse Americans might expect when reading traditional Chinese verse in translation. The volume also includes a memoir of his experiences growing up outside of Mainland China, and as a Chinese poet studying and working in the United States. This serves to illustrate Yip’s decision to write in English — a decision informed by his desire to better voice himself to an American audience, as well as part and parcel of a poetics project that is both Chinese and international, traditional as well as modern. The “chronology” or timeline of the book is a clariication of Yip’s life: when and where exactly did he get his irst teaching job, what was the name of the magazine he published, how he ended up in the United States (for doctoral studies) and other questions of that nature. After the generous selection of poetry (more than half of the book) and an at times abstract memoir, the chronology gives the reader concrete details to ill in the gaps. This is necessary: it is easy to get lost in the details of his poetics as well as the images his poetry creates. One sees how Yip’s work and life are in many ways inseparable, as a person who reimagined a tradition through foreign modernities as well as a foreign language. Like many of his 304 contemporaries in Taiwan, Yip received a thorough education in the Chinese classics, and an introduction to literary works of the Western world — “Western” being shorthand in the Sinosphere for pretty much anything deriving from European heritage — which he explored as an adult. And Yip has internalized these contrasting modalities. For Yip appears to be skeptical that any single tradition or practice can continue without deliberate efort, and that it can exist without other traditions continuing to inform it. This skepticism was born by his own experiences as a war refugee at a time when both established and new political systems vied for legitimacy, and the question of Chinese culture was central to any such claims. Yip sees China’s continuing struggle for global representation as still a question of culture, and ultimately tied to its legacy in letters. “[W]hat is at stake here is not a question of inclusion… but also a question of representation. Simply put, it is a question of whether the indigenous aesthetic horizon is allowed to represent itself as it is and not as it is framed within the hermeneutical habits and the poetic economy of the West.” (318) If China and it’s culture (conceived as a tradition in letters or, more speciically, poetry) are to represent themselves to the world, then it needs to be able to speak on behalf of itself, and not simply in response to Western claims about China. As such, Chinese culture here is seen as a matter of aesthetics irst. The claim — a claim that is not unique to Yip’s thought, and can be seen in many other Chinese thinkers, going all the way back to Confucius — is that the culture is an act of artiice to be shaped rather than received. The “aesthetic horizon” is an imagining of what is possible in the future, i.e: poetry gives, through its form, a model of what can and cannot be written or thought. That the “poetic economy of the West” has distinct habits which have not accommodated this is in contrast to Western modernism, which Yip believes is more pliable, and international. But how exactly does this aesthetic horizon represent itself? For Yip, by superimposing an understanding of the Chinese language over what are considered Western modernist techniques. The Chinese tradition from the early shamanic songs all the way to the present day is framed by poets and the state alike as a tradition of the creation and control of language. In contrast to his contemporary François Cheng, the French structuralist who theorized that Chinese poetry was more or less symbolic of (Daoist) cosmic orders, leaving real-world relations unafected, Yip sees verbalization as a decisive factor in poetry. Language performs actions in the world; it is decisive in shaping human relationships. And here he 305 borrows from Ezra Pound, who theorized that the Chinese language, when properly used, was a demonstration of Confucian social values — a stance not far from Confucius’, who saw the function of naming as giving correct proportion to human interactions. Incorrect naming would result in an inability to perform concrete tasks. So it will not be surprising that Yip is not interested in the stereotypically Chinese features of poetry: moons, drinking, gauze curtains and so on. By incorporating English into his poetics, the “indigenous” is given a diferent, artiicial voice. The slippery language of his poetry demonstrates that modernist techniques of verbal layering and oblique reference alongside the traditional Chinese techniques of igurative distance and subjective alienation are nearly the same techniques, but yield surprising efects. From “Beijing: August”: Sky-reaching tombstones, The Transnational Commerce Shadows over shadows over shadows of ghosts Closes in and tightens in rings A thousand, ten thousand pounds of memory … A young poet crippled by reality Is about to speak only to Find his throat Stufed with balls and balls Of crumpled paper written all over with his poems (140-141) The poet Yip writes of has his voice “blocked” by drafts of writing that are no doubt weighed down by “ten thousand pounds of memory” — cultural baggage. Although he is in Beijing, the cultural capital of Mainland China, modernity in the form of trans-national inance “shadows” him to the point that he is “crippled by reality.” But the poem is not mere commentary, because it describes the poet’s writing: his writing demonstrates an aesthetic horizon alongside larger facts of existence, like the late summer of the title. Through Yip’s poem, the imagined poet’s writings reach readers. And as Yip is writing the poem in English, the character of the Chinese poet ends up writing a trans-lingual poem. Together — the poet in the poem, Yip’s presentation of the poet in his English-language poem, the imagined trans-lingual poem and its community of readers — a poem is written. 