We read the story of Cook Ding in elementary school. He is an expert at cutting up oxen. He sees crevices between an ox’s bones and joints and inserts the blade of his cleaver lightly. Hu-la, the meat falls apart like a lump of earth. Joy fills him as he cleans his cleaver, which still cuts like new after nineteen years of use. He follows the Dao, and what he does is wei wuwei, do without doing—effortless like non-doing.

In my youth, I was skeptical of Cook Ding’s joy. I couldn’t quite picture butchering without hearing the predawn shrieks from the slaughterhouse not far enough from our apartment. It was a bloody, messy business, a far cry from Cook Ding’s breezy effortlessness. People strove. I strove. Every school day seemed to be lived for the college entrance exam. Even the morning qigong practice with my parents was meant to help me concentrate better for higher scores.

I studied English in college, a useful major in the economically reforming China. After graduating, I moved to Shenzhen, the special economic zone, and wrote and translated for the English Page, which was inserted in the municipal newspaper and was known as the “necktie of the metropolis” (if Shenzhen was a western suit).  It was the mid-90s, and the city was deluged with all things West: midnight bars, rave parties, Big Macs, Guinness, Nirvana, marijuana. I strove to be worldly.

A few years of my restless working, consuming life, I felt a longing for elsewhere. I imagined a kind of disappearance, maybe in a remote town where I would be alone and finally meet myself. I would do nothing—just write and wander and learn what life was all about.

The thought translated into graduate study abroad, a more logical, and predictable, next step for ascendance. It was a plausible, even applaudable way of disappearing, a more complete one as well. In the last year of the last millennium, I found myself in a classroom in the heartland of America, wondering how the language I’d learned felt on my classmates’ tongue. I sat on a campus bench eating an apple. A squirrel looked at me sideways, didn’t seem to see me, only saw the apple, waiting for it to drop. For a fiction workshop, I translated a story I’d written in Shenzhen. The professor, who had come to America in his twenties like me, except from a different country decades earlier, suggested that I write an American story. I didn’t know what that meant, but wrote a story set in the studio I rented where the refrigerator made chattering sounds at night. I changed the Chinese names to Anglo-Saxon ones to make it American.

My first year of writing stories in English was far from wei wuwei. Words did not flow. They were squeezed out and then staggered on the page without conviction. In my second year, feeling no good at fiction, I switched to poetry, a more forgiving genre for non-native speakers, as it involves fewer words and has a higher tolerance for non-standard English. To mitigate the battle between the two languages, I wrote my first draft in Chinese and then translated it back and forth while revising. After several years of writing poetry like this, I tried fiction again. I wrote a novel in Chinese, about how social forces act upon two sisters, both of whom could have been me. I wrote quickly. Words I thought I’d forgotten or never possessed poured onto the page. On good days, I tasted wuwei. The perplexing, disorienting I disappeared. A coherence emerged that felt almost easeful.

Meanwhile, there was the business of making a living. After several temp jobs, and caring for a toddler, I returned to school for a PhD in the hope of getting a stable job. The ESL instructor decided I wasn’t fluent enough in English to teach Composition, even though I had taught a year of poetry during my MFA. Her class included a weekly tutorial where I sat in front of her desk, read passages out loud, and tried to make what came out of my mouth appear as unbroken lines on her computer screen—via some sort of software intended to rid non-native speakers of their accents. She was convinced that when English speakers spoke, their words were naturally linked. Frustrated by my broken lines, she asked, “Why do you want to write in English in America? Why not stay in China and write in Chinese?”

For one thing, she seemed to be speaking of striving. What I was doing, writing in a foreign language in a foreign land seemed reward-less, and therefore, self-defeating. We revere effortlessness. When we see a musician play as if their fingers were infallible or a swimmer swim as if water were their true element, we catch a glimpse of our own potential. But when efforts seem misguided or fruitlessly exerted, they are simply wasteful, like the way my instructor must have seen me—failing again and again to link the lines on her computer, and inevitably, failing to write well in a language that is not mine.

The summer after my first year as a PhD student, sitting under a century-old oak in the backyard of our rented house, I found myself scribbling in English in my notebook. The extensive use of English that year must have crowded out my Chinese, which until then had been the language I wrote freely in. A relief, since now I could skip the time-consuming self-translation when already there was hardly any time to write. It was also unsettling. I seemed to be losing my Chinese and I would never be able to write in English as if it were my native tongue. I would be stuttering, perpetually seeking the right word in my linguistic unbelonging.

I ended up teaching composition, completing my PhD, and getting a full-time job—as a fellow PhD candidate had predicted, except for not quite the right reasons: “You have a book, you’re Chinese, you’re a woman, of course you’ll get a job.” In an interdisciplinary course I co-taught with a history professor on East and West encounters, I learned for the first time about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the country’s first immigration law that barred the entry of Chinese laborers and denied citizenship to the Chinese who were already here. I learned that without the Chinese laborers, the transcontinental railroad across the Sierra could not have been built, and approximately 1,200 Chinese railroad workers died building it. I was struck by my ignorance. How could I have lived in this land for almost twenty years without knowing these basic historical facts?

In the summer of 2019, visiting my parents in Guangdong, I told my father I was reading about Chinese in the 19th century America. He reminded me that his great-grandfather had helped build the railroad. The information was somehow new to me. What I had known was vaguer: my ancestor had labored overseas for two decades before returning home to build the two-story house my father grew up in. The focus had been on the two-story house, not the detail of his labor. Maybe this was because the blood-and-sweat railroad work evoked no glory or promised no redemptive wuwei, and the bloody purges and expulsions made his return a choice he had no power to make. Maybe shame resided in what was left untold. The legacy that had been erased in America, for different reasons, was also erased in China.

I read all summer, delaying the writing. I kept telling myself I needed to learn more. But at the beginning of the fall semester, during my pre-tenure research leave, I began to write. At first, nothing but dull words appeared, but after an hour or so, I felt an easing in my head and words began to flow. I wrote every day. Some days, nothing shone. Some days, the novel seemed to be writing itself.

Early the following spring, my daughter came home and told me a classmate had done a little song and dance in front of her: “I am coronavirus from Japan, hanging out with Chinaman.” When a week later, her school switched to remote, I was relieved. I had been afraid she would be asked, “Do you eat bats?” or get beaten like other Asian and Asian American kids were experiencing across the country. In the past, the question for her was “Do you eat dogs and cats?” which, like the one my former ESL instructor had asked me, had no good answers.

One day, I ventured out for a walk. A man standing by the duck creek yelled in my direction. I couldn’t make out what he was yelling. It could have been a version of “Go back to China!”—the ubiquitous rant hurled at people who looked like me. A not-so-distant echo from the rallying call shouted by mobs a century and a half ago: “The Chinese must go!”

I wrote my fear and anguish and anger into the novel about my precursor immigrants who were all too familiar with such yelling. Some of my characters decide to go back to China. Some stay put, to claim their space at whatever cost.

I wrote and when it went well, I forgot I was writing in a language not native to me. It didn’t seem to matter which language I was writing in, or where I was. I was simply writing, without striving to write. I disappeared into the world of my making, a safe place to be. And I felt joy.

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Ye Chun’s Straw Dogs of the Universe is available from Catapult.

“What language do you dream in?” When you are a multilingual person, there is always somebody who asks you this question. My answer is, “I do not know, it depends. Maybe my dreams come already translated.”

Don Antonio was the physician during my childhood in Ondarroa, my hometown in the Basque Country. Antonio was a rural doctor sent far away from Valladolid, Central Spain, to a tiny Basque-speaking fishing village. Antonio was tough. During consultations, he used to ask me questions and take notes. I did not answer him. My mother translated the conversation between the doctor and the patient. She was my first translator.

“Don Antonio will think you don’t understand,” my mother barked. “Your Spanish is quite good. Why don’t you talk to him?” The reason was that his rudeness scared me, and I took shelter in my mother tongue. I have to admit that visiting the doctor was not so bad after all. On our way home, Mom used to take me to the bookshop next to the doctor’s house and treat me to a book. That was our deal, “I will go to the doctor as long as you buy me a book.”

I was a shy boy, and books were my closest friends.

I loved books, especially translated literature. Reading was like talking to friends from all over the world, opening windows to other cultures. Of course, I liked writers from my community, but there were not so many books published in Basque at that time. I had to find outside what I could not get at home. There was a tiny good bookshop in my hometown. The bookseller, a middle-aged man who introduced worldwide music and literature into our lives, was responsible for my early interest in Raymond Carver, Sylvia Plath, Italo Calvino, Anna Akhmatova, Natalia Ginzburg, Yehuda Amichai… They were all translated authors. Then I start to write, inspired by them. So, I can say that translations made me a writer.

My whole life I have been living between languages, going from one to another on the same day or even in the same conversation. We were Basque-Spanish bilingual children during school years, and now, living in New York, English is our third language. I live in New York and I create mostly in Basque. It is my mother tongue and I have developed my writing career in Basque. There is another reason too. It is the smallest language among those that I speak. I go for small things. I think writing in Basque is contributing to a culturally biodiverse planet, a multilingual one.

New York gives me a sense of shelter to write in Basque, provides me with the distance and the freedom that maybe I could not have had in my country. James Joyce wrote Ulysses in Paris. He wrote it in English in a French-speaking city. Would it have been the same book if it was written in Dublin?

I completed my last novel, Life Before Dolphins, in New York. For the first time I wrote both versions, Basque and Spanish, simultaneously. It is interesting how different each language can act. They act like fractals. Basque seems like drawing done by a butterfly wing. Spanish, on the other hand, is a chameleon’s circular and long tail Basque has the beauty of short sentences and accuracy. Spanish loves complicated sentences, its cadence lasts. Once I finished the two versions, I brought to each of them what I had learned while writing the other. Both versions, original and translation, are the master.

Nothing is lost in translation. Books flourish in translation. They reach new readers; even the quality of the original text itself improves. Translating is somehow a process of creating. It is not just an approach to finding the word, the expression in a different language. It has to capture the soul. Make the story work in a different culture.

Elizabeth Macklin translated my book of poems, Meanwhile Take My Hand, into English. She was working on an ending to the poem “River,” which says: “they could be an old woman’s hand / awaiting any other hand’s caressing.” The complicated part was that the order of the words was the opposite in Basque and English. It was impossible to translate the sentence in the same order. To me, it was essential to finish the poem with the word “zain” (awaiting), because it is the story of an aged woman who lives alone in the city. Elizabeth found the best solution, placing “caressing” at the end of the poem. Neither Spanish nor French could respect the order of the original. Just in Japanese, Nami Kaneko could place “zain” at the end of the poem. Japanese has the same order as Basque.

More recently, Megan McDowell suggested a new title for the novel she is currently translating. The original name was Izurdeen aurreko bizitza, which I literally translated as Past Life of Dolphins. She advocated instead for Life Before Dolphins. Her explanation was that in the Past Life of Dolphins, the animals are the subject, while Life Before Dolphins is more focused on the humans. I have to admit that the title sounds much better now, thanks to the translator’s wisdom. Translation improves the original.

