Translated by LISA MULLENNEAUX
Photo courtesy of Archives Bouanani
This country
My country is this horizon with blank pages
where I see skeletons of broken children
wandering, begging for the light of thin wisps
of stories that might finally appease them
In hands the color of amaranth magic
they hold hippogriffs like dogs
a talisman to protect themselves from the lover
with hair braided into black shapes
By CASEY WALKER
Twelve years ago, in waters off the Azores, my father was thrown overboard on a whale-watching skiff and my mother thought she could save him. The trip had been my mother’s dream. She hadn’t seen the islands since she was a child, visiting her grandparents. My father’s overconfidence about boating in bad weather, an unanticipated storm surge, a possibly intoxicated boat pilot—that was the tragedy of my mother’s ancestral homecoming. No bodies were ever recovered. In lieu of caskets, the funeral director set up an oversized portrait taken on my parents’ wedding day. That young couple, with expressions formally posed, was all but unrecognizable to me.
Indifference is far more efficient
than fission or fusion
as a weapon of mass destruction,
and far less problematic
than uranium or tritium
to procure, occurring,
as it does, massively in nature.
The boy circles once more through the kitchen, past the ledge of photographs & the St. Francis tin, inside of which sleeps whatever’s left of the dog. My boy shows no signs of slowing down despite my tired oration on the topics of physics & premonitions, that denouement when I too was a spinning child & my head tripped down its irreversible path into the solid corner of the piano bench. No signs of slowing down nor do I mention how, playing ghost & turning beneath the sheet, I felt like a cannonball, I felt like nothing else speeding through darkness & then through the fog near the rocky shore. Afterwards, I knew only gravity, my blood, the irrefutable bleeding.
I’ve never been content with less than
God. Visions
like interior castles:
a red and white blanket
over grass, broken
slabs of tile, folded denim
in a fishing boat, sand-gold
grains of rice, all the colors
that tint a bruise—
From THE MEAD ART MUSEUM
More than thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the independent states that emerged from its territory continue to grapple with its legacies. In Ukraine, this struggle has unfolded amidst a political and cultural war waged by Russia. As Vladimir Putin’s regime weaponizes the shared Soviet past in its attempts to erase Ukraine’s nationhood, the Soviet legacy remains the subject of heated debate among Ukrainians. While some identify “Sovietness” with “Russianness” and seek to remove it from the national narrative, others attempt to reclaim their Soviet legacy, emphasizing the agency of Ukrainians who created it.
In 1927, a Russian architect named Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov built an astonishing home in Moscow for himself and his wife, son, and daughter. Using affordable materials (building supplies were scarce), Melnikov and his son pitched in alongside several hired laborers to frame and erect the house. A photo taken at completion shows the owner—a slender man dressed in a suit, spats, and top hat—standing proudly in front of his home, with his wife (sporting a plaid coat and matching hat) at his side.
The Reading Life is a special 15th-anniversary essay series reflecting on close reading and re-reading, written by The Common’s Editorial Board.
“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
―Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a letter of February 20, 1997, to a humorist, Oliver Sacks says that one of his favorite words is APOCOPE. “I love its sound, its explosiveness (as do some of my Tourettic friends—for whom it becomes a 4-syllable verbal tic which can be impacted or imploded into a tenth of a second) and the fact that it compresses 4 vowels and 4 syllables into a mere seven letters.” This is the type of response I adore: succinct, passionate, informed, all around a single, transient word. The quote appears in Dr. Sacks’ Letters (Knopf, 2024, 726 pages), edited by his long-time assistant and researcher Kate Edgar. Notice the length of the volume: it is massive, even though, as Edgar mentions, it only comprises about a tenth of all of the letters Dr. Sacks wrote; he was an inveterate, compulsive logophile who wrote nonstop on napkins, pads, notebooks, and anything else within reach. (W. H. Auden, an early champion and long-time friend of Sacks, addressed him in print with the honorific “Dr.”; I gladly follow it here.)
Translated from the Spanish by JACK ROCKWELL
Piece appears below in English and the original Spanish.
Translator’s Note
Translating several of Bellolio’s stories, but especially this one, I’ve found that the hardest part has been the beginning. By the time the text hits its stride, somewhere in the second or third pages, it has swept me along with it, and it feels almost effortless—nearly as much so as Bellolio’s painstaking craft makes her own writing seem—to bob and weave with her sentences, to bunch up and then uncoil with the tense spools of her thought. But once I wrap back around to the beginning, I read the first few sentences I’ve translated and am shocked to find what feels like a jerky, uneven mess.
Bellolio rigorously calibrates the motions of her prose, and the elegance of her language applies some serious heft to the felt necessity of her narrator’s thought. This thought, and the careful patterning that structures it, are absolutely essential to this digressive, contemplative story. In the first long paragraph of “River Landscape,” a compassionate investigation of the interior life of a murderer fleeing his crime, a series of repetitions in the text mimics the destructive return of his victim’s face to his mind’s eye. While these repetitions spread out as the story progresses, in the beginning they are stacked thickly on top of one another. Finding the right rock and sway to carry the reader through this dense opening passage took some obsessive tinkering. I’m still not completely satisfied with it, but it’ll have to do for now. There was much going back and forth between alternatives, and much friendly (and incredibly patient) advice given by friends and colleagues, such as Jan Steyn, Emily Graham, Miharu Yano, and Dabin Jeong. I’m very grateful to all of them, and especially to Dabin, who introduced me to Bellolio’s work.
—Jack Rockwell
Photo courtesy of Jules Weitz.
America
This afternoon I am well, thank you.
Walking down Main Street in Danville, KY.
The heavy wind so sensuous.
Last night I fell-
ated four different men back in
Philadelphia season lush and slippery
with time and leaves.
Keep your eyes to yourself, yid.
As a kid, I pledged only to engage
in onanism on special holidays.
Luckily, America.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.