306 Of And, Keith Waldrop. Cornwall: Guillemot Press, 2018. unpaginated Reviewed by Matt Turner A small press from the quiet seaside area of Cornwall, England, has published an elegant, unobtrusive chapbook — a pamphlet, really, containing only 13 pages of poetry — bound by abstract, elliptical art from Tony Martin, enclosing poetry by Keith Waldrop — in my opinion one of the signal igures in American poetry for the last, well, ifty years, though “signal” isn’t quite the right word, since a signal acts a a beacon whereas Waldrop’s poetry is often quiet, anachronistic, elliptical, unobtrusive. In a word, contemplative. The poems, largely without punctuation and capitalization, shimmer on the surface of the page, and their beacon glint misdirects the reader (I say misdirects instead of leads because the poems do not form narratives as much as they almost imperceptibly dislodge expectations). Stanzas, if they can be called that, retain little formal regularity, often breaking over several verses; verses break between words, sometimes; few verses are end-stopped, and most do not stand alone as conventional semantic units. But that’s not to say that there’s no sense to be made, or that sense need be created. One of Waldrop’s themes, aging, was previously explored in his book Transcendental Studies, paired with notions of animateness, what it means to be alive. Things age and, when old enough, no longer able to resist, become inanimate. Unable to stay free of life. (“Plurality of Worlds,” 95) And in “Before Leaving,” in Of And, Waldrop continues: if I sit in the dark I remember or sitting darkly forget 307 there, my Soul, among local motions * above-mentioned sky, high ceiling scrim nose visible beyond bonnet Two views in “Before Leaving”: one of contemplation, where the “Soul” is subject to both outward perception and memory; the other, maybe, the view of a baby in a carriage. Presumably the speaker in the poem is objectifying himself, “unable to stay free of life” and so detaching himself from it. But it’s diicult to say exactly where the speaker is — as he puts it in “By Cold Starlight,” “I decline my soul in / writing.” This kind of self-relexivity makes it diicult to summarize or point to positive tendencies. Yet that’s what I mean by a signal beacon of indirection. There aren’t may writers — poets or otherwise — who write with this degree of subtlety, where meaning is pressed through form as well as semantic units. For the stanza-verse structure of the poems does not so much open the poems up to multiple meanings (the way many experimental poems do) as much as it delates meaning, unmooring it from the things it are refers to. Nevertheless a strong sensibility and even urgency is present in the poems. But this calls into question what we mean when we talk about obscurity or quietness or subtlety, as these are present in all senses. 308 a Convulsive beauty The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire Bilingual Edition, Translated by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2017. 962 pages. Reviewed by John Olson There is no evident way to speak of this book. It’s extraordinary. Extraordinary in its strengths and complications, extraordinary in its depths and invocations. Open it at any point and sparks of sacred ire ly across the page. One is in the realm of ghosts and shadows. There are iery rages and volcanic epiphanies, voodoo enchantments and torrents of words tied into knots of radiant energy. There are ferocious ragouts of hot chili and squid, the fragrances of hibiscus and frangipani, the sting of the plantation whip. This is a book that teems. Swarms, pullulates, boils. The glands under the mantle of a cephalopod swarming with luminous bacteria send a glow into the ocean water of unparalleled beauty, and is the kind of image I need to describe the phenomenality of this work; the efects of its verbal conjurations confer - and are the product of - the phantasmagoric marvels of surrealism, but the rawness and brutal candor of its experiences and observations are, in fact, quite real. The beating heart at the core of this book is an actuality, a rhythmic muscle circulating tremors of beauty and passion. And it is precisely that combination of the marvelous correlated with living, breathing actualities that so distinguishes the work in this book. In his meditations on the material world, Earth and Reveries of Repose: an Essay on Images of Interiority, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard observed that profusion and turmoil are parallel occurrences, each symptomatic of struggle, each emblematic of a powerful life energy: “Notice in the irst place,” he writes, ...that a static disorder is imagined as an agitated whole: the stars are so numerous that they appear, in the beautiful summer nights, to swarm. Multiplicity is agitation. There does not exist, in all of literature, a single immobile chaos. At the most one inds, as with Huysmans, an immobilized chaos, a petriied chaos…But here is the reciprocal paradox. Just look – or imagine – a multitude of bodies going in all directions so that one must attribute to them a number that surpasses reality: agitation is multiplicity. 