Featuring work from thirty-four countries, the Spring 2022 issue is once again charting new territory across the landscape of world literature. From Hermann Hesse to Kim Hyesoon, as well as coverage of Ukrainian poetry and exceptional Swedish works in our Special Feature, these wonderful inductions into the English language are full of discoveries. Not sure where to begin? Read on for our blog editors’ curated selections!
Through the brutal scorchings and flighty erasures of passed time, Greek tragedies have endured—as though stone, and not words, were their material. Near as our own stories, ancient as storytelling itself, and inextricable from the passions they depict, the characters that had suffused the fifth-century Athenian air with their spectacle defy temporality, continuing to walk and rage within the immediate theatre of our world. In the betrayal of fathers and the names of flowers, in funerals and weddings, in any force that could be mistaken for fate. By the logic of the tragic’s pervasive mutability, their untimely timeliness, one is made to think of the ways cycles are kept and broken, if whether the knowledge of something coming has ever been enough to stop it.
On the mitigative potential of the tragedies, Brian Doerries (the founder of Theatre of War, a production company which stages performances for communities confronting urgent social issues) had posed a question: “What if tragedy is a form of storytelling that was designed . . . to wake us up to the slim possibility of human agency, of making a choice that averts imminent disaster before it’s too late? What if tragedy is as refined of an advancement as architecture or the sculpture, law, government of 5th century BCE . . . a form of storytelling that arose out of a necessity of nearly eighty years of war, to communalise trauma, give citizens permission to access and express their emotions, and help heal the city?” To conceive the life of these plays as not to instruct but to change, what emerges is how the devastation of tragedy offers us, by way of its lapidary endings, the opportunity for transcendence. In José Watanabe’s Antígona, translated with an impeccable ear by Cristina Pérez Díaz, Sophocles’ Antigone is given fluid, elemental form, a series of poetic rooms built for one actress to walk through, inhabiting their rhythm as she inhabits time. Written beneath the dense terror of civil conflict in Peru, Watanabe’s distilling of chorus into a single rivulet of speaking is to run a thin-wire sieve through the voracious appetite of mass violence and statistic, provoking the wide overarch of trauma into open intimacy, into something that is suffered individually, in bodies united by the likeness of experience but ruthlessly alone in bearing it. The voice is torn with the tension between thinking and knowing, between feeling and narration, spreading itself amidst the leaves of time:
The sacred eye of daylight does not penetrate that far
nor the cries of friends and relatives. In that silence,
death, laborious, enfolds the girl
in a dense cocoon of shadows.
Antígona was staged by Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, named for the Quechua word for I am remembering. In letting an ancient sadness pass through this urgency for addressing the present, Watanabe’s work grows the weight of these moments, stacking on its shoulders the assertions and judgments of the before, then marking its impressions so strikingly that the time, as we are living it, reveals itself as not simply the endless motion of future being mercilessly swept into the past, but a place where a whole terrain can be enacted—where we can look, and we can think, and we can know that we are remembering.
In contrast to the liminal spaces drama carves out between the voice and the ear, is the word as painting. Fabio Pusterla, in “First Landscape,” resurrects ut pictura poesis in maximalist emphasis, growing the brittle, industrial vistas of his childhood by the charged ambition of seeing. Entranced in the particular, kinetic language—impeccably rhythmised in translation by Will Schutt—the mind is delightfully taken for a walk, as words are transfigured into cartographic marks. One trods along the text curious but happy to be led, through the strange psychogeography of Pusterla’s vaguely apocalyptic, discernibly haunted boyhood:
Farther on, two major attractions: a mysterious cache of old clothes and bales of paper, where sometimes, on Sundays, we would spend hours hopping from pile to pile, scaling pyramids on the point of collapse, then jumping down onto loads of frayed, stained textiles, which released a dense ancient dust that made you choke.
Throughout the distanced romance of Pusterla’s lovely—despairingly lovely—and measured language is the slow helplessness of retrospect, of bemused revelry at a youth that knows too well its young-ness—“as if whatever happened during our adventures belonged to a parallel world, which did not intersect with our ordinary reality and yet, because of that, was more significant and indelible.” That visceral sureness of the world’s wideness. That unwieldly and animal impetus to run into it. “First Landscape” is like throwing a bucket of cold water on Wordsworth and his intimations, where instead of that verdant and glossy awe, there is a hard flourish of wonderment, and the steadfast knowledge that to tell something—or even to paint something—is not to bring it back to life again, but simply to assert that it had existed, exactly somehow, as it does in the mind.