When we moved to New York five years ago, my son was concerned because “English was occupying the room that once was Basque.” He was talking about his brain, and how he felt that he was forgetting his mother tongue. At the beginning, he translated from Basque to English. The structures of his sentences were exactly the same as they were in Basque, and if a word in English did not come to him, he would use a formula to make a Basque word sound English. Five years later, Basque words are made up from English words. Three languages flow fluently in him. There is room for three or more languages in the palace of his mind. That happens to him, and to everyone. So, let’s be open to languages.

The Cuban poet Carlos Pintado told me that he had listened carefully to the podcast that I publish weekly. It is recorded in Basque. He was surprised that he did not understand anything. He tried to decipher words as a thief tries to decode the combination of a safe moving the dial. If you manage to open the box of a new language, you will find a treasure inside.

I still don’t know the language of my dreams. But I do know that I dream of a world where languages live together, travel across borders.

Most translators of contemporary literature have at some point worked with an author who knows some English. And if an author knows some English, they’ll likely want to take a glance at what you’ve done with their prose. On occasion this can be helpful, when they save you from a mistranslated idiom, say, or clear up a particularly knotty passage; but most of the time, at least in my case, I find it to be a pain in the ass. Or maybe I’m just jaded by a couple bad experiences, when an author, overestimating their knowledge of English, started picking apart my sentences and bending them back toward the original Italian, rendering the text perhaps more literal but less faithful in tone and meaning. What happens, then, when the author reviewing your translation not only speaks English fluently but has already written a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories in the language?

Jhumpa Lahiri, as is well known by now, has been writing and publishing much of her work in Italian since 2015’s In altre parole, translated into English, under the title In Other Words, by Ann Goldstein. With her latest novel, 2018’s Dove mi trovo, published in English three years later as Whereabouts, Jhumpa did the translating herself, and it’s safe to say—based solely on the number of people who have asked me “Why didn’t Jhumpa translate the stories herself?”—that everyone assumed she’d go on doing just that. Why she didn’t is a question for her, not me, alas, and she does address it in an interview with Cressida Leyshon that accompanied the New Yorker’s publication of “P’s Parties,” one of the three (of nine) stories in Roman Stories that I translated.

So yes, there are nine stories in Roman Stories, six of which Jhumpa did the first pass translation of and three of which I took the first crack at: “P’s Parties,” “Well-Lit House,” and “Notes.” When each of us had completed our drafts, we swapped stories, marked them up, and passed them back for a final look. I wish I could tell you that we spent long hours on the phone debating the nuances of one crucial word, or that we cursed and moaned and took one another’s suggestions through gritted teeth, or that epiphanies shot off like embers from the hearth of our melded minds, but mostly we agreed, grateful to have another pair of eyes on our work.

Though this arrangement adds some pressure for the translator on the front end—I naturally felt a little more anxious than usual to deliver pages that were as clean and convincing as possible—it takes the pressure off in the later stages, when it’s time to set the words in stone. Those final decisions I could leave to a person not only perfectly capable of making them but who possesses the very voice I was aiming to capture. How could she be wrong?

Any yet, on the publication of “P’s Parties” in the New Yorker, you could still find people tweeting about how the prose style felt unlike her in some way, or even that her books written in English are for English-language readers and those written in Italian for Italian readers, as if there should be a partition. Alarmingly, what these readers are expressing here is not so uncommon: the fear of indirect contact. They can’t bear to think that their beloved author has passed through the filter of some other being. To read Jhumpa Lahiri in translation, they think—even a translation she’s involved in producing—is to get less of her. It’s part of the reason readers in the U.S. don’t like translation much in the first place—we distrust anything but direct contact and assume the middleman will cheat us in some way. If we’re not getting the real thing, why get it at all? And it’s why we often don’t credit or forget to credit translators, because when we do have a Great Literary Experience, like reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies as an undergrad, for example, it doesn’t even cross our mind that some second party—some guy named Stephen Mitchell—could have put us under such a spell. We resent that there’s an interpretive element to translation. And it’s the same resentment that lay at the root of my bad experiences with those Italian authors, who tried to superimpose my English onto their Italian—to make it more of a tracing than a drawing. But you can’t trace one language with another.

So what did this all mean when it was my turn to review Jhumpa’s translations? What could I possibly do? Even if her English veered from the original Italian, isn’t it her right to veer? How would I be able to tell the difference between a mistake and a willful departure? Aware of this dilemma, and of Jhumpa’s preference to stay true to the Italian, I took a maximalist approach, over-correcting and suggesting any solutions that seemed felicitous—always based on the original text—so that Jhumpa could consider all options and take or discard the changes as she saw fit. The result would be a text that combines the craft of two different translators, with their unique relationships to the English and Italian languages, and two different approaches to problem solving, into one fluent and unified manuscript. I hope that’s the case, for anyone who picks up Roman Stories—and I hope it feels like the real thing.

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Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz, is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

In 2016, Sergey Gandlevsky was arrested and detained by Moscow police after tearing down a poster of Stalin on the wall in the Lubyanka metro station. Lubyanka is the notorious neighborhood that housed the Soviet secret police. It is now home to Russian security services. “I tore it off the wall,” Gandlevsky said, when asked by a journalist, “because [Stalin] is a criminal.”

After being threatened with imprisonment for vandalism and petty hooliganism, Gandlevsky was released without charge. The Soviet Union has been dead for over thirty years, and Stalin’s crimes disavowed by the Soviet Union in the 1960s, but it is as if history is repeating itself in Russia. “Everything that’s happened to us will happen again,” as Gandlevsky once wrote in a poem, not knowing how it would come true.

Despite his detention, Gandlevsky has never been, strictly speaking, a political dissident. He has always been, first and foremost, a poet. But in an unfree society, to be a poet, Gandlevsky believed, required refusing to participate in a system he believed was morally bankrupt. At a bilingual reading with Gandlevsky, someone asked why I decided to study Russian language and poetry, I said that I heard Reagan call the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire,” and I thought Reagan was wrong—that a whole country could not be evil. Gandlevsky replied, “when I heard Reagan say that, I thought he was right.”

Sergey Gandlevsky was born in Moscow in 1952, one year before Stalin’s death. An integral figure in the Russian underground poetry scene in the 1970s and 1980s, Gandlevsky began writing poetry only for himself and his friends. In 1972, at Moscow State University, Gandlevsky co-founded Moscow Time, a poetry group which included fellow comrade-poets Alexander Soprovsky, Aleksey Tsvetkov, and Bakhyt Kenjeev, until Tsvetkov’s emigration in 1974. (Gandlevsky would later elegize all of these poet friends in verse.)

Critic Lena Trofimova recalls how Moscow Time’s “poetic fraternity opposed the official literary studio of the university, who had all the necessities of a comfortable but a conformist existence—good lodging, financial support, organized regulations of study.” When asked about Moscow Time’s aesthetic position, Gandlevsky laughed and said:

Since we are talking about three or four extremely funny young people who are always drunk, this very idea would have caused a surge of drunkenness and laughter. There were, of course, reasons of the most general, ideological order. We were all idealists. We believed that death is not the end. We did not believe that there is no purpose in life and that the Universe is a confluence of some molecular circumstances. We did not treat poetry as a mere human activity: one stitches boots and the other writes in rhyme. At the same time, after all, we were scoffers, so the priestly pose in its pure, symbolic form was not welcomed.

Unlike the Sixties Generation of Russian poets—most notably, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrey Vosnesensky, and Bella Akhmadulina—who embraced the role of the poet as public figure of political conscience and performed readings for thousands of people, the Seventies Generation saw the limits of poetry as public dissent. The trial of poet Joseph Brodsky in 1964, the show trial of writers Yuli Daniel and Andrey Sinyavsky in 1966, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 ended the Khrushchev Thaw.

With the ongoing reassertion of the Communist Party in the Brezhnev era, the elder generation of poets looked morally compromised to the rising generation. Gandlevsky himself had no love for what he saw as the “versified ideas of the middle intelligentsia” of Yevtushenko, and saw poetry as a means of privacy, a bulwark against a politics that had contaminated all aspects of Russian life.

By contrast to the attention-seeking political harangues of the Sixties poets, Gandlevsky and Moscow Time saw poetry as a personal matter. For them, as Gandlevsky writes in Trepanation of the Skull, “There was no one whose eyes had to be opened or who had to be made to understand [about the wickedness of the Soviet Union]. Everyone knew everything without that.”

In the 1970s and 80s, during the twilight years of Soviet empire, Gandlevsky worked odd jobs—night watchman, theater stagehand, museum docent, and train cargo guard—opting out of the system of relative privilege afforded to writers who played by the rules. As internal émigrés, poets who had opted out of the “official” path of Russian writers during the Soviet period, Gandlevsky and his generation forged new directions in Russian poetry—often by reasserting links to suppressed or forgotten Russian poets whose emphasis was on aesthetic freedom over political engagement.

Gandlevsky and other poets of the underground did not appear in Russian literary journals until the late 1980s. Since then, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Gandlevsky’s work has received nearly every major Russian literary prize; he has won the Little Booker Prize (1996), the Anti-Booker Prize (1996), Moscow Score prize (2009), and the Poet Prize (2010). A Russian critics’ poll in the 2000s named him the country’s most important living poet.

While Gandlevsky continues to write poetry, the poet-Soviet period rhymed with the poet’s expansion of his literary repertoire into drama, critical essays, memoirs, and novels. His work has been translated into numerous languages and has been included in nearly every major English translation anthology of Russian poetry since the early 1990s. The first volume of his selected poems translated into English, A Kindred Orphanhood, came out in 2003 from Zephyr Press, followed by two narrative prose works translated by Suzanne Fusso, Trepanation of the Skull (Northern Illinois University Press, 2014) and Illegible (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019).

If the affiliations of Seventies Generation provide a cultural context of the Soviet stagnation period, they don’t describe what’s distinctive about Gandlevsky’s verse. Gandlevsky writes in strict rhyme and meter, in what is known in Russian poetry as classical form. Gandlevsky once said that classical form was “given to me by birth…there really wasn’t any choice for me in this regard.” Gandlevsky’s employment of classical form was, in some sense, a return to a Russian poetic tradition that had been buried by Soviet imperatives.

Yet the classical verse tradition and its rhyme and meters remain a standard feature of Russian poetry, long after modernism staked new pathways in American and European poetry. Where Gandlevsky’s poetry distinguishes itself is in how the classical form and ordinary, degraded life collide, a convergence that Mikhail Aizenberg has called the “explosive mixture” of Gandlevsky’s verse. In the words of poet and critic Lev Loseff, what makes Gandlevsky’s work so pleasurable is that he transforms, with minimalist means, the squalid into music:

Gandlevsky turns the monotony and squalor of Soviet/post-Soviet life into lyrical poetry of the highest probe, and the means by which he achieves it are utterly minimalist. If one has a dream in his poem, it is a dream about fixing an old shed and not having matches to light a cigarette. His diction is almost as mumbling and cliché-ridden as a conversation in a crowded commuter train. His verse forms strictly adhere to the versification rules of a middle-school textbook: iambic pentameter or iambic hexameter for meditative poems, anapest for more sentimental lines. Yet, I repeat, nothing finds a more direct way to your heart than these flotsam and jetsam of the commonplace carried by regular iambic or anapestic waves.

