Launched four days ago, our blockbuster Summer 2023 issue gathers never-before-published writing from a remarkable thirty countries—including a spotlight on Indonesia. Don’t know where to begin with this thrilling mélange of established and emerging voices? To help you dip your toe into this brand-new edition brimming with literary gems, our blog editors take you through their favorite pieces. Read on!
Within the tensions of unrequited love, the transformative faculties of ardor conduct their most astounding magic. Time is stretched to its utmost limits, unbound feelings hit a multiplicity of extremes, and the physical proof of reality collapse under the extraordinary pressures of belief. There’s not a lot of happiness that can be found amongst the shifting phantasms and polarities of this condition, but there is plenty of beauty, of poetry, of hope and awe, all of it stemming from nothing but the imagination in overdrive, sparked brilliantly alive by the beckoning figure of desire.
There are many examples of such love to be found in life and art, but one that seems particularly difficult to understand is the love of a fan. The indulgent culture of fandom gives free reign to displays of love-as-devotion, ranging from pedestrian claims of destiny to reckless acts of sacrifice—and because it often inflicts the young and the hyperbolic, its passions are seen as lacking any certifying element of truth. A one-sided, disingenuous, superficial love. But just try telling that to a fan.
In an excerpt from her novel, Phantom Limb Pain, Heejoo Lee does much to redeem this expressive, unrestrained love. Tracing the contours of a fan’s deep—even vicious—adulation for an idol, Lee’s forthright prose, translated with a sensitive colloquiality by Yoojung Chun, reaches a tender, natural honesty, describing an emotion that gives a rhythm to the days and months, a thrill to the pedestrian events of waiting and wanting, and a vividity to the fantasies making life more beautiful. Manok, the young woman who paves the way for our nameless protagonist into fandom, is “downright shameless,” keenly following her idol’s every move, openly displaying her possessive jealousy, and attributing her love to an act of God. Being a fan in South Korea’s multibillion-dollar idol industry is nothing less than laborious; fans religiously attend promotional events, spare no expense in purchasing goods and merchandise, and “pour their hearts out” at every opportunity. From the outside, one is made to wonder what any individual gets out of this all-consuming lifestyle, and here, Lee explains it to us through Manok, with the eloquence of absolute sincerity:
Their presence stayed mysterious over repeated encounters, and it refused to be locked into language. Their real presence rendered everything in high relief, so that everything—even their shadows or things that might be their shadows—became amazing to me.
Through her fine character study of this unparalleled passion, Lee reaches the undeniable role of absence in our most loving feelings, our most forceful desires. The fans are in touch with an aspect of love that many find difficult to pronounce: the fact that they are in love with being in love, that love is a power lending its immensity to whoever is held in its grasp, and that this power is not enacted in fulfillment—it comes forth only in longing.
The unrequitedness of love has this duality of pain and pleasure, but the unrequitedness of grief seldom finds the same discrepancies. Often grief is too large, too encompassing, for one to see its facets. Yet, in Zang Di’s poems, taken from the collection The Loquat Boy: Elegies for My Son, grief does not overshadow the immensity of details in the poet’s innermost mind. In these two poems, the lost child is undeniably alive, running and pulling open curtains, struck with wonder and with curiosity—even as Zang’s language takes a despairing edge under the mournful title, searching out amidst shadows for the oasis that memory holds. In expertly crafted lines, translated elegantly by Eleanor Goodman, these poems sculpt a glass globe in which the poet’s recollections are enacted—minute, quiet, precisely described moments of domestic joy. In “Little Spring Goddess Primer”, the parents who want a moment alone must continue to give their young son meaningless mysteries to solve; in “Blue Hourglass”, the titular gift is presented to the child frozen in time. These two works reflect the poet’s honed attention to the potency of ordinary moments when refracted through different versions of oneself—what rises to the surface when we look at the things we lived through, again and again.
Another masterclass in attention is taught by the work of Diana Garza Islas, taken from her collection Black Box Named Like to Me. The strange, enticing syntax of this title points directly at the playful, textured language of the poems here, which create a defamiliarised vortex of language for the reader to wander through. Reminiscent of automatic writing and the ecstatic practices of Dadaist poetry, Islas’ language is at once hypnotic and jarring, painting micro-sceneries that look like something else entirely when you come out on the other side of the line:
If I drew seaweed on my thighs to give the poem legs it would read elephant or lichen or four-box bird or dead bulls in a horrible doorknocker.
But it was already too late. And they were water levels marked in stone with phosphene brushes. Pigment lining up eras. Or a heron at the pond’s edge that sees me and knows that I’m the mammoth door, that I’m not amber either.
Translator Cal Paule admits to taking certain liberties in his note: “I’ve built in different sound patterns in my translations that offer a similar kind of pacing or play, through alliteration, metrical patterning, and occasional rhyme.” In resolving one of the most painful aspects of translating poetry—the music—Paule has woven a sonic texture that delights in the myriad notes of English, undulating as in “a boreal bow that haloes fluorine melting”, or sinuous as in “Stillwater simultaneous to the sun abyss, fossilized / lava in my sky”. In such a striated, complex nebulae of words, populated with verdure, colour, animal life, and geographical wonder, these poems are a veritable atlas, a world in which language is as alive as the creatures it represents.
—Xiao Yue Shan
It’s been hot in New York, hot and filled with smoke from wildfires in Canada, and it’s made the summer feel surreal: unnatural, unhealthy. Reading this issue, with the skies outside sometimes tinting orange and the sound of my newly purchased air filter in the background, I was drawn to pieces that dealt with the uncanniness of nature, the way it contains deathliness and life. In Vasyl Makhno’s “Green Dog Days” translated by Ali Kinsella, it’s “summer vacation, and the dog days were with me.” Makhno’s Nicaragua is beautiful, the natural landscape so verdant and full of “green grandeur” as to seem almost unreal, “the green flow[ing] gradually from the earth to the water, turning the waves green”—and it is, in a way, unreal, in the way that any place in the past is unreal. Makhno writes that in “Nicaragua, everything, it seems, is stripped of permanence,” death and life colliding, “[t]his temporariness peeking out from [a] funeral procession [that] looks like a carnival, and these people, the coachman, and the carriage have perhaps even been borrowed from some carnival reality.”
It is unendingly strange, the proximity between overflowing life and the inevitability of death. In Solange Rodríguez Pappe’s “The Sea Bed,” translated by Victor Meadowcroft, a deeply strange and unsettling and lovely story, a young woman finds that she can “cut paths through the leafy jungle with muscled arms, and, while it’s true that she was still terribly young—not yet even approaching thirty—she was convinced that she had secretly found love with a friend of her father.” While with her lover, she has a dream about water (“What could it mean to dream about water? she asked herself”), a dream in which she passes through “the frozen seas of the Arctic, which grow terribly bored in their stillness,” to stranger seas. The story is full of meditations on the flowing of water, the insistence of passion, and the inevitable passage of time.
—Meghan Racklin
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