309 This formula is pertinent to Césaire; from beginning to end his poetry teems with volatile, white-hot intensities, a continuous pullulation of untethered, fecund transmutations engendering and perplexing one another in what André Breton referred to in L’Amour fou as a “ixed explosion:” “convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, ixed-explosion, magiccircumstantial or it will not be.” Images crowd together in a furious surge of animus and incantation, mutating, tumbling, convulsing, all of it engendered by huge emotion, not a single emotion, but thousands of hungry, contradictory, entangled emotions. There are rages, and there are raptures; there is resignation and deiance, sometimes fused together in a non-dualistic dynamic of transcendent symbiosis; great sympathies and horrendous cruelties, the “docility of ticks” and “hearts of iron.” Take, for example, these lines from And The Dogs Were Silent, a book-length, dialectically structured poem of antiphonal voices lamenting and lambasting the barbarities of colonization: a rumble of chains of carcans rises from the sea… a gurgling of the drowned from the green belly of the sea…a crackling of ire a whip cracking, screams of the murdered… …the sea is burning or it is the tow of my blood that is burning Oh the scream….always the scream bursting from the mornes…and the drums rutting and wind swells vainly with the tender odor of the musty ravine with breadfruit trees with sugar mills with bagasse harassed by fruit lies… Earth my mother I have understood your cloak and dagger language One is reminded of Rimbaud and the fantastic deliriums of “The Drunken Boat” in a dizzying, psychically liberating leave-taking of industrialization, capitalism and the oppressions of a culture obsessed with scientiic rationalism. There, too, in the violent splendor of the imagery are obvious echoes of Lautreamont and The Songs of Maldoror. All of which is quite deliberate, and no small irony. Césaire, a black man living in Paris in the 30s of the 20th century where he attended the Ecole Normale Supérieure and turned to poetry for release and therapy after the exhausting, intellectual cramming required of the students. Two key developments occurred in these formative years: he became hugely inluenced by surrealism and met and became close, life-long friends with the Senegalese poet, cultural theorist and politician (the irst President of Senegal) Leopold Sédar Senghor. Together, they would establish a literary and cultural movement called negritude, which 310 might be best described as an airmation of Pan-African racial identity as a dynamic, oppositional force to the Euro-American values that had enslaved and degraded them. Negritude is a highly plastic and generative term emphasizing diferent values and diferent strategies at diferent times. In its early manifestations it was unabashedly Marxist and iercely anti-colonial. It makes total sense to me that surrealism would play a part in this. The irony that a European literary movement of the early twentieth-century might inspire an anti-colonial movement becomes signiicantly less ironic when you realize the fact that surrealism began as an oppositional alternative to scientiic rationalism and provided means for psychic liberation and a medium by which to tap into the sources of the collective unconscious and alter the leaden realities of the mundane, workaday world through the divine madness of poetry and its athanor of alchemical transmutation. Read anything by, or about, Aimé Césaire and you ind the name Leo Frobenius pops up a lot. The name sounded familiar to me, and then I remembered that I irst encountered his name reading Ezra Pound, who refers to him in Guide to Kulchur with admiration: “The value of Leo Frobenius to civilization is not for the rightness or wrongness of this opinion or that opinion but for the kind of thinking he does.” That thinking went deep into the collective unconscious of culture, for which Frobenius used a term: Paideuma. “To escape a word or a set of words loaded up with dead association,” Pound observed, “Frobenius uses the term Paideuma for the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period.” In his preface to Leo Frobenius on African History, Art and Culture, Léopold Sédar Senghor takes it further: his reading of Frobenius suggest something deeper, broader, more universal than a cultural substrate of mythic resonances. He identiies it as the “essence of life,” “that spiritual energy in the Other which causes emotion…It is this ‘possession’ of the ego by the Other and the reaction of the ego to the Other which explains the diferences in style between diferent artists – and this is what interests us here – between diferent races…For every race possesses its own Paideuma, that is its own peculiar capacity for and manner of being moved: of being ‘possessed’…the artist, whether sculptor, dancer, or poet, is not content to relive the Other; he recreates it in order the better to live it, and make it live. He recreates it by rhythm and thus makes of it a higher, truer reality, one that is more real than the factual reality.” 