Reminiscent of American confessional poetry, which seethed with fact under the hard artifice of form and allusion, Gandlevsky’s poetry works precisely through yoking oppositions—between form and content, between high concerns and daily indignities. The traditional themes of poetry—obsession with language, freedom, death, love—emerge against the backdrop of a depiction of a vulgar life scarred by alcoholism, debauchery, and ennui.

If there’s something that most outsiders get wrong about Russia and Russian literature, it’s that they presume Russians are obsessed with misery, suffering, and death. On the contrary, Russian poetry is a master class in enchantment, playfulness, and ecstasy. As I’ve written elsewhere, the music of Russian poetry is enchantingly joyful, even ecstatic. It is in their poetry that we can witness the pleasures of a people stereotyped by the West as morbid depressives. It is, indeed, what makes translating Russian poetry most challenging, and why readers of Russian poetry in translation tend to absorb only a vision of a grim and absurd reality but not what it sounds like to have such pure music collides with the grim or the absurd.

Translating this explosive cocktail is no easy task. For one, Russian poetry’s longstanding tradition of classical form and its adherence to meters is aided by features of the Russian language—its regularity of conjugations and declensions, its flexibility of word order, and its multisyllabic words offer the Russian poet a capacious and seemingly inexhaustible treasury of rhyme and meter in which to play. In contrast to most American poetry, which a century ago threw off formalism as if it were an outworn girdle, Russian poetry still enjoys the rigorously erotic pleasures of form’s confines. (There are, of course, glorious outlaws in both poetic traditions.)

While my initial attempts to translate Gandlevsky often leaned toward accuracy of meaning over fidelity to a poem’s music, Gandlevsky’s later work encouraged me to loosen up my technique and take greater risks for the purpose of song. After all, Gandlevsky was no Social Realist, but a bohemian, vodka-fueled, descendant of Pushkin. My translations, as a result, ride on a ghost of meter and rhyme, carrying the voice and vision of this distinctive Russian poet across the borders of English.

The tone of Gandlevsky’s poems combines humor with world-weariness, but the speakers of his poems are quite masculine. Gandlevsky’s poems occasionally perform a wounded bravado, a weary machismo. But just as the American confessional poets often play with the ruse of unmasking, Gandlevsky’s poems are not simple autobiographical confessions. Gandlevsky once said that though his poems “underline the biographical,” his memory “is cunning, not simple-hearted, and very selective.”

In a poem like “To land a job,” Gandlevsky masterfully combines classical form with a portrait of a rogue, which may or may not be Gandlevsky. Echoing the song “Bolshoi Karetny” by the gutter-voiced Vladimir Vysotsky and Sergei Esenin’s “Letter to My Mother,” the poem reads like A Portrait of the Artist as a Lumpenproletariat:

To land a job at the garage
And sing about a black gun.
And not once in ten years
Stop and visit your old mum.
En route from Gazli in the south
After a canister of sour booze
Screw some girlfriend in Kaluga
Leave her when she’s due.
Gaseteria lamb of Wednesdays,
Cod-pea soup on Thursdays.
To vow to a friend at lunch
To rough up a garage owner, then
Surmount the promising hill
Of a thirtieth birthday…

Is the poem a boast? A confession? A portrait of self-degradation? Or does it reside in the Venn center of all three? Dunja Popovic, in an examination of Gandlevsky’s work called A Generation That Has Squandered Its Men: The Late Soviet Crisis of Masculinity in the Poetry of Sergei Gandlevskii, argues that the poem begins in the glorification of masculine depradation, alcoholism, sexual conquest, violence, and criminality. Against the backdrop of conservative Soviet social mores that propped up the Soviet system, the speaker’s messy life could be read as a rebellion against conformism.

Yet as the poem unfolds, the stakes of his irresponsibility grow. He’s not only failing to visit his mother, he’s also drinking rotten liquor and getting a woman pregnant. But even inside this little ballad, he’s turning thirty, suddenly facing the grim landscape of a life of gaseteria lamb, illegal hauls, and treacherous somnolent drives:

At dawn
To drive for black market gravel
And sing the black pistol.
And if you can’t catch that gig, doze,
Your cheek on the steering wheel,
Remembering with gloom and woe
That Mahachkala brawl.

The poem leaves us with an ambiguous image, in which the driver is either sleeping at the wheel of a parked vehicle, or about to head into a fiery crash. Either way, his life is passing gloomily before his eyes, encapsulated in the flashbacks to brutal beatings.

The poem begins in the romance of a carefree male freedom and ends with a fatal narrowing into ruefully recalled violence. Still, the poem’s superabundance of music, its song-within-a-song, makes this portrait of a trucker barreling into the abyss seem more like a blues song or a quick Scorsese movie, inviting us into an intoxicating but ultimately nihilistic romance of a careless existence.

Though the poem’s lyric speaker could be Gandlevsky, I couldn’t help but observe that, in Gandlevsky’s head-spinning memoir, Trepanation of the Skull, a drinking buddy named Misha Chumak visits the poet from Gazli, along with his girlfriend and baby. In Russian poetry. the use of verbal infinitives invites us to read this poem as a dramatic monologue. But then, one could read any poem—and certainly any poem by Gandlevsky—as a dramatic monologue of a fictive self.

This poem aptly demonstrates some of the challenges in translating Gandlevsky. Gandlevsky forces a translator to scramble between retaining cultural particulars, at the risk of losing the American reader, and opting for some American equivalences, at the risk of effacing the original. Years ago, looking for an American equivalent of рыгаловкa, a Gandlevskian neologism combining the words “to belch” and “diner,” I found it while on a bus ride from Boston to New York. Somewhere around 125th Street, I looked up and saw Gaseteria. (Gasterias no longer exists, but it served its purpose.)

In my earlier translation of this poem, I translated the last lines in this way:

And if not lucky enough for this,
To drift off—cheek on the steering wheel—
Remembering gloomily
A brawl in the Caucasus.

The new version restores some of the rhyme throughout the poem and reasserts the place name of Mahachkala, and the assonance of “Mahachkala” and “brawl” approximates more closely the music of the Russian line.

Gandlevsky’s spiritual quest might evoke images of the Beats for the American reader, but for the Russian reader, one hears more keenly the sounds of and allusions to Russian literature. When reading Gandlevsky, a Russian might hear echoes of Pushkin’s measured lyric delight, Chekhov’s alternating atmospheres of gloom and grace, Blok’s foreboding symbolism, Mandelstam’s dark paranoiac urgency of the Voronezh years, Okudzhava’s melancholy songs of Old Arbat, Vysotsky’s gutteral visions, Nabokov’s plaintive nostalgia for his lost Russia, and Tolstoy’s argument with God.

Gandlevsky’s conversation—at times, his argument—with tradition is something that we may only vaguely discern, just ghostly demarcations. Still, Gandlevsky’s poetry does not politely invoke the great writers, but rather brings them alive to wrestle with their incomplete legacy.

*

Despite Gandlevsky’s late experimentalism, the poems maintain a continuity of comic melancholy. Elegiac colors have always tinctured his poems, but as his poems reach past midlife into old age, his backward glance to his childhood and youth sometimes feel bathed in nostalgia:

Bright ochre and rust delight these old eyes.
Between roofs, a cloud grows out of itself.
Wind gathers, drags leaves by their scruff,
Batters a fountain, a mag of expired styles.

The blue autumn light. I dig it like no one.
There’s snow on the roof, but fire in the oven.
What I would give to wait at the train
For a stylish black-coated twentyish woman.

What is more traditional than a poet singing the praises of autumn, the yellows and reds seen by the poet as ochre and rust? That paradox, of the artist’s colors and of metal turning rusty, captures Gandlevsky’s mixing of memory and desire, of beauty and ugliness, of love and dying. This autumn is not only a season, of course, but the poet’s struggle against aging, against expiring. Despite his graying hair—”snow on the roof”—the poet’s desire flares up in his chest. (The Russian expression for an older person engaging in midlife crisis behavior is, literally translated, “gray hair on the head, demon in the rib”).

Yet Gandlevsky remains quicksilver and self-mocking, irreverent both with the poetic tradition and with himself. As one poem goes:

I said farewell to the Falstaff of youth
And took my seat on the train.

In the rocky process of evolution,
I turned from playboy to lone wolf.

And nonetheless April
With its non-alcoholic drops
Still pounded my head like schnapps.

Should I hang a house for birds,
Aim for some laudable goal?
Or should I just aim and fire?

Long story short, I will not be consoled.

No matter the particular life that you face, you will say farewell to the Falstaff of youth, but that doesn’t mean that he won’t go away without a fight.

When I first met Gandlevsky, in 1993, he’d already reached midlife, craving a steady, tidy existence with Lena, his wife, and his young children Sasha and Grisha. He’d recently begun editing the journal Foreign Literature, which he continues to this day. We met outside the metro stop. Charlie, his Boxer, panted next to him, his tongue outside of his mouth.

We wandered through the streets of Moscow. Gandlevsky stopped short, and pointed to the roof of a crumbling monastery. It was here, some years ago, he said, he once shared a bottle of vodka with a drinking buddy. Today, those days are gone. His kids are grown and he’s a grandfather now. He quit smoking, and prefers burning time in his garden.

Thirty years ago, I chose to translate Gandlevsky because I believed he captured the spirit of his age more scrupulously, more intensely, than any other poet of his generation. His friend, the poet Aleksey Tsvetkov agreed, saying, “With the exception perhaps of Pushkin, I do not know another example of a poet merging with his time to such an extent that that time could be—and probably will have to be, at least in part—reconstructed based on his poems.”

But I have gone back to his work, again and again, not simply for its documentary or historical value, nor for its youthful insouciance or its critical sentimentalism. Generations come and go, as do brands and bands and slang, but what remains is the haunting music of the heart’s longing, affixed by mere words to a page.

Poetry is not a commodity but a way of being, a way of inhabiting an interior homeland. In contrast to the professional productiveness and frenzied graphomania of some poets, Gandlevsky works slowly, writing only a handful of poems every year. He still spends weeks, even months, composing a single poem, turning it over in his mind as he goes about his day, taking walks and working with the earth. When, after a particularly extensive two-hour recitation of his poems, I’d asked him how he’d memorized all of it. “I don’t memorize them,” he said. “That’s how I write them.”

For quite some time, rumors circulated that Gandlevsky was going to emigrate from Russia and move to Israel. Given the political turn of the country—or perhaps, turning back—it’s no wonder. When, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, Gandlevsky decided to move to the Republic of Georgia, where he writes now, in exile. In addition to fears about his family’s safety, he also shared another reason. “I am seventy years old,” he wrote to me, “almost my whole life has been dominated by people with whom I want nothing to do. Can I at least live the last years of my life—I don’t know how many of them I have left—by myself, in a country that has aroused my strong sympathy since my early youth!?”

He will, of course, remain Russian until the end. Wherever he is, he will be writing into freedom. And when he passes, the poems will be the testament to that invisible labor. To write is to make a home amid our political or spiritual or actual exile. “My homeland,” he said back in 1992, quoting another Russian writer, “is Russian poetry.”