Reading is a paced activity, one that glides in linearity, obeying the inclinations of our thinking and the singular direction of forward momentum. Gifted writers are able to exert some control over this velocity, with aptitude for music or an architectural sensibility, but truly exceptional works are able to fracture our experience of reading altogether, showing us the text’s true immaterial nature—that it is at once happening in front of us and speaking with something beyond us. In this excerpt of Majgull Axelsson’s shimmering, extemporal My Name is Not Miriam, the expertly tempered oscillation between description and narrativisation, inversion and extension, reality and fantasy—within one woman’s experience of morning—moves the deceptive clarity of the page into a palimpsest of both personal and worldly historicity, entangling trauma unsparingly with perception so that sensations are not simply felt, but translated through various schemes of feeling. Telling the story of a Roma woman, who, having survived the concentration camps, assumes a false Jewish identity for personal preservation, Axelsson—in Kathy Saranpa’s poetic English—singularly coalesces reality and its deceptions:
She sinks down to the ground with the agility of a young ballet dancer, bends forward and dips her brain in the glassy lake, allows its water to penetrate every space, every empty chamber, float around and wash every cell, make her brain free from all of the repulsive old smells first, and then free from all of the horrid memories, and finally from all evil thoughts.
The way of the mind, to go where it may, is not often thrilled along with fascination, with the reassurances of nostalgia, or even the sentimental tulle-layers of journeying; sometimes one is simply caught, madly and woundedly, in the abyss of thinking’s freedoms. When nothing is still. When one knows no peace. This constant reverberating resonance sometimes shuttles with it nothing but pain, and illusion, and profound emptiness—the mind cannot always hold it.
Yes, but the text can.
—Xiao Yue Shan
In this perilous moment of various humanitarian, existential, and ecological crises, many of the characters of the dark, yet enlightening Spring 2022 issue emerge after staring determinedly into the abysses of war, death, and loneliness. One poignant example is Shuxian Lee’s cover art, a child’s desperate evocation of her embattled hometown, which serves not only as a map for survival as she flees from bombs and gunfire, but also as a memorial and a preservation for a place levelled by war. Lee’s piece is apt for an issue consisting of works that recover meaning from the destructive and dehumanizing forces of war, late capitalism, and urbanization. The individuals within resemble the tortured scientists of Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, confronting the ends of their known worlds—what the writer and art historian Agnieszka Taborska calls times when “the world has gone mad” in her essay—and faced with the need to fill the void with new systems of belief, new ethics, and new relations with others and nature.
The erasure of one’s known world literally occurs for the professor and novelist Andrii Petrovitch Krasnyashchikh, who, in “As Bombs Fall”—a series of taut yet pensive essays sparely translated by Matthew Hyde—chronicles the wartime experience in his Ukrainian hometown of Kharkiv, which, under constant attack from Russian forces, is “life in a town which no longer exists.” Among Krasnyashchikh’s many revelatory insights on wartime include, in precise detail, the warping effects of war on memory: the memories of World War II and the current war merge for his father, while those of pre-war Kharkiv dissolve for his ten-year-old daughter. As the writer ruminates on the destruction of the old Kharkiv and its culture by the siege, his work evokes the significance of documentation—the salvaging of memory from oblivion. This aspect is movingly illustrated through recurring symbols of photographs, drawings, and maps of the pre-war city. Notably, his daughter’s drawings of old Kharkiv function as a form of defiance against the annihilation of culture and memory, a way of bridging the abyss between pre- and post-war times. Krasnyashchikh underscores the mnemonic meaning of the drawings, writing:
To draw the Shevchenko Gardens, the dolphinarium where we celebrated her tenth birthday, on 19 February. Just five days before the war. The centre of town, where the Shevchenko Gardens stand, are in ruins now.
After the war my daughter will draw Kharkiv, what’s left of it. That’s how she’ll remember Kharkiv. She’ll ask, when they start to clear up the ruins: “what did that used to be?”, or “what was there before the war?”
Importantly, the author is likewise concerned with the preservation of his Russian language, against takeover by Putin and the Russian forces. Though he wavers towards the idea of switching to Ukrainian for good, he ultimately resolves to writing and speaking in his native Russian; the author’s wrestling with personal identity culminates in the reclamation of language, a refusal to be forced out.
This recovery of meaning in language, when words have been reduced or evacuated through force, is also central for Ian Ross Singleton in his comprehensive analysis of the timely Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky. The piece serves as commentary on not only this urgent collection, but also the many pieces of war poetry across this issue; Singleton, who has written extensively on Ukraine, problematizes the function of war poetry through meticulous comparative readings of formal and syntactical choices within the original Ukrainian poems. He also places them in conversation with traditions and other critiques of war poetry—most notably the anxieties expressed by Simone Weil in her reading of The Iliad, regarding the reduction of meaning and animacy engendered by war. Though Singleton acknowledges the tendency of war to turn people into things, he nevertheless affirms poetry’s capacity to reverse the process of dehumanization through assigning of meaning to everyday existence—children, pain, and death. For these Ukrainian poets, poetic expression, or the Ukrainian language itself, reconfigures one’s perception of reality by charging an enervated landscape with human meaning. Here, language, like Krasnyashchikh’s drawings which retained the past in the face of destruction, “keeps meaning alive,” offering a map back to a displaced reality.