311 In his monograph on the work of Aimé Césaire, Modernism & Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire, A. James Arnold (who is also a cotranslater, with Clayton Eshleman, of this collection), sees the inluence of Frobenius on Senghor and Césaire in their formation of the negritude movement as a conjoining dynamic, “a link between negritude and surrealism.” “Surrealism,” he writes, “was a necessary steppingstone for Césaire between the irst exploratory eforts to deine negritude in prewar Paris and the resolute commitment, artistic and political, to destroy the ediice of colonialism after the war.” In “At the Locks of the Void: Cotranslating Aimé Césaire,” from a collection of essays titled Companion Spider, Eshleman elaborates further on Césaire’s singular ability to combine the marvelous and strange with an unlinching, down-to-earth social realism. As someone who has been long inluenced by the psychic liberation and phantasmagoria that is surrealism, but frustrated by an equal compulsion to bring the real world into the mix, I ind this of great interest. How did he do it? Césaire, Eshleman writes, “commits himself to a sacred, whirling, primordial paradise of language, open to his subconscious depths and destructive of ‘the reality principle,’ or as he himself puts it, ‘the vitelline membrane that separates me from myself.’ On the other hand, his quest for authenticity will also include confronting the colonial brutality in his own overpopulated and defeated Martinique…” “This is a vision of Eden,” Eshleman continues, …that also includes its night side, a dyad that is incredibly diicult to maintain, because a vision of paradisal wholeness and existent human sufering in the present negate each other. A signiicant part of the energy in Césaire’s language is generated by his attempt to transform the language of the slave masters of yesterday and the colonial administrators of his own day into a kind of surfrançais, as in surreal, a supercharged French that in its own fashion is as transformational as surrealism attempted to be of bourgeois, patriarchal, French mentality. The collection is divided into eight sections, each section representing a previously published book: The original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, The Miraculous Weapons, Solar Throat Slashed, Lost Body, Ferraments, i, laminaria, Noria, and Like a Misunderstanding 312 of Salvation. It also includes ample notes on the poems, a glossary (Césaire loves seeding his poetry with the names of plants, igures from world history, biblical and religious references, neologisms, deities and phenomena unique to African, Martinican or Caribbean mythology), a chronology (Césaire lived a long, full life), an introduction by A. James Arnold, and essays introducing each section. In addition to his work as a poet, Césaire led a vigorous and important life in politics. In 1945, he was elected mayor of Fort-de-France, during which time he co-sponsored a law that transformed France’s Old Colonies (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, and Réunion) into overseas départements. Later, as a member of the Communist Party, Césaire was elected deputy for the irst district of Martinique to the Constituent Assembly in France. I remember being rather stunned to discover that Césaire was still alive when, circa 2005, there was a news story on Le Journal de France2, a French cable station we’d begun watching, about Césaire’s refusal to receive Nikolas Sarkozy whose government had recently passed a law that called for the recognition of the positive aspects of colonialism. I took delight in this, mainly because I saw Sarkozy in the same light as Clinton, Bush, and Obama, predatory capitalists pushing a scheme of neoliberal economics that seemed taken out of a playbook written by Ayn Rand, brutal “austerity” measures that eviscerated Greece, created horrendous income inequalities globally and destroyed the middle-class in the United States. I continue to hold it responsible for a litany of many other social ills, including depression, loneliness, eating disorders, crushed labor unions, deregulation, privatization, massive tax cuts for the rich and an opioid addiction crisis. I felt peculiarly represented by the old man and poet in Martinique. I also ind it amazing that anyone can write poetry and lead a high proile political life at the same time. And why might that be, I ask myself. Do poetry and politics conlict? Well, yes, they do. But that would require a whole other essay. An immersion in Aimé Césaire can have startling consequences. Tropical shadows bejeweled with hallucination. The liquid moonlight of surrealism. Mad invention. The liberating energy of a spider singing karaoke in a Tokyo bar. Each word comes out like a juicy cyst, intricate mineral skeletons tapdancing on a numb arm. Cymbals crashed together. A hidden blue-green waterfall behind the eyes. A washrag draped over a kitchen faucet. 