All Articles by Date
May, 2012
To Fly to the Himalayas
(This post is based on Yuyutsu Sharma's 2010 visit to Cordoba where he was invited as a guest poet at the Cosmopoetica Poetry Festival.) My life I can tell you in two words-- a patio and a small piece of sky where a lost cloud and some bird fleeing from its wings pass by sometimes. (Marcos Ana, “My Life,” Translated from the Spanish by Nicolas Suescun ) A nameless apprehension overwhelmed me. A nauseating thud hammered my heart as I stepped over the threshold…...
The Quality of the Fabric: An Interview with Bernardo Atxaga
Phillipe Starck´s forty-three-thousand-square-foot cultural center, the Alhóndiga, that was opened in 2010 was the setting for the Gutun Zuria literary conference that brought writers from the U.S., Spain and elsewhere to Bilbao in mid-April. Residents of the Basque city packed the auditorium each day to listen to the invited speakers, Bill Keller, Chuck Palahniuk, John Verdon, William Gibson and Philip Gourevitch, among others. (See: http://www.alhondigabilbao.com/programacion/gutun-zuria-festival-internacional-de-las-letras)…...
Insularity, Mobility, and Imagination: Writing from the Indian Ocean
In early March 2011, two news items about Mauritius landed in my inbox almost simultaneously: one, a glowing article in the U. S. news magazine Slate, titled “The Greatest Country on Earth,” and the other, a denunciation of greed and environmental damage on the coast of the island, published in the Mauritian daily L’Express. In the first article, Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate in economics and professor at Columbia University in New York, rightfully sings the praises of…...
Center of Flacq
At the first rays of dawn, when the dogs abandon their posts and the vagrants their cardboard boxes, the most pointless of prayers ascends into the sky. A plea. God, grant us this day our daily bread . . . The wind from the east muffles the prayer, the voice weakens, but at that very instant you think it will vanish into thin air, it intensifies, proliferates, spreads out over the tarnished roofs of the municipal buildings, onto the sticky benches of a classroom. In plain sight the voice sometimes…...
The Iron Caterpillar
Strange phenomena can strike such dread into human hearts that I ask you to believe in the one that knotted the stomach of the young diver named Paolo, who noticed the haze of the tunnel when he was returning from a day of fishing . . . Shortly after stowing his fishing gear, mask, snorkel, and flippers in a big, army-green sports bag, and proudly hooking the day’s catch of black jacks and red snappers onto the steel tip of his harpoon—which he immediately placed on his shoulder like…...
Traces of Our Fathers
Writer, journalist, and filmmaker Alain Gordon Gentil has recently finished shooting four documentaries that retrace the great Indian, African, French, and Chinese adventure of immigration to the Mauritian land. The series is titled “Venus d’ailleurs” [“They Came from Elsewhere”]. Memories from the set. I have never celebrated the past, but my childhood has had a way of hanging on. And when it has you in its grip, it conjures images that can only be understood…...
Diary of an Old Mad Woman
I am a cliché. An exotic cliché, indeed, I’ve been living here close to thirty years and like clockwork, I am asked the same questions, the same commentaries. So you come from there, it must be so beautiful so wonderful; why do you live here when your island is so lovely. I just dream of going there, to relax under the beautiful tropical sun, allow me to tell you madam, that you have the charm and kindness of the people from over there. Yes, nice and charming, that’s…...
Isle Say Blood
our fragmented history written with a large axe told by the bordertracers slaves of their prejudice our marooned history chained by hatred whitewashed memory, creole coolie color anger pain dockers our disinvented history open book on nothingness pages thrown into oblivion rewritten by the portolan of night our dismembered history archipelago of sorrow Chagos of our lost islands our incomplete history treated with complacency . . . from what oceanic anger in what…...
Weaving Dreams
And as he gazes at her, their soul-child is conceived (Henri Michaux, Life Within the Folds) That day as she finished weaving the few meters that would wind seamlessly around her body, she tied off the threads and eased the fabric from the loom to hold it and marvel at its lightness. Her hands beneath its sheerness had turned blue. She placed it over her face and looked through it at the softened outlines of objects. At her slightest movement it whispered, speaking to her—of what? Oh,…...
The Crossing toward Hope
1997. Day breaks under a raging downpour. It’s raining buckets. Raining screams. Raining mothers’ screams that drown out the thunder of the bullets raining down on their sons. It’s raining bullets over Mutsamudu. The Kalashnikovs fire away and stop. Soldiers on the other side fall, fire back, run away. A rebel screams and falls. A bullet has lodged in his right leg and the blood is spurting out. The blood of independence, say the local media. The blood of separatism, chant…...
Ludwig and I Kill Hitler for No Reason (or, A Berlin Springtime)
"Another piece of pepperoni?" Ludwig offered generously. "Thanks, I'm full." I patted my stomach. "Full," Ludwig repeated the word, enchanted. "It's been so long since I heard that word." He glanced affectionately at the pepperoni stick lying on the uncovered table, as if looking at an old friend who'd helped him relive a pleasant childhood experience, and stroked the peel nostalgically. From time to time, they could hear the shelling out there and if you pressed your face against the…...
The Sea Horses’ Ball
Below the Mipham plane the Himalayan sky. The wind florifies the snow. Fa-fa-mi . . . mi-fa-fa . . . Shadows gain in luxuriance, tufts of omphalodes and orthosiphon. Don’t stay grounded. Don’t stay attached to anything. My word as a stewardess! In order to thank the Black Virgin and brush her by a breath in her orchard of light, the plane loses some altitude. And to allow the amphibians of outerlava to turn their faces toward the wheel of Virgil. Rain or shine, the plane dives…...