In this issue, the decoding of deeper meanings buried within everyday routines is not merely a means of coping with war, but also with more insidious forms of violence like urbanization. Like Krasnyashchikh, Theis Ørntoft confronts a foreign agent of destruction invading his home country, in the form of wolves that have returned to Denmark. Another philosophically probing piece of nonfiction, in “Our Days in Paradise are Over,” translated by Amy Priestley, the Danes’ fear of the wolf functions as the piece’s central metaphor for humanity’s estranged relationship with nature, the result of rapid technological advancement and urbanization. Ørntoft argues that this willful ignorance of our place in nature has not only resulted in the global climate crisis, but also alienation from our true animal selves. Like the Ukrainian poets, the writer performs a witty yet illuminating Barthesian reading of the concealed meanings within everyday routines to restore primeval elements of humanity, most notably a more conscious awareness of our entanglement with nature. The piece replants us within the world’s order, in the words of Lina Hagelbäck in her enchanting poem Map of Comets, through a surrealist heightening of our perception of reality. Like the works of Krasnyashchikh and of the Ukrainian poets, the essay gives “the atlas / it can take me away from here,” because “We have lost ourselves / in a sealed baroque nightmare.”
—Darren Huang
While many of the pieces in this issue deal with war explicitly, even those that do not often revolve around societal decay on one level or another. In the excerpt from Johannes Lilleøre’s My Sick Friend, translated from the Danish by Sharon E. Rhodes, the bodily breakdown that forms the core of the plot (which sees the titular character’s bone marrow abruptly fail for no known reason) is mirrored in the social fabric. Doctors, far from expressing concern or solicitousness, are openly ecstatic about having such a rare case in their hands; the sick friend, for his part, fantasizes about having been switched at birth and uses his time in the hospital to cut up maps, dispassionately unmaking and remaking the world. The scenes with animals are often brutal, and Lilleøre’s descriptions of medical treatments highlight their biological origins in a way that is both gruesome and absurd: “The horse comes into the room as a clear liquid in transparent bags.” This kind of attention to medicine’s usually invisible origins accentuates the ways that modern production distances us from the material and labor that go into the things we need and want.
This breakdown extends to the body politic as well; taking his friend for a rare visit to see the outside world, the narrator realizes too late that the poorly maintained roads––the result of unfulfilled promises by electoral hopefuls––render the wheelchair ride excruciating. Throughout, the friendship at the center of the piece is alluringly odd. The narrator relates his friend’s steady decline with an eerie detachment, only once letting the mask slip. (It’s an emotional mismatch that finds a parallel in his friend’s own reaction to his diagnosis, as though the fact that it was grave medical news of personal import had failed to register: “He’s battle ready. In a strange way he’s looking forward to the fight because he’s sure of victory. He can just feel it.“) For all of that, there is a strange sense of too-closeness about their relationship: the narrator takes up residence in a bed beneath the hospital ward sink, and we get little insight into his life outside of the sick ward––indeed, his friend asks him at multiple times, sometimes seriously and sometimes in jest, to leave. In this way, the illness at the center of Lilleøre’s piece is not a plot device for the healing of social wounds but serves merely to catalyze other imbalances.
In Goderdzi Chokheli’s “Letters from a Fish” (translated from the Georgian by Alex Niemi and Lamzira Sadagashvili), social alienation is realized not as a slow-burning strangeness but as a sudden, climatic moment of rupture. Exhausted with the belittling he faces from the collective farm foreman, Gamikhardai jumps into the local river and declares that he has had it—not only with the village but with humanity as a whole. As the community attempts to coax Gamikhardai back onto land, Chokheli’s story examines not only the idea of belonging but also complex issues of how to balance one’s responsibility towards others with one’s own needs and desires—all while managing to be both humorous and heartfelt.
But when Heinz Helle takes up the question of modern social alienation—particularly as it relates to literary production—explicitly in his essay “To My Fellow Machines” (translated from the German by Hannah Weber), he manages to find his way to an optimistic conclusion: “If there is a task for readers, then,” he writes, “maybe it is to never stop trying to understand why something was written, and for whom.” I think there is probably no better note to end this dispatch on than that.
—Erica X Eisen
*****
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