Griffin Lessell

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Review: Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

March 10, 2020 Reviews

“There were moments when I didn’t need to tell my body how to move,” poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo writes in the opening passage of his memoir, Children of the Land. He’s introducing a scene in which armed ICE agents arrive at his house. He’s a senior in high school. The agents are looking for his father, who isn’t there. They leave. Yet their presence, a longstanding threat finally realized, creates a shift. Hernandez Castillo can no longer act without thinking. He explains, “Even laughter required some kind of effort. I had to remind myself: this is funny, this is how you laugh—laugh now, laugh hard, spit out your food.”

Review: Older Brother

November 19, 2019 Reviews

Book by MAHIR GUVEN

Translated from the French by TINA KOVER

Reviewed by FEROZ RATHER

The protagonist of Mahir Guven’s debut novel, Older Brother, is the son of a Syrian emigre taxi driver and a French mother who has died by the time the story begins. He is in his late twenties. An Uber driver addicted to hash, he is living in a suburban ghetto outside of Paris he calls “the dump of France.” He fears his ennui, induced by the indifference of the countless customers he ferries around, might kill him. But despite the jadedness, his caustic humor enlivens him, endowing his fulminations with a faint existential quality.

Choosing a Transitional Object

October 29, 2019 Issue 18, Issue 18 Poetry, Poetry

By LUIZA FLYNN-GOODLETT

Snip Hansons from Teen Beat while debating
Taylor versus Zac so passionately a curl escapes
its barrette and your best friend tucks it behind

A Kind of Privileged Existence That Sets It Apart From Other Worlds

October 28, 2019 Issue 18, Issue 18 Poetry, Poetry

By ELEANOR STANFORD

All summer, I sit on the porch, my son appearing, disappearing. Walls of rain or night, of larkspur, bleeding heart. The stone floor long ago lifted from the lion’s den.

Translator’s note: Having children is a way of remaking oneself.

Eclipsed

October 28, 2019 Essays, Issue 18, Issue 18 Essays

By JESSAMYN HOPE

Normally along this straight back road in Idaho lay only quiet flatlands stippled with clumps of yellow grass, but today the prairie was bustling with cars and RVs and people gathered around camping chairs and telescopes. We were all here to see the Great American Eclipse of 2017—not only the first total eclipse of the sun to cross the country from Pacific to Atlantic in a century, but the first to grace the mainland at all in thirty-eight years. Since thirty-eight happened to be the median age in the United States, this meant roughly half the people readying to see today’s eclipse hadn’t yet been born the last time, and half who witnessed it then, in 1979, had since died. My husband and I, driving down the road in a blue compact, were a man and woman on the sadder side of the median, but only by a few years, so we weren’t used to it yet. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t decide how much this was worth, witnessing a total eclipse of the sun. I feared I might have lost the ability to distinguish true excitement from an admirable effort to keep life exciting.

Earth Has No Sorrow That Heaven Can’t Heal

October 28, 2019 Fiction, Issue 18, Issue 18 Fiction

By LYNN PANE

The motorized chair arrived, and Berger left it unwrapped in the middle of the living room. He circled it—keeping to the walls and the furniture to recover his balance—as if the chair was prey. He almost needed it, but he had the walker for the moments he grew tired. He imagined these new fixtures—the oxygen tank, the shower stall, the protein shakes—as gifts. Every day something new arrived on a delivery truck. He wanted the boxes to come wrapped in paper and ribbon, but then again, the boxes didn’t represent a future, and so he no longer turned his head at the sound of the doorbell.

The Y-Gene

October 28, 2019 Issue 18, Issue 18 Poetry, Poetry

By KIRITI SENGUPTA

My friends were aware of the wish I nurtured.
If I had a daughter,
I would name her Srividya!
I was not influenced by any actor.
Our prayer room hosted a dazzling
crystal Sri Yantra on the holy altar.

Poetry by Isabel Zapata in Translation

September 18, 2019 Poetry, Translation

Poems by ISABEL ZAPATA

Translated from the Spanish by ROBIN MYERS

Poems appear in both Spanish and English.

Translator’s Note

Like many translators, I grow weary of talking about “faithfulness” and “betrayal,” about whether it’s “possible” to translate poetry, about what gets “lost” in translation. These queries quickly become platitudes, and platitudes are tiresome. But what’s always relevant, always urgent, and always exhilarating to me about translation is the idea of respect. The practice of care. One of my favorite translators, Sophie Hughes, recently said in an interview: “I approach a text that is already complete, mature, sure of itself, and it’s my responsibility to look after it, to respect it for what it is (its nature or essence), whilst protecting it from linguistic butchery, from translationese, from too many mistakes or outlandish mis- and reinterpretations.” And how can we respect anything for what it is until we truly listen to what it has to say about itself and how it sees the world?

Translation as Art: Against Flattening

August 7, 2019 Essays, Translation

Essay by HISHAM BUSTANI

English translation by ROBIN MOGER

Essay appears in the original Arabic here.

An introductory essay to Stories from Syria, a portfolio published in English by The Common and in Arabic by Akhbar Al Adab (Egypt).

Today, in the second installment of a transatlantic literary collaboration which I hope will last for many years to come, Akhbar Al Adab publishes the original Arabic texts of stories by Syrian writers whose English translations appear in a special portfolio in Issue 17 of The Common, a literary magazine based at Amherst College. The first portfolio in the series contained stories by Jordanian writers and was published in Issue 15 of The Common, which followed the collaboration’s inaugural project: an issue of the magazine (Issue 11, Spring 2016) entirely dedicated to contemporary Arabic literature in translation entitled Tajdeed (Renewal), in which editor-in-chief Jennifer Acker and I selected stories and artworks by twenty-six writers and five artists from fifteen Arabic-speaking countries, with eighteen translators bringing the work into English.

Practicing Disaster

July 17, 2019 Dispatches

By GEORGINA PARFITT

H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Oregon

1. Avalanche

To practice the quick slipping away of ground beneath our feet, geologists built a second mountain. This one is a tender surface, fitted with sensors, and rigged for data. On sunny, cold mornings, to practice how helpless, they measure piles to drop — peat, gravel, water-saturated masses of organic matter, combinations to mimic what might happen — and let them fall into chaos. To practice the moment of shock, they invite everyone like a performance. The scientists on their lunch break gather, promising to stand quietly for five minutes after the stopwatch starts, for the duration of the drop, to watch how it all tumbles, gaining speed, no gasping no matter what it looks like, and for ten whole minutes after. This is the most difficult part. Practicing the quiet after.

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