The gift of reading Gandlevsky in translation is to visit a vision, amid war and exile, of a homeland made of words.

______________________________

“A Homeland Made of Words” by Philip Metres, from the introduction to Ochre & Rust: New Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (Green Linden Press, 2023).

First Parable on Turbulence

I had a dream I got what I wanted: a baby, a silver necklace, and worldly success. That these gifts numbered three ensured this magic could be trusted. All I had to do in return for each was express gratitude. But each time, I failed that test. My voice clotted in my throat. The gifts turned like milk. The baby proved a weirdly heated rubber doll, the silver chain a hopeless tangle, and the performance of my play a mess of scenes that would not end.

I tripped from the dream into morning, struck with early April light. The clearest of lights. From there, I tried to relate my “nightmare” to my husband: a baby, a necklace, success. Amid such beneficence, what could explain my dread? It was the gratitude I could not pull from my throat like a golden thread.

The mandate for gratitude abounds in our current moment. Every throw pillow demands it, every coffee mug, every tee. For many, gratitude is a guiding star, allowing one to correctly orient past to future, to keep one’s preciously assembled raft moving forward toward some shore.

But not for me. I cannot coax it from my throat.

And so I remain at sea, in turbulence.

In Lovely Blue

The Blue Light, a newly translated memoir by the late Palestinian author Hussein Barghouthi, is both a thing of nervy beauty and a record of turbulence. Born in Ramallah, brought up between Palestine and Beirut, and educated in Europe and the US before returning to Palestine, the polymathic Barghouthi wrote in every genre, including poems, plays, songs, screenplays, and prose; to date, only two of his works may be read in translation. The Blue Light is brought from Arabic into English by Fady Joudah, the Palestinian American poet-doctor whose own poetry and translations of major Arabic-language authors have won wide recognition, including the Griffin Prize for international literature.

The Blue Light burns with a lyric immediacy and a wiry charge. Summarized plainly, the memoir relates a period Barghouthi spent as a graduate student of comparative literature in Seattle, during which time he thought he was going mad. After a youth spent in constant transit, “I was looking for an area with reasonable weather and some downtime to organize my chaos,” Barghouthi relates at the bottom of page one.

But, to evoke and invert the maxim from Casablanca, if you come to Seattle for the good weather, you’ve been misinformed. Just so, Barghouthi finds an inversion of his expectations during his sojourn in Seattle. His chaos will not become organized. Instead, he’s further inundated with turbulence. For nine months, he wanders in a dark wood around the university. Yet this nocturnal wood is thick with characters, from Bari the Turkish-military-brat-turned-Sufi to Don the can-collector-sage to Suzan, the hippie survivor who compulsively draws blue peacocks in white notebooks at the Blue Moon Tavern, the Grand Illusion Cinema, the Last Exit Café. He’s drawn to these joints by their names. Of the shady and the crazy, the dump and the dive, Barghouthi writes, “God surrounded me with the marginal world and all its gravitational pull….In this world of the margin, everyone transits.”

Not surprisingly for a figure who has spent his life in transit and who is surrounded by transients, Barghouthi comes to see place not as a key coordinate of reality but as a “ruse.” Amid a world of transience, what is real? For Barghouthi, the real is not secured in a place but pointed toward, via a suggestive aesthetic-cum-spiritual pattern he calls “the blue light.” A good comparatist, he derives his color theory from various sources—the Naqshbandi Sufi, Tibetan Buddhism, European art and literature, African American blues, the Quran, his own life. Such eclecticism is both a method and a sign that one is on the right path:

Blue is the color of the energy of creation within us. I remember how years ago I would shut my eyes and listen to Stravinsky, Beethoven, or Mozart. I used to imagine myself in a wadi in the mountains of my childhood. And the wadi was a bewildering dark blue, the rocks were dark blue and magical. Was that an awareness of suppressed creative energy or a longing for childhood? Or was it total estrangement?

This transit from the firm ground of declaration to an eddy of interrogatives is typical for The Blue Light, as it is for the blue light, confirming that the movement of both Barghouthi and his memoir is not just aesthetic but mystical, pushing outward from the self into the “bewildering dark blue” of “total estrangement.” The signature motion here is not (yet) toward unity but toward an ever-broadening question. It is not placatory but turbulent. “And maybe there is, also, blueness to my ill wishes,” he later confides.

Within a few pages, then, this book becomes less a memoir than a mystical inventory of color, a night-writing lit with blue. Of course, like a bower bird, Barghouthi keeps a catalog of blues: sky, sea, childhood-ice-cream-parlor awning, the pulsing vein in a proselytizer’s clenched jaw. This suggestive celestial hue receives its terrestrial counterpoint in green—“They buried my brother in Pistachio,” he relates in Joudah’s unnerving translation, referring to a cave with dirt of that color. When his mother claims “children don’t die, they become green birds in a paradise with flowing rivers,” the skeptical child-narrator decides to investigate:

On an empty, spacious and moonlit night, I went to Pistachio. I wanted to get my brother out of there. I imagined all of the children coming out in white shrouds—if they were even shrouded—and flowing in moonlight before they began to walk in gardens, in the shade of olive trees, in silence. Moon color is evidence of the wakeful power of the imagination that refashions the world….In Palestine, the color of memory is lunar. The moon is the only nightlight that clarifies to the peasants the features of objects.

In this luminous passage, the greenness of “Pistachio” is washed away by “moon color,” “lunar.” But what color is lunar? Do you know it when you see it? Is it ineffable? Is it of this world, the next, or somewhere in between? Perhaps “lunar” represents a color that has moved beyond anatomical human vision to an intensely mystical, and of course nocturnal, “nightlight.”

This passage is also suggestive of the political content and context that forms the grounds of this memoir, triangulating the mystical and the aesthetic with the specific historical fact of the militarized dispossession, displacement, and diaspora of Palestinians decade after decade on a relentless, turbulent tide. On first meeting his Sufi interlocutor Bari, Barghouthi notes, “his form was that of an ancient pastoral warrior: a well-knotted military boot ready for an emergency, a green winter US naval poncho, and a rough wild wooden stick with a bracelet tied to it, completely out of context.” Similarly, Barghouthi himself, wandering in the woods of Seattle, thinks of himself as

a secretive guard of myself on constant military alert. The near-endless rain, the tedious greenery was more a verdant hell than a fertile beauty, my skin that was used to sun and dryness became estranged. When early Arabs introduced the first palm tree to Europe, they called it “the stranger.” I was a stranger palm tree.

The militarized and the pastoral meet in these displaced youths’ experience of nature, which, though emblematized in both cases by the color green, is not set off from human affairs but inflected with human tones, history, violence, and vigilance. To exist this way is to be “completely out of context,” like the palm tree, “the stranger.” It is no wonder that Barghouthi elsewhere describes the birds of Palestine as “hysterical”: “They evade any sign that points to a bond between them and humans,” he asserts, their avian hysteria ironically belying their contiguity with human turbulence.

If to be “completely out of context” and “estranged” is the intolerable condition of those in diaspora; it is also the aspiration of the Sufi mystic—and of the visionary poet, as famously formulated by Rimbaud. When Joudah renders Barghouthi’s phrase as “total estrangement,” he creates for the Anglophone ear an unmissable rhyme with Rimbaud’s call for “dérèglement de tous les sens,” typically translated as “total derangement of the senses.” This allusion in turn conjures the great Syrian poet Adonis’s lecture “Rimbaud, Orientalist, Sufi.” For Adonis, Rimbaud may be read as Sufi because “when we abolish the action of the senses, we abolish what separates us from the profound essence of things.”

Joudah’s doubly allusive translation sheds (blue) light on the text’s formal doubling of derangement and estrangement, confirming that turbulence is something that the poet-mystic must move through—not just for aesthetic but for spiritual reasons. The largest figure of such turbulent blueness is of course the sea. The sea itself is not free from politics—Barghouthi reports not being able to visit the sea from his mountain home in Ramallah due to blockades of the sea routes. He recounts stealing past guards for his first encounter with the sea and later, in Beirut, stealing with his mother down to the military club pool after nightfall to wash his baby sister’s hair in the sea. On this nocturnal outing, “I felt a hand grab the back of my shirt at the same time as a wave submerged me to my waist.” Though this anecdote literally relates how his mother saved him from drowning, by repetition it becomes inverted. He feels the sea is chasing him, a spot in time recollected not in tranquility but in turbulence: “In a chase there is movement, energy, vigor, anger, freedom, drama, flare, madness.”

As the book rises toward its climax, this ultramarine tide begins to deliver Barghouthi to the first inklings of a new spiritual state—an intermediary level he identifies as barzakh:

In the Quran, a barzakh partitions two seas that God has destined never to meet. I felt as if ecstasy is fresh water in the heart….And there’s another sea, salty with fear, pain, regret, sorrow, revenge, jealously and other negative feeling. A barzakh sits between the positive and negative seas that meet only when the world becomes brackish, unclear, as when a waterfall delivers itself to a salty sea that dominates it. I call this mixing of the two waters in the heart: overflow.

This spiritual development entails a move away—or, at least, an intent to move away—from personal turbulence. But barzakh itself is not just one thing—it is mysterious, multiple, midway between the sensual world of humans and the purely abstract world of God. Adonis has described barzakh as the zone of the imagination, of the poet, “in which things are transformed, i.e., the site of images and revelations.” In this elevated-though-not-ultimate middle zone, the poet creates images that point mortals toward God. At the book’s close, it is the into the double sea of barzakh that the young man commits himself.

Second Parable on Turbulence

As our four-year-old son transforms from toddler to child, the weapons he raises against me go from intuitive, the chubby fist, to cultural, a cheap plastic flute reimagined as a gun. He stares down its invisible sights at me. When he’s in these moods, we take everything away from him and set him riding for the park.

This time, as he arrives, a peregrine falcon flies over, just a few feet above his head. It is one of a pair currently nesting on the broadcast tower of our beleaguered local news station, and it bears in its talons something dark, wet, impossibly long and thick for its wingspan. At first I think it is the leg of a dead thing, a deer, a foal, some kind of omen, but then I realize it is just a branch. As falcon and child ride away from each other, the epic force is not lost on my son.

“I am like that phoenix!” he exults as he rides away.

Phantom Pain Wings

Viewed from our current moment, that is, from its height, the career of Kim Hyesoon as a poet of global renown looks like a classic American-style success story: the supremely talented individual, the frictionless rise-and-rise. But that’s not her story. Kim Hyesoon released her first poetry collection into an intensely sexist literary culture and amid a notoriously turbulent year for Korean democracy: 1979. That year saw the assassination of the authoritarian leader Park Chung Hee, followed by a military coup by General Chun Doo-hwan and a curtailment of democracy that would last into the 1990s. A student protest movement in 1980 culminated in the May 18 massacre in Gwangju—opening an irreparable wound that continues to orient and destabilize Korean politics to this day.

