Our latest—and fifty-seventh—issue draws together work from thirty-one countries and twenty-one languages, from antiquity to the boldly contemporary, the comedic to the compassionate, the historic to the experimental. To help you navigate this compendium, our blog editors offer up their favourites.
In one of the many street art pieces embroidering the surfaces of Athens, a black sign reads: ‘A memory of a memory that we are all left with.’ Greece’s capital is bound in all directions: to the bodies that live within its confines, the oblique and omnipresent archive, the dynamism of recollection, the strategies of function, the desperation of loss, the translucency of power, reality’s elasticity and its collapse. To be within it, then, is to acknowledge that no space is neutral—that the collective illusion of fixed borders, fixed pasts, and fixed stratagems of everyday life are gossamer comforts. There is nothing stable in the city. The condition of its existence is nothing less than a mass hypnosis.
‘When my parents told me we lived in Athens, I believed them.’ Amanda Michalopoulou writes in ‘Desert‘, translated with great emotional heft by Joanna Eleftheriou and Natalie Bakopoulos. Through a combination of confession and elucidation, the piece seeks to delineate the living morphology of present-day Athens from its manipulated dreams of cohesion and glory, earmarking the ‘transcendent’ objectives of the ancient city as a catalyst for its current fragility, the very definition of transcendence gesturing at an inoperable unreality, a beyond that persists only in attempts and potentialities. ‘A city that would invent cities and governments, language and liberty,’ so Athens grew with immovable conjectures of goodness and intelligence, until: ‘Step by step, they created a society that matched their insatiable vision of absolute power and control.’ The converge of experience and concept is chaotic, and space does not hesitate to dislocate itself from our comprehension. Thus, as Michalopoulou describes her ‘investigations’, the city can perhaps be only understood via the fragmented origins of our most ancient texts, in those long-gone years where our present certainties had been amended, invented, reconstituted, and dismembered ceaselessly. The instability of today’s Athens resents the wonders and heights of its own birth, yet this shakiness is also evidence of another strength, for it is as David Graeber said: ‘The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.’ Our fictions have been our downfalls, but it is also our power.
A similar haunting of fragile reality threads through Faruk Šehić’s ‘who came back‘, translated in lyrical precision by Ena Selimović. By now we all know that our conflicts have no sense of the end, that nothing is over when one says it is over—not the battle, not the day, not the journey, not the injury, not the wrecking, not the sense of helplessness. All of it living on, strangled in a present that attempts to exclude them:
if he did come back, where does he live?
is his life comfortable or bare?
he was given a medal, a war pension, a prosthesis
does he dream of revenge?
does he dream of a world bereft of wounds?
bereft of scars?
Šehić voices this common knowledge, but pursues it with an intensity that truly testifies to the profound fallacies that the practice of war insists on—the absolution of victory, righteousness, or heroism. If the soldier does not come back, the poet truly attempts to detect what does, what composes the material of the world after the obliterating vehicle of war has passed through it: what we look at when we look at a mass grave, or a field on which a bloody battle had taken place, or a man who only seems to be halfway here.
‘maybe no one came back from the war’, the poem suggests, quietly halfway—but then something comes: ‘maybe the leaves / maybe the weeds. . .’
—Xiao Yue Shan
In Death of the Author, Roland Barthes once wrote of writing: ‘once an action is recounted . . . this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins’. According to his reasoning—one which will serve among the foundations for the transition to poststructuralism—writing is inherently a death, as any author is necessarily killing their internal thoughts and feelings as a sacrifice to render the ineffable. Herein lies an essential springboard from which Monica Vrečar’s self-translated piece, ‘Does Poetry Exist, Or Not,’ which questions if at last, poetry has died.
She pens:
When I lie and tell myself I must, when I judge and condemn, when I insist on the solidity of my “self” and demand that others affirm it, when I bloodthirstily dehumanize my enemies and cannot see myself in their flaws, when I resist pain so frantically that reality smears into a blur. In such states, everything snags—words, shoelaces, cupboard doors, even my bodily processes. I push against these frictions until I exhaust myself, intoxicated by conviction and fleeing the inconceivable nature of existence, hiding in a hall of mirrors where every reflection is my own.
In the modern-day world, Vrečar finds herself unable to engage in poetry, ‘one of humanity’s oldest arts,’ when the pains and realities of her actual existence tear her away and pull her back to the concrete. Yet, such a rejection of poetry likely embodies a new level of self-aggrandization, as she goes on to explore. In this, Vrečar delves into the role of the poet: their responsibilities and duties to their readers, their audience, their legacy, and their own obligation to pursue a non-normative viewpoint, free from any ideology or excessive introspection that would place ego at the centre.
Her piece contains important cultural literary intertext, with Slovenian poet Karlo Hmeljak’s interpretation of Duchamp’s infrathin (‘the mismatch in a conversation in which two people try in different ways to articulate the same meaning, fail to do so, yet some “sure, sure” [a shared glimpse of understanding] still occurs amid the failed attempts at articulation’) just among one of them. The translation has a unique flow and rhythm, and the resulting essay is full of philosophical interplay, with poetry and insightful intertexts that are sure to have a lasting effect. The theories and arguments that Vrečar posits and demarcates leave an indelible and irresistibly thought-provoking impression. It has certainly resurfaced in my own thoughts daily since my first reading, and I look forward to my next revisitation of it.