Wild Daffodils
It was only during our first weekend together in the Vosges Mountains that I noticed how in tune we were. Before that, whenever we met I felt as if the city, the noise, and other people were preventing us from being completely ourselves. For our first evenings out we went to restaurants recommended by Sunday magazines, and these were often alike, with the stark lines of their décor, their brightly colored walls, geometric plates and expensive wines. There was nothing to tell us apart from…...
Moorings: Indo-oceanic Creolizations
Moorings (amarres in French), in Reunion Island Creole a profoundly polysemous term, also means link, ties, enchanted, bewitched, to be in love, to be enraptured, to be bonded, to care (amar lë ker) whatever excites the senses (i amar la boush) [. . .] Natives of an island that is often forgotten on maps of the world, often confused with other French overseas territories, we seek to affirm a problematic based on this very forgetfulness, on this confusion. For being forgotten, not…...
Famine
Frogs invariably proliferate in a flood. My countries, crass latitudes and borders of hell, often encounter these blessed times. Winds and rains. Frogs. Toads. Pelobates and other pelodytes. Inflated rice paddies and the unmistakable stench of excavated death. Excavated lifted battered returned. The plague prowls and help is standing by to fill a few wallets. The world’s tears make good neighbors. Definite solidarity, international s’il-vous-plaît, on the silt of humanitarian…...
Peshawar
I liked Peshawar. I preferred it to hot, racing Rawalpindi, or grand, haughty Islamabad. I think I preferred it to any other city in the world. Indolent in the autumn sun, it was the perfect place for waiting. Although formally it was part of the state of Pakistan, Peshawar belonged to Afghanistan by now. It lived according to Afghan laws and rules, it thought and felt the Afghan way, it spoke Afghan and it looked Afghan. And Afghanistan meant eternal waiting—always, everywhere, and for everything.…...
The Hole in the Garden, Part III
“Hello?” There was no answer. I put the phone back down. I turned to go back to the kitchen and it rang again. I picked it up, wordlessly this time. Again nothing. As soon as I hung up it rang again. After this happened a few more times I just unplugged the phone. Quiet at last. I took the leftovers from the freezer and put them in the microwave. I didnʼt bother trying to figure out who might have been calling or why. Maybe it was a telemarketer, bitter because I had refused to buy…...
Adania Shibli’s “We Are All Equally Far from Love”
With the publication of her debut novel, Touch (translated from the Arabic by Paula Haydar)—told from the point of view of a little girl living at the time of the Sabra and Shatila massacre—Palestinian writer Adania Shibli was hailed as a strikingly original new voice in Arabic literature. Her second novel, We Are All Equally Far From Love, now out in a faultless translation by Paul Starkey, will confirm the young Galilee-born writer’s reputation as a formally brilliant literary…...
Kratos
From my face made puffy by the swelling of centuries my shithead laughter, I gaze at you from my manure where negro death unfolds in mass, crater bodies in rotten piles, pink abscess on vagina in bloom, smooth penis, stuck inert in the still pulsating throat of the latest cut-carved On my pile, Let there now be modernity, Let there now be prosperity, Let there now be liberty, I perish humus by my flesh You may now develop, emerge, grow, increase, consume, see, you are progressing, prospering, shining,…...
April, 2012
Literary Journeys through Catalonia: Searching for Mercè Rodoreda’s Barcelona
With Mercè Rodoreda's novel La Placa del Diamant (translated as The Time of the Doves) in hand, we took a lulling hour-and-a-half train ride from Girona to the sprawling, modernist city of Barcelona. The distance between Girona, the capital of the rural province of Gironès to Barcelona, the birth city of post-Spanish Civil War author Mercè Rodoreda is not great: an estimated ninety kilometers separates the two regional capitals. The train cuts through farmland,…...
Listening Under the Kitchen Table: An Interview with Kirmen Uribe
Kirmen Uribe is a Basque writer and poet. In 2008, his novel, Bilbao-New York-Bilbao was published in Basque. (It has subsequently been translated into more than ten languages and was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura (Narrativa) in Spain. Uribe has also published children´s stories and his collection of poetry, Meanwhile Take My Hand, which was translated into English by the U.S.-born writer, Elizabeth Macklin, was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. (Macklin…...
The City and the Writer: In London with Hisham Matar
Special City Series / London If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of London as you feel/see it? London…...
Musical Beds, Catalan Style
If you've finished the issue and are still in the mood, check out Empar Moliner's rollicking "Invention of the Aspirin" in our October 2007 Catalan issue. A bored wife finds she has the ability to slip into other women's identities—and their bedrooms. Shapeshifting from secretary to teen to porn star, and whirling in and of bed with, among others, her daughter's boyfriend and the president, she embraces this cure for her ennui. The result is inevitable and (at least for the…...
Day Three at the London Book Fair
The highlight of the third and final day at the Literary Translation Center was a conversation among poets, editors, and translators about an exciting new book of contemporary Chinese poetry. The book is called Jade Ladder—and the panelists discussing it, and related subjects, sounded like just the playful, dissenting and sensitive voices you’d hope to find in such company. At the center was poet Yang Lian, who described one poem in the collection as a “flower that opens…...
Translators of the World Unite! (With Other Writers, who are also Translators)
Word for Word / Wort fur Wort Reading and book reception at Columbia University Deutches Haus, April 12, 2012 In perhaps the best kind of exchange program, three writers from Columbia’s MFA program went to Germany last year to swap their work with students at Das Deutsche Literaturinstitut Leizpig, honing their translation skills and getting the chance to see their own work reflected in a different language. The Word for Word Literary Translation Program has, in its first year, culminated…...