Kim’s translator Don Mee Choi is herself a poet, visual artist, and winner of many major prizes, including a National Book Award for poetry and the MacArthur “genius” award. Choi, whose father worked as a war photographer and who left Korea as a child, has related the following two parables about the inception of Kim’s career. As a young woman, it was Kim Hyesoon’s job to bring manuscripts to the military censors for review. On one occasion, Kim was slapped by the police for refusing to reveal the name of a feminist literary translator. On another, the censor returned to her a manuscript completely blacked out except for the title and the playwright’s name. As Choi has proposed, “it is from this blackened zone that, I believe, Kim Hyesoon’s poetry emerges.”

The Gwangju massacre was itself psychically recapitulated in 2014 by the Sewol ferry disaster, in which 250 high school students and sixty others drowned. In its wake, Kim Hyesoon’s devastating book-length elegy, Autobiography of Death, was published. Translated into English by Choi (the eighth volume on which they collaborated), the work won them the 2018 Griffin Prize, the world’s most lucrative and visible prize for poetry. I am certain Kim would never wish to be thought of as a national poet, yet one could argue that in Autobiography of Death she has written a national epic—not of patriarchal milestones—battles, conquests, warriors, kings—but from the site of nation’s deepest wound, the wound at its midsection, the obliteration of its own children, which stops and deranges time.

But if one could construe Autobiography of Death as a sublime anti-epic, Kim’s newest work, Phantom Pain Wings, blows the dome of that thought to pieces. Pain Wings follows Autobiography the way Yeats’s shattered, shattering poem “Byzantium” follows his elegiac “Sailing to Byzantium,” which opens with its famous backward glance: “That is no country for old men.” In “Byzantium,” the emperor’s palace collapses, yet, through this ecstatic destruction, its marble floors are at last translated to that which their swirls could only evoke: “that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.”

Just so, in Phantom Pain Wings, both poet and poem are shattered as the dead and birds ventriloquize each other through the medium of the poet herself. As its very first lines acknowledge, “This book is not really a book / It’s an I-do-bird sequence.” Of course, as in all of Kim and Choi’s double oeuvre, this is a work of extreme virtuosity, or maybe even virtuosity-in-extremis—if virtuosity is the ability to endure such turbulent transmissions. “I-do-bird” distends the surface of both Kim’s poems and Choi’s translations. Like the Magnificat, Mary’s exultant time-place-and-status-deranging anthem whispered into the ear of her pregnant cousin, “I-do-bird” indicates directions of flight that are both sublime and bodily, physically inside and at the same time spatially or spiritually beyond:

Woman-is-dying-but-bird-is-getting-bigger-sequence

She says, The pain is killing me

When my hands are tied and my skirt rips like wings

I can finally fly

I was always able to fly like this

Suddenly she lifts her feet

Translation-of-a-certain-bird’s-chirping record

of I-do-bird-below-the-railing

sequence

In Kim Hyesoon’s cosmology, long articulated through essays such as “Hearing” and “Princess Abandoned,” pain is the signature of the feminine poet’s shamanic transit—not just to but through the subterranean zone of the dispossessed and the dead. Pain is a feminine experience, exacted by the mystical phenomenon of hearing by which the voices of the dead enter and leave the body of the poet. In Phantom Pain Wings, more than any other volume to date, this mystical pain is insistently physical, rendered an ecstatic orthography:

Therefore, I draw a line across my notebook

sscribbling

away

Bird never sspeaks to anyone first

Of course I’m the ssame way

My face will grow feathers

I’ll fly away

For the Anglophone reader, the double s’s in Choi’s rendering create a hypnotic, ensnaring effect: the reader feels her own bird feet looped in the sonic spell of I-do-bird. But Choi’s note at the end of the book tells us more: the hangul consonants equivalent to the double-s sound, ㅆ, visually resemble bird feet—“they are the birds’ webbed feet, poet and bird swaddled as one.” These paired consonants reappear later in the book in the poem “A Blizzard Warning,” and this time Choi chooses to leave them in the English translation for their concrete effect. This time the bird explodes from the textuality of a letter into the poet’s world, rendering the poet herself a white page, the better to bear its birdy footprints:

The flock of birds from your letter mashes my trees, my dense forest

Birds pluck off and eat all my early-sprouted sore nipples

I’ve become the whitest ruined field…

All the ~ㅆ word endings that have left before me are falling

They fall down like trousers, holding hands, in pairs, running through

the blizzard ㅆㅆ ㅆㅆ ㅆㅆ

Part ~ed

Di ~ed

Forgotte ~ed

The presence of Korean as the bird language poking through the English translation is more than just an audacious feat of artistry and translation on the part of Kim and Choi. By calling attention to the written-ness—the punctuation, orthography, and hangul consonants and vowels in which the poems are recorded—the bird language calls attention to Phantom Pain Wings as a specifically written vision, a convulsing interface between the mundane and superhuman worlds that splits to reveal more of itself—a ripped seam marked by pain. Birdsong here does not serve, as it does in most Western canonical poetry, to represent naturalized “language,” toward which, in our fallen state, we humans can only aspire. Instead, Kim’s birds, like the dead, will thrust themselves through our human instruments, through any hole, and regardless of the cost.

Bird Riders of the Barzakh

In her alert, alarming afterword to Phantom Pain Wings, Kim expresses almost physical revulsion to the popular expectation that poetry be a medium of empathy or source of consolation:

Startled, I get frightened. And, conversely, I become even more frightened when I’m asked who my poetry comforts. Therefore, when someone even utters the word comfort, I want to run and hide. I don’t think I’ve ever comforted anyone with my writing. Moreover, I think literature betrays the readers’ desire to be consoled. Perhaps literature crosses into a zone where consolation can’t intervene, evaporating any possibility of comfort.

After that typically effacing “perhaps,” Kim shows the full scale and difficult magnanimity of her vision. Poetry can’t be the medium of podcasty keywords like empathy and consolation because it is already engaged in vast, exacting acts of mediumship, opening cosmic zones through the painful aperture of the poet’s self. To illustrate this model, Kim mobilizes an image taken from Korean folk culture— Bird Rider, an infant ghost who chirps, who must be ventriloquized and translated by multiple shamans, who can throw her voice into animate and inanimate objects, who “can fly like a bird to the past and look down at the scene of the crime,” and who “speaks in the untranslatable fragmented language of the wounded.”

Bird Rider rides on turbulence; Bird Rider moves among orders, species, and states of matter; Bird Rider has an obligation to both the living and the dead that’s larger than consolation for either. In her mediumship, Bird Rider occupies an in-between zone that recalls the image of barzakh that occupies Barghouthi—a poet’s zone of making and variousness, a throng of images that point to a singular Ultimateness. Barghouthi and Kim both end their texts by envisioning their personal transformation into birds—not the wistful, subjunctive escape into nightingale form as ideated by Keats, for example, but a disfiguring process predicated on isolation and pain. Barghouthi declares—

I will pile mask after mask on my face. Under all of those masks I will ascend naked to the blue light, naked and alone. And from a distance I will know in my heart for sure that other birds are headed to the same ascension, birds that I will greet from afar as I kill every sorrow inside me that breaks my soul and complains of the journey’s loneliness, and I will dance. Give me, please. What? Another mask, a sixth mask.

Here the convivial Barghouthi, whose text has been flocked with comrades, flies alone and pecks his own breast, while Kim’s description unexpectedly picks up some of Barghouthi’s more habitual ecstasy. She writes,

It’s the movement of my body, sending the ghost of extremity to its original place, to its inherent existential place, to my whole body. Jumping up and down, the ecstasy of rhythm and the dance combining to my aid. As if wings are sprouting from my limbs. As if disobeying my existence. As if arriving at the ocean.

The ocean beyond the existence of self, where both these birds must ride—barzakh, perhaps.

Conclusive Parable on Turbulence, with Lines by KH (Italics Mine)

“I am like that phoenix!” my son exults as he rides away. His words are carried back to me on the wind of his own going.

But there is no phoenix. There is just the word phoenix. Yet it rises, and it stays with me like a speck in the edge of my vision for days, so that I turn my face, so that now in my mind’s eye it rises up above the boy with his burden, the bird on its bike, indicating an invisible wind that rips like a seam between bird and boy and spills out a garrot of arterial time, so that I feel it on my face, a suprahuman coordinate, that must be borne, distended, convulsive, abdomen, April, the belly of a day, and me all at the bottom of that spasming ocean of wind and soaring, light and time. Phoenix, is what, is what is, is what is going to rise and maybe (re)birth itself as its own likeness in a spasm of pain, an arterial garrot of simile, dolphin-torn, gong-tormented, like is the ligature, which breaks, lets in the sea, to shake, the sea of faith, so turbulent, that region, that relation that relentlessly regathers to break, again, to break with me in it, to break with me in its gut, I cannot thank it, for I am like it, in its riding, as it breaks and breaks. If I am like it, how do I thank it? If I can’t thank it, how can I pray?

Hit me

Hit me

The bird has already flown away

What you have hit is

just a void wearing an outfit

It’s bright inside my outfit!

__________________________________

“On Turbulence” by Joyelle McSweeney appears in the latest issue of Image Journal.

In 1953, the relatively unknown Juan Rulfo (Mexico, 1917-1986) published The Burning Plain (El Llano en llamas), a collection of short stories set in rural Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century. The novel Pedro Páramo (1955) appeared two years later. These innovative works challenged traditional narrative forms, altered the course of Mexican and Latin American fiction, and helped usher in the so-called Boom of Latin American literature that would include renowned figures such as Carlos Fuentes and Rosario Castellanos, from Mexico; and Nobel laureates Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez, from Peru and Colombia, respectively. A second novel, The Golden Cockerel (El gallo de oro), although penned around 1956, would follow in 1980. Despite this relatively small corpus, Juan Rulfo, with his somber vision of Mexico, captured the imagination of readers to become one of the most celebrated authors in his home country as well as throughout Latin America.

Often considered Mexico’s most significant novel, Pedro Páramo is also that nation’s most translated work of fiction. The already mentioned García Márquez would famously praise the work, proclaiming that it was upon reading Pedro Páramo in the mid-1960s that he finally felt prepared to pen his own masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, Cien años de soledad). Coincidentally, both Pedro Páramo and One Hundred Years of Solitude will appear soon in highly anticipated Netflix productions, and enthusiasts of both novels are hoping for strong showings. Currently in post-production, Pedro Páramo features three-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto in his feature-length directorial debut, with Manuel García-Rulfo—a distant relative of the author and star of The Lincoln Lawyer—in the eponymous title role.

*

Juan Rulfo was born in 1917 in southern Jalisco, a region acutely affected by the brutality of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) and the Cristero Revolt (1926-1929). This turbulent period gave birth to modern Mexico and continues to shape the nation’s contemporary society, politics, and culture. Rulfo’s early years were deeply influenced by this period of violence including in 1923, his father was killed in a senseless dispute. Rulfo was six years old. His mother never recovered from the loss and died in 1927 at 32 years of age. As an orphan, Rulfo lived in a boarding school in Guadalajara, the capital of the state of Jalisco, until late adolescence when he moved to Mexico City. Although he would move between these two large cities before settling in the nation’s capital, Rulfo remained deeply attracted to the small towns and countryside of rural Mexico in general and of his home state in particular, and it is this landscape with its often-callous history that so defined his narrative.

