All Articles by Date
February, 2012
Festival Neue Literatur This Week in New York
The Festival Neue Literatur has been around since 2010. This festival of new writing from the German-speaking countries (Austria, Germany, and Switzerland) is put on in New York every year, in February, by a consortium of cultural institutes. It takes place over a long weekend and consists of a series of linked readings and conversations that involve U.S. writers as well. I’m serving as its curator this year. The idea behind the festival is that there is such a wealth of wonderful…...
Romanticism
Our technology enables the resurrection of an incomplete body.
Regular readers of Words without Borders will remember Otto Bohater, the downbeat Warsaw detective, and his faithful partner, Watson the White Rat, who appeared in an extract from Essence in 2007. Their further adventures are described in Romanticism, a thrilling horror story in which the spirits of Poland’s greatest Romantic artists–the composer Frederic Chopin, the artist Jan Matejko and the poet Adam Mickiewicz–are brought back to life with dire consequences. As these bloodthirsty vampires…...
from “The International”
The old man had his eye put out by the colonists a few years ago.
Both travel book and testimony, L'intruse records the experiences of a French human rights activist in the Middle East. Roannie, a retired pediatrician and member of Amnesty International, spent nine months over several years as an "international" in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The French artist Oko heard her stories and suggested she publish her experiences in graphic form. The resulting collaboration was published in three volumes: Le Decouverte, Les Palestinians, and Les Israeliens.…...
It was a November of bitter rain and snow blackened by use
we filed the dead leaves by size to ease the task of the forest that was absent for reasons known only to itself The parents had left with the door We mistook puddles for creeks pebbles for meteorites the wind’s hordes for wolves A child would liquefy as soon as a snowflake touched the ground We could hold out till Epiphany handling our feet like toys waiting for a redistribution of parents © Vénus Khoury-Ghata. By arrangement with the author. Translation…...
God, the mother claimed, is behind every tree in the forest
his right shoulder lower than his left heavy with rocky snowfalls from such endurance It’s his motionless breath that fissures our walls in the night when one winter hands power over to another The deaf bluetit’s wing-beats count for nothing nor the mother’s invectives guilty of having grouted the tiles with her tears Yet the storm announced festive disorder erosion polished up by subtle winds Everything smiled at us and the mother who wore her tears around her…...
When did their language mingle with ours
so my brother spoke the words of the arbutus so the mother thickened her sauces with the ash tree’s black resin The female branches made off with the laundry on our lines the young shoots leapt into our nights cracked our pavement The “wanted” poster distributed via winds and tides led to a blackbird It was he who’d set fire to the forest with a match He who’d sung Hallelujah mockingly at the old oak tree’s burial Our careful openings had nothing to do with…...
A Necessary Distance from Reality: An Interview with Rutu Modan
Rutu Modan is a rarity. One of the few established comics artists in Israel, she is also one of the few established female comics artists in the world. After graduating from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, Modan began writing and illustrating comic strips and stories for Israel's leading daily newspapers, as well as editing the Israeli edition of MAD magazine with Yirmi Pinkus. In 1995, she and Pinkus cofounded Actus Tragicus, an internationally acclaimed collective and independent…...
Dead
the mother looked like the linden tree in the square like the wood of the table on which she wrote our faces like the log that didn’t sweat or complain about the smoke dead she began to avoid us turned her back to the mirror to the moon to the skylight less dead she would say that the moon was a loaf of bread baked between two stones A moon doesn’t fill a bread-box doesn’t plug up the cracks in the sink doesn’t sweep the crumbs of quarrels under the table doesn’t…...
As night became talkative
we were lent a window on a fragment of the world We we re the house and the road that led to the house The mother moved the door each time a train went by and at each procession toward the cemetery The earth remained the same despite the dead buried in it They were wept for in unison but laughter was separate The mother sprinkled the doorstep with soot though she no longer had a cauldron Her kitchen utensils fled after the last guest deserted her I try to imagine that departure…...
Admiel Kosman’s “Approaching You in English”
I can write poems that bang. Loud. Like the shutters. With a vengeance. Poems made of rain. And poems for the poor made of tin. * Leave me everything, beautiful. Fasten everything into the light. Sitting in any of the rooms that is each poem in Approaching You In English you’ll notice a tear in the ceiling; none of these poems are sealed shut. Rather, they are permeable, pierced open in parts, and their cracks and fissures allow a certain light to come in. …...