313 The mind inds quick release in surrealism. Why is that? Why does surrealism continue to work its magic after all these years? And so many wars. It’s like getting slapped by a sonnet, pulled into life by a powerful shaman splicing images alloyed with rage and frustration. You can sing your head of with an electric guitar like Buddy Guy and almost obtain the same result, but poetry doesn’t leave you with ringing in your ears, or a hangover. Some energies die instantly if you harness them. Each molecule is a world. The palm of a hand can be soft as a mushroom. And the next instant make a ist and punch a hole in the wall. Poems are extraordinary messages from outer space, torrents of words lashing in spurts of erotic energy in a Singapore discotheque. There’s always something creepy about too much harmony. You need dissonance. Some poetry is very careful the way it steps around on the page. Césaire isn’t like that. Not at all. It’s the opposite: ixed explosion. A continual combustion. The rain of ash empearled with tiny ires. Hummingbirds rocketing out of a blind man’s rancor. Blast furnaces on onionskin paper. Thoughts penetrating as X-rays. The glow of bones on a black background. The feeling of sand trickling through the ingers on a Martinique beach. Some women look great with tattoos. Others not so much. Why is that? The world is the movie of everything that is. The lowers of a hibiscus used to clean somebody’s shoes. A laundry basket vibrating on the top of a washing machine as it goes into spin cycle. If words could burn this book would burn down. 314 triple tongue CoCoon in tube sauCe Words on Edge, poetry by Michael Leong New York: Black Square Editions, 2018. Reviewed by John Olson Can you feel it? There’s something out there. It could be anything. It could be an obelisk, a cosmic blooper, an amalgam of pillow ticking and ininite space. It could be nothing at all. But it doesn’t feel that way. Whatever it is, it feels huge. It feels like the sublime, like the shine of the inefable. Which probably doesn’t shine. Because it’s inefable, and inefability eludes all category, no matter how many words I throw at it. It stays inefable. Incommunicable This is the kind of mess that words get us into. They lure us into communicability, and then drop us. Flat. They lead us to an edge and dare us to leap. “Writing,” observed Roland Barthes in Writing Degree Zero, “is always rooted in something beyond language, it develops like a seed, not like a line, it manifests an essence, and holds the threat of a secret, it is an anti-communication, and it is intimidating.” The book is called (aptly) Words on Edge, and I’m intimidated. Michael Leong’s poetry is exquisite. We say something is exquisite when it is alluring and elegant, but also when it is razor-ine, when it has an edge, and that edge might be used to slice open a section of air and pull something out of it that hadn’t existed before, something that we did not know existed, something that existed outside of language and was conjured into being by an unorthodox employment of that very same language. This is called invention, and can lead to great and wonderful things, what André Breton would call the marvelous. “Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful,” he proclaimed famously in the Manifesto of Surrealism, “anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.” Words on Edge is chock-a-block with keen, subtly elaborated lines that combine a euphoric semiotic arc - signiiers liberated from referential content - with an intellectual aura. Lines like “…the explosion of the mind / into a cryptic lace of radiant thinking,” or “how a descending tone / implied the mysterious solace of chifon.” A better example might be the poem dated “April 13, 2013,” which is part of a sequence 315 titled “Fruits and Flowers and Animals and Seas and Lands Do Open” that grew out of the 2013 National Poetry Month initiative sponsored by the Found Poetry Review. Here is how Leong describes the project in the appendix: Entitled “Pulitzer Remix,” this online and ephemeral project entailed eightyive poets posting new poems every day based on the language of the eightyive books which have won the Pulitzer Prize in iction. After volunteering to participate, I was assigned Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams (1921), a comedic novel of manners set in the Midwest. All of the words in this thirtypart long poem, with no exception, were derived from Tarkington’s text, and all of the thirty sections of this poem were composed daily throughout the thirty days of April. This is, in essence, a document of my life as I lived it in April 2013 through the obsessive reading, rereading, and remixing of a single book, an experiment of what happens when a life makes poetry, at least the writing of it, a priority of thirty continuous days despite all else. I like the phrase “despite all else.” I know what that means. I think anyone that devoted to the writing of poetry knows what “all else” is all about. Jobs, chores, kids, noise, intrusions, etc. Ah, world, go away! And take your tedium with you. Rock musicians need garages to practice. Concert pianists need ingers. Tuba players need a large lung capacity. Dancers need to maintain high energy levels, strong bones, and lexible joints. Poets need solitude. Leading a normal life as a poet can be a son-of-a-bitch. It also helps to have a language lying around. Leong’s commitment to the work of converting Booth Tarkington’s text to distillates of weldable alloy has resulted in a work that is characterized by a haunting, oneiric beauty. He leads us well outside the parameters of socialized discourse and presents us with (to quote Barthes again) “a Pandora’s box from which ly out all the potentialities of language.” Here is “April 13, 2013” in full: The earth was swallowing our words, stamping out our solemn breath with its footsteps. 