*

Despite the significance of Pedro Páramo, most critics would likely agree that the novel has failed to gain the following among English-speaking readers that it deserves. Juan Rulfo is not the only Spanish-language writer to be neglected by English-language readerships, of course, and Rulfo’s relative anonymity among these groups may be attributed, in part, to a crisis of reading in translation in their countries. Beyond this general malaise toward the literatures of other cultures, many observers have wondered if lackluster translations of Pedro Páramo might have contributed to Rulfo’s struggle to secure a loftier position among English-language readers.

Pedro Páramo has appeared in print in English twice before, translated in 1959 by Lysander Kemp (Grove) and in 1994 by Margaret Sayers Peden (Grove and Serpent’s Tail). It is not my intention to disparage previous attempts to make Juan Rulfo’s narrative talents available to English-speaking readers. Indeed, I admire the professional accomplishments of my two predecessors, and I prefer to see my efforts as building upon the work of these earlier individuals. Lysander Kemp (1920-1992), who served as head editor of the University of Texas Press from 1966 to 1975, was a prolific translator whose work on Nobel laureate Octavio Paz is particularly notable. For her part, Margaret Sayers Peden (1927-2020) is one of the most well-known translators of Latin American literature, having worked on such significant figures as Carlos Fuentes and Isabel Allende, among many others. Kemp and Peden deserve praise for their role in making Rulfo available outside of Mexico, and each has moments where their solutions to this author’s challenging text seem inspired.

My favorite example of inventiveness in previous English-language versions of Pedro Páramo comes from Peden. Shortly after the novel opens, one of Pedro Páramo’s estranged sons—not yet named—is led toward Comala, the town that his ruthless father dominated and the one that his pregnant mother abandoned shortly before his birth. This son—now an adult—asks his guide about Pedro Páramo: “Who is he?” The response, in the Spanish-language original, is memorable: “Un rencor vivo.” Peden renders this phrase masterfully as: “Living bile.” Her option, while not fully literal, captures the poetry of Rulfo’s evocation as well as its striking contradiction: Páramo who, although dead at this point in the narrative, lives on in a region still deeply traumatized by his legacy of abuse and loathing.

After completing two drafts of my own translation of Pedro Páramo, I read back through Peden’s version. I was stirred by her reaction to “Un rencor vivo” and realized that my early attempt to capture the beauty and weight of Rulfo’s original was inadequate. I came back to this phrase often over the next several weeks and pondered about two dozen alternatives. I never considered adopting Peden’s words in this instance, however. Not only had I not come up with this possibility on my own, but it seemed clear that her variation was the result of a reading that was very personal. Ultimately, I landed on a solution that I hope readers will find nearly as powerful: “Bitterness incarnate.”

Notwithstanding my appreciation for the efforts of Kemp and Peden, I can say with confidence that Pedro Páramo deserved a new translation. Let me offer here only one example. Rulfo’s novel constantly challenges the reader. It defies comprehension, with confusion and fragmentation central to what seems an unstable fictional world. The text vacillates between presence and absence, between reality and irreality, and even between life and death. At the same time, Rulfo’s writing is defined by a faith in the ability of diligent readers to discover interpretive possibilities hidden within the disintegration of the novel. Facing such a rich fictional source, the successful translator, I believe, must safeguard those elements of the original, no matter how subtle, that are embedded with meaning. Surprisingly, Kemp elided words, phrases, and even whole sentences in his version. Meanwhile, a misstep in the first line of Peden’s translation has undermined that work since it was released nearly thirty years ago. As the novel opens, Páramo’s son (yet unnamed, as mentioned above) explains why he came to Comala. As readers will eventually understand, the place from where this speaker tells his story is essential. In one of the most iconic opening lines of any Latin American novel, this first-person narrator declares: “Vine a Comala porque me dijeron que acá vivía mi padre, un tal Pedro Páramo” (emphasis added). In Peden’s translation, the adverb “here” (acá) is replaced with the adverb “there,” erroneously placing the act of storytelling somewhere outside the anguished town of Comala. My corrected version of this line reads: “I came to Comala because I was told my father lived here, a man named Pedro Páramo” (emphasis added).

Ultimately, the desire to accurately reflect both the letter and the spirit of Rulfo’s fictional universe was fundamental in my efforts to translate one of the seminal texts of Latin America. It has been my pleasure to render this novel into a new English translation, and it is my hope that I have done justice to an author whose enduring literary legacy I admire beyond measure.

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Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, translated by Douglas J. Weatherford, is available from Serpent’s Tail and Grove Press. Translator’s note © 2023 by Douglas J. Weatherford. The book will be available from Grove Press on November 14, 2023.

I first came across Marie NDiaye’s writing in 1993, by way of her magnificent novel En famille (Heather Doyal’s translation, Among Family, is alas out of print), and my reaction, I confess, was that I wasn’t quite sure I got it.  Which troubled me more than a little: at the time (before she moved on to Gallimard) NDiaye was nominally associated with the “jeunes écrivains de Minuit,” a little circle of writers published by the Editions de Minuit—Éric Chevillard, Marie Redonnet, and Jean Echenoz, for example—whose stylish, deadpan, inventive books spoke to me in a way that nothing else being written at the time did.  I loved those Minuit writers; I got them.  All of them, I now had to realize, except one.

With Echenoz or Chevillard I always knew what the novel promised me, what it expected of me, how I was supposed to perceive the voice speaking to me: for all their brilliance, those novels respect the terms of a readily definable pact between author and reader.  To read a novel by NDiaye, on the other hand, is to become acutely aware of the absence of the guideposts that ensure our untroubled progress: realities change, understandings are thwarted, characters appear and vanish, endings come out of nowhere, and through it all an unforgettable narratorial voice hovers between earnest and baroque, analytic and musical.  NDiaye gives us no maps; we can only follow along as her narratives stubbornly refuse to stick to an unswerving path, seem always just about to disappear around a corner ahead of us.  If at first this disconcerted me, I soon came to find it delightful, exhilarating, and rich, to see her books as an experience (like something lived, something gone through), not just a reading.  Maybe I didn’t get them straight off, but they got to me.

And with that was born an insistent desire to translate her.  My first attempt—on the novel that would eventually be published as My Heart Hemmed In—was so sadly unworthy of the original that I abandoned it after a few pages; maybe, I concluded, I wasn’t the right person to translate her books.  But then I taught Autoportrait en vert in a course on recent French writing, and the itch came back stronger than ever; I had to translate it, and this time not give up, even if it was terrible, even if, as seemed likely, it would never be published (too short, too unpigeonholeable).  I didn’t care about that; I just wanted to figure out how to translate Marie NDiaye.

There’s nothing beautiful or uplifting about the translating process; it’s ninety-nine percent revising, as banal as can be.  Oh, but that moment when you’re reading through the latest draft and hear the stirrings of a voice very like the one you know from the book!  There are few greater happinesses to be had in this world.  Fate eventually put my finished manuscript in the hands of the keen-eyed, intrepid CJ Evans at Two Lines Press, to whom I am forever grateful, as I am to every reader who has since found in that book what I did.

I haven’t looked at Self-Portrait in Green for ten years, and it’s moving to see it again in the context of the other NDiaye novels I’ve translated since.  There’s a haunting unity to her work as a whole, just as there is a profound diversity.  None of her books really resembles the others, but a continuous current runs through them all, or rather a series of currents, from broad themes (the perverse unknowability of other people) to dreamlike leitmotifs (shoes, falling, the gesture of tucking back a lock of hair).  All of those are present in Self-Portrait, and with every new book she writes they take on a new density: we can see Katia Depetiteville’s not-exactly-fatal leap from the second floor of her house as an echo-in-advance of Wellington’s fall from the hotel balcony in Ladivine, or the visit to the father in Africa as an anticipation of the first chapter of Three Strong Women.  Just as in a dream, no incident in a NDiaye novel is ever without meaning, but the nature of that meaning can be stubbornly opaque; one way to read Self-Portrait is as a quietly relentless compendium of such incidents or moments, joined together more by association than by plot.  Hence, perhaps, the very particular, very unshakable spell that it weaves.

But there’s another constant in NDiaye’s work, which first struck me when I read her recent novel The Cheffe.  There’s a lovely moment in that book where the title character (who I think it’s not too presumptuous to see as a conduit for NDiaye’s thoughts on her writing), asked to explain the experience she wants to impart with one of her meticulously-designed meals, answers by sketching out a sequence of enigmatic shapes with her hands.  Reading that passage felt like a small revelation; it showed me something I’d always felt in her books but never quite seen.  What I mean is something hard to pin down, an intricate interlacing of shifting relations between characters, spatial and geographical movement, acceleration and deceleration of time, and the long, wandering arc between the first moments of the story and the last, an amalgam of moving parts that work together to create something that feels to me very like a shape, irregular and indefinable but real.

It’s hard to explain that feeling without falling into purple-prose subjectivity, but let me at least try with Self-Portrait in Green.  For one thing there’s the refrain of the rising Garonne, for another the bookends of the two appearances of the mysterious snakelike creature (which shows up again, perhaps, in My Heart Hemmed In); inside those two symmetries lies a fuzzily-delineated parade of “women in green.”  Some of those women flutter into existence only for a moment before disappearing from the narrative; another stubbornly refuses to disappear even after she’s gone.  The very definition of a “green woman” is unstable, evolving and blurring as the procession goes on.  And then, finally, a classic “return to the origins” with the visits to the mother and then the father (the latter involving an abrupt trip to a faraway place, another recurring element of her stories, as in the forthcoming Vengeance Is Mine) before we find ourselves back before the Garonne.  Think of this book’s shape, then, as a convolution of order and chaos, direction and wandering, an unknowable writhing inside a recurring known: inevitability and (in, as) mutability, rigor and (in, as) instability.  The shape of the book is in other words as elusive as its subject—maybe, in fact, that shape is those green women’s very nature.  Is, to extend the narrative’s final words, this book itself a green woman, as productive of meaning, confusion, and sad, strange beauty as they are?

I don’t mean all this as any kind of a key.  There are many ways to read a novel by Marie NDiaye, and in truth my favorite is to drift along on the current, let the book take me where it likes, and marvel as the landscape mutates before me.  I hope this new edition will give a new crowd of readers that joy, and many others.

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Self-Portrait in Green: Anniversary Edition by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump, is available now via Two Lines Press.

Children’s books, comics, puzzles, toy cars, soccer balls, illustrations, the lyrics of songs and lullabies: taken together, the stories in Michele Mari’s You, Bleeding Childhood represent a cataloguing of objects and texts, a crystallization—through the most personal artifacts—of a childhood, and with it, a life. A literary project such as this could no doubt be deemed obsessive, but for Michele Mari, the highest form of literature is, as he put it in one interview, the kind “that surrenders to its own obsessions.”

When asked what his own defining obsession was, he indicated the following: “That of living life as a continuous mourning for my childhood, for which I have a nostalgic, neurotic fixation. Not because it was a golden age—quite the opposite….But because it was the most meaningful thing I ever lived through.” Childhood, with all the terrible consequence of its joys and its pain, is revealed in the pages of Mari’s stories as an open wound, one that inevitably bleeds into and tinges the years and decades to come, so as almost to blot them out entirely.