Alexandra Chreiteh’s “Always Coca-Cola”
In the opening section of Always Coca-Cola, the savage and heady debut from young Lebanese novelist Alexandra Chreiteh, our narrator Abeer is flipping through a women’s magazine when an article extolling the importance of high-SPF lip balm catches her eye. Models, apparently, never leave home without wearing it: “It’s extremely important for models to protect their lips because the lips are the most important symbol of a woman’s femininity and attractiveness. Lip balm helps…...
Her apron drawn on her skin
the mother sent us out in the street naked Walnut husks served us for ink Fences we’d jumped were the pages we leafed through Euphoria in the evening when she multiplied her arms two to embrace us two to push us away and make sure we had the same number of smiles and tears How to tell her with no punctuation about the transparent toes of the children whose paths we crossed the women all red on the inside the dogs blue at the corners of their mouths as if they had bitten into…...
Necessary or True Happenstances: An Introduction to the Work of Hye Young-Pyun
“O. Cuniculi” is featured in Hye Young-Pyun’s third collection of short stories, Evening Courtship, for which she was awarded the prestigious Dong-in Literature Prize last year. The story begins one night in a park when a man on temporary assignment out in the country is captivated by the red eyes of a rabbit “whose white fur had turned filthy.” The man brings the rabbit home inside his shirt. But he will soon regret it, and in the end he will not know how to get rid…...
O. Cuniculi
A rabbit. He turned at the sound of rustling in the bushes and spotted a ball of white fluff. What he’d mistaken for a white dog was staring at him with red eyes. He wouldn’t have known it was a rabbit if not for the eyes. He knelt before it. The eyes held him captive. As he gazed into them, relief at the thought that he was not the only one in this world with eyes red from exhaustion washed over him, and he chafed to think such a being had been stranded in an unlit park for so long that…...
How to find the mother when her face disappeared behind the hills
How to find the mother when her face disappeared behind the hills leaving us a body without contours two packets of cold for the armpits white grass for the pubis Gone off with her friend the fire she spoke to us in flares and sparks from behind the hill’s shoulder her voice become brambles loose stones broom bush if a storm broke she collapsed in soot whole nights spent down on the floor sniffing a sketch of her looking out for her rages in lightning lips split by sun and frost…...
January, 2012
A New Series: Literary Journeys Through Catalonia
Throughout history writers have, again and again, undertaken journeys—journeys of the mind and actual journeys, traveling across their respective homelands as well as exploring more distant, foreign territories. They have traveled, one could argue, to feel captivated and reinvigorated by a sense of discovery, and perhaps even to make sense of the apparent chaos of the human condition by observing its nuanced manifestations through a variety of cultures and landscapes. The synergy between…...
From the Translator: The Eternonaut
I discovered El Eternauta while translating a poem. Until recently I considered myself to be primarily a translator of poetry. I’d made a few forays into prose, but poetry is always where I’ve situated myself as a writer, and following the conventional wisdom that one must be a poet in order to translate poetry I stuck to it. The poem, by the contemporary experimental Puerto Rican poet Nestor Barreto, is called El Eternauta, and was ultimately too hard at the time, too much in allusion…...
Homeless Rats: A Parable for Postrevolution Libya
Libyan writer and diplomat Ahmed Ibrahim Fagih’s Homeless Rats is a quasi-fantastic historical novel that offers considerable insight into Libyan culture and geography, in particular that of the Western Jebel Nafusa, which played a key role in Gaddafi’s ouster. The plot revolves around the efforts of members of a displaced tribe from the town of Mizda (Fagih’s birthplace) to cope with severe drought in the late 1940s, just before Libya’s Independence in 1951, and well…...
The Ark
I shall destroy man whom I have created from off the face of Belgium: both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them. Make thee an ark of resinous wood, just like that of Noah, and shalt thou pitch it within and without with pitch. The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all…...
Seizing Cervantes
When it all began, that is, when the Skeptic Party rose to power in the United Kingdom, in 2070, I was completely in favor. The group’s plan to completely forbid religious practice pleased me greatly. I was brought up in an intellectual environment, the son of a family that never believed in any god and always associated the religious figure with some guy with a double-digit IQ or a fanatical human bomb. I admit, I voted for the Skeptic Party as soon as it came into existence. But I’m…...