Fabio Stassi’s nonfiction piece, an extract from Bebelplatz: The Night of the Burned Books, is equally enthralling, if not still more haunting. Stassi’s writing revolves around Bebelplatz, a public square in the centre of Berlin’s Mitte district, and the location of the infamous Nazi book burning (Bücherverbrennung) of May 10, 1933—a day that is still commemorated in a memorial called ‘The Empty Library’. Stassi evokes its unearthly atmosphere in his visit to Bebelplatz—a testament to the unsettling legacy which with history can mark, and indeed mar, a place:
And who knows whether the square we have in front of us could still tell us something, but [the guide] stopped there, and said no more, said nothing about what had started to happen again on the eastern borders of Europe, said nothing about Ukraine, nothing about Russia, there was no need, within themselves everybody knew that, since the pandemic, the world had again come off its hinges.
This short excerpt exemplifies how places like Bebelplatz and the weight of their historical role is tantamount in forcing us to re-examine humanity’s trajectory, and at times its more recent despicable acts. Indeed, as we have seen for the past two years, with ever-growing numbers of gratuitous casualties, the world has continued to fall further off its hinges.
The piece includes insightful references to Don Quixote, delivered by poignant narration, with Ruth Chester’s thoughtful and expressive translation being the perfect match for the pathos which suffuses Stassi’s original. Thought-provoking and haunting, the excerpt serves as a reminder of the integral importance of literature, and even a reminder that those who seek to stifle or censor it (thereby betraying their fear of it) are, perhaps, among those who fully comprehend the extent and potential of its power.
—Sophie Benbelaid
As a half Turkish person, I felt compelled to highlight the excerpt from Kemal Varol’s novel Dark Mist, the complete text of which does not exist in English (yet!). I very regrettably don’t know the Turkish language (yet!), so I’m grateful to the translators for bringing the literature of my father’s homeland into my reading world, and am especially draw to Turkish works that evoke the folkloric nature of the culture—the propensity to turn tales and invent etymologies. Varol’s writing, translated by Başak Çandar, has a dreamlike quality, a blurring of fantasy and reality that permeates the Turkish styles I’ve come to enjoy in translation. In the classical epic The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus is forced to recount the story of his life to the Phaeacians in order to win his passage home; the prisoners in Dark Mist, who have epithets instead of proper names (“The Rat,” “The Soul Traveler”), feel the stakes of storytelling just as heavily, with the difference that they are trying to create a sense of home in their new environment, knowing they will likely never return to their old ones. The narrator observes:
Everyone who came into Taşkale would eventually tell their story to someone. Without fail, this was the rule. One way of speeding up the interminable stretch of time was to recount what one had lived through. In fact, at times it seemed to me that everyone had come to prison just to tell their story to someone, or to find an end to their story.
This excerpt from the novel displays a wry, playful sense of humour, written in a prose that immerses the reader in the world of the prisoners and their stories. Given the viral popularity of books like Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat, I’m hoping more Turkish literature will make its way into English translation. For now, what a treat to have a taste of Kemal Varol.
I confess that a personal bias has also informed another choice; I studied Classics in university and remain eternally fascinated (obsessed?) with antiquity and its reception throughout history. Somehow, I have missed out on the work of Herodas, but I certainly know the work of William Heath, who has translated some of my favourite writers from antiquity, including Sappho and the lyric poets. The piece in our Fall issue, “Mimiambs,” belongs to the genre of short dialogues, “Mimes,” a form of popular entertainment in Greece that focused on character rather than plot development, in which a single actor or a small group would represent a scenario from daily life. These particular fragments are not only full of cleverness but also tell us a lot about perceptions of different geographical locations at the time. For instance, Gyllis invokes the riches of Egypt in Mimiamb 1: “Everything you / can find elsewhere, they’ve got there now.” There are also striking intertextual references drawing on the rich canon of Greek poetry. Kynno in Mimiamb 4 paraphrases a famous Sappho fragment with a fun gender reversal: “Look, my love, at that girl whose sights aspire up / upon that apple, her own Eros will lay her / flat if she can’t reach that far up the branch it seems.” This type of literature is certainly a gift to read, all the while providing insights into Greek rituals, beliefs, and practices. I’m thrilled to see the value of ancient literature in translation upheld.
And in another serendipitously personal touch, the brilliant Claire Foster, my literary polestar here in Toronto, was the first to put Jen Calleja’s Fair: The Life-Art of Translation on my radar. Unfortunately, the book is not available in North America, but the extracts I was able to glean hooked me immediately and convinced me of Calleja’s unique, brilliant insight into translation practice. I was thrilled, therefore, to see an interview with her in the newest issue, and with the wonderful Sarah Gear to boot. What a total delight it was to read their exchange. I’ve never thought about the possible connection between spy work and translation, but can relate to being seduced by the mystique of a spy—having spent a good deal of my childhood emulating Harriet the Spy (Hilary the Spy sounded so convincingly similar). In fact, both spying and translating require a sublimation of oneself to a larger task, a quiet form of attention, immense powers of observation, but also a sense of creativity, play, and adaptability. In the interview, Calleja also importantly frames the economic realities of her profession as a translator, as well as the amount of energy required to do the work, what Gear calls “the precarious, often chaotic side of the translation industry.” I also loved Calleja’s comparison of collaborative translation work to playing in a band, the importance of forming connections rather than operating in total isolation (introverted sitting-at-desk-alone people unite). To return to something I brought up in the beginning, Calleja beautifully and helpfully frames translation as first and foremost an act of storytelling: “it always comes down to me thinking about how best I can tell this story and really drawing on everything I know and all the tricks of storytelling to be able to do it.” I love that image, and I’m grateful to get to read Calleja’s musings before I can pick up her book in the UK over the holidays.
—Hilary Ilkay
*****
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