Surprising as it may be for anglophone readers who are new to his work, Michele Mari—once a literary outlier in his native Italy thanks to his bookish phantoms and infatuations—is today seen by many Italians as a kind of living legend. His books, from the late 1980s onward, have prefigured disparate trends in literary fiction, from a general revival of the gothic and the fantastic, to the split selves that have come to characterize autofiction. And yet if Mari can now be recognized as an unlikely trendsetter at home, his work is less frequently considered in relation to his actual contemporaries as it is to distant models such as Poe and Melville, or Céline and Gadda.

Mari’s writing, with its tendency to mimic older authorial voices and styles, in many ways invites such a reading, employing what he himself calls a “literary vampirism” to explore what would be too crude, commonplace, or heartbreaking to talk about otherwise: a method that elevates these topics and, at the same time, renders them more bearable, if not hilarious. In other words, style enables a “process of redemption,” of regaining the upper hand on life.

This correlation between literature and real life, however, is not always straightforward. Before producing more overtly autobiographical work, Mari published three novels of the most fantastical and hyper-literary order. Beginning with 1989’s Di bestia in bestia (From Beast to Beast)—set in a gothic castle where a man hides both his immense library and his own monstrous twin—each of these early novels explores the theme of the double, of one’s own freakish or regressive other half.

Although the theme might be less apparent in the book as a whole, perhaps it is only with his 1997 collection You, Bleeding Childhood that we discover a key motivating factor behind Mari’s recurring focus on the hidden other. From the very first story, the reader is presented with a Jekyll and Hyde scenario, in which an outwardly respectable—indeed, an outwardly grown up—professor decides he must hide away in order to give vent to his truest passions and reread his childhood comics.

Michele Mari’s comic book adaptation of The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino, 1972. Michele Mari, La morte attende vittime (Nero, 2019).

While his use of literary pastiche has led Mari to be read in dialogue with venerated authors of the past—that is, with the “canon”—nowhere is the vast and unconventional nature of his own personal canon more evident than in this collection. By drawing most explicitly on the genres that made him fall in love with reading in his youth, Mari engages in a process of expansion and inclusion, subverting common conceptions of what counts as classic literature.

Throughout You, Bleeding Childhood, a refined and even archaic vocabulary melds fluidly with the lexicons, tropes, and traditions of numerous popular genres, plumbing the emotions a young reader might experience when first encountering infatuating and hair-raising works of horror or adventure, fantasy or sci-fi, not to mention folktales and myths, mysteries, westerns, nautical novels, and so on.

This ennoblement of what is often viewed as second- or third-tier literature is carried out continuously, from “The Covers of Urania,” an essayistic ode of love and terror to a sci-fi series that introduced the author to “the dark side of literature”; to “Eight Writers,” in which a supergroup of maritime writers must be disbanded, as they individually battle for supremacy in a heightened fan-fiction of the mind; or again in “Comic Strips,” where a literature professor realizes that his childhood comics, still contained in his extensive and invaluable library, hold an “eminence before which all the other books—the ‘real’ books, the ‘serious’ books—had to bow down.”

Such a statement shouldn’t be read as simply farcical or provocative: before enrolling in university and setting out to become a professor of Italian literature, Mari actually focused on drawing comics and graphic novellas, even garnering the praise of Italo Calvino. After receiving the sixteen-year-old artist’s adaptation of The Cloven Viscount—another bloody tale of a split individual—Calvino wrote, “I had great fun looking at your Viscount comic. Your way of narrating through images is full of witty and effective visual devices….I’m delighted by your work.”

Editions taken from Michele Mari’s collection of the sci-fi series Urania. Michele Mari, Le copertine di Urania, with photos by Stefano Graziani (Humboldt Books, 2023).

Across Michele Mari’s oeuvre, these decisive books from his youth come together with other childhood relics to form a personal mythology. More than just symbolic items, they are fetishes, in the original sense of the word. Gradually, these artifacts also reveal themselves as prisms through which to view others; as talismans that house the essence not only of the author and his past, but also of his most formative relationships: grandparents, neighbors, classmates, and most importantly—and most frighteningly—parents.

Of his parents, Mari would write at greater length in his partly fictionalized “horror autobiography” Leggenda privata (Private Legend), but the importance of these blood ties is first captured in his stories. Mari’s father was renowned industrial designer Enzo Mari, a domineering figure in reference to whom the author would write that his own “admiration was such as to prevent any healthy antagonism at its inception.” Already in a few chance anecdotes in the stories “The Covers of Urania” and “Down There,” this father betrays a clear taste for frightening his young son, recounting the unthinkable in a straight-faced manner that appears both scarring and, paradoxically, generous, as though imparting one of the greatest gifts for the development of the author-to-be (an author who is always dead serious even when deadly funny).

In “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”—one of Mari’s most Kafkaesque stories, insofar as it recalls the father–son dialogue and the terrible revelations presented in stories such as “The Judgment”—an imagined conversation between the two men acts as a near manifesto on the emotional power of personal objects. With the central figure of Enzo in this story, one can’t help but wonder how much his methodology as a designer and artist, who used household objects such as furniture, calendars, and even toys to convey radical ideas and political values, influenced his son’s tendency to see the items that filled the day-to-day of his formative years as more than merely material.

Enzo Mari and Michele Mari, at the Danese design showroom in Milan. Courtesy of Michele Mari.

A less apparent but equally impactful presence is the author’s mother, the children’s book illustrator Iela Mari (née Gabriela Ferrario), who sets the tone and the subject matter of two stories in particular: “War Songs,” dedicated to the bloody and sorrowful mountain hymns of the Italian Alpini from World War I, which she would sing as lullabies; and “Jigsawed Greens,” in which the puzzles  obsessively assembled by mother and son become, in a dizzying, Borgesian escalation, a vector for contemplating the infinite through the infinitesimal.

Though all but silent on the page, Iela is everywhere in these stories: in the references to mountains, for one, which are first used as a metaphor in “Jigsawed Greens,” before appearing in the songs of those Alpine troops. Iela had been a skilled mountain climber, an activity that became so detached from her married life that Enzo apparently didn’t even know about her passion—let alone that she had regularly climbed with the likes of Dino Buzzati, an author who originally made a name for himself with the novella Barnabo of the Mountains.

As Mari reveals in Leggenda privata, such stories seemed to pertain to a different Iela from before, with the pieces of his mother’s life appearing impossible to fit together: a mother characterized, in other words, by fragmentation, who already in You, Bleeding Childhood imparts a vision of the world broken into puzzle pieces, singing of a military captain who commands that he himself be “into five pieces cut.”

Jigsaw puzzle depicting Iela Mari, drawn and cut by Michele Mari in 1969. Photo © Francesco Pernigo. Michele Mari e Francesco Pernigo, Asterusher (Corraini Edizioni, 2019).

In contrast to the frantic anxieties that fill Mari’s paternal tales, in these two stories the narrator’s profound emotion and nostalgia are perceptible under an analytical veneer, an apparent coldness, as if to mirror a figure who is referred to elsewhere in the collection as the “Fake Mother,” one who, even when smiling, dons the emotionless mask of a body snatcher. While Mari evidently feared as a child that his real mother had been replaced by the hollow exterior of an extraterrestrial or pod person, in Leggenda privata he also points to the overpowering character of his father as having had a hand in turning her into what can only be described as a shell of her former self, writing “my mother was destined to be colonized, if not by a pod than by him, he who occupied people like a tenant occupies an apartment, renovating it according to the most rational laws.”

The English edition of You, Bleeding Childhood also includes two beloved stories from Mari’s 1993 collection, Euridice aveva un cane (Eurydice Had a Dog), which complement the recurring themes and obsessions of his 1997 collection: the accumulation and fetishization of objects, a preoccupation with the passing of time, and the impossibility of preserving the past. The first story for which Mari explicitly used his own life as his subject matter, the title story of Euridice also familiarizes readers with the much-mythologized house near Lake Maggiore where he spent his summers growing up, in a town first referred to as Scalna, and in later works called by its real name, Nasca.

“Scalna was never a town,” the story opens, and this line has been something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the house and its surroundings shifting over the years to mirror the inner life of the author. Scalna—that is, Nasca—is, today, not a real place but a ghost town, a hardly locatable hamlet where, although everything has closed, everything has kept still, with outward appearances remaining unchanged: on the walls along its main street, the painted words for the tailor or the trattoria are still legible over the doorways.

This place has stayed deeply tied to Mari’s autobiographical or autofictional work, becoming the setting of several moments in You, Bleeding Childhood, and returning in two of his most personal and horror-inflected novels, Verdigris (which And Other Stories will publish in 2024) and Leggenda privata.

Though he has split the majority of his adult life between his hometown of Milan and Rome, Nasca is nonetheless where Mari has done most of his writing, in that same library in which he all but entombed himself in his youth. If Mari wrote in “Eurydice Had a Dog” that he fantasized as a child about keeping everything exactly the same in his neighbor’s house so as to turn it into a museum, that is largely what he has done with his own home.

Through the rusted front gate and down the walkway, up the flights of creaky stairs: there, in the bedrooms, one can still find stacks of puzzle boxes and piles of old toys on the antique furniture; or, resting on the nightstand, a single Urania paperback, perhaps left there from the small hours of the night before, or from decades earlier.

Michele Mari’s house in Nasca. Photo © Francesco Pernigo. Michele Mari e Francesco Pernigo, Asterusher (Corraini Edizioni, 2019).

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You, Bleeding Childhood by Michele Mari is available via And Other Stories.

Daniel Guebel’s The Jewish Son (Seven Stories Press, 2023) has the theme of interpretation at its heart. How is the material of reality understood—or invented—as aesthetic form? Guebel constantly draws parallels between the writer trying to create beauty from the shards of experience, and the theologian trying to find God in a world of seemingly isolated events. Both writer and theologian try to give sense to randomness through narrative and anecdote. They don’t copy reality, but through their ideas, create it. At the same time, they share a self-destructive impulse to destroy what seems stable and certain.

“Spicy interpretation” is the name Guebel gives to a strain of the Jewish tradition where the novelty and originality of interpretation gives value, and “truth” is less important than the possibilities created by a new reading. To offer an unexpected explanation even becomes a way of approaching the irrationality of the divine:

At some point in the Jewish diaspora’s thousands of years of history, a method arose to interpret the precepts of the Talmud. This method was called pilpul, which in Hebrew simultaneously means “pepper” and “sharp analysis,” that is, spicy thought, and which expresses the will to achieve, through logical operations and oppositions of reasonings, the infallible and unique sense of Jehovah’s message. It is at once a corroboration of the imperfection of human thought and an examination of the nooks and crannies of the divine mind, which reveals a secret distrust in its judgment and harbors a secret suspicion: that God is mad.

To interpret is to change events, just as to add spice during the cooking process takes a dish in another direction, one that might enhance or destroy it, and without a doubt, alters it.