316 Overhead, a Chinese silhouette appeared in God’s abandoned factory. A new generation continued an endless divination, which, they said, could make presentable the black bones of the absolute. Going to the movies, we sometimes discover the rarest woodcut. I’ll go. I thought you’d forgotten. It was a protracted promise, a igure of speech. The evening had already begun deteriorating into Sunday. Leong likes using “found language.” Found language can be anything, overheard conversation, social media, snippets of code, movie dialogue, essays, articles, stories, ad copy, instruction manuals, science projects, quite literally anything. It’s all about collage, fusing, mingling, combining. The more disparate the sources, so much the better. But what about originality? If originality is an issue then language is the wrong medium for you. The entire language is a collage. “Good morning” is plagiarism. T.S Eliot, who famously proclaimed “good poets borrow, great poets steal,” said something pertinent in his essay “The progress of an artist is a continual selfsacriice, a continual extinction of personality… It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I shall, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of inely iliated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.” What happens is catalysis. According to Eliot’s description: 317 When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a ilament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unafected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more completely separate in in him will be the man who sufers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. Is the chemistry here correct? I don’t know. I’m not a chemist, and I don’t have any platinum or sulfurous acid lying around (thank goodness). I can pour some baking soda and vinegar in the bathtub drain and show you what happens (it’s actually pretty cool, the baking soda come bubbling out in a jubilant izz), but I’m not sure I can derive an appropriate metaphor from that. What Eliot is getting at here with all this fancy chemistry is the idea that a poet’s mind is a “receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.” In alchemy, that receptacle was called a “philosophical egg,” or (in Latin) an “ovum philosophicum.” The concoctions the alchemists were looking for was gold, which was a metaphor for spiritual transformation. Not everybody who collages scraps of found text may be looking for spiritual transformation, but any time disparate elements are brought together in a literary or artistic medium some very powerful magic takes place. “In Alan Yentob’s 1975 documentary Cracked Actor, David Bowie describes how he used Burroughs’s cut-up technique to “ignite the imagination,” and in an interview from 2008, Bowie further elaborates “I use it for igniting anything that may be in my imagination….You write down a paragraph or two describing several diferent subjects, creating a kind of ‘story ingredients’ list, I suppose, and then cut the sentences into four or ive word sections; mix ‘em up and reconnect them… You can get some pretty interesting idea combinations like this…You can use them as is or, if you have a craven need to not lose control, bounce of these ideas and write whole new sections.” Leong takes this principle to an extreme in a major section of the book titled “The Philosophy of Decomposition / Recomposition as Explanation: A Poe and Stein Mash-Up,” in which 318 Leong brings together texts primarily from Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” and Stein’s “Composition as Explanation.” The melding is virtually seamless. It lows together nicely. I’m guessing that Leong put a lot more work into this apart from just bringing the texts together; the overall efect works as a single voice. Stein’s energy and exuberant prolixity somehow manages to low with Poe’s considerable density and rhetorical elegance. Here is a sample paragraph: I now have to rapidly combine all that has been previously narrated into a concentrated solution – from the irst act to the ending description – before the poem soon demands a moral and turns into prose. In a fantastic tone of the most profound seriousness, it spoke to me of a certain beast remaining in the syllable that was forming an elaborate window within the general arrangement, that was inventing a diferent time-sense, that was throwing open the very being of the inevitable. I sense a little more Poe in this sample than Stein, but the luidity of the piece belies any obvious engineering; the line “In a fantastic tone of the most profound seriousness” contains both a feeling of creative excitement and a tinge of nineteenth-century loftiness of purpose. It’s signiicant, as well, that both texts are concerned with the philosophy of composition. This is a dynamic that goes much deeper than technique, it takes a phenomenological approach and explores how writing afects us on a perceptual and ontological level. Leong uses other source material in this collection to produce some remarkable results, such as “Menu in Chinglish,” dedicated to poet John Yau. As Leong describes its genesis in the appendix, “This poem was inspired by the phrase ‘monolithic tree mushroom stem squid’ which occurs in the New York Times article ‘Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish (May 2, 2010).’” I will leave you with the poem in full; you can order anything you want: monolithic tree mushroom stem squid braised rainbow mangrove maw double pronged rhizome berry pig sniper shepherd’s sponge spigot beef cheek ricochet preserved duck eggplant implosion pungent heliotrope of oyster pouch 319 salted forehead belly blossom chicken web monad broth silver in swimming membrane lavor retinal eel matrix bamboo vertigo triple tongue cocoon in tube sauce gluteal libidinal shrimps 320