*

Guebel is visiting London for a few days, and we kill a few hours in Bloomsbury. At some point, hungry and tired of walking around that zone of street guitarists and rain-soaked plazas, where busts of writers gleam as tired beacons in the evening light, we duck into the Chambeli Indian Restaurant, its name looming from the darkness in orange neon. Guebel asks for a glass of water. A few minutes later, a steaming plate of golden papadams arrives, lightly oiled, accompanied by a variety of yogurts and chutneys.

“Linguistics and gastronomy, how delicious!” exclaims Guebel.

“My favourite part of the book is where, as a child, you discover how the link between a thing and its representation is arbitrary. Coca Cola could be Limca or Xangu. The relationship between word and name is not obvious, but depends on a system of signs. The same holds for an event and its interpretation. Languages and histories are systems of combinatorial possibilities,” I say. Or something like that.

Our friend, the literary critic Mariano Vespa, shows up from Stansted, rolling a suitcase full of books from Frankfurt into the restaurant. Just then the waiter approaches, and we order: saag paneer for me, lamb curries for them.

“The immediate explanation is always an option, but you’re attracted to the opposite. You don’t explain to make sense of things, but to ramify and complicate, in the Jewish tradition of pilpul,” Vespa offers his opinion. He himself recently wrote a biography of the Argentine writer Rafael Pinedo, who does the opposite: he treats language as ecstatic revelation, instead of explanation.

*

Spicy interpretation applies to the relationship between father and son. The son seeks the perfect series of words or actions to impress the father, an open sesame to unlock love. The father, in turn, seeks to anticipate the son and decipher his actions.

The reading is never straightforward, but always hides a second, double interpretation. Nothing is ever precisely what it seems. To act out is to obey (in the case of the son); to punish is to show love (in the case of the father).

A perverse reading of intention, or one that draws on the techniques of psychoanalysis, where the surface gives way to unforeseen depth. Guebel, in the first pages of his book, plunges a ladle through the skin of a bowl of soup.

*

While translating The Jewish Son, I listened to a lot of jazz standards, Sephardic Jewish music, Chilean and Argentine folk songs. What these traditions have in common is that when singing, interpreters tend to put emphasis on the “wrong” syllable, so the words sound like another language, or like nonsense, a pure stream of sound. Going even further, the group Inti-Illimani composed one of its songs by underlying the syllabic emphases of a poem, and then swapping them out with different sounds.

These ways of fitting words to music results in a not-unpleasant defamiliarization. The verbal text becomes a transmutable lyrical force of its own, rendering language and meaning unstable. Rhythm, repetition, and intensity of emphasis start to matter more than what it said. A language of shamans, of people possessed, of echolalia.

Something like this happens when editing a piece of writing or translation, too; you start to read for rhythm, not just plot and argument. A desensitizing process: the father has already died, and now we are at his funeral, performing the last rites with precise intonations.

*

The wait for the food is long, and our stomachs begin to grumble. A waiter rolls a trolley toward us, but sets it down before the couple at the next table, both skinny and mohawked.

“They never brought my water,” says Daniel.

At last, the trolley makes its way toward us. The waiter puts a malai kofta in front of me, a chicken korma and prawn biryani in front of Daniel and Mariano. None of which we ordered.

A silence follows, in which we polish off the food regardless. Hunger is king.

“At what point does understanding become misunderstanding?” asks Daniel.

“At what point does failure of communication become secret language?” I ask.

“At what point does meaning become nonsense?” asks Mariano.

“Dessert or coffee?” says the waiter, clearing away our shiny plates.

*

Despite its short length, The Jewish Son is full of back-and-forths and about-turns. At some point in the translation process, I tried to draw the book’s shape shape. What would the flips in interpretation look like, converted into a visual image? The moments of zag, the unexpected diagonals, the lightning bolts of intuitive or surreal movement, the geometries of interpretative action, the avoidance of a straight line?

I attempted different approaches, sketching dots and arrows where an idea turned into another, or doubled back on itself, and did the same when an emotion changed into another. On the page, the ink drawing looked like the giant wing of an unknown bird, or the scaled body of a snake, with a mystic balance of fold and unspool, collapse and explosion, condensation and chaos.

Similar shapes emerge when I try to draw the jazz compositions of certain artists. What to make of this? How is the mind connected to heart and hand?

Well, I don’t know. Perhaps a message in Daniel’s book is that one is also an infinite mystery to oneself.

*

Susan Sontag, in her famous essay “Against Interpretation,” argued that “interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art.” She asked instead for an erotics of art, where explanation does not block sensuality.

The “spicy interpretation” Guebel presents as the Jewish tradition, in contrast, discovers a sensuality in interpretation itself. Spicy interpretation involves nonobvious readings, readings against one’s inclinations, readings that transform anecdote into analysis or vice versa, readings that deliberately misunderstand or understand a different way, readings that adopt ecstatic approaches others might consider idiotic, readings that are aware of their failure, readings that plunge the memory into doubt, readings that ask whether a received truth might actually signify its opposite.

Spicy interpretation, despite its roots in legality, ultimately also doubts the primacy of the word. Not just because (as writers and translators know) the link between objective reality and the phrase that describes it is highly fragile and mutable. The word turns into painting, theater, or even bonsai, the art practiced by Guebel’s mother in The Jewish Son. It comes from, and returns to, life.

Daniel told me there are two versions of his father’s death in the book—the real death, a natural one, and the false death, through the morphine he injected. Nobody in the Argentine press noticed this. What does it mean to die in a book if one can flip back the pages, or rewrite? What does it mean to fantasize about murdering a loved one? What is hate, what is love?

Maybe here is the limit of interpretation: when you close the book, the body is still absent.

*

After some hesitation, Daniel opts for the Passion Pot, described on the menu as a “luxurious mango flavoured ice cream, rippled with passion fruit sauce and topped with papaya pieces,” while Mariano goes for the Midnight Mint, a “luxurious dreamy Mint flavoured ice cream in pot, rippled with gorgeous chocolate sauce, topped with curls.” For me: the tried-and-true pista kulfi.

The waiter who interprets orders incorrectly is a challenge to the status quo. He makes sure people don’t eat the same-old-same-old, but instead change their habits; he is a tyrant of taste, innocently deaf or passionately perverse. If we had made a fuss, he might even have misinterpreted our complaints as praise.

Three carrot halwas arrived. We ate them and left, satisfied and happy.

Note: This story was written for illustrative purposes. The real waiter at the Chambeli was impeccable, and if you get the chance to grab dinner there, I recommend it.

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The Jewish Son by Daniel Guebel, translated by Jessica Sequeira, is available now via Seven Stories Press.

I live in a small college town in central Vermont, where during a normal academic year, the college provides ample opportunities for cultural enrichment: concerts, plays, films, lectures, and so on. But then came the pandemic: the students had been sent home, the library was closed (books could still be fetched for faculty, but there was no browsing or schmoozing). I found myself in need of a project.

After having translated over twenty Russian novels into English, including three major works by Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground, Devils, and Crime and Punishment), I decided to tackle Dostoevsky’s crowning achievement, his last and best novel, and one of the undisputed classics of world literature, The Brothers Karamazov. Who knew how long it would take or how long the pandemic would last?

I first read Brothers when I was a high school student, puzzling over profound, religious questions: is there a God? if so, why does evil exist? And if not, how should we live our lives? I was studying the Russian language and had begun reading the great works of its literature in translation.

Karamazov was an ambitious choice for a fifteen-year-old, but one that spoke directly to the questions that mattered to me. As a non-observant Jew, I was overwhelmed by the Devil’s temptation of Christ in the wilderness, imagined anew in the famous scene with the Grand Inquisitor (Book Five).

Now, after many years of thinking, writing, and teaching about Dostoevsky’s final novel to many different audiences, I find myself just as awed by that section, and quite taken by the entire book. It speaks to me and deals with the questions that I wrestle with in my profession and in my own life. Dostoevsky once wrote that his faith was “tempered in the furnace of doubt.” So was (is?) mine!

Of course, the novel had been translated previously, once by the indefatigable Constance Garnett, who translated more than seventy works of Russian literature into serviceable English, beginning in the early 1910s; and by the popular Anglo-Russian pair, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who had been translating many Russian novels since the early 1990s. But I planned to do my best.

I chose not to follow the translations of my predecessors; however, on occasion I did engage with them critically, especially in the particularly complex passages, believing that literary translation is in reality an enterprise in which a translator builds on the work of his/her predecessors. If Garnett could come up with the perfect English counterpart, who was I to reject it and use a less appropriate phrase?

In my translations, I try to achieve an evenhanded position on the continuum of accuracy/accessibility, somewhat closer to my readers—namely, the general public and students in high schools and colleges. What elements have I tried to highlight in my own version of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece?

First of all, I try to do justice to the author’s dark sense of humor. The narrator himself maintains an ironic stance to the action of the novel, right from its very first lines. He uses impudent wit and sarcasm to paint a portrait of the “nice little family” living in the provincial town of Skotoprigonevsk (literally, a “stockyard.”)

In addition, the brothers’ dissolute father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, is an authentic buffoon. Each scene in which he plays a role winds up being a “skandal” (just what it sounds like), and undercuts the seriousness of the action.

Secondly, contemporary Russian draws upon two sources for its diction and syntax: so-called “Old Russian,” the spoken language of the East Slavs, and Old Church Slavic (or Slavonic), the language of the Orthodox Church, similar in a way to Latin and modern Italian. When Alyosha presents us with Zosima’s life and works in Book Six, or when he sees his miraculous dream during Father Zosima’s funeral in Book Seven, I tried to be mindful of this rich high-style source and render it with my own elevated language.

Finally, I have tried to distinguish between two kinds of repetition. It seems to me that the Russian ear is much more tolerant of repeated words and phrases than the Anglo-American ear. A literal translation of all the author’s repetitions would be too tedious.

I eliminated what I considered unnecessary repetition of words, including Russian names (first names, patronymics, and diminutive forms), and rely on pronouns, synonyms, and other devices to vary the word choice. On the other hand, I do retain essential repetitions, those that have semantic importance, such as the heart-rending “lacerations” (nadryvy), which comprise most of Book Four in the novel.

Translating Dostoevsky is different from rendering other authors into English. His prose is impassioned, fiery, and intense. Nothing in his novels ever happens “gradually” or “slowly.” His favorite adverb, frequently repeated in consecutive phrases, is “suddenly.” Similarly, his favorite adjective is “strange”: when he says something is strange, it is out of this world, beyond the range of common experience. These two examples provide quite a challenge for the faithful translator.

Although some translations can have a limited shelf life because their vocabulary grows obsolete and their syntax seems unnecessarily complex, I hope to have produced a version of The Brothers Karamazov that will engage the general public and students for some time to come.

May this new version last a good long time, and bring pleasure and usefulness (Horace’s dolce et utile) to its readers, and some genuine insight into the splendid culture of nineteenth-century Russia that produced it. As Dostoevsky himself added somewhat immodestly in the penultimate sentence (which I have taken out of context) of this magnificent novel: “Hurray for Karamazov!”

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The Brothers Karamazov by Fydor Dostoevsky as translated by Michael R. Katz is